That this House takes note of (1) the causes of crime and reoffending, and (2) the effectiveness of rehabilitation, including the contribution made by the voluntary sector.
My Lords, I am very pleased that the House has an opportunity to debate the causes of crime and reoffending and the effectiveness of rehabilitation, including the contribution made by the voluntary sector. I am also delighted to welcome the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, to the Front Bench—I believe that he was here yesterday, but this is his first debate. He is very welcome. The whole House will benefit from his expertise and experience, including as a judge for the General Court of the European Union and president of the Competition Appeal Tribunal. Most recently, he gave forthright advice to the Government following his criminal legal aid review. It is a nice touch that his central recommendation of a 15% funding uplift for fee schemes, increasing investment by £135 million a year, was announced by the Ministry of Justice the week he makes his maiden speech. I am sure the whole House is anticipating what he will say as keenly as I am.
I am thankful to all noble Lords who put their names down to speak and look forward to hearing all contributions, particularly that of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. His report on the contributors to the riots that began in HMP Strangeways in 1990 and spread to 20 other jails was an indispensable foundation for my own two reviews. These built on one of his 12 recommendations, linking prison safety with family contact. I emphasised the importance of strengthening prisoners’ family ties to prevent reoffending—including, of course, while inside prison, the focus of the Woolf report—and intergenerational crime.
Before I turn to the importance of healthy and supportive relationships in rehabilitation, I want to start with the causes of crime and reoffending. There is not time to do justice to the many criminological theories that try to explain these causes, each of which has its own strengths, weaknesses and gaps and applies only to some types of crime and not others. Simply, some see individuals as rational actors capable of making their own choices, including whether to commit crime, by weighing up likely benefits and disadvantages. Others focus on relative deprivation and suggest crime happens when individuals or groups see themselves as being unfairly disadvantaged compared to others who appear similar. Front-line practitioners describe the high prevalence among criminals of family breakdown, father absence and other adverse childhood experiences, as well as neurodiversities such as dyslexia.
The Prison Service refers to criminogenic needs: the characteristics, traits, problems or issues in an individual’s life that directly relate to their likelihood of reoffending. The “big eight” are accommodation, employability, relationships, lifestyle, drug misuse, alcohol misuse, thinking and behaviour, and attitudes, as well as three others which affect how offenders respond to support—learning disability and challenges, mental health conditions and low maturity levels. However, the idea that there are causes of crime is a relative newcomer. The late Professor Christie Davies pointed out that it was not until the 1890s that the thought processes of the educated and prosperous elite became “causalist”. They looked down, as he put it, at
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for getting the debate today, and for his very thoughtful—and for some, I suppose, somewhat controversial—contribution. He has been very brave and has said some things that need saying and that these days we are not prepared to say. I look forward with interest to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester’s contribution.
The causes of crime are the old fundamentals—the seven sins—such as greed, pride, lust and anger. Anger is one which causes a great deal of problems for families and society, and many people who have uncontrollable anger end up in prison. It is interesting that the Government’s 2018 strategy on anger and violence in society and in prison took it back to looking at what happens with alcohol and drugs, which is an area in which the House knows I have spoken fairly frequently. I will not labour on that today; I anticipate that my good friend the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, who was chair of the Commission on Alcohol Harm—of which I was a member, so I declare an interest—will speak at some length on this topic. Alcohol and harm, and the Government’s responsibility in the way they handle alcohol and harm, is a big factor.
I welcome the Minister to his role and, like others, look forward with great interest to his contribution. I hope we will have not just words but that he will be able to pull some levers and we will have some action.
I come at this from a long experience of personal problems with drink and drugs, many years ago. I have also spent much of my time working with people in recovery. I work also with people in recovery from prison, and later I will give noble Lords a message I have had from a friend who I spend a couple of hours every week with, who has been in Brixton prison three times. He comes from a difficult background but is now in recovery, training as a therapist and making very good progress. He has some useful insights into what we might be doing.
Lord Suri (Con)
My Lords, I note the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer. What he has done—
My Lords, first, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, on securing this debate. I welcome the Minister to his new position and look forward to working with him. I worked with his predecessor, who conducted himself with great integrity and conscientiousness, and I very much hope that the positive and constructive relationship we developed will continue.
