Better Prisons: Less Crime (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)
(1 week ago)
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Lord Foster of Bath
That this House takes note of the Report from the Justice and Home Affairs Committee Better prisons: less crime (1st Report, HL Paper 153).
Lord Foster of Bath (LD)
My Lords, as the chair of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, it is a pleasure to lead this debate. I look forward to the five maiden speeches from new Members; I welcome them all. I am delighted that they have chosen the committee’s report on prisons, Better Prisons: Less Crime, for their first outings.
I thank all members of the committee for their contributions to the report, and I am pleased to see so many of them here. We were splendidly supported by our specialist adviser, Alex South, a former prison officer and author, and by our office team: clerk David Shiels, policy analysts Rhouda Elalfy and Olek Hola-Peryer, media officer Aneela Mahmood, and operations officer Amanda McGrath.
During our inquiry we visited two prisons, Belmarsh and Isis. I pay tribute to the work of the dedicated prison staff and those in the third sector who work in incredibly difficult circumstances doing difficult, life-changing work. I am delighted that the Government plan to act on our recommendation for a Prison Service medal for exceptional service. I am grateful to all who contributed evidence, especially the many prisoners who sent us handwritten letters sharing their invaluable experiences and insights.
Sadly, most witnesses painted a depressing picture: the prison system is
“operating either in or at the verge of crisis most of the time”,
it is “disheartening and saddening”, and worrying to the extreme—all flavour of what we heard during the inquiry. I know that the Minister is working tirelessly to improve the state of our prisons, and I applaud him for it, but six months on from the publication of our report, the situation facing prisoners and prison staff remains grim. Most worrying is the very high level of reoffending by those who leave prison—40% of ex-prisoners reoffend within a year; for those in prison for less than a year, it is over 65%. Shockingly, in the year to June 2025, a staggering 40,000 former prisoners were recalled to prison—a 32% rise on the previous year.
We concluded that the purpose of prison should be much clearer and recommended that the Minister’s own words should be used—that is, that the purpose of prison should be
“to punish people, to protect the public and to reduce reoffending”.
But at present our prisons are failing to reduce reoffending and so failing to protect the public. We argued, therefore, that the punishment for a prisoner is the loss of liberty and that the main focus of the work in prisons should be to reduce reoffending through what is sometimes called rehabilitation or purposeful activity, of which currently there is far too little.
His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons uses purposeful activity as one of its four healthy establishment tests, yet it continues to be the worst performing metric. The chief inspector found that almost three-quarters of prisons inspected were poor or not sufficiently good at providing purposeful activity. Some of our other findings gave pointers as to why that is. In addition to overcrowding and lack of clarity about the purpose of prisons, our report found limited autonomy for prison governors, who were stifled by bureaucracy; a wholly inadequate staff recruitment and vetting procedure, and subsequent inadequate prisoner officer assessment and training arrangements; a huge backlog of much-needed repair and renovation; and a sense of complacency within the MoJ and HMPPS, and inadequate accountability arrangements.
No wonder there is little focus on purposeful activity. After all, measures such as education and skills training, or measures to help prisoners with their mental health, or with drug, alcohol or gambling addictions, are hard to provide in overcrowded, understaffed, dilapidated and underresourced prisons where governors have inadequate freedom to govern. Too often, prisoners can spend up to 23 hours a day in cramped cells, with little to help them lead constructive, crime-free lives when they leave. It is these conditions which also lead to boredom, self-harm, frustration and increased violence in our prisons. All this costs the taxpayer £54,000 per year per prisoner, with seemingly little benefit.
We considered each of the barriers and made recommendations to reduce them. On overcrowding, we largely welcome the Gauke review and the measures that flowed into the Sentencing Act from it. However, some measures will place increased strain on an already overstretched Probation Service, and we remain sceptical about whether the planned £700 million over four years for the Probation Service will be sufficient. Last week’s PAC report suggests that it agrees. It said the service was under “significant strain”, seriously impeding its ability to protect the public and reduce reoffending.
Nevertheless, we especially welcome plans to introduce community sentences instead of most prison sentences of under 12 months. We made just this proposal in one of our earlier reports, where we pointed out that well-run, probation-led community sentences have lower levels of reoffending and cost significantly less. Under the structure of HMPPS, the Prison Service and the Probation Service are linked. If, with increased resources and staffing, the Probation Service can successfully keep more people out of prison, the Prison Service can then more easily improve purposeful activity for those still sent to prison.
But the Sentencing Act measures alone are insufficient. It is estimated that, over time, they will reduce the prison population demand by 7,500, and the new prison building programme will deliver 14,000 new places by 2031. But despite all that, it is still estimated that, by 2029, the prison population will have increased by 2,000. That is why some of our other recommendations are so important and why the committee was so disappointed by the Government’s rather complacent response.
The Government accepted or partially accepted 34 of our 35 recommendations. That might seem like a job well done but, alas, that is far from the truth. The Government claim that many of the recommendations are already work in progress. Yet, in the majority of these cases, we fail to see either the work or the progress. For example, the Government accepted our recommendation to implement women’s leadership groups and support for female staff but then bizarrely, implying nothing further was actually needed, went on to say:
“HMPPS have reviewed our policies and are content that they are sufficient to address the needs of women”.
Our recommendations regarding prison governors also illustrate the point. Just as a good head teacher, with the right support, can transform a school, so too can a prison governor, with the right support, transform a prison. But prison governors need the freedom to act, so we called for increased governor autonomy so that those running prisons, who best understand the needs of their staff, prisoners and community, can implement desperately needed changes. In this case, the work in progress was a report on previous efforts that had not gone anywhere near what the committee or many governors were calling for. To ensure that the governor’s vision can be clearly communicated to staff, we argued for measures that would enable greater visibility of governors around the prison. The Government agreed, but offered nothing concrete. Surely the move to build mega-prisons, such as the 1,700 place HMP Welland Oaks, will serve only to exacerbate the problem.
I hope the Minister, when he winds up, will assure us that the committee’s pessimism is misplaced. But our pessimism is not just that of a discontented suitor who has been rejected; others share it. In the other place, the Justice Committee, referencing the Government’s response to our report, noted:
“It is promising to hear that the Government recognises the value of Governor autonomy, but it is unclear what specific action it will be taking to improve it”.
Benjamin Franklin once said:
“Well done is better than well said”.
When he winds up, can the Minister say what actions in relation to governor autonomy we can look out for?
The responses to other recommendations have been equally disappointing. Clearly, having sufficient well-trained, motivated and supportive staff working in our prisons is vital. But with the prison population rising, it is extremely concerning—but, frankly, not surprising—that so many prison officers are leaving, some after less than a year in service, and that there has been a significant fall in the number of people joining. For example, in the past year there has been a loss of 1,000 band 3 to band 5 prison officers—the ones walking the wings and interacting with prisoners every day. In short, there are more prisoners but fewer staff, and the remaining staff are often disillusioned and demoralised, as evidenced by the very high levels of absence through sickness. An average of two and a half weeks is lost in sickness—often mental health issues—per officer each year. That is simply unsustainable.
The MoJ has at least now resurrected an earlier recruitment campaign that promotes a career in the Prison Service. It says:
“An extraordinary job. Done by someone like you”.
The reality, however, is that a career in the Prison Service is not for everyone, and the recruitment process should reflect that. After all, our report was clear that the current role of prison officers is defined by firefighting and crisis management—asking them to do more with less. No wonder, then, that the number of prisoners released in error has sky-rocketed by 128% this year, from 115 to 262. I hope the Minister will tell us what progress is being made to introduce a digital solution to the problem.
More significantly, we call for a drastic overhaul of officer recruitment and vetting. We were horrified to discover that there are no face-to-face interviews. It is all done online. Very few of those being interviewed had ever been inside a prison, and prison leaders have almost no say about who works in their prison. Despite the high drop-out rate, and all the other evidence pointing to its failings, we were nevertheless told by HMPPS that the process is “robust”. Some noble Lords may have seen reports of a 17 year-old child who, despite being underage, got through the recruitment and vetting procedures, and then was given the task of looking after murderers and terrorists in HMP Erlestoke. That is hardly evidence of a robust system. Does the Minister think that it is robust, and can he tell us what is being done to ensure that staff are properly vetted, that they are aware of the unique challenges of life on the wings and are ready to work?
