Speech at the Social Market Foundation conference: Putting the Rehabilitation Revolution into Practice.
25/01/2011
It is a pleasure to be able to speak here today, and I would like to thank SMF for their kind invitation and for organising such a lively, informative and timely conference.
The publication of the Green Paper on sentencing and rehabilitation is of course the immediate backdrop for this conference, and today I want to outline my concerns about some of the measures the Coalition are pursuing, as well as to take a more reflective view both of Labour’s record in Government on criminal justice, and on some of the key areas that we might consider in our Policy Review.
i) Labour’s record
Although one would never know it from what Government Ministers have said in recent months, there were many real improvements to the criminal justice system in the last decade.
• Crime fell by 43% from 1997 to 2010.
• We extended and toughened community sentencing; provided 9 million hours of community work through Community Payback; and introduced neighbourhood policing in every community.
• We cut re-offending by 16%, funded a fifteen-fold increase in drug treatment; introduced an Alcohol Strategy for Prisoners, and improved services for prisoners with mental health problems following the Bradley Review.
• We made huge progress with regard to women in the penal system through the Corston Report and by investing £15.6 million to set up dedicated support centres to help women prisoners.
• We increased the number of offenders working and learning in prison; we introduced a Victim Surcharge; we made sentencing more transparent and consistent by introducing the independent Sentencing Council; and we increased probation funding by 70% in real terms.
• And, of course, we set-up the payment-by-results pilot at Peterborough prison.
Indeed, many of the boldest proposals in the Green Paper seek to build on the work Labour did in Government.
Community Payback and the Victim Surcharge, for example, are now to be extended; community sentences are to be used more widely; drug, alcohol and mental health treatment are to be expanded – although how is not yet clear – and the Peterborough pilot is to be the template for the Lord Chancellor’s prison reform programme.
ii) Concerns about the Green Paper
So we should not accept the Coalition’s crude portrayal of the Labour years. The criminal justice system is fairer, better resourced and more effective than it was in 1997.
And equally, we do not simply oppose the Lord Chancellor’s Green Paper.
There are proposals that we support – for example, to reduce further the number of young people in prison, to widen the use of restorative justice and to provide community solutions wherever possible.
And I do not question the sincerity of the Lord Chancellor’s intention to reduce reoffending and improve support services for victims and criminals.
But I do question whether he has a credible strategy.
Firstly, the question of resources.
Taken as a stand-alone document, the logic of the Green Paper is clear.
It is hoped that prison numbers can be reduced by diverting people from custodial sentences, and by lowering re-offending rates.
Tougher community sentences, and earlier intervention are to achieve the former; and re-offending is to be reduced by making prisoners more skilled, employable and equipped to ‘go straight’ on release.
But this Green paper comes against the backdrop of an unprecedented 23% cut in the MOJ budget, a reduction of 10,000 prison and probation officers, and the likely consequences of the Coalition Government’s wider policies: with rising unemployment, cuts to benefits, reduced support for young people and more people living in poverty.
Nor does the Lord Chancellor appear to have had any discussions with his colleagues at DCLG, the Department for Education, or the Home Office on the impact that their cuts will have on crime and especially youth crime. On the contrary, the Lord Chancellor is a supporter of the rapid fiscal reduction programme.
The problem is not so much that the Lord Chancellor is soft on crime, as that he has forgotten the causes of crime.
This issue of resource is central.
• For example, he has not agreed with the Department of Health where resources will come from to provide additional and more intensive drug and alcohol treatment programmes.
• With 10,000 fewer prison and probation officers – a cut of 15% in frontline staffing numbers – how will the Prison Service be better able to prevent drug and alcohol misuse and to dedicate the necessary time to support prisoners with complex needs? How will they find the time to engage prisoners in the education and training they need? Similarly, how will the Probation Service be better able supervise ex-offenders?
• How will the excellent work undertaken since the Corston Report be continued when the Coalition Government will not guarantee funding for dedicated women’s centres beyond March?
• How will more young people be diverted from custodial sentences when the Government are cutting support to find jobs and stay in education?
• How will more prisoners be helped to find housing and a job upon release when Housing Benefit is being cut and unemployment is rising?
The reality of this Green Paper is thus not that resources are being diverted away from managing the prison estate and toward providing additional community solutions, but rather that resources are being CUT significantly across the board.
And this can only have serious consequences for the CJS as a whole.
The Green Paper does, however, appear to offer one answer to all these questions.
Indeed, the same answer is offered throughout the Green Paper: all problems can be overcome by adopting ‘payment by results’ models to deliver services.
Payment by results will reduce reoffending rates; PBR will decrease prison numbers; PBR will reduce drug and alcohol dependency, PBR will make community sentences more effective, PBR will provide a job and housing for ex-offenders and PBR will reduce the number of young people in custody.
Payment by results is without doubt an interesting and potentially highly useful way to deliver effective and innovative services. The Peterborough pilot set up by the Labour Government has real promise, and we are all looking to this pilot to see how, when and if we should go further with this method of delivery.
It is, of course, a 6 year pilot, working with 3,000 short-term prisoners, and with the support of social sector investors such as the St. Giles Trust – with their strong track record of working with prisoners – I am optimistic that we can see some real progress on reoffending rates from HMP Peterborough.
But these are early days for payment for results: Peterborough is just one out of over 140 prisons in England and Wales, and we need to look carefully both at the Peterborough model and wider issues such as scalability, the potential for payment by results to create perverse incentives and the ramifications it could have for other service providers. Prof. Melhuish at Birkbeck has raised similar questions in other fields.