In six minutes I can cover only a small number of points. The first part of this debate—the causes of crime and reoffending—is a herculean task in itself, but the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, treated us to a fascinating insight into that this morning. So I will focus on two areas of sentencing which frustrate the rehabilitation of offenders. First, we put people, especially women, into prison for short periods of time. I know that steps have been taken regarding sentencing in this area, but if the better development of women’s centres recommended over 14 years ago by the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, had been properly implemented, it would have obviated many of the problems we see today.
If you tried to design a system to ensure that people had the worst possible chance of rehabilitation, you would take them out of their home, rob them of their identity, put them in a threatening environment rife with drugs, lock them away for long periods of the day, ensure they got little or no help with addictions, mental illness and re-education, and give them no home and no job on release. Release them on a Friday, when they are unable to get anything organised—money, accommodation, et cetera—and you have a perfect recipe for perpetuating the system. Short-term sentencing shows how amazingly successful you can be at robbing an individual of their self-respect and their former lives in a really short time—and when they reoffend, just give them more of the same: spend more money on what does not work.
My Lords, I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for securing this debate, and I welcome the Minister and his maiden speech. Others have spoken of his great attainments, but what must now be half a century ago, he gained first-hand experience of the real problems that people needing legal advice face in day-to-day life when we worked together at a legal advice centre. I shall return to this in a moment.
I do not want to speak about the causes of crime—that is impossible to get into in a few minutes, although the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, did so eloquently—but will deal instead with what needs doing now, what works and what does not work. First, I want to say a word about IPPs. I could not equal the eloquence of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, or the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in dealing with the sentence, but I think we ought now to appreciate that although there are just over 1,500 people who have not been released, there are nearly 1,400 people who have been recalled. We overlook the importance of rehabilitation. One appellant described to me once that she felt like a puppet on a string when released. We need to address the problems caused by indefinite detention and the possibility of recall. We have to await the report of the Justice Select Committee on other matters, but I very much hope that we can address proper support to those released so we do not find so many coming back.
Secondly, I turn to women offenders because here, again, there is something that works. Obviously, there are some crimes for which we must send women to prison for a significant period of time, but sending a woman to prison for short-term offending is, in my view, almost invariably wrong. When I chaired the Commission on Justice in Wales, we recommended in our report that:
“A commitment should be made, in our view, to establish a number of women’s centres and the supporting interventions. This would overcome the well-documented problems of women’s imprisonment and would enable women to serve their sentences in their home areas. These centres take a holistic approach to reducing offending by women, offering court-ordered support and supervision, access to mental healthcare and treatment for addictions, skills for employment, financial management and debt advice, parenting support and the opportunity to gain and maintain safe housing.”
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for introducing this debate. His work is inspiring; I want to say “yes” to all that he has said and am sorry that I have only six minutes. I too welcome the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, and look forward to his maiden speech. I refer to my interests stated in the register as Anglican Bishop to Prisons and president of the Nelson Trust. Last week, I visited HMP Wakefield. In reflecting with the governor on long sentences, he said that he had asked a group of prisoners whether, if they had known the tariff for their crime, it would have been a deterrent. For all but one, the answer was no. Most crimes are rarely planned in a calculated way.
Earlier this month, the Independent Commission into the Experience of Victims and Long-Term Prisoners published a report with a comprehensive set of recommendations, holding together for the first time the perspectives of the offender and the victim. The report highlighted that the number of people in England and Wales given a prison sentence of more than 10 years has more than doubled in a decade, at an ever greater cost. Where is the evidence that greater severity equates to greater deterrence, or a safer society? We need to curb the unhelpful and inaccurate rhetoric about keeping the public safer through longer, tougher sentencing. What matters more than longer and longer sentences is how people are spending their time while in prison, in terms of not only education and purposeful work but meaningful interventions which prevent reoffending and someone else becoming another victim. Holding together justice and restoration is central to Christian theology; I believe it is vital for us to rediscover how those two dwell side by side.