We also made recommendations about training and support for prison officers. It surely cannot be right, for example, that almost all formal assessment of prison officers’ work has been abandoned. Again, the Government response was muted, and that is a polite way of putting it. Can the Minister be more positive and tell us what changes in training and support are being planned?
One final concern is on the response to our several recommendations about activities to reduce reoffending. Given the Minister’s previous work in this area, there was an enthusiastic response in words but, unfortunately, actions contradicted them. No sooner was the ink dry on the Government’s response than we started to hear about cutbacks in the education provision in many prisons; this provision has been shown to significantly help to reduce reoffending.
Writing about the new prison education contracts in October last year, the chief inspector reported that he had been told that—due to inflationary increases, and some of the funds being used for a new IT system—there would be effective average cuts of 25%. In fact, some prison leaders had told him that cuts in their prison had reached 60%. We now know that around 300 prison education staff have been made redundant. It is one thing to ignore a committee’s recommendation, but it seems perverse that the Government are ignoring their own research; this research shows how important education is to reducing reoffending, and yet they are ploughing ahead with cuts to it. This is not the only failing in providing appropriate purposeful activities: support for inmates with mental health or addiction problems is woeful, and skills training is patchy, doing little to prepare inmates for employment outside. It is prisoners and the public who will suffer the consequences. We need more purposeful activity, not less, and I hope that the Minister can give us some good news about the future situation. We have waited far too long for it.
Since its founding in 1982, the inspectorate has been highly critical of the lack of purposeful activity in prison. In the first ever inspector’s report the chief inspector, Sir James Hennessy, wrote:
“We believe there are powerful reasons why the Prison Department must ensure that an inmate does not spend day after day in blank inactivity; he should be kept occupied for a normal working day at work, education, or some other constructive activity”.
It was not happening 43 years ago and, sadly, is still not happening. It shows why inspectors’ reports should be acted upon more often.
The evidence we receive points to a system beset with problems. Piecemeal and gradual change will not suffice to fix them. HMPPS needs to go further and faster, but the Government’s response to our report was disappointing. It illustrated our concern that the MoJ and HMPPS are far too complacent about what is happening in our prison estate. This is in marked contrast to the Minister. I welcome his zeal and practicality in addressing the many issues in our prisons. I just hope that, in time, his department starts to have the same approach and puts its energies into ensuring the wide-scale provision of measures to reduce reoffending. Only then can we truly have better prisons and less crime. I beg to move.
Baroness Bi (Lab) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, I feel deeply honoured to be making my maiden speech today. I thank noble Lords on all sides of the House, as well as Black Rod and his team, the doorkeepers, police officers and all the other amazing staff for their warm welcome—not least in being so patient with me as I try to find my way around. As a former chair of the Barbican Centre Trust, I have been wondering whether we need yellow lines on the floor to help those of us who lack a sense of direction.
I thank my noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon for her support, and my noble friend Lord McNicol and my noble and learned friend Lord Hermer, who introduced me to the House three weeks ago today, and I look forward to hearing the maiden speeches of my fellow new Peers.
I welcome the report of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, and the Government’s acceptance of many of its recommendations. The report reflects a compassionate approach to balancing the needs of the public, prisoners and staff. This is a welcome change to the rhetoric of ever-longer sentences and harsher conditions that has resulted in us having the highest imprisonment rate in western Europe. We seem to have forgotten Portia’s advice in “The Merchant of Venice” to season justice with mercy.
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Timpson, the Minister, for meeting with me to discuss his department’s response to this important report. I would also like to thank him for his and his family’s long-standing leadership in providing employment to former prisoners, which is so important to reducing reoffending.
I decided to become a lawyer at the age of 14 because I cared passionately about human rights, civil liberties and the rule of law; I still do. However, when I finished university, I knew I could not support myself as a human rights lawyer without borrowing what seemed to me at the time to be an unimaginably large sum. I discovered that City law firms paid to train their lawyers, and so that is the route I took. I specialised in international debt capital markets and have had a wonderful career, working with clients and colleagues across the world. This has given me a valuable insight into the needs of investors and our position in an increasingly competitive world. I also advise on ethical finance, including green and social bonds, which are a growing segment of the market, and combine my focus on finance with making a difference. I note, in the context of this debate, that the world’s first social bond was issued to reduce reoffending rates at HMP Peterborough.
The last time I felt almost as proud as I do today was in 2018, when I was elected by my partners to be the chair of our law firm, Norton Rose Fulbright, as the first woman and ethnic minority person to hold that role since the firm was established in 1794. My election reflected the huge changes that have taken place in the City since I arrived in 1990, when there were very few people who looked like me or who came from my background. It has been a privilege to be a part of the City for over 35 years. I am keen to ensure that it remains competitive and retains its position as the leading international financial centre, providing a home for talented people of all kinds. That requires us to be an outward-looking, confident society that abides by the rule of law.
I grew up in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, and had assumed that we had moved past the racism and bigotry that I experienced then. In recent years I have seen, with increasing concern, the cynical manipulation of legitimate concerns about declining living standards, inadequate infrastructure and poorly funded public services into a targeting of minority groups who are blamed for wider societal failings.
Those of us who believe in equal rights, a globally connected world and the rules-based order have to accept that the argument is not won, and we must fight harder and better for our values. Yet there are so many things for us all to be proud of. I have the privilege of being vice-chair of the Disasters Emergency Committee, and I am humbled by the generosity and compassion of the British public, who in the last four years have donated over £700 million to its appeals—and that in the midst of a cost of living crisis.
Until very recently, I was chair of the Patchwork Foundation, which supports young people interested in civic society. Each year, as a new cohort of patchworkers arrive, I am deeply encouraged by the passion and principles of our young people who are determined to make the world a better place. I hope that by working with noble Lords across the House I can play my part in helping the patchworkers to achieve that better world and, along the way, satisfy the spirit of the 14 year-old who wanted to be a lawyer so that she could help people.
Lord Moraes (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the excellent maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Bi. We are being joined in this House by a gifted lawyer from the private sector with a strong sense of public service—someone who is knowledgeable and passionate about many of the difficult issues we will have to deal with on the Floor of this House, as noble Lords have just heard.
My noble friend mentioned that she is the chair of Norton Rose Fulbright, one of the five “Magic Circle” law firms, I think—anyway, it is definitely a firm I would not have got into—and the first UK woman to chair the global law firm since it was founded in 1794. After Cambridge University, she worked in a range of major law firms. She is internationally qualified and made a stellar career. Last year, the FT listed her as one of the 50 most influential lawyers in the UK. I am not going to embarrass her with any more plaudits, but I think noble Lords get the message.
When you follow a maiden speech, you look for things that you have in common. My noble friend and I have some things in common: we both came to this country as children, we are of a similar generation, and we both have law degrees. But my first thought was that my parents would have wished that I had her career following my law degree, rather than what I actually did with it; that was my abiding thought. Anyway, it worked out in the end.
My noble friend has combined her legal career with a strong public service ethic, including extensive pro bono work, vice-chairing the Disasters Emergency Committee and chairing the Patchwork Foundation, which helps with integration of vulnerable communities. These are just some examples that speak to her values and who she is. We all know that the real strength of this House is when Members who have hugely significant experience in their chosen fields use it here to really good, positive effect. I am sure that my noble friend is firmly in that category. I look forward to her contributions in the months and years ahead, and I am sure the whole House will welcome her to her place.
I turn briefly to two of the critical issues in the Select Committee report. I should mention that, along with the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, I joined the committee only in January, so I was not involved with my colleagues in the interviews and the hard work last year that produced the report that the noble Lord, Lord Foster, has so eloquently described. But, as a member of the committee, I felt that this is such an important issue that I should raise a couple of critical issues from the report.
