That this House takes note of the Report from the Justice and Home Affairs Committee Cutting crime: better community sentences (1st Report, Session 2023–24, HL Paper 27).
My Lords, I need to declare an interest. I am a trustee of the charity Safer London, whose focus is on keeping young people out of offending. We are in a rather different context from late June, when a debate was scheduled on a report by the House’s Select Committee that I chaired until earlier this year. I am particularly pleased that the new Minister for Prisons, Parole and Probation—I hope I have that in the right order—is able to respond. On my behalf and, if I may, on behalf of the committee from which I have become time expired, I welcome him very warmly and with high expectations. So, no pressure, but he is now an old hand in this Chamber—after three days.
It is fair to say that the committee felt that it and the previous Justice Secretary were on the same wavelength. The then Government’s response to our report was published in February. It was careful and encouraging, but I hope the Minister will not feel constrained by it. We are, of course, interested in updates, new directions and the “how” as well as the “what”.
The committee’s starting point was, as the title indicates, cutting crime, particularly reoffending, and making better use of sentences served in the community. We looked at the benefits of community sentences to society—for instance, value for money, the intergenerational impact of imprisonment, and as a humane and practical response for the individual offender. The use of community sentences had dropped considerably, though there were and, no doubt, still are varying interpretations of the data.
During our work, prisons reached operational capacity. Then the Government announced proposals for revised early release, and we are all aware of the new Government’s plans. The issue is not just a matter of theoretical capacity and physical conditions, but scope for rehabilitative work. The committee well understood that the aims of sentencing include punishment. Under the 2020 Act, there are also the reduction of crime, the reform and rehabilitation of offenders, public protection and reparation.
There are positive reasons for the use of community sentences. One is that the offender can retain contact with his—most often it is a male, and I will refer to offenders as such—support networks, and his home and job, in both cases, if he has one. Imprisonment often means these are lost. The Minister may say something about employment and the importance of the stability of a home and a job, and, conversely, the much increased risks of reoffending without those stable bases. A previous Chief Inspector of Probation commented on HMPPS paying for accommodation for people coming out of prison. He said:
“What you need is to pay for the accommodation before they have had to go to prison in the first place”.
The issue of accommodation will only escalate. This is one of a number of areas that cry out for cross-departmental working.
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, for introducing this debate and for her very skilful chairing of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee. Her thoughtful and probing approach was a real asset to the committee. My thanks also go to the clerks, researchers and special advisers for the excellent support that they provided. It was also a pleasure to work with the other members of the committee.
I also take this opportunity to extend a very warm welcome to the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, and congratulate him on his elevation and appointment as Minister with responsibility for prisons, parole and probation. As a former chairman of the Parole Board, I am delighted that he is undertaking this task. I cannot think of a better person to help us develop a more effective strategy for prisons and shape a more responsible debate about crime and prisons. The point about trust is well noted.
We had a response to the report by the previous Government. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said, it was encouraging, but I hope that the new Government will approach this issue with vigour and determined commitment.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, has covered the findings of our report very comprehensively and admirably. I will focus on just two issues I feel quite strongly about. The first is public opinion on matters of crime, prison and justice. We did not cover this in the report, but we must recognise that we need to shape public opinion to get a better debate on these issues. The second is the Probation Service and a need for better, improved rehabilitation provisions in the community. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, mentioned the expertise we have in the third sector.
The first thing, which should be said quite emphatically, is that non-custodial sentences are not a soft option. To create support for non-custodial sentences, we need to change public perception and the public narrative. We need to ensure that people understand what prisons are for. We need to do much more to enhance public confidence in the criminal justice system and sentencing. An evidence-based change in approach to communication is much needed.
My Lords, I am glad to take part in this debate and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, for enabling the report on community sentencing to be discussed in this House. It is an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, and I commend her point about changing the public narrative.
I also welcome the Minister to his new role and commend his excellent maiden speech, delivered on Wednesday, for which I was pleased to be present, and the wisdom and expertise that he brings to his new role. I wish him very well indeed. I also commend him on the way he dealt with repeating a Statement from the other place and taking questions before he had delivered that maiden speech. If I may use a word borrowed from my primary field of expertise, this was a baptism-by-fire experience.