As has been said, at the opposite end to long sentences are short sentences. These too are often not the answer. From my work with the Nelson Trust and women’s centres, as have been mentioned, I know the value of community sentences, police diversion schemes and other non-custodial interventions. Holistic intervention in the community for women, men and children can often address the root causes of offending, including drug and substance abuse. We know that offenders are often people of multiple disadvantage, and tackling those drivers to offending is key.
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the right reverend Prelate. I tip my hat to the work of the Church of England—indeed, of all faith leaders—to do with prisons. I too draw particular attention to the report chaired by the former Bishop to Prisons, James Jones, who has been a great influence on me and the way in which I try to think about prisons.
I start by declaring an interest. I am a patron of Unlock, a prisoners’ charity, and a trustee of the Prison Reform Trust. I see that my first chairman, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, is in his place; I look forward to hearing what he has to say.
It is interesting—and no surprise—that two former Lord Chief Justices are listed to speak in this debate; one, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, has already spoken, while the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, has yet to speak. Once again, I welcome my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy to the Front Bench. I look forward to him gripping this vexed question of what to do with prisons and prisoners with some degree of enthusiasm—even evangelism—because, unless a policymaker in the Government takes charge of this issue and owns it, it will just dribble on uselessly.
My noble friend Lord Farmer is to be congratulated on obtaining this debate. If I could bottle his speech and have it delivered by the crateload to every Whitehall department, I would. I have a suspicion that not every Cabinet Minister will condescend to read the Hansard of today’s debate but they jolly well should because everything that my noble friend said goes straight to the heart of the issues that my noble and learned friend on the Front Bench now faces.
Everything that has been said in this debate has been said time after time, ever since I became interested in this question. I was appointed shadow Prisons Minister by David Cameron in 2006, I think it was, when he became leader of the Opposition. I set about visiting as many prisons, YOIs and secure training centres as I could to see what was going on, in order to produce for my party evidence-based policy. In the end, after two or three years, I produced a paper called Prisons with a Purpose. As the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, mentioned, a number of the ideas in that paper were taken up by the coalition Government when they came into office in 2010 but, sadly, so many of them have fallen by the wayside. So we are still here. I am like a cracked record, repeating what I have been saying for the past 15 or 20 years. I dare say that I will go to my grave and wave from the hole in the ground, saying, “Do you remember? Why have you done nothing about this?”
My Lords, it is an honour to take part in this debate. My main reason for signing up to it was to listen and learn. Much of the discussion has focused on whether prison works and I want to highlight this issue in relation to older prisoners. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, rightly stressed the importance to prisoners of having a job when they come out of prison but, of course, a small proportion of prisoners are pensioners. Their specific needs must be given greater attention; I ask the Minister to say at least something in his reply about the specific needs of older prisoners, including in terms of their rehabilitation and their re-entry into society.
I have just two specific points to add to that general call. First, the punishment is what is levied by the court, but prisoners lose out in other ways. Prisoners of working age lose their national insurance contributions. There is a whole debate there but inflicting poverty on prisoners when they get to retirement age should not be part of the punishment. I suggest that one reform would be for prisoners who work or are in full-time training to be entitled to national insurance credits so that they can look forward to an adequate pension. That must be part of a policy for rehabilitation and re-entry.
My second, main point relates to the removal of the state pension from those prisoners who are of pensionable age. It is always difficult to engender sympathy for prisoners—it is perhaps even harder to do so for older prisoners given the typical nature of their crimes—but this is an issue not of sympathy but of rights. We have a state pension system based on contributions. In my view, if prisoners have paid their contributions, they should receive their benefits. Often, broadly, the argument is reduced to, “Well, we need to recoup part of the cost”, but we do not do that for prisoners under pension age. Why should we take a pension away from those who are over pension age?
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“a mass of weak people divided into the virtuous and the offending only by chance opportunities and adversities that caused them to act as they did. They were not truly free agents”.
In today’s parlance they would be termed “victims”, in the sense of those who have come to feel helpless and passive in the face of misfortune or ill-treatment.