I should mention that last year I whipped, very briefly, for the Minister and for the MoJ. I mention that only because it gave me an insight into the work that he, the department and the team are doing. I learned that this is an acutely difficult issue. The noble Lord, Lord Foster, really spelled that out. It is acute, but it also consists of much deeper systemic problems. The report and my colleagues who put it together have adequately explained that.
I want to pick up on two issues. The first is the issue of the prison population and capacity. The second is the critical issue of the number of prison officers, their level of experience, the persistent recruitment and retention challenges, and the consequent effect on the morale of the service. Some of the deeper issues are consequent on that, which our chair mentioned.
The report talks about how deeply rooted the recruitment, retention and experience problems are and how they peaked as this Government took office. That is where we get the idea of crisis. That crisis is still being dealt with, as I learned last year. On prison officer training, I know the Minister was well placed—it has been said—to take on this challenge. Before he took office he conducted a review of prison officer training. I would be interested to know how he feels that that review is informing the work of the department now. Are we making progress on many of the serious issues that the noble Lord, Lord Foster, raised? Obviously, this speaks to the experience of officers, the challenges identified in the report and what the MoJ is trying to do. I am genuinely interested to know where we are going on that.
On staffing generally, can the Minister update the House on the current status of and any improvements or recovery he has seen in the staffing levels and retention of officers? We are now in 2026, and we have had Royal Assent to the other aspect of dealing with this crisis, sentencing, and creating more capacity. How that is all working is really interesting to me and the committee. It may be a bit too soon to understand how the Sentencing Act and the Gauke review are now affecting the critical issue of capacity and prison places. But it would be interesting to hear what the Minister’s hopes are for that. In my opinion, the report was built around not just criticising what is happening but genuinely looking for solutions to this crisis and to the deeper systemic issues. The Gauke report was an honest way of trying to manage the prison population, but if it is too early to look at the effects of it, I would also be interested to know what other new routes the Minister feels might be taken to address some of the critical acute and systemic problems.
I will leave my remarks at that, knowing that many of my colleagues were involved last year in the hard work of putting the report together.
Lord Redwood (Con) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, I am very conscious of the enormous privilege to be able to speak from these Benches in this magnificent room, in a Palace which represents the history and traditions of our great nation. I am suitably humbled, and I am very grateful to all the staff who have helped me already to acclimatise to the different mood and traditions of this noble House. I pay special tribute and give thanks to my two noble friends, one present in front of me today, who introduced me kindly as long ago as Tuesday.
I would like to reassure all assembled here that I speak in a debate on prisons not from any personal experience. I managed to survive 37 years in elected politics when allegations of law-breaking became all too common surrounding all too many MPs, but here I am, free of all such charges—but interested in the question of the quality, productivity and efficiency of public services. It was my good fortune to be offered a platform last night at the Centre for Policy Studies and to be given rather more time to expand on research I have been doing into why productivity has failed us so badly in the public services over the last 25 years under many different Governments. Why is quality not all it should be?
I welcome the report we are debating, and I welcome its aims and themes. “Better prisons”—who could possibly disagree with that? “Less crime”—that is exactly what we want. There are good comments in the report and there were good remarks from the noble Lord who introduced the committee’s findings.
We need to get back to the questions of what the Prison Service is for and how Ministers and the executive leaders of that service can do a better job in future. The first vital task is to ensure that those who have committed crimes of violence, and who could go on to damage individuals and societies further, are locked away to protect the rest of us. We, the law-abiding public, are the prime customers of the Prison Service, and we expect that manifestation—protection from those who would harm us—to be top of its priorities. Under the recent Government, and under the current Government, there have been too many cases of the Prison Service even letting out those who could harm us well before time and due date. Hitting the target of not letting out people we should not be letting out must surely be an urgent priority for Ministers to address.
The second important thing is to create safe spaces throughout those prisons, both to make them a bit more of a pleasant working environment for the security of the staff and for all those many prisoners who can be persuaded to return to a legal life, get a job and make a proper contribution to society when they have completed their term in prison. However, we read in prison reports of all too many cases where prisons are schools for scandal and colleges for crime; they are places where there are thriving entrepreneurial businesses, but for all the wrong things, such as supplying drugs. Surely it must be a priority to get all prisoners off drugs and to manage and provide treatment programmes for those who need drugs. They must not be fuelled and fed by illegitimate businesses within the prison framework.
The third thing that we want, which is touched on at rather greater length in the report, is for more people who leave prison to not want to go back there. They should be given support and help so that they are given training and find it easier to get a job; they should be able to get a bank account and re-establish themselves in normal life, because we do not want to see them in the Prison Service again.
On my wider work on public sector quality and productivity, I believe that quality and efficiency are two sides of the same coin. Get it right first time and you do not need a complaints department; get it right first time and you do not waste so much money. In my experiences as an executive councillor in my youth, as a Minister, as a participant in Cabinet and shadow Cabinet debates, and as a Back Bench MP who was very attentive to the public services in my area, I saw all too many examples of poor management, mistakes and error. Time does not permit me to go through my toolkit for mending quality and productivity issues. I look forward to further debates, because it is surely a vital, national, cross-party cause that we should manage better and achieve better results.
Baroness Buscombe (Con)
My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Redwood. I welcome him to your Lordships’ House and congratulate him on his excellent and, may I say, pithy maiden speech. My noble friend brings a wealth of in-depth and current political and business experience, coupled with a record of long and lasting commitment to his constituents and his country. He is renowned for his razor-sharp mind and ability to cut to the quick, together with standing up for his beliefs and being resolutely unafraid to speak to truth. His arrival with us is timely, particularly given his economic and business expertise and, as we have already heard, his in-depth knowledge of how we might achieve effective productivity. Because of our need to focus on economic growth, we look forward to his many contributions. I also look forward to listening to all the other maiden speeches today.
As a member of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, I support all that we stated in our report. Therefore, to avoid repeating the speech by our excellent chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, I decided to check our report against a speech I once made in your Lordships’ House on education and health in prisons as shadow Education Minister—and previously a shadow Home Office Minister and a barrister—to see if there had been any progress over 20 years. I will read some extracts from that speech:
“The primary roles of prisons in the criminal justice system are punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation and the protection of the public, but this must incorporate the development of learning and skills. … We must not underestimate the potential role that good prison education can provide to prevent reoffending. … I recently visited Brixton Prison and saw first-hand the excellent work being carried out by the governor and the head of learning and skills. There is real commitment among the staff I spoke to. They want to get results and see the system actually enhance progress, not hinder it”.
In addition, I stated:
“There is a high turnover of staff across the prison system. Governors are moved from prison to prison. This is massively disruptive. … Will the Government seriously consider developing a solid career structure allowing progression within the Prison Service and imposing a fixed minimum term for a prison governor to remain in each post? Heads of learning and skills must be integrated into the system. … They must be given the opportunity to plan for the long term, and not to meet the latest Whitehall target. … We must focus on outcomes rather than outputs if we are to see less reoffending. … The layers of bureaucracy that exist are seriously hindering innovative development in offender education”.
I will read a couple more relevant extracts:
“Even providing an individual with qualifications alone is not enough in the fight to reduce reoffending. This must be coupled with structured learning so that prisoners can develop their ability to communicate and interact. … Like governors, prisoners are moved from prison to prison. … There is a severe knock-on effect from this disruptive approach for the prisoners and the community. … Support and provision must be provided in the community. Forging links with local employers is difficult, but essential. … Offenders need to be equipped with skill trades … in which they can make an honest living with a salary which stands a chance of rivalling an income from drug crime”.
Finally,
“prison education … must start at the beginning. It must deal with the emotional and social problems facing offenders and then move on to qualifications and employable skills”.—[Official Report, 8/12/05; cols. 835-38.]