Throughout my ministry in episcopal orders, I have gained insights into the value of community-based initiatives supporting the criminal justice system. First-hand insights from supporting indigenous family and kinship initiatives among Māori and Pacific island communities in New Zealand, where those communities are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system, and from listening to the distress of young men brought into the youth custody estate in Wetherby young offender institution—often from far-away locations—give support to many of the conclusions of the report before us.
I welcome the Government’s commitment to a sentencing review, creating a framework that is consistent and clear to the public. This was a point that the Minister made in his remarks on Wednesday. At the heart of the report before us, as other noble Lords have mentioned, there is a clear message: the need for more community sentencing. As the report outlines, growing evidence points towards community sentences being far more effective in reducing reoffending than short custodial sentences. Many of those in the criminal justice system suffer from addiction and mental health issues. These are health issues that require treatment—treatment that does not come in the form of a locked cell. The tailored sentences that community sentencing provides enable offenders to attend necessary treatment and rehabilitative programmes while remaining in their existing support networks, which can be a vital part of their rehabilitation.
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, on her contribution today but, much more particularly, on her excellent chairmanship of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee’s work on community sentences.
Our report came out in the context of the criminal justice system being regarded, according to the press, as a catastrophic public safety failure—so it was certainly relevant to have it. It has been found that 52.7% of hyper-prolific offenders, with at least 45 previous convictions, are given community sentences. The great majority of those offenders are of course not redeemable. Community sentences are therefore not suitable for them—something needs to be done about that—but for offenders who are neither prolific nor violent, intensive community-based sentences, including both punishment and treatment programmes, can be highly effective.
The Government need to make it clear in legislation that community-based sentences rather than short-term prison sentences should be the preferred option for these non-violent and non-prolific offenders. Very important is that, when sentencing offenders to community-based sentences, judges and magistrates must be required to set out the conditions of the sentence and why these are being imposed, with a very clear purpose of reducing reoffending in future.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, mentioned, our report makes it clear that crime can be reduced, and the lives of offenders turned around, through rigorous community sentences. This is not a likely outcome of short-term prison sentences, as we know. Yet community sentences currently fail to achieve their full potential: they are not sufficiently rigorous in either their treatment or punishment components, so work needs to be done on all that. Also, the use of community sentences has more than halved over recent years. As a result, we have untapped potential in our criminal justice system. To reduce reoffending, we need to keep offenders out of prison and apply rigorous community sentences to far more offenders.
My Lords, both the prisons crisis and, more happily, the very wide welcome that has been given to our new Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, in the media and during the debates on Wednesday, provide a perfect backdrop for this debate on the report from our Justice and Home Affairs Committee, then chaired by my noble friend Lady Hamwee. The Minister’s background as a former chair of the Prison Reform Trust and in his family business, which practices what he preaches, gives a great deal of heart to those hoping for deep reform of the criminal justice system.
The Lord Chancellor, in her recent announcement on prison capacity, said:
“Longer term, we will also look at driving down reoffending, because the entrenched cycle of reoffending creates more victims and more crime, and it has big impacts on our ability to have the capacity that we need in our prison estate”.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/7/24; col. 180.]
She made no mention of how to reduce the use of prison, such as community sentences, but my right honourable colleague Alistair Carmichael did, saying:
“The answer surely has to be more than just building more prison capacity. The problem is not that our prison estate is too small; it is that we send too many people to prison, and that the time they spend there does nothing to tackle the problems of drug and alcohol dependency, poor literacy and numeracy skills, and poor mental health, which led to their incarceration. Can we hope to hear in the very near future the Government’s comprehensive plan to tackle the issue of the time that people spend in prison?”.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/7/24; col. 180.]
So it was heartening to hear the Minister in an interview with Channel 4 refer to the Dutch experience, saying:
My Lords, I hope your Lordships will bear with me as I speak during the gap. I am aware that such contributions are meant to be kept short, so I will speak relatively briefly. I do not need to mention my interest, because it has already been referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford.
I congratulate the committee on its report, which is absolutely excellent: it is rigorous and well-argued, and a very good piece of work. For my part, I agree with its conclusions and recommendations. I thought the Ministry of Justice’s response was careful and constructive, and also a very good piece of work. That said, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, that the Government ought now to treat this as a springboard, rather than the final word, and to build on that response, because there is progress that can be made.
