My Lords, the purpose of this Bill can be summed up very simply: to improve the support we give to offenders in order to break the cycle of reoffending. There are many noble Lords speaking today who have championed reforms on this topic with successive Governments. Faced with such experience and expertise, it may seem unnecessary to dwell on why we need an Offender Rehabilitation Bill, but let me remind the House of the problems that have inspired this Bill, and of what has driven those who have campaigned long and hard for those reforms.
Last year, around 600,000 crimes were committed by people who had broken the law previously. Almost half the offenders released from our prisons offend again within a year. That goes up to a staggering 58% for those sentenced to prison terms of less than 12 months. And yet there is no statutory requirement for most of this group to receive supervision and support after release. As a result, many of them leave the prison gates with little more than the £46 in their pockets.
Such offenders have a host of complex problems: a shocking number of them will have been through the care system, and many have come from broken homes and are addicted to drugs and alcohol. As noble Lords will know, a greater proportion of women than men in custody are serving sentences of twelve months or less—21% compared with 10% of men in 2011—and many of those women will themselves have been victims of domestic violence.
The Bill aims to transform the support available for offenders given short prison sentences by introducing a 12-month period of rehabilitation in the community after release. The first part of this period will involve release under licence, in the same way as with longer-sentenced prisoners now. Indeed, the first clause of the Bill extends release on licence to all offenders given custodial sentences apart from those of a single day. However, for many offenders, this will not give long for those providing services to intervene. That is why Clause 2 creates an additional supervision period, solely for the purpose of rehabilitation, which will “top up” the licence so that every offender released from a sentence of less than two years has at least 12 months of supervision after release.
The conditions of this supervision period, which are set out in Schedule 1, reflect its explicit purpose of rehabilitation. They can include visits from the offender’s supervisor, drug testing and appointments in relevant cases, and participation in activities that the supervisor thinks will support rehabilitation. Activities may cover a wide range of different interventions. For example, they could include restorative justice where appropriate and where both victim and offender consent. I remind noble Lords of the Government’s strong commitment to increasing the use of restorative justice. In particular, I take pride in the fact that the Crime and Courts Act 2013 now puts pre-sentence restorative justice on a statutory footing for the first time.
We might also expect to see providers make greater use of mentoring. Excellent work is already going on, for example, in prisons. My right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister in a speech this morning drew attention to the work being done in Peterborough
prison, where older, longer-serving prisoners are actively mentoring those serving shorter sentences. Given their experience, those who have been through the criminal justice system themselves can sometimes be most effective in convincing others that they really can and should turn their lives around.
Supervision after licence will allow maximum discretion for the professionals who work with offenders to tailor their interventions to the needs of each individual. However, it also balances that with a period long enough to tackle the complex issues that prisoners released from short sentences often face.
The Bill also creates a new role for the magistracy in overseeing the effectiveness of supervision after release. While the supervision period will apply automatically to all short-sentenced prisoners after release, magistrates and district judges will be able to hear cases in which an offender is alleged to have breached a requirement of supervision. Clause 3 will give them a range of options for dealing with a breach, including a fine, unpaid work, a curfew or, ultimately, committal back to custody for up to 14 days. This will give magistrates a much greater oversight of the delivery of sentences for this group of offenders. We intend to engage with the Judicial College and the Sentencing Council on the support and guidelines that this new role might require. I look forward to hearing the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, on these matters, given his experience as a magistrate.
I now turn to the wider Transforming Rehabilitation reforms. Noble Lords will know that, on 9 May, the Government published their strategy for reforming the services delivered to offenders in the community. We will create a new public sector National Probation Service, working to protect the public and building upon the expertise and professionalism which are already in place. The National Probation Service will report to the Secretary of State as part of the National Offender Management Service. This will give the probation service a stronger role within NOMS and the Ministry of Justice. The National Probation Service will play a fundamental role in protecting the public from the most dangerous offenders in our communities. Probation professionals in the National Probation Service will continue to work to protect the public from those who pose the greatest risk of harm and have committed the most serious offences.
Alongside this, we will open delivery of services for offenders in the community to a diverse range of new rehabilitation providers, as envisaged in the Offender Management Act 2007. We expect to see a wide variety of voluntary and private sector providers, from local community groups to regional and national organisations. In particular, we want to see a system which values and utilises the local expert knowledge of the voluntary and community sector. These providers will work alongside the National Probation Service and will manage the vast majority of offenders. We expect that most staff currently performing probation roles will transfer to the new providers. We will put in place a new system where the skills and expertise of probation professionals, coupled with the innovation and versatility of voluntary and private sector providers, support the rehabilitation of all offenders.
Opening up these services will allow us to make savings which we will invest in rehabilitation. It will also allow us to make better use of the money we already spend on managing offenders. We will create incentives for providers to focus relentlessly on reforming offenders, giving those delivering services flexibility to do what works and freedom from bureaucracy, but only paying them in full for real reductions in reoffending. Our payment structure will ensure that providers have to work with all offenders, including the most prolific and hardest to reach.
Finally, we will also put in place an unprecedented nationwide through-the-prison-gate resettlement service. This will mean that one provider will give most offenders continuous support from custody to the community. We will support this by ensuring that most offenders are held in a prison designated to the area to which they will be released for at least three months before release takes place. I hope that noble Lords will be as enthusiastic about this last reform as we are. It has long been recognised that closeness to home is an important factor in an offender’s resettlement process—and something on which the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has long campaigned. Our reforms will draw on the best that organisations across all sectors have to offer, allowing access to offenders at the start of their time in custody through to release and beyond.
Linked to these wider reforms, parts of this Bill will support individuals working with offenders—whether they are staff of the National Probation Service, voluntary and community sector workers and volunteers, or those working for new rehabilitation providers—to use their experience of working with offenders to provide innovative services. Just as the new supervision period provides the maximum discretion, so we have tried to match that for non-custodial sentences. For community orders and suspended sentences, Clause 13 will create a new rehabilitation activity requirement. This combines the existing supervision and activity requirements and gives those supervising an offender more discretion to tailor activities to their needs during the course of the order. Clauses 14 and 15 make similar reforms to the programme and attendance centre requirements. These reforms build on the efforts we have already made to strengthen community orders, so that sentencers and the public can be confident that they are a robust sentence which combines punishment with effective rehabilitation.
I am sure that today we will hear genuine concerns about the pace and direction of our reforms, but I remind the House that a number of noble Lords across all Benches have campaigned for many years for greater support to be given those sentenced to less than a year in custody. They have argued for better through-the-gate services and for more effective and better respected community sentences. These are ambitions which this Government share and this Bill gives a real opportunity for them to become a reality. The hard fact is that without our wider reforms we would not be able to afford to extend rehabilitative support to offenders released from short sentences, but neither could we afford the status quo, with offenders passing through the system again and again, with more victims hurt and more communities damaged. It is the need to tackle that cycle of reoffending, particularly for offenders
released from the shortest prison sentences, which drives these reforms and is the central purpose of this Bill. If we can cut deep into the 58% reoffending rate for those sentenced to less than 12 months, it will change lives—not just for victims but for offenders, whom it may well help to move away from a life of crime.
I know that the objectives underpinning this Bill are supported by the whole House. The provisions themselves will be subject to close and careful scrutiny today and through every stage of the Bill’s passage through this House. But I believe it is a piece of genuinely radical reform deserving of your Lordships’ support, and I commend this Bill to this House. I beg to move.
3.20 pm