I made that speech in December 2005, eight years into a Labour Government. The most damning fact was exposed in a reply to a Written Question I had asked Her Majesty’s Government that same week on how many civil servants from the Home Office, broken down by grade, had visited prisons in the last eight years. The answer was none. Since then, the challenges have grown; there is violence and religious extremism in our prisons, with young men—I know some—told to convert to Islam for an easier life behind bars. And how can prison staff be recruited online? This is insanity writ large. In addition, I now have Written Answers confirming that some foreign criminals, who are to be deported at the end of their prison term, are being released from HMP Huntercombe in Oxfordshire because the Home Office paperwork does not keep up with the prisoner release system.
One of the most revealing evidence sessions during our inquiry was with two former Members of the other place: former Home Secretary Charles Clarke and former Justice Secretary Michael Gove, now my noble friend Lord Gove. I was struck—indeed, I think the whole committee was struck—by the degree to which they were in tune with their collective paths and desire to achieve lasting and demonstrably better outcomes for prisoners and prisons to reduce reoffending. As usual, both efforts were cut short by our frankly broken political system shuffling the cards.
Rereading the speech that I made all those years ago, or extracts from it, has been for me quite depressing. I often think of the noble and late Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. He would be making the same speech today, I fear, that he made time and again years and years ago. However, I look to the Minister, who I know will understand more than most that the key solutions are, in principle, quite simple—as he set out to teach shoe-repairing following a visit to HMP Thorn Cross in Warrington in 2002. The Minister must be, as I am, an optimist, as he is determined to find and implement solutions to give a real and practical lifeline to prisoners to reduce reoffending.
We recognise this in our committee, and as some of us have been Ministers, we are very aware of how incredibly difficult it is to get things done within our current Civil Service system. It is uphill in treacle, and the pressures are relentless and immense. What we need now is a Government who have the courage to change that system, root out obfuscation—
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Lemos) (Lab)
May I ask the noble Baroness to draw her remarks to a close?
Baroness Buscombe (Con)
They need to root out obfuscation and denial, fear of making decisions and preferment to work from home, and understand just how vital it is to make the Home Office and Ministry of Justice fit for purpose, so that better prisons really will lead to less crime.
Baroness Prashar (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for introducing this debate so admirably and highly commend his chairmanship of the Justice and Home Affairs Select Committee, of which I was a member until the end of January. The noble Lord steered the Select Committee with deep commitment and skill, and it was a pleasure to work with him and other members of the Select Committee. I also want to thank the clerk of the committee, his team and the special advisers for this support. I congratulate those who have made the two maiden speeches, and I look forward to three more.
As we heard, our prisons are in a state of crisis, and there is urgent need for a strategic and focused reform of the system if we want to reduce re-offending and protect the public. The Government are attempting to address some of the most urgent problems. Some steps have been taken to reduce overcrowding in prisons, bolster the Probation Service and reform the sentencing regime, all of which I welcome. As I have said before, the appointment of the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, as the Minister responsible for prisons, probation and reducing re-offending was an inspired choice, and it is reassuring to have a Minister who understands what is required—within, if I may say so, the constraints of the current system. I know that he is working tirelessly to make a difference.
Reducing the prison population is essential to ensure a well-functioning and effective service. Systemic change and culture shifts require time, but urgent and meaningful action should be taken now if we are to avert the crisis facing our prisons. These actions are not just about resources and capacity. Our report focused on practical changes that can be adopted now to make a difference, and highlighted the inadequacy of some of the changes, given the scale of the problem.
Regrettably, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Foster, the Government’s response to our report does not appear to grasp the essence of our recommendations. The response, if I may say so, is rather too official, as the noble Lord spelt out. The assurances given in the response sound hollow, given that education provision in prisons will be cut by 50%, and the impact of these cuts has been graphically described by the Prisoners’ Education Trust. Our report focused on leadership, governance, management and staffing of prisons. However, leadership qualities, style of leadership, governance arrangements, management, levels and types of staffing, and training and recruitment would become self-evident if there was clarity about the purpose of prison, and if that purpose was backed by policies and practices and effective communication aligned to that purpose.
The purpose of prisons is not clear. There is confusion within government and the HMPPS about the purpose of prisons, because policy and practice are fundamentally misaligned. Prison sentences, incarceration and loss of liberty are the punishment, and the purpose of prisons is to prepare those in custody for life after prison in order to reduce reoffending and help them integrate back into the community, and, ultimately, to protect the public. The first priority, therefore, in my view, is to have absolute clarity on and understanding of the purpose of prisons. If that is properly understood, it would clarify what qualities, skills and experience are needed for those running prisons, be they prison governors or prison officers. What level of autonomy should be given to prisons, and what should be the balance of responsibility between the centre and local prisons?
What relationship should there be between prison and probation services, and the third sector and employers? The relationship between the prison and probation services needs to be clarified and understood. Very poorly thought-through reforms over several years have demoralised the Probation Service and confused its identity. There is, in my view, a shared purpose between the prison and probation services, which is to reduce reoffending and prepare people for life outside the criminal justice system. This needs to be reinforced, and it is encouraging that the Minister is giving support to the Probation Service, although the investment to bring the service up to speed is not adequate.
Secondly, there is a need for clear and effective communication to explain to the public the purpose of prisons. Government has a duty to ensure that public discourse about crime and punishment is based on an understanding of the role of prisons, and an appreciation that those in custody eventually have to be integrated into the community.
Baroness Prashar (CB)
I know that I am running over time, but it is an advisory time limit and I will finish in two minutes.
Lord Lemos (Lab)
No, I am sorry, that will not be fair to all the other speakers. It is an advisory time limit, but I must invite the noble Baroness—
Baroness Prashar (CB)
I have another couple of minutes—this is advisory.
The Government have a duty to ensure that public discourse about crime and punishment is based on an understanding of the role of prisons and an appreciation that those in custody will eventually have to be integrated into the community. We cannot defend what is not understood.
My third point is about much more focused and tailored opportunities for purposeful activity—that is, educational opportunities for prisoners to learn skills which equip them to lead a purposeful life when released. I will make two points here. First, the Open University provides very good digital learning, which needs to be extended. The other point about education is having some joined-up thinking to make sure that employers actually work with prisons—
Lord Lemos (Lab)
I am sorry to get to my feet again, but I think the House is on my side and the noble Baroness should now conclude her remarks.
The Lord Bishop of Gloucester
My Lords, as Anglican Bishop for prisons, I wholeheartedly welcome this debate and this excellent report. It is also a privilege to follow two excellent maiden speeches.
I submitted evidence to the committee, and I will continue to bang the drum for reform. Better prisons will play a vital role, but they are not the end point or the complete answer to reducing reoffending. I agree with the reframing of this from rehabilitation, as rehabilitation implies that people were once at an acceptable place in life to which they can be rehabilitated, whereas for the majority of people in prison, this was never true in the first place.
The Minister has my support for measures being taken in the Sentencing Act, but these are not enough. We need an honest realignment of how to address crime and punishment in a vision for a society in which all people can flourish—victims, ex-offenders, families and communities.
I congratulate the report, and the noble Lord, Lord Foster, in pushing for a definition of the purpose of prison, as others have said. In the recent debate on what was then the Sentencing Bill, I was heartened by the breadth of support for my amendment on the purpose of prisons. This emerged from some work with a number of people across the criminal justice sector, as part of a round table which I have been convening in Westminster. We submitted our work to the Gauke review. I regret the Government’s reluctance to identify this as a crucial step. If we truly want clarity across HMPPS, the wider criminal justice system and, indeed, the public about exactly what it is we are seeking to do and be, we need this legislative definition of the purpose of imprisonment. Would the Minister agree to meet with me to discuss introducing such a definition?
In the past year, I have taken time to listen to young people across Gloucestershire, both through an online survey and at in-person events. It is important to include the voices of young people in policy-making. Most students thought that the most important use for prisons was to keep the public safe. The next most popular answer was that they are to rehabilitate offenders. Fewer students thought that prison’s most important use was to punish. Instead of building prisons or making sentences longer, young people thought that reducing crime required addressing some of the upstream issues that lead to that repeat reoffending, not least tackling drug and alcohol addiction. They also spoke repeatedly about the need for employment opportunities.