I will make a couple of points. I was delighted when, on Wednesday—I cannot remember whether it was during questions on the Lord Chancellor’s Statement or during the King’s Speech debate—the Minister went out of his way to remark upon the great attachment to public service of those working within the probation service. I was delighted, because my experience running the CPS taught me that there is nothing more destructive to the morale of a workforce than to be constantly criticised and abused—in the press and, sometimes, even by members of the Government, as I am afraid we have seen in the past. This drains enthusiasm and demotivates; it sucks the lifeblood out of a workforce.
I was interested to hear what the Minister had to say in his remarkable maiden speech about his own business and the way he treats his employees. I hope the Government will take a similar approach. Of course, when things go wrong, they have to be investigated and put right, but it seems that we hear only when things wrong; we do not hear about the countless occasions when the men and women working in our public services get things right.
I was simply going to say that I think that is absolutely right. I knew the new Prime Minister for 25 years at the Bar, first as a practitioner and thereafter when he succeeded me as Director of Public Prosecutions. I think his instincts would tend towards supporting generally the conclusions of this report. If that is right, those inclinations, combined with the Minister’s well-known desire to boost rehabilitation, could lead, at last, to some real reform in this area.
Sometimes the planets do align. This is a very welcome report on community sentences, and a Minister who believes that too many people are imprisoned. In my experience of over 30 years in policing, the biggest problem with low-level crime recidivism is the disruptive nature of short-term prison sentences, particularly to employment, housing and family ties, to the extent that it can lead such prisoners becoming institutionalised and unable to survive outside prison. I worked at Holloway, in north London, as a police constable. I distinctly remember an older woman who, having left the local women’s prison, made her way to the nearest store and blatantly committed shoplifting, hoping to be swiftly returned to the security of the prison. The local magistrate granted her wish. Short sentences can encourage recidivism, and community sentences can encourage reform.
As my friends, the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee—who so expertly chaired the committee and whose report we are debating today—and the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, have said, community sentences can be tailor-made, enabling those subject to them to maintain the links that are so important in preventing reoffending. I am sure the Minister will agree that, if at all possible, any sentence should have the aim of preventing reoffending through rehabilitation, rather than by incarceration.
Committees always have to be disciplined in their focus to make their inquiries manageable, and this committee understandably decided to concentrate on community orders specifically, rather than other forms of community sentence, such as restorative justice sentences. It is on this subject that I wish to speak briefly.
Later in my police career, I worked with Professor Larry Sherman, now the Metropolitan Police’s chief scientific officer, on a Home Office trial of restorative justice, including those involved in serious offences that led to custodial sentences. The greatest positive impact was on victims of crime voluntarily coming face to face with their assailant, where the offender became a real person, not some monster in the victim’s imagination. In a legal system where the defendant can refuse to participate in the process, and where people in wigs and gowns talk to each other about something that is going to be done to them without their direct involvement, for the offender too, engagement with the restorative justice process can make them realise that the victim is not just another faceless target but someone with friends and family, and feelings. It makes their offending real.
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Community sentences can and should be tailored to the individual, but that does not mean that they should not be robust and demanding. My noble friend Lord Beith, who was on the committee, commented that it is much easier to sit on your bunk all day—but actually, I think many of us would find that pretty demanding. One of the routes to a personalised sentence is through problem-solving courts and intensive-supervision courts, which work holistically. The Government’s response was a little cautious. The committee of course recognised that you cannot just randomly introduce new schemes, and we understand the value of pilots. Our recommendation was that there should be proper monitoring and evaluation of the pilots—because there are quite a lot—and that pilots should not be launched without a plan for evaluation. But we wanted to see best practice shared and scaled up: single pilots will not get us far nationally. Can the Minister update us on progress?
We were interested in incentivising offenders by deferring sentencing—positive behaviour before passing sentence means a less severe sentence—and a single judge following the progress of an offender, with regular reporting back to the judge during the sentence. I suppose that the courts backlog, alongside bulging prisons, means that this is a rather long-term aspiration. Integrated community sentence orders are being tried in Ireland, with incentives for engagement in rehabilitation and meaningful activities.
I certainly did not have the impression that every offender is resistant to orders incorporating treatment requirements, but I did get the impression that they are often not supported to be more than passive recipients of what is done to them. Treatment requirements to address drug and alcohol abuse and mental ill health need the offender’s consent. There seems to be a lack of understanding of this, and the processes do not help.