At DWP I found small but highly effective voluntary groups may find themselves unable to compete with larger companies for these contracts. This means that some of most successful, innovative and experienced voluntary sector providers can be cut out of the market.
I am also concerned that payment by results contracts may be awarded on condition that the eventual provider is uniquely entitled to deliver services in a given way for the duration of the contract. This would mean that other providers would be unable to emulate good practice until the contract expired.
Again, perversely, this would prevent the dissemination of good practice, and place artificial constraints on service delivery.
Furthermore, there is no intrinsic reason why good practice should be linked to complex financial innovation, which the Public Accounts Committee has shown sometimes end up being more expensive than gilts.
Secondly, the CJS is a system, and the different parts need to co-operate. Setting up different institutions to compete with each other is not always helpful. For example, one explanation put forward for the recent riot at Ford is that inappropriate prisoners were in open prisons. And that is more likely to happen when closed prisons have financial incentives to hold on to prisoners who are more easy to manage.
So while payment by results could make a potentially important contribution to improving public services – including in the CJS – there remain potential problems with expanding it on a much larger scale, and it is far too early to place in it the level of confidence that the Green Paper does as a potential universal delivery mechanism.
iii) A Labour Alternative
In the short time left, I would like to outline some areas that I think Labour’s Policy Review might touch on.
It is well known that many prisoners experience criminality at an early age. 17% of prisoners were arrested for the first time before turning 13, and 54% were arrested before their 16th birthday.
These are shocking statistics, and we all know the stories of the teenage shoplifter who ends up as a serial adult offender: of the child who commits their first minor offence aged 10 or 11, runs away from home at 12 or 13; is excluded from school at 14; commits progressively more serious offences until they are sent to prison for the first time aged 16; and then spend much of their young life in and out jail, unable to find a job, before being placed on an IPP or a life sentence at the age of 30.
It is this chain that we have to break.
We have reduced the number of young people in prison significantly since 2008 – and the Green Paper recognises this – but there are still far too many people who enter the criminal justice system at a young age. The consequences for them are severe and, often, irreparable: reducing their chances of good schooling, or finding a job or a life outside of criminality.
We need to find ways of intervening earlier to prevent children from going down this route.
We need to provide the resources for social workers, Police and community workers to better identify and help children at risk. We need to look much more closely at Family Intervention Projects and at working with parents and children to alter behaviour and steer them away from crime and dependency.
At the other end of the chain, the Green Paper proposes to raise the qualifying threshold for IPPs – Imprisonment for Public Protection – to people who would otherwise receive a determinate sentence of 10 years or more. Currently over 6,000 prisoners – almost 7% of the prison population – are on IPPs.
I understand the logic of proposal in the Green Paper, but I think the public will be concerned that this will mean a large number of people who have previously been given IPPs for repeated sexual or violent offences could subsequently end up serving only 5 years in prison before being released without the prior approval of a parole board and an assessment of the threat they pose to the public.
The IPP raises some complex problems – not least the need to increase resources and guidance so that IPPs do not become a form or permanent incarceration where prisoners are unable to complete the necessary behavioural courses or adequately demonstrate diminished risk.
So I think there is case for looking at the entire IPP sentence – the scope, the guidance the parole board receives and the resource level needed to make the sentence more effective.
One of the striking factors about the CJS is that there is some very good practice and some fine examples of innovative solutions to complex and challenging problems, and there is a high level of consensus among professionals as to what this looks like.
The question we need to ask is how can we make this good practice, common practice?
Policy makers need to engage with, learn from, and encourage those who are running successful projects, and we need to see how we can expand good practice wherever it is applicable.
We need a range of providers, with projects being run by people with passion, skill and experience.
So when a voluntary sector group, a charity, or a particular Prison or Probation Trust have shown good practice, and their approach has led to reduced reoffending rates, lower youth crime etc, then Government should reward them, learn from their success and enable them or other providers to adopt similar models elsewhere in the CJS.
Take, for example, the fantastic work Barnados have done with Family Intervention Projects – which have achieved a 64% reduction in anti-social behaviour and a 61% reduction in domestic violence in often profoundly challenging family environments by providing intensive support, structure and guidance for parents and children.
Or take the work that groups like CentrePoint do help ex-offenders stay off the streets and to turn their backs on a life of crime.
These are precisely the examples of good practice that Government should be supporting by rewarding them and helping to set up similar projects.
The truth is that these examples of good practice – of successful, innovative projects – exist already in the CJS.
The people with skill, passion and commitment to run them are here already.
Government does not need to create them, or provide financial incentives for them to turn up to work.
But in this Government’s headlong rush to make savings through payment by results, there is a real danger that those groups and experts that are most experienced in and passionate about reforming the CJS will be drowned out by those better equipped to win Government contracts.
So the Government needs to provide a voice and an opportunity – whether through advice, support or financial assistance – for successful organisations to expand their work and to help create a better CJS.
In short, the market is not the only way to provide quality or innovation in public services.
The voluntary sector and small, experienced groups can also be drivers and deliverers of high quality services.
Within the public sector there are also many committed, professional people who would respond well to being given greater freedom to exercise their judgement within a proper framework of accountability.
And so, as we go along the policy review process, I hope we can encourage a range of providers and thus ensure that our criminal justice system is driven by skill, quality and diversity.
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