On a slightly different note, the committee’s report articulates well the challenges faced by prison governors in recruiting and developing staff. As I noted in my submission to the inquiry, based on my own visits to prisons,
“Whilst good governors are invaluable, culture cannot be created by one person alone and relies on the buy in to a set of values that are understood, shared, and lived by all the prison staff”.
I continue to be astounded that prison governors are unable to appoint their own staff. This is out of sync with most of the public sector. Absurdly, the first time governors meet newly recruited staff is on the day they start work. It is not a surprise then that governors express frustration to me, not least with the protracted HR processes to dismiss staff who do not meet their expectations and who would not have been recruited by them in the first place.
Much more still needs to be done to invest in staff and to value the prison sector, both in training and development, as we have heard. The public are shocked when they discover that training for prison staff takes a matter of weeks. I might also add that, in most of our prisons, chaplaincies are doing an outstanding job. Good chaplaincy teams feed into a good culture. They could be used much more to develop staff, not least in that relationship which is at the heart of a good culture system.
I will make a brief point about the recent policing White Paper which indicated that a crime prevention unit would be established in the Home Office. Shockingly, in 103 pages, the White Paper does not mention prison once. Where is the joined-up thinking? Can the Minister reassure the House that this new crime prevention unit will look at the place of prison?
This leads me finally back to culture. Good leadership within a prison builds culture and hope. If we want safer communities, we must create safer, more humane prisons. The culture inside the prison will translate to the culture outside the prison.
Lord McNally (LD)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester. I commend the work of the chaplaincy service in prisons. I also welcome this debate, inspired as it is by the report of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee.
The noble Lord, Lord Timpson, must have been feeling a little battered about two-thirds of the way through the speech by my noble friend Lord Foster. He probably had a note from his office saying that my noble friend is a Liberal Democrat and is sympathetic to his aims. This is what makes my noble friend such a formidable politician: he does not pull his punches, but he does not mean any harm.
Lord McNally (LD)
That came out wrong. When he referred to the Government’s response to the White Paper, he also reminded me of my old friend, Fred Peart. Fred was Leader of the House a long time ago. He had an absolutely fail-safe way of answering questions, however hostile. When there was a request for action, he would stand up, repeat it and then say, “I have to tell the noble Lord that it will not be next week”. I thought that the Government’s response was, as my noble friend Lord Foster delicately implied, a “not next week” reply. There are so many times when they adopt the suggestion but do not make any practical advance. This is one of the problems.
When the Government were elected some 18 months ago, one of the most welcome appointments was that of the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, as Minister for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending. I served at the Ministry of Justice from 2010 to 2013 as Minister of State under the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, and from 2014 to 2017 as chair of the Youth Justice Board. My delight at the appointment of the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, was because, during those seven years as a Minister and then as YJB chair, I had worked closely with the noble Lord, his brother and their late father in the pioneering work that the Timpson family has done in helping and assisting the rehabilitation of offenders.
I was further encouraged by the fact that the noble Lord would be joined in the battle for prison reform by my successor as YJB chair, Charlie Taylor. Since 2020, he has been His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons. My only fear is that the sheer scale and multifaceted nature of the crisis in our prisons would break their spirits because of the magnitude of the task faced.
I will raise a couple of points on which the Minister may want to comment. I am genuinely worried about the retreat on education. I know the budgetary problems that are faced and I commend the work done by David Gauke on the sentencing review. But, as has been said by a number of speakers, the education of prisoners is one of the key ways to rehabilitation. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, raised the problem of drugs. The general public just do not understand why drugs should be so effectively and proficiently available in our prisons. The man in the street wants to know how they got in there and how this is such a factor in our prisons.
I see that I shall get a commending smile from the Whip by sitting down. Good luck.
Lord Babudu (Lab) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, I am grateful to be able to speak in this important debate, which goes to the heart of who we are as a society. As it is my first time addressing your Lordships’ House, let me start by thanking the wonderful staff throughout this place: the doorkeepers, the caterers, the cleaners and the security staff. My mother worked as a cleaner and my dad as a security guard, so there is a special magic for me every time I get to greet anybody in this House doing such work—they are the unsung heroes of our story.
I thank my supporters, my noble friends Lady Lawrence of Clarendon and Lord Boateng, two giants of Black British history who have inspired me from my childhood through to this very day. I also thank Black Rod, Garter, the Clerk of the Parliaments and everybody else who, among all the demands on them, has so dutifully learned to pronounce the surname Babudu. Those efforts make me feel incredibly welcome.
“But where is Babudu from?”, I hear noble Lords ask. From Ghana, where my parents were born and raised, and where they left in search of a better life for their as yet unborn children. They came to Peckham, via Elephant and Castle. I was born here, and for some 40 fine years we lived under the watch of the force of nature that is the noble Baroness, Lady Harman, who was until recently our Member of Parliament. Peckham, my little corner of south London, is a magical place. I grew up there, my wife grew up there, we are raising our five children in the area, and I had the honour of representing Rye Lane in Peckham as a local councillor.
However, as magic as Peckham is, it is not always the easiest on its residents. Growing up in Peckham, I saw how normal it was for children to carry knives. I was 11 the first time somebody pulled a weapon on me. I was 14 when I first lost a friend to knife crime. Were it not for the warm embrace that my parents held over me and my siblings’ lives, I am under no illusion that I could have been the subject of, rather than taking part in, this debate on our prisons.
We are living in history. Democracy is under strain, society is fracturing and technology is racing forward. In such times, I am especially glad to find myself in your Lordships’ House, where working with each other to find common cause is seen as a badge of honour, not a lapse in party discipline.
While I am younger than many of your Lordships—something my children simply do not believe—I bring some understanding, I hope, of issues relevant to this place. I have spent most of the last two decades helping charities and funders better use evidence, and working with young people to help get their voices heard by decision-makers. Time after time, young people show an incredible ability to bring unique and valuable perspectives. One initiative that I am especially proud to have been a part of is Peer Action Collective, which has so far seen nearly 300 young people conduct research and social action involving over 12,000 young people across England and Wales, changing how communities understand the role of violence in young people’s lives and how to tackle it. I hope to continue to use my voice to amplify young people’s views.
I also bring some wider experience: I started off as a corporate solicitor, I have led and grown social enterprises, I have been a local councillor and I have led successful initiatives on issues as diverse as tackling school exclusions and getting finance into start-ups, particularly those led by women and people from minoritised backgrounds. The guiding purpose which has steered me through all those roles and to this place will guide me in it. That purpose is to help bring about a healthier society; one where, whatever your background, your race, your sex or your socioeconomic status, you have a genuine opportunity of living in good health. I am currently executive director of Impact on Urban Health, part of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Foundation. Whether there, here, or elsewhere, I will always spend my time championing solutions that impact the true drivers of good health: where you live, where you work, the air you breathe and the food that you eat.
We know a lot about how we can turn back the tides of ill health that are rising all around us. With that purpose in mind, this debate is a perfect opportunity to say that health will be advanced by appropriately investing in people, especially those who are furthest from good health. That does not mean indefinitely large and growing prisons or welfare bills. It means giving people an opportunity, an honest chance to find their feet, when they are trying to overcome challenges that have been part of their lives for a long time.
In preparing for this debate, I spoke to a friend who had two spells in prison before dedicating himself to ensuring that young people do not make the same mistakes he did. He shared his worry that prisons, as they stand, cement people’s identity as a criminal, and do not prepare them for the outside world. I believe that is a big part of why we have a persistent reoffending crisis. We also face a health crisis in our prisons. The Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Chris Whitty, said late last year:
“On average, people in prison and on probation start from poorer physical and mental health than the general population, and the prison environment can exacerbate this”.
Prisons should be places that people leave healthier, more ready for work, less likely to reoffend and more able to contribute to society.