I was surprised that pre-sentence reports are not more widely used. This is partly a matter of capacity and of saving court time, and because the short-format reports are insufficiently detailed and there are varied views of their purpose, and some misconceptions—of course, these are all connected. One ex-offender saw PSRs as probation’s advice to the court on the sentence and was emphatic that the court did what probation told it. PSRs can give offenders the opportunity to consent to treatment and give sentencers confidence to impose treatment requirements. The MoJ was encouraging about increasing the number of PSRs. Again, can the Minister update us on the feasibility of adopting the new model?
The Probation Service is central, but it is an unattractive profession with unmanageable caseloads—I hesitated before writing that, but it was the evidence we received. We were well aware of the impact, still felt, of the reorganisation of a decade or so ago, and, if we were not, many witnesses would have made sure that we were. But we were clear that there should be no large-scale restructuring in the next few years. The reunification of 2021 must be allowed to settle down.
We got the logic of recruitment in waves so that experienced staff were in post to support the next intake. But the best may be the enemy of the good. Is the MoJ confident that there are so many potential recruits out there? The Secretary of State mentioned the recruitment drive. The current chief inspector applies the term “not sustainable” to the current position and suggested that capacity should be freed up by probation officers no longer being required to monitor people released after short sentences. If that is not directly relevant to community sentences, it is on the same page, and the Minister may wish to comment.
The previous chief inspector talked of the role having evolved to focus more on supervision and administration: more “assess, protect and change”—its current tag line—than “advise, assist and befriend” offenders, which is the statutory duty under the 1907 Act. The relationship between an offender and his probation officer is crucial. The ex-offenders—I stress “ex”—we met were impressive not only in demonstrating their successes but in explaining obstacles along the way. So were the treatment providers—the relationship with them is also central.
Smaller providers feel squeezed out by big national organisations and excluded by the complex commissioning process. This must be very recognisable to anyone who has dealt with contract bids by voluntary organisations and procurement by local authorities, so I hope that the Government’s promise to simplify the process at local government level will not stop there. There is a lot of enthusiasm, energy and expertise in the third sector, but providers feel unappreciated, given the obstacles in the way of applying it. The Government recognise this, but I did not take from our work that the benefits of changes had filtered down to service level. The Government referred to the dedicated grants probation portal to support the smaller bodies. How is that going?
Both the Probation Service and the courts need to be aware of what services, including treatments, are available—crucially, available in the local area—and make the most of them. Referrals must contain sufficient information and risk assessments, and commissioned partners must be able to feed back information. Data sharing is less than optimal, and there are still misapprehensions about restrictions: “We can’t—GDPR”. Smooth commissioning, allowing flexibility so that partners can innovate, would be of wide benefit, including to the taxpayer.
The stereotype of unpaid work by offenders is unfortunate. Both the public and offenders should see the work as having an intrinsic value. There are good models of support for offenders. I will not let this moment go by without plaudits for so much of what goes on in women’s services, and a plea for funding—I describe it as investment—for its expansion.
Youth services have much more bandwidth than adult services, though I am of course aware of the recent report about Feltham. Staff remain in post for long periods, caseloads are manageable and there is scope for thoughtful actions such as addressing communication needs—reading and writing. We heard persuasive views about the cliff edge at 18 and suggestions of extending “youth” to 21 or higher. This is not a new point, as understanding of a young person’s development is increasing. I would be anxious, though, that standards in youth justice services might drop if there was a handover of young adults without more.
I end with a particular, and perhaps more recent, concern. In the light of the size of the prison population, the demands of post-release supervision must not mean that we lose sight of the lowest level offenders.
I hope that the committee’s report and its work will be useful to the Government. When we spoke earlier this week, the Minister said he thought that, at so many points, trust was the issue. I absolutely agree. I welcome his commitment and what I would describe as hard-headed practicality. It is a very positive mix. I beg to move.
The lack of confidence is exacerbated by the reinforcement of unhelpful beliefs in how we talk about crime and justice: we prioritise punishment and prisons, and leave other necessary measures, such as non-custodial sentences, out of the narrative. We have a duty to ensure that the question of public discourse about crime and punishment is taken very seriously. Offenders, once they have served their sentences, have to be integrated into the community. Rehabilitation is a necessary part of public protection, so those who commit less serious offences can be treated in the community. We know that prison, on the contrary, is a training ground for turning less serious offenders into hardened criminals.