The half century up to 1900 saw a decline in deviance: a drop in crime and social disorder that was directly linked to the influence on popular morality of religious institutions, notably the Sunday schools. These turned out such relatively law-abiding young people that the average age of prisoners rose. The turning point of this decline was the First World War, which started a flattening out, and the late 1950s ended it, just before the dawn of the sexual and social revolutions of the 1960s. That is when we begin to see Davies’s “U-curve of deviance”, based on data, not theory. This U-curve reflects a fall and subsequent rise in crime, drug and alcohol abuse and births outside of marriage. He associated this rise with a decline in “moralism”—knowing the difference between right and wrong—which implies that individuals have autonomy to choose whether they behave with, as he put it,
“virtuous innocence or deliberate guilt”.
This was gradually replaced by an ever-expanding legal corpus. To give an example, when I started in the City in 1963, its famous motto was still, “My word is my bond”. The complete trust in a word and a handshake slowly disintegrated to a recognition that one was bound only by what the law allowed or forbade. Religiously reinforced moralism, with its totemic notion of free will, was replaced by the causalism I described earlier. The loss of commitment to and identification with religion, and country, led in turn to a loss of the idea of service, sacrifice and the moral driver of duty. Perhaps one reason we admire the Queen so is because she embodies these values, which are self-evidently right and needed.
Not for a minute am I saying that the century when deviance fell and flattened was a perfect golden age. However, no one can say the changes that have taken place since the 1960s have produced one either. The House of Commons Library describes the history of crime in the 20th century as being dominated by the sharp rise in offences since the late 1950s. The 1960s were the only decade in the last century when crime doubled. Family breakdown has also soared. Half of all children are born outside an explicitly committed relationship. Hence, one-third of children live in separated families, a million rarely or never see their fathers and 80,000 are in local authority care. So, as we talk about the causes of crime today, we need to hold that concept in tension with Davies’s sense of de-moralisation. Ultimately, the cause is always the freely exercised decision of someone’s will to commit a crime—which may, of course, involve coercing others, against their wills, to be involved. But there is in everyone a contributor, without which they would not have ended up in criminal behaviour.
Turning to what is effective in curbing reoffending, the Ministry of Justice’s own statistics highlight how good relationships with families and significant others can aid rehabilitation. When I wrote my first review in 2017, reoffending rates were running at 43% and over 60% of children of prisoners went on to offend themselves and end up in prison. However, prisoners who receive family visits are 39% less likely to reoffend than those who do not. Intergenerational transmission of crime is, if anything, higher when mothers have been incarcerated, presumably because they are more often primary carers whose absence typically makes life more chaotic. Possibly as few as 5% of children stay in the family home, for example.
Yet the stark truth is that, pre pandemic, around half of prisoners were never visited. Given that around 25% were in local authority care, this is perhaps unsurprising. Looking at very recent reports from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons, the level of visits in some prisons has not yet picked back up to its rate in early 2020. The Ministry of Justice and the Prison Service must be congratulated on the swiftness of the implementation of my reviews’ recommendations to make video calls available when prisons locked down at the beginning of the pandemic. However, these should complement and supplement but not replace physical visits.
In some jurisdictions only video “visits” are available, and this is very far from my policy goal. I met prisoners who longed to see their children in the normality of their home environment. One man, who had been in care, and in prison for almost three decades, yearned to see his only remaining relative, his grandmother, who was too old and infirm to visit. I heard about teenagers undertaking exams which precluded a long, possibly overnight journey to prison. A video call can make a huge difference when physical visits are not possible, but a woman I met recently highlighted the value to her daughter of seeing her father in the flesh, saying “When my daughter visited the prison, the school said it was a breath of fresh air for her, they could see how the face-to-face contact brought a massive improvement.”
The quality of physical visits is also another very live issue following the pandemic. I visited eight prisons in late April and late May this year to see how they were faring with their strategies to improve prisoners’ relationships with families and significant others. While so much of the outside world really has returned to normal, many prisons feel far from that, even if it is a long time since an outbreak. High Perspex screens shot up during the pandemic for public health protection, and social distancing was still in force. Gradual changes may have been made since my visits, but normality must be re-imposed everywhere on the estate as quickly as the restrictions were brought into force. It will be very important to clear away all artefacts of the pandemic, so that in 10 years’ time they have not become so entrenched in visits that, for example, no one knows why officers are still behind Perspex screens. Prisons should not be among the large sections of the public sector which seem to have a case of long Covid.