Lord Dubs (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend and to congratulate him on his excellent speech. He certainly has a lot of experience. When he speaks to us in the future, it will be not from the theory of what it is all about but from practical experience of the day-to-day life that he has led. He is so well qualified to speak in this debate and, ideally, to one day become chair of the same committee, and more besides. I am genuinely impressed by the things that he has said. His children are amazed that he is one of the youngest here—I was one of the youngest here, but that was a long time ago. What I will says is: what took him so long to get here? He should have been here long ago. He is going to make a great contribution to this House and our work. He has made a great maiden speech and I wish him well in his future endeavours—we are going to be friends for a long time.
I am delighted to be a member of this committee and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Foster, on leading us so ably through many interesting projects, including this one on prisons. I am convinced that my noble friend the Prisons Minister is committed to getting action to sort out the problems of the Prison Service. He inherited a very difficult task when he became Minister, and I wish him well with that.
I remember when I was in the Commons and was interested in penal reform. The prison population then, in the 1980s, reached 44,000, at which point we thought the world was coming to an end—that was an absolute disaster. We are now at double that figure and in an impossible predicament. We just cannot go on like this, so I hope that our recommendations will help the Minister. A lot of this is a work in progress. I do not denigrate that phrase; I think I will give the Minister the benefit of the doubt by saying that “work in progress” means he is going to do it and we are going to get on with it. After all, one of the recommendations from the Select Committee report states:
“We believe that the current Prisons Minister understands the need for change and what needs to be done; he should be strongly backed by the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Justice”.
That sums up what our Select Committee report is about.
In preparing for this debate, I thought about how I have visited a large number of prisons. I will not go through them all but, as part of the Select Committee’s work, we visited Belmarsh and Isis, both characterised by excellent first-class women prison governors. We were really impressed by them. We sat around a table with a group of prisoners in Belmarsh and their plea was, “Please could we have the sort of training to help us get jobs when we get out?” It was a heartfelt plea. We were then told there were difficulties around this because they were not always going to be there long enough. There were also difficulties in liaising with local education authorities and so on. That is something that could certainly be overcome. On that list of prisons, I should add that I had Wandsworth prison in my constituency. Interestingly enough, I have visited prisons in Chicago, Bangkok and Tokyo, but this is not meant to be a tour around prisons of the world.
One of our big challenges is public opinion. Public opinion is being whipped up by some in the press to demand longer and longer sentences. One reason why the prison population has gone up is because sentences are much longer. This is not a satisfactory position. We have to tackle this culture in public opinion, because demanding ever-longer sentences simply will not solve the problem and will not make us safer in the end.
Interestingly, we learned in our evidence that prisoners like the idea of prison governors being more visible in walking around the prison. That is something we do recommend. I know there is a lot of pressure on prison governors, but it is important. We felt that governors should oversee the recruitment process of staff, that they should be longer in post before each rotation, that they should have more say in budgets and that there should be training for governors.
Let me talk about an experience I had, not as a member of the committee but before that, in Coldingley prison. The Howard League for Penal Reform had initiated a business in the prison, where prisoners did design work and so on, competing in the marketplace with the outside world. It was very enlightening. One of the prisoners, who was in prison for a long time, told me it was the best thing that had ever happened to him. There was an excitement about it. What happened? It closed down. Why was it closed down? Well, they were earning money. The Home Office said, “If you’re earning money, it can be taxed, and there’s a problem about employment rights, and we can’t have that competing with the authority of the governor”. So it was all stopped. It was a really brilliant initiative, and it just came to an end.
There needs to be more support not just for governors but for prison staff. There needs to be far more help with education and vocational training. It is an indictment of the system that about half of prisoners are functionally illiterate. I hope that the Minister will deal with these problems. He has a lot on his plate, and I hope he gets the full support of other Ministers in the Government so that he can bring about the changes that we all wish to see happen.
Lord Farmer (Con)
My Lords, it is always a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and to be part of a debate where we have five maiden speeches, three of which have taken place and were very impressive. I add my welcome to the five new noble Lords. I look forward to the remaining two speeches.
I welcome this report, which focuses on what happens in prison. Its statistic that reoffending accounts for 80% of the costs of offending is shocking, because it strongly suggests that prison is not working to rehabilitate people. Preventing reoffending requires prison to tackle criminogenic needs—the changeable factors in a prisoner’s life that directly influence their risk of reoffending. Lack of healthy, pro-social relationships is female prisoners’ greatest criminogenic need and men’s second-highest, exceeded only by the closely related lifestyle and associates need. We will never see the much-needed step change in rehabilitation unless we harness the power of good relationships throughout the system.
Better Prisons: Less Crime mentions this 10 times and emphasises the difference that good staff-to-staff, as well as staff-to-prisoner, relationships can make. It mentions HMP Woodhill, and I attended the inspection where it was given an urgent notification. One response to this has been staff better supporting staff. The Minister and I and other noble Lords visited HMP Belmarsh recently and talked to the exceptional governor there about her successful buddy system, where more experienced officers come alongside new recruits, which is helping greatly with retention. Better Prisons: Less Crime gives education more than 100 mentions and employment more than 30. Yet my first report to government on the importance of strengthening family and other relational ties to prevent reoffending and intergenerational crimes said:
“Supportive relationships with family members and significant others give meaning and all-important motivation to other strands of rehabilitation and resettlement activity”.
Ensuring that prisoners have good relationships should top the hierarchy of goals. The Government’s own starting point for commissioning my two reviews was that those who receive family visits are 39% less likely to reoffend than those who do not, making this the most successful rehabilitation pathway. I have had much pushback on this, especially criticism that this focus is being soft on crime. My response to this is that if we lower reoffending by helping prisoners cultivate good relationships, with all that this entails—lower court costs, less crime, fewer victims, more children growing up with reformed parents in work—we are actually being hard on crime. Can the Minister advise how prisons are emphasising the need for good relationships?
I still work with HMPPS and the MoJ on this agenda, and this policy area has some very vocational civil servants dedicated to bringing about system and culture change. My review’s implementation treats relationships as the golden thread running through all processes in prison and probation, influencing how staff, from governors to newly recruited officers, treat prisoners, support each other and engage with the wider community. An extrovert prison purposefully builds relationships with the outside world. Some prisons now run community days for the 50% or so of prisoners who do not receive social visits. People come in from local organisations as living reminders of what life is like outside. They help prepare prisoners ahead of release, pointing them away from criminal associates by providing alternatives. Some are prison-experienced themselves and are a powerful encouragement that change is possible.
Focus has now widened to the role that good peer-to-peer support plays in rehabilitation. Prisons lack in many areas, but what they have in abundance is prisoners—and prisoners can be an asset. I sat in a peer support project in HMP Bullingdon alongside the area executive director, who said that one of the mentors had form as the major troublemaker in other local prisons. That mentor testified to how much his role had changed him:
“For years, I would respond to all authority with violence, and where did it get me? I tell mentees, I was just as angry and frustrated as them, but sharing that built good friendships that helped us both change and stay out of trouble”.
This project had support from the very top and a senior and highly skilled supervisor who could identify prisoners likely to be good mentors.
Every wing in every prison needs these programmes. Before HMP Dartmoor shut down, a similar programme, Peaceful Solutions, significantly changed it into a calmer prison, one result being that officer recruitment became much easier despite the remote location. So can the Minister outline how approaches with the potential to change prison culture by harnessing the power of pro -social prisoner-to-prisoner relationships are progressing?
Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)
My Lords, having just joined the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, I support this report and particularly commend the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for the way he introduced it. I thought he was direct, unsparing and fair. I am sure that this Minister in particular will take its central message: that it is all about implementation and the clock is ticking, and it has been ticking for many years. That is a very fair comment.
All political parties represented in this Chamber need to understand the context that the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, described, which is that not one of them has gone into in a general election promising lower sentences or more remission. This Government have done something about remission, but those two facts have driven the prison population to an unsustainable level, as well as the context in which this report is delivered. We have to acknowledge that.