There is also a responsibility for the media to be accurate in reporting and not perpetuate misunderstandings of the law and sentencing. Maybe we should consider whether we need guidelines for the media on the way these things are reported. The Sentencing Council has a role too. It should be supported to expand its communication across both traditional and social media. How to engage the public should be an integral part of the discourse about non-custodial sentences and needs attention. In other words, there is a need for a very proactive role in communicating this. Is this something the Government intend to pay greater attention to?
Moving on to our report, the evidence we gathered shows that offending and reoffending can be reduced through rigorous non-custodial sentences. With the right investment, appropriate provision in the community and support for the Probation Service, non-custodial sentences can be very effective. They reduce reoffending and, in the long run, pressures on prisons. We found that there was a drop in the use of community sentences—their use has more than halved in recent years. Along with changing public perceptions, what is needed is an increase in the provision of effective rehabilitative services in the community, particularly for the treatment of addictions and mental ill-health, with services tailored to the needs of individuals.
In our report, we give examples of good practice drawn from support for women and young offenders. We believe that this can be replicated. Targeted investment in treatment places is required. Those which work best are the ones provided locally and where all the agencies concerned actually co-operate. We also need incentives to encourage low-level repeat offenders to engage with rehabilitation.
The Probation Service should be encouraged to place trust in the expert and experienced third sector. That needs quite a bit of attention. The forthcoming commissioning process is an opportunity. Maybe the focus should be on increasing the numbers, longer contracts, partnership working and adequate funding. Will the Government use the upcoming wave of commissioning as an opportunity to apply the lessons of the past two years? Are there plans to use the commissioning process to make the changes recommended in this report?
As we heard, the Probation Service has been subjected to enormous changes. It has been pulled and pushed in different directions, which has led to an identity crisis: pushed into being a law enforcement agency, with a greater emphasis on public protection and less on rehabilitation of offenders. Inevitably, this has led to less concentration on less serious offenders. Faced with massive changes and unrealistic expectations, along with unimaginable case loads, this affected its performance and its ability to focus on less serious offenders and produce timely pre-sentence reports. We need a well-supported, well-trained and adequately resourced Probation Service that is not subjected to constant change and contradictory expectations. The current changes announced on early release will put further pressure on the Probation Service. What steps are being taken to mitigate the impact on it?
It is extremely encouraging that we now have a Minister who is well versed on prison reform. I look forward to his response to our recommendations and, going forward, to a more enlightened debate on penal policy.
I believe that those who commit an offence must take responsibility and face just consequences for their actions. The theme of justice is central to a number of faith traditions, particularly the Judaeo-Christian tradition. With this perspective in mind, justice is not simply about punishment; it also transforms and restores. This view of justice is reflected in community sentencing. It ensures that justice is served while providing offenders with restoration through rehabilitative services.
I want to focus on the vital support that local organisations provide. The report emphasises the value in partnering with the third sector and how community sentences are
“more effective when the Probation Service is a fully engaged member of local partnerships”.
My experience of witnessing the work of charities in Newcastle only confirms this. The Oswin Project offers people with criminal records in the north-east of England second chances through mentoring, training and employment. Its initiatives include Café 16, located in Newcastle Cathedral and staffed by a team of prison leavers who are led, trained and mentored by the project. The café sells excellent baked goods supplied by the charity’s bakery in HMP Northumberland, further providing prisoners with new skills that they can use following their release. Across the country, hundreds of incredible organisations such as these understand local needs and opportunities and are working to break the cycle of reoffending. I therefore encourage greater devolution in probation services and more local commissioning of rehabilitative services.
The faith-based sector also does invaluable work in supporting offenders to transform their lives. Junction 42 works across the north-east of England to empower individuals to take control of their lives and become active contributors to their communities. When I spoke with the director of Junction 42 ahead of this debate, she shared the need for charities working in this sphere to receive longer-term and consistent funding from the Government. This echoes the evidence shared in the report, as longer-term funding allows charities to plan ahead and results in a lower staff turnover, providing offenders with greater stability and consistent relationships. What plans do the Government have to increase the length of contracts with third sector partners, particularly smaller charities? I note that the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, referred to this area of concern in her opening remarks.
“It is cheaper and safer to reduce crime or to reform criminals than to build gaols”.
Those were the words spoken by a Minister of Justice in New Zealand in the 1880s when introducing legislation establishing probation—nearly 30 years before probation services were introduced in this country. More than 130 years later, his words still ring true. I understand the immediate issue of overcrowding in the system that needs urgent action, but I am concerned that there should not be too great a focus on building more prisons rather than making long-term reforms to the system.
