My Lords, in welcoming this Bill, I know the House is all too conscious of the degree to which the history of our penal policy during the past few decades has been one of failure. The failure has been a failure of our criminal justice system and our penal system to turn an acceptable proportion of convicted offenders away from lives of crime.
When offenders are apprehended and convicted, that process, and the contact with the system that it entails, should afford society an opportunity not only to punish but to work out what has gone wrong with offenders’ lives and provide help and support to try to put things right. Every offender for whom the prison gate has unnecessarily become a revolving door has blighted his own life, damaged his victims’ lives, often irreparably, and at least disrupted, but often wrecked, the lives of his family. Society has been infected with the harmful effects of crime and the fear of crime, and we have all borne the extra financial costs: victims, the criminal justice system, social services, the penal system, insurers and those who pay the premiums.
As the Minister pointed out, reoffending rates are appallingly high, disproportionately so for those released from sentences of less than 12 months, for whom the figure is more than 58%: not far short of half overall. The very fact that never before have we provided support for prisoners released from these shorter sentences is a disgrace. It is very important that this is now being addressed by Clause 2 of this Bill.
The commitment to through-the-gate services for prisoners on release is very welcome generally. However, it is crucial that, as is proposed, the link with those who will provide support services for an offender on his release is firmly established well before release. The goal must be a planned release. There should be arrangements in place, so far as can be achieved, for a released prisoner to have a place to go to, an occupation, whether in employment, education or continued training, and people to return to. With respect to employment, it is heartening to note that a number of companies, including Network Rail and National Grid, are training prisoners within prisons and employing them on release.
Those providing services preparatory to release should, so far as possible, be the ones providing the support following release. The mentoring system in Peterborough, mentioned by my noble friend, has been a success and should be rolled out. It is important that those mentors should be able to see prisoners before release as well as after.
To enable all this to happen, it is vital that the Government implement their intention, mentioned by my noble friend, to ensure that at least the last few months of every prisoner’s sentence are served geographically close to the community to which the prisoner will return on release.
I particularly welcome the increased focus on drug treatment provided for by Clauses 10 and 11. The new arrangements will enable supervisors to help offenders to tackle drug dependency. Drug appointments and drug-testing requirements will enable the more effective monitoring of drug use in the community, but it goes without saying that the rehabilitation of drug-dependent prisoners would be massively improved by a successful drive to stamp out the scourge of drug use in our prisons.
The Government propose a far-reaching reorganisation of the probation services, to be implemented under the umbrella of the National Probation Service. This reorganisation has the worthwhile aims of increasing the diversity and range of providers, of involving the many organisations within the voluntary and not-for-profit sectors in contracted services, which are already doing significant and ground-breaking work in this area, and of giving service providers greater autonomy. However, it is important that we bring the probation service with us in this reorganisation, and it is imperative that the expertise and the good will of our probation officers are retained within the newly reorganised services. It is important that we do not underestimate the difficulties that we face in achieving these aims in the context of larger probation trusts and difficult new arrangements for contracting.
The new proposed structures will inevitably be much more diffuse than the probation service hitherto with which we and the probation services are familiar. My noble friend the Minister has been considering whether and how the professionalism and expertise of probation officers might be marked and recognised within the context of the new arrangements. I believe that we should consider how we might achieve this. Something like a new chartered institute of probation officers might serve the purpose well, enabling professional qualifications to be fully recognised and enabling the profession to remain united and subject to a respected code, with employers having the benefit of a guarantee of professionalism and quality that would mark out members of such an institution.
The proposed arrangements for payment by results have been controversial, as the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, pointed out. If they work and prove practical to implement on a national scale, they might at best provide incentives and rewards for success by cutting reoffending and enabling more informed choices to be made between services that are proved to be effective and those that are not. However, there is always a risk that such arrangements might be seen only as a way of saving resources at a time when that is, rightly, a national imperative, even where the use of extra resources might be justified.
The cost to the United Kingdom economy of reoffending is estimated by the National Audit Office at between £9.5 billion and £13 billion. In a speech this morning, my right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister put the figure at £10 billion. These are staggering figures. While that expenditure cannot be eliminated, of course, I believe that a more enlightened and determined approach to rehabilitation can take people out of lives of crime and help them to lead useful and productive lives in their place.
That is the background to the general point that I made in the debate on the gracious Speech: that the changes to be brought about by the Bill and the Government’s proposals must be properly resourced and that the potential savings are so substantial as to justify, where necessary, a departure from the traditional approach of Treasury accounting to spending proposals, where the outcomes are savings that are of their nature, and almost by definition, unquantifiable. If they are properly resourced and if there is good will and determination on all sides—within the service, within government and, I might say, in co-operation with local authorities as well—I believe that the changes in the Bill, in the context of the programme of rehabilitation involved in the greater use of community sentences on which we have embarked, might now start turn to turn around the failure of the past few decades.
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