There are many vacancies in the Prison Service, and officers are being lost to Border Force among other places. Can my noble friend the Minister outline what the Government are doing to recruit and retain them? Without adequate staff, rehabilitation is almost impossible.
Other important rehabilitation activity addresses prisoners’ lack of education, employment skills and accommodation, and helps them to get off drugs. I know other noble Lords today will do justice to these issues, but relationships provide essential motivation. One deputy governor I met recently impresses on his staff that, “Without a supportive family to return to he’ll return to crime regardless of the education he takes part in and the accommodation he gets upon release.” We need to ensure that relationships are truly embedded in the reducing reoffending culture. That means that in all national and local strategies, and in every speech from politicians, families and relationships are firmly screwed in as the third leg of the rehabilitation stool, without which it falls over. I see part of my role as ensuring that this happens.
I turn briefly to the voluntary sector, which includes prison chaplaincy. The sector has a vital role to play in weaving that golden thread of relationships through all the processes of prisons. Although prison chaplains can be the overlooked service, they stayed on the front line during covid, as did many family service organisations. They are statutorily required to meet all prisoners upon arrival at a jail. On my recent visit to HMP Durham, a reception prison, I realised that these early days are possibly the most stressful time of a sentence. Indeed, Professor Alison Liebling found that one-third of all prisoner suicides take place in the first week of custody.
The organisation Nepacs runs a dedicated early days in custody programme in HMP Durham, and all the men on the wings know Tracy, who runs it. Her work is rooted in awareness that the huge stress that comes from being in prison, after being on the outside, is compounded by not having your glasses, not having your own underwear, or not having your own false teeth. She sources these, and the messages she passes between prisoners and their family members dampen some of the shock and crises all are experiencing straight after arrest or sentencing.
The voluntary sector often excels at spotting important unmet needs such as these and filling them, but organisations have to go to charitable trusts and dig into their own reserves to do pioneering work. The commissioning process needs to incorporate and act on proven effectiveness of new ways of working. Can the Minister tell me if the Government are convinced that their commissioning process drives continuous improvement and innovation, rather than just preserving the status quo?
I will finish here because I am very keen to hear all noble Lords’ contributions, particularly my noble and learned friend Lord Bellamy’s maiden speech. I thank noble Lords for contributing to this vital debate.
I agree basically that the family as a unit is the best one available to us, but let us not deceive ourselves and think that simply because we are in a family and we have that relationship that everything will work fine there—it does not. My experience is that many people come from backgrounds where, prima facie, the family is perfect, yet they end up drinking too much and taking drugs. Why does that happen? We should spend time looking at that. My experience is that it is often a combination of the DNA, the past history of the family, and then of course the environment in which the child is in—and it is mainly at the childhood level that this develops. We have got to be careful about making assumptions that there are simple solutions; there are not. This is a complex topic.
I pay tribute to the Cameron Government here. When David Cameron was in power, he came up with a number of quite notable and distinctive polices in this area, which regrettably were not followed through. For example, they produced a very good alcohol strategy, but it was never implemented; it had fallen by the wayside by 2015. Why have the Government still not got a strategy on alcohol when, at the present time, we have more problems with alcohol then we have had for the past 15 years?
Cameron also encouraged the development of a more participative society; it is interesting that the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, cited the Queen and service. When this country is in difficulty, we have found that an extraordinary response comes from the people. When Covid began, 750,000 people volunteered to help the NHS. They were not used properly—what a waste of talent and opportunity. Everywhere we look, when we have a real problem, we get a great response. For example, we have had an outstanding response on Ukraine from people willing to accommodate refugees. When it comes to asking what we can do in prisons, not enough work is done in trying to tap into the good will of the British people and get them involved in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, is involved, and the way that many of the people I know working in AA go into prisons and try to get people into recovery.