My friend, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester, expresses her regret that she could not be here today to participate in this debate. She recently travelled to the Netherlands to learn about the prison system there. In due course, she hopes to share her reflections from that trip with the House.
There is much opportunity to learn from overseas, but the Minister has rightly said that we need to get our own house in order in a way that will work effectively for our context. Much can be learned from examples of best practice already being implemented in our own system. I highlight the specialised women’s services providing tailored, wraparound support that have proven to be effective in reducing reoffending. What assessment has been made of the success of this holistic approach? Do the Government plan to extend this model to all probation services?
If we do not think long term about the rehabilitation of those in the criminal justice system, and increasing the use of community sentencing, we will continue to have this same debate in the years to come. Our criminal justice system needs bold reform; we need not solely to punish but to provide offenders with support to turn their lives around. I am sure that the Minister will agree that our system needs such reforms and that he understands the bold action that it requires. I offer him and his colleagues all my support in this mission.
The adult offender service can learn, as the right reverend Prelate said, from both the women’s service and the youth offending service, both of which adopt effective supervision of offenders in the community. Increased investment in treatment for offenders serving community sentences is urgently required, as the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, also said. In particular, the need for mental health and drug and alcohol treatments far exceeds the imposition of these treatments, and the availability of such treatments needs to be expanded substantially and urgently. Some 91,000 people on probation at any point in time have mental health issues, yet only 1,302 of them started mental health treatments as part of a community sentence in 2022.
Increasing the use of community orders can be expected to lead to a decline in reoffending, which would result in long-term savings. Of course rigorous community sentences are costly but, in the long run, they really are cost effective. The Government would do well to reverse the decline in their use under the previous Administration. However, the first step will need to be an increase in the availability and quality of mental health and addiction treatments.
“They have shut half their prisons. Not because people are less naughty in Holland. It is because they have got a different way of sentencing, which is community sentencing, so people can stay at home, keep their jobs, keep their homes, keep reading their kids bedtime stories and it means they are far less likely to commit crime again”.
That completely gels with the report, which emphasises that too many low-level and non-violent offences are dealt with through short sentences, but that these can be counterproductive and more likely to compound the issues that lead to crime in the first place. If someone needs support to move away from non-violent crime, they will have better access to the services that can help them if they are being supervised in the community.
The report’s very first sentences are:
“Crime can be reduced through rigorous sentences served in the community. With the right investment, intensive community sentences can succeed where short prison sentences fail”.
“Rigorous” and “intensive” are key adjectives. The report points out that community sentences are
“demanding on the offender and help them stop committing crime, thereby protecting the public. Breach mechanisms mean that offenders are being held to account”.
It also points out that community orders can save the public purse money, not only through reducing the use of expensive custody—since even the most intensive types of community orders cost less than prison—but through a reduction in reoffending.
But courts are not utilising community sentences as widely as they might. Over 151,000 community sentences were issued in 2012, but the number steadily declined over the following decade to just 69,000 in 2022—a reduction of over half. So the committee understandably reports that there is untapped potential for keeping offenders out of prison and supporting them to avoid reoffending, but the scope for effective results needs to be better understood.
One barrier to overcome is the all-too-widespread perception, reinforced and hyped by much of the media, that community sentences are a cop-out for offenders. The Justice Committee in the other place, under the excellent chairmanship of Sir Bob Neill, said in its report on public opinion and understanding of sentencing:
“Low levels of understanding of sentencing have an effect on the quality of public debate on sentencing, which in turn can have an influence on sentencing policy … There needs to be a step-change in the Ministry of Justice, the Attorney General’s Office and the Sentencing Council’s efforts on public legal education”.
Is there more that the Minister believes can be done in this regard? Will the Government be robust when predictable quarters of the press accuse them of being “soft on crime” and point out that in fact changing behaviour is jolly hard work?
Another barrier to greater use of community sentences is the sorry state of the Probation Service a decade after Chris Grayling launched his ideological and disastrous “transforming rehabilitation” so-called reforms, which actually involved fragmentation and part-privatisation. The role of the Probation Service is key, as the report highlights. Lack of sentencer confidence in probation’s ability to effectively deliver community sentencing must have been shaped in part by the chaos and constant policy churn in the Probation Service, which has suffered a disastrous impact on its staff retention.