I wish to talk about two subjects relating to this report; first, about the complex and difficult problem of staff corruption, and then about the tagging of prisoners on release from prison. The vast majority of prison staff serve in a difficult role with integrity. However, there are issues of corruption with some staff, which appear to have increased over the last few years. The report identifies some of the challenges with the present recruitment process, for example. It is difficult to estimate the scale of the problem. However, there are two significant symptoms of it. One is the wide availability of mobile phones in the prison estate. This is really important. We are getting murders arranged from prison, drugs supply continued and firearms discovered. It is vital that this is controlled. The second is the fact that drugs are available in prison, leading to more people leaving with a drug habit than entered with one—on average, this rises from around 40% on entry to 60% on leaving.
Of course, both forms of contraband can be delivered by drones or visitors, but the penetration being achieved in phones and drugs indicates significant elements of collusion. The problem is increasing, because there is an ineffective system for investigating the intelligence being gathered. I blame no one for this problem, because it is caused by a basic flaw in the system. The Prison Service does not have an investigative arm with the necessary powers, including overt and covert surveillance mechanisms, within the community outside prisons. The police do have the powers but require a high degree of certainty before they start a resource-intensive investigation. Therefore, because the Prison Service does not have an investigative arm, it struggles to get the evidence to persuade the police to investigate this serious crime. This problem is aggravated in rural areas, where many prisons are located, which are often covered by small police forces that generally do not have the resources to investigate the most serious crimes. This means there is an increasingly high bar to commence an investigation.
Local prisons in urban areas face a different problem: the prison staff often share schools, licensed premises and so on with the families and associates of prisoners, which adds further pressure on discipline and staff integrity. The overall problem could be eased by providing a national squad of police officers, supported by prison staff, to investigate intelligence in the prison and in the community, combining prison and police intelligence, powers and skills. At the moment, there is no such unit and everybody is deprioritising this vital area. If we want to continue the prison staff professionalism that this report argues for, a foundation of integrity and basic security in the system is vital. At the moment, for the reasons I have described, I fear it is seriously challenged.
I move briefly to tagging, which the Minister and I have discussed before and which we agree is a vital opportunity for the future when prisoners are released. It starts to control some of the factors that cause prisoners to continue to reoffend. We now have geolocation, which can exclude prisoners from certain areas or maintain them within one. There is sobriety tagging, which manages whether someone is taking drugs or, more often, alcohol as a precursor to their offending pattern. The Minister will know that there have been problems in fitting these devices on leaving prison. The commercial company involved has not always been able to do it—that is not always its fault, but it has not always happened. Probably more importantly, the data produced by the tags is not shared live with the local police, who could do something about the breaches, particularly if a crime has just been committed. In any case, it is vital that this is looked at.
These two areas are vital: prison corruption—I blame no one for that, certainly not prison staff—and tagging. Could the Minister update us on both in his reply?
Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friends and noble Lords on their excellent maiden speeches. I look forward to those to come and welcome them to the House. I thank the chair and the witnesses and contributors who helped produce this excellent and detailed report. I share the disappointment that has been expressed about the Ministry of Justice’s response. It was complacent, generalised and lacking the urgency that this topic demands, notwithstanding, as has been said, our confidence in the Minister.
Prison imposes the most severe power of the state, the deprivation of liberty, for three reasons: to punish offenders, to protect the public and to reduce reoffending through rehabilitation. However, because prison is failing to reduce reoffending, it is also failing fully to protect the public. The prison system is now in a parlous state after years of neglect. Prisons are overcrowded, understaffed, ineffective and very costly, not only financially but in the damage inflicted on communities. Nearly half of all prisoners on average are reconvicted within a year. The Sentencing Act may help, but it does not obviate the need for radical reform of the prison system.
I will focus on a few key priorities in the report. The first is leadership. The head of an institution is usually the most important factor in determining its culture, effectiveness and efficiency, and they can be held to account if they have the autonomy to do what is required. In the Prison Service, that is not the case. The top-down control by HMPPS stifles innovation and weakens governors’ ability to manage effectively. These findings are mirrored by reports from the other place and the chief inspector. Governors are accountable but not empowered.
The government response claims that governors do have some flexibility, but that does not reflect what many governors told us: that lack of autonomy was one of their main areas of frustration and needs transformational change. In what other spheres of public or private services is it thought that rigid centralised control is the best way to achieve effectiveness and efficiency? It is not true in education, the police, health or even private prisons. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that there needs to be a step change in governor autonomy and how does he propose to increase operational and strategic freedoms for governors?
The second point is workforce, which includes myriad issues. I agree that most prison officers and support staff are doing their best in difficult circumstances, but there is, nevertheless, a daunting list of workforce challenges that must be addressed, including recruitment, performance management, training, appraisal, line management, sickness absence and so on. It is astounding that prison officers are recruited via an online process, as we have heard, and that governors do not meet new recruits before they turn up for work. Would that be regarded as acceptable for a teacher, social worker or police officer? I think not. There is at best a patchy system of training, virtually no system of appraisal and little supervision, with line managers expected to manage 20 to 30 officers.
We hear almost daily about workforce problems, including corruption—as we have just heard—hundreds of prisoners released in error and allegations of staff misconduct, including with children in secure units, yet the committee was given very little detail and perceived no real sense of urgency from the Ministry of Justice. It said this was a work in progress. Can my noble friend the Minister set out how he is approaching this fundamental programme of change and what his priorities are?
The third point is reducing reoffending through purposeful activity. This could be said to be the raison-d’être of the prison system, yet it repeatedly fails to deliver education and remedial programmes. Prison becomes a very expensive waste of money, by failing to reduce the likelihood of reoffending on release. There is limited availability of and access to provision. Attendance is not prioritised against the demands of prison routines or staffing problems, and it falls by the wayside. Could my noble friend the Minister give further details about what work is going on to improve this situation?
Finally, I will mention women in prison, where there are very high levels of need and vulnerability, 71% reoffending, high levels of trauma, substance abuse and so on. This discrete and very vulnerable subset of the prison population is in particularly urgent need of the recommendations in our report. Will my noble friend consider accelerating those recommendations in the women’s estate?
These are just a few issues. Setting all the others aside, they alone are incredibly challenging. I genuinely do not doubt my noble friend’s ability and commitment to the changes necessary, but, with the greatest respect, his task will be even more difficult unless he can build a more capable, flexible and innovative HMPPS.
Baroness Davies of Devonport (Con) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, it is an honour to participate in this debate and to follow the noble Baroness. I thank noble Lords in all parts of the House for their warm welcome and pay tribute to my sponsors, my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and my noble friend Lord Young of Acton. I thank the officers of the House and all the Palace of Westminster staff for their kindness and time. I honestly cannot say enough about how wonderful and patient everybody has been as we have got lost around these red and green carpets. I thank my noble friend Lord Moynihan, who has been my mentor. I think he wanted to check my speech to make sure that I did not tell your Lordships stories about what happened way back in 1980, when we were on the same Olympic team. Without his guidance I would have been seriously lost, so I thank him very much.
I will always cherish my introduction day. It was a privilege to be able to share it with family and friends, including my 90 year-old father. My dad was my coach, and is still coaching today, but was ostracised for speaking out against the East German state for cheating during the Iron Curtain era. As the coach of the only individual female medallist in the whole Great Britain team in Moscow, which was me, he was still left off the coaching staff for daring to ask for a level playing field for women. On the day of my introduction, he was wearing purple to remember my mum, who lost her life because of the contaminated blood scandal. Without incredible family support, I would not have made it as an international athlete, a career spanning 13 Olympics so far, as either a swimmer or a poolside reporter.
That passion for sport will, I hope, be put to good use in your Lordships’ House as we consider ways to promote the health, well-being and wider social benefits which come from taking part in physical activity. My international life in sport began at 11 and lasted 20 years. There was five hours a day of training, six days a week, juggling school work with the pool. In those days, there was no lottery funding and my choice after state education was retirement or a sponsored degree in America, which I took. I had been training hard for 10 years—the longest holiday being a week—including training on Christmas Day, which was down to Mr Daley Thompson, and for three months I trained with two broken arms. However, to maintain my scholarship, I had to swim full time, so I came back to the UK, took part in a television programme called “Give Us A Clue”, which many noble Lords are too young to remember, and I was promptly banned for receiving £40 expenses, even though UK Athletics had trust funds and athletes were able to be full time. I had to wait another nine years until trust funds were introduced into swimming before I could make a comeback to finish my sporting career at the Barcelona Olympics, if you do not count “Gladiators”— and if only I had trademarked the word “Amazon”.