I hope the new Minister might start thinking about how we can marshal that great British spirit. To a degree, this is a debate about spirit. We have spent so much time talking about material deficiency when, in fact, we have a great poverty of spirit in this country. However, if we can provide leadership, we can give a lift to people, and they will come forward and work with us. We need to do more because our record in prisons is very poor indeed in comparison with many other countries.
I am running out of time, and I regret that I cannot give your Lordships a quote from my friend who is an ex-prisoner, but I will write to the Minister with it. He gives some very good suggestions on what needs to be done.
At the other end of the sentence spectrum, we have those who do not know how long they are going to be incarcerated for. The duration of life sentences has doubled over the last 40 years from an average of nine years to 18 years, according to the Independent Commission into the Experience of Victims and Long-term Prisoners. Even worse, in my view, is the situation of indeterminate sentence prisoners, who are kept in prison for inordinate periods of time, long after the sentence has been abolished because of its unfairness. I will leave it to the other members of our small and select cross-party group to elucidate further on that.
I am sorry to say that the Minister is inheriting is a broken system, with any rehabilitation services trying to operate on a shoestring. We who have the temerity to point these contradictions out are branded lily-livered liberals. Well, I am a Liberal, for sure, but like many across this House I believe in evidence-based policy. The report of the Independent Commission into the Experience of Victims and Long-term Prisoners concluded that
“sentencing for serious offences has lost its way and is not working for victims, prisoners, or society as a whole.”
The report discusses the five purposes of sentencing, which are supposed to be the punishment of offenders, reduction of crime, reform and rehabilitation of offenders, protection of the public, and making of reparation. We have got the punishment side down really well—but the rest of it, not so much.
If all five purposes of sentencing are to be met—not simply locking people up and throwing away the key—we need more public awareness of what prison is actually for. We need a complete root-and-branch review of sentencing policy, incorporating all the resources at our disposal. We need the voluntary, private and public sectors all working together, throwing away the dog whistle and using evidence-based policy, doing what works, and thus serving the interests of all.
The Minister has first-hand experience of knowing how vital those issues of safe housing and employment are to dealing with people.
I wish to say how grateful I am to see that the Ministry of Justice, in conjunction with the Welsh Government, will open next year a residential women’s centre in Swansea that will be an alternative to short custodial sentences. This is a very important development, but key to it—I am not sure how well understood this is—is the holistic support that is to be given. The probation service does an excellent job, but in dealing with offenders you need to bring in the whole community, including the voluntary sector. Certainly, it is quite clear from pathfinder projects being undertaken in Wales—there is not time for me to set out the details—that there is success not in criminalising people, to which I shall return in a moment, but in providing holistic support for them in the community, with debt advice, safe housing, employment and dealing with the consequences of abuse: a one-stop shop for rehabilitation.
It has shown in Wales that it works; it is one way of trying to stop reoffending and rehabilitate effectively. I commend the work being done by the Ministry of Justice and the very significant sums being spent by the Welsh Government on subsidising the third sector on a more permanent basis and funding the work being done.
Thirdly, I turn to the other aspect that needs urgent attention. In the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act passed earlier this year, Sections 98 to 121 dealt with cautions. I very much hope that urgent steps are being taken to get the legislation under way, because another cause of reoffending is criminalising at too early a stage. The success of the projects in Wales, particularly those in Dyfed-Powys and north Wales, has shown that if you give people community rehabilitation and do not criminalise them, you can stop them going on to offend. I very much hope that urgent work is being undertaken by the Government to get the statutory instruments that are needed, and the necessary guidance, so that we can properly stop criminalising people and look for an alternative, rehabilitative approach.
We also know that if men and women are to cease from reoffending, they need purposeful work, strong relationships, addiction intervention and a home. A project I have advocated for in the diocese of Gloucester is the prisoners building homes programme. These prisoners are working with a modular housing provider to build low-carbon, modular homes for local communities and vulnerable people across the south-west, hopefully including for prison leavers. The prisoners are acquiring skills for future employment. I would love to see more projects like this, but it will take significant cross-departmental and interdepartmental working and the will to think outside the box when commissioning or securing funding.