The Lord Chancellor made a welcome commitment to recruit 1,000 more trainee probation officers by March 2025 but, as she has acknowledged, this is not new investment but a “redeployment of resources”. This is not particularly encouraging. The committee stresses the need for manageable case loads, as probation officers are often managing more than 70 cases. As my noble friend pointed out, the Chief Inspector of Probation in England and Wales, Martin Jones, was reported on Monday as saying that the current model for the Probation Service was not sustainable; unfortunately, one of his suggestions was to reduce the demand on probation officers to monitor people released from prison. Will the Minister respond to those concerns about the non-sustainability of the Probation Service?
Some commentators believe that the issue goes beyond money and that the Probation Service needs a strategic focus, with national leadership and accountability coupled with localised service delivery. There are suggestions around for reorganisation. The committee’s report suggests:
“When services are provided locally, various agencies can cooperate effectively. The co-location and co-commissioning of services are the gold standard”.
Do the Government have any thoughts on the Howard League’s suggestion—I am pleased that its president, the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, will speak in the gap—of delivering probation work through local community justice partnerships, each with a board including representatives from the police, local authorities, local voluntary groups and members of the community, sentencers, health boards and regional prison management?
The committee’s report stresses that pre-sentence reports produced by the probation service are an essential part of the sentencing process. However, the probation service has been under great stress and has not always been able to produce these reports. Do the Government have any new thinking on how to encourage the greater production and scope of pre-sentence reports?
As others have said, our committee’s report points out that:
“The need for mental health, and alcohol and drug treatment far exceeds the current rate of imposition of Community Sentence Treatment Requirements, which itself exceeds the availability of treatment”.
How will the Government ensure better provision of treatment facilities?
The report wants incentives to be created to encourage low-level, repeat offenders to engage with rehabilitation, and says that
“The approach which underpins Ireland’s ‘integrated’ Community Service Order is a helpful model”.
Do the Government see scope in looking to what Ireland is doing?
The report comments favourably on the effectiveness of “wraparound rehabilitative support” offered to female offenders and some young people, wanting it to be a model for probation services generally. Do the Government agree with those suggestions? Does the Minister have any thoughts on how to avoid the cliff edge at 18, which the report stresses?
Finally, the committee’s report stresses the importance of the availability of housing, saying:
“Being homeless makes it difficult”—
if not impossible—
“to comply with the requirements of a community order”.
I am glad that the new Government are giving long-overdue prominence to the supply of housing, but is the connection to offending being given specific attention?
We clearly have great hopes of the new Government bringing a new approach to criminal justice. We wait with eagerness to hear the detail of the Government’s commitment.
There are other pressures; it is not simply media and political pressure. As others have made clear, the probation service is badly understaffed and underfunded. There are too many relatively junior probation officers taking on cases which should be reserved for more senior, experienced people, who do not exist in the service. This will take a long time to put right. Recruiting 1,000 new probation officers is better than nothing, but they will be trainee probation officers, at the bottom. Programmes to try to tempt back into service more senior figures who have left in recent years will also be important.
If it will become the aim of this Government, as I very much hope it will, to try to reduce our prison population, the obvious place for them to start will be at the lower end, with those serving shorter sentences who have the highest reoffending rates—over 50% for adults released from serving sentences of 12 months or under. However, if these individuals are released without some form of supervision, the policy will soon discredit itself, and the Government could even be forced into a U-turn. An absolute corollary of reducing the prison population is to boost probation and rehabilitation services. The former cannot happen successfully without the latter.
We are told that there is not enough money, and that may be the case, but we could save some money from the £600,000 it takes to build each new prison cell, put less people in prison, and spend some of that money perhaps on intensive treatment, probation officers and other rehabilitation services. We have the balance of expenditure wrong.
I was very interested in the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord McNally, during the King’s Speech debate on Wednesday. He is a distinguished former leader of the Liberal Democrats, and I think we can all agree—I am sure Liberal Democrats would—that he is a wise old bird. He made the point that it is important in this debate to keep lines of communication open with the top of the Government.
Restorative justice is most impactful when it is not followed by the brutalising effects of a prison sentence. When restorative justice leads to genuine remorse and empathy and a tough but positive community sentence, it keeps everything in the real world that the offender inhabits, something that can turn offenders’ lives around and make the victim’s experience less traumatic. I could not let this opportunity pass to attempt to ensure that restorative justice is on the Minister’s agenda.