Those challenges have taught me to be resilient, to understand that no one can keep you down unless you consent to it. Those same challenges have made me resolve to hold up the principles of equality and fairness. I am passionate about the physical and mental health of our children and how to motivate them to be the very best they can be. I feel privileged that I grew up at a time when stereotypes were being pulled down and, most importantly, we had no smartphones and we had free speech. Never before have our children been bombarded with so much grown-up material as they are today.
Here in the House, I also hope to extend my interest in women’s rights, so in that context, I turn to this debate on the Better Prisons: Less Crime report. However, I wanted to highlight the unique challenges incarcerated women face. Of the 88,000 prisoners in England and Wales, only 8,000 are women. The default setting for management is therefore male. It is imperative that we look at how we treat women in prisons in a way relevant to their biological needs. The average stay is only 42 days—just long enough for you to lose your home, your children, to ruin your life, but not long enough to make any major improvements in your poor mental health, or your drug or alcohol abuse, which is more prevalent in the female estate. Shockingly, 82% of women in prison report mental health illnesses.
There are no female prisons in Wales and if you live in Cornwall, you will be put on remand in Gloucester, a round trip costing over £100 for any family member who wants to visit, which is all too often more than the whole week’s food budget. Women need the connection with their children; many are single parents. An obvious solution is the expansion of the third spaces—community-based care centres that offer much closer-to-home facilities. The vast majority of these women have at some point in their lives been victims themselves of crime or violence. Self-harm figures have rocketed in the last 10 years and are almost nine times higher than in the men’s estate.
After talking with Zoe Short, governor of Eastwood Park Prison, which covers the whole of the south-west and Wales, it was obvious that mentoring programmes help to build the confidence female inmates often lack, and could be hugely advantageous, making these women feel like they matter. There was such a successful programme in recent years, but it was limited to men and football. I hope the Government may consider expanding the mentoring programme, and I hope to discuss further what I might be able to do to encourage other successful sportswomen to take up the opportunity of motivational visits, including looking at encouraging more of the physical activity that I know directly correlates to more personal self-confidence.
In closing, I know there are some truly amazing people here, doing incredible work on this subject in the House, and I thank noble Lords for introducing the debate and bringing their extensive professional experience to bear on policy formulation across all party lines.
Baroness Bertin (Con)
It is a real honour to follow my noble friend Lady Davies of Devonport. I congratulate her on a thoughtful and brilliant first speech, a story of such determination and resilience. She was a total hero of mine growing up—I am trying not to be too starstruck—and a huge inspiration to me and so many young girls, at a time when mentors in the sporting world were in pretty short supply. She was someone we could all relate to, and she came across as incredibly kind and encouraging. She was, and remains, a remarkable sportswoman. Let us just take a moment: she swam for Britain aged 11—I had barely got myself to school on my own at that age. It is a huge testament to the support she had from her family, and I heard her tribute to her mother and father. At 14, she won two European bronze medals and, aged 15, she won two Commonwealth gold medals. Her astonishing form continued, and she went on to win silver in the Moscow Olympics, although we know it should have been gold. She became an even bigger household name when she burst on to our TV screens. As a dedicated TV addict in those days, I basically spent the first 18 years of my life watching her on TV. She was either commentating brilliantly on key sporting events, appearing on “A Question of Sport”, presenting “Big Brother” or absolutely nailing her opponents as a Gladiator. She was a staple in my life. She is a mother, a grandmother, a committed campaigner for so many charities, a skilled equestrian—I could go on, but all noble Lords need to know is that she is superhuman.
However, perhaps most importantly, she is brave and campaigns courageously for women’s rights in sport, at considerable personal cost and risk to herself. She spoke out at a time when few people were brave enough to make the common-sense case that it was unfair on women to have to compete against transgender women in sport. I know that many young women in elite sport, and more generally, are incredibly grateful to her for this. She is brave, determined, hard-working and full of integrity. We need more of this in our politics, so I and many others are delighted that she joins us in this Chamber. I look forward to working with her—and maybe even working out with her, but I am not sure I am brave enough to do that. I know she will make powerful contributions, and she has already shown real leadership.
I also welcome the other four new Peers to this House. We have heard some amazing speeches already, and I look forward to working with them. We are at our best when we are cross-party, so I am sure there are lots of conversations to be had over the years. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for his amazing leadership and the team, particularly Alex South on the committee. I have been on committees that have produced many reports, but this has been a particularly powerful one.
Speaking of bravery, I want to begin by recognising the courage of our prison staff across this country. They rarely get that acknowledgement, and the Prison Service medal is the least we can do. They are on the front line. On the point the noble Lords, Lord Foster and Lord Hogan-Howe, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, made so powerfully about recruitment, it is absurd that we are recruiting in this way. It is such an important and difficult job. You cannot possibly be recruited as a prison officer, potentially having never stepped into a prison before. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, said it is insanity writ large, and it is. I remember the first time I went into a prison—although admittedly, I was eight months pregnant; do not ask what I was doing, heaving myself around Wormwood Scrubs. You can either do it or you cannot: it is a pretty shocking experience once those doors close and you see the reality of being inside a prison. It is no good for the staff or those in the prison, because when it becomes clear that someone is not right for the job, people start to worry a great deal about their safety, and rightly so. The whole thing potentially starts to fall apart quite quickly. The committee is unequivocal that our prisons are in a state of crisis. They remain overcrowded, under-resourced and unable to provide the conditions necessary for rehabilitation that so many of us have spoken about.
This overcrowding has many problems, about which noble Lords have spoken very eloquently. Low-level offenders are frequently housed in close proximity to more serious criminals. When we went to Belmarsh, which other Peers have spoken about a great deal, I talked to one inmate who said, “I came in because I robbed Tesco, but I’m leaving knowing how to rob a bank”. He was half joking, but that is the reality. The committee noted that overcrowding, poor conditions and a lack of purposeful activity create circumstances in which criminals become far more hardened rather than helped. When the cells are full, the staff are stretched, and gangs operate with impunity.
It struck me, on the several occasions I have been into prisons, that a lot of the classrooms and workshops are completely empty, either because there has been a big security problem or because the logistics of moving these guys around are incredibly challenging, especially if there are gangs being placed in the same prison. It is just an impossibility. There may be provisions for education, but quite often, with the greatest will in the world, you cannot get people out of the cells and into the places to do the learning. That is a massive problem.
On employment, the reason why I was in Wormwood Scrubs when I was eight months pregnant was because I worked for BT at the time, which was trying to recruit. My friend, the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, obviously knows a great deal about this, and I praise his work on it. It was not and is not straightforward, and far more work needs to be done on the programmes that help prisoners gain real work experience to make sure there is a real, meaningful connection with local employers that helps drive what they want from people leaving prisons, so that they can them give them meaningful employment about which there is a sense that it could potentially lead to something, rather than just being an activity for the sake of it that does not really take them anywhere. That is very important to get right.
Many others have also mentioned the urgent need for clarity of purpose within the prison system. The committee calls on the Ministry of Justice to enshrine reducing reoffending as the statutory aim of prisons. Rehabilitation is not an alternative to justice; it is essential to it. Being in prison is the punishment. What follows must be about equipping individuals to return to society as stable, contributing citizens.
I have one final point, raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, on tagging. If electronic monitoring and tagging are to be an answer to early release then there are some big problems to be addressed in the back office and in its organisation if it is going to be rolled out at any great scale effectively. I make one very small, urgent plea: when there is a lack of faith in that system, such as survivors of domestic abuse being absolutely terrified when they know their perpetrators are coming out of jail, it is vital to get the electronic tagging system under proper control, if it is an approach we are going to take.
Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)
My Lords, the