A recent IMB report on HMP Bronzefield found that 65% of women face homelessness on release. I urge Her Majesty’s Government to continue to engage on this issue in a meaningful, interdepartmental way and with a gendered approach.
Turning to the voluntary sector, the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, has highlighted the importance of relationship. As a Lord spiritual, this is not a surprise. Restored relationship sits at the heart of Christian belief, and I am glad that the noble Lord has highlighted the importance of chaplaincy, paid and voluntary, in prison and beyond the gate. Relationship sits at the heart of so much of the work of the voluntary sector, supporting the charity sector in a commitment to the flourishing of individuals and communities, not least with prison leavers.
We have many examples in the faith-based sector, such as the Welcome Directory, which signposts prison leavers to worshipping communities of all faiths to find a place of welcome and community. There is also the Prison Advice and Care Trust, PACT, which has volunteers and staff in courts, prisons, probation services and the wider community. There are so many local and national initiatives with stories to tell of transformed lives. People in the charitable and voluntary sector stand ready to be part of the solution, but it needs the Government to intentionally work with them and tap into their considerable experience, wisdom and insights.
Returning to the overall focus of today’s debate, I would argue that sustainably funded community intervention and purposeful rehabilitation in prison and beyond the gate need not carry a high financial increase if we realign the funding, stop a focus on more prison places and address the pervasive issue of more and longer sentences which are failing both victims and prisoners.
I urge noble Lords to join me in pushing for a national debate informed not by the occasional sensational Daily Mail headline but by evidence, so that we can turn the tide for the sake of our overcrowded prisons and for real justice for victims of crime, so that reoffending is tackled effectively once and for all. I invite the Minister to meet with me and those behind the independent commission to reflect further. It is of course easier to file all this in the “too difficult” drawer and continue to focus on lengthening sentences and building more prisons. But I hope for a better way, and I look forward to the rest of today’s debate.
If I may say so, there is not only a moral and justice case for dealing with prisoners in a productive and sensible way but a hard-headed economic case. The cost of housing a male adult prisoner in a long-term secure prison is enormous. If, when that prisoner is in there and is literally a captive audience, we do nothing to prevent him—it usually is a “him”—reoffending, are we not letting ourselves down? Are we not letting our fellow citizens down by fooling them into thinking that a Government with a policy of sending more and more people to prison for longer and longer while doing nothing constructive with them when they are in there are achieving something positive?
When I became the shadow Minister, the first person I rang up was the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham; he is no longer in his place. I have learned a great deal from him and many others who know an awful lot about this subject. He asked me to think about three things; noble Lords have mentioned them already. The first is what we do with prisoners when they are released. He said that they need a job, a stable place of accommodation and a stable relationship. Those things come through their families and the system, be it the Prison Service, the Parole Board or the voluntary sector, enabling people to leave prison in a condition in which they can get a job.
If you leave prison and you cannot read or write—bear in mind that the average reading age of an adult prisoner in our system is 11—you cannot get even the most basic manual job. So why do we send people to prison for all those years and not teach them to read and write or to add up? Why do we send drug addicts to prison and not effectively treat their addictions? Why do we send mentally ill people to prison and not effectively treat their mental health problems? I guess it is because it is easy just to keep on doing the same thing over and again.
I have been saying the same thing over and again. My six minutes are now up but I urge my noble and learned friend on the Front Bench to launch out on a new path—one of real reform and real positive advance.
It is notable that prisoners do not lose their occupational pensions. There is a technical point here, to a certain extent. Currently, for many older pensioners, part of their occupational pension is a replacement for the state pension. There is a lottery element: if you get a pension from the state, you lose it in prison, but, if you get an identical pension from an occupational scheme, you do not lose it. Given the national insurance position of a large number of older pensioners, their wives—it typically is wives—lose their pensions as well. That cannot be right.
This is not a new point. In the past, the Prison Reform Trust and Age UK have expressed dismay at this policy, and my main point is that it is directly relevant to prospects for rehabilitation and return to society that we should not inflict additional penalties which move people into greater poverty, with the consequent knock-on effects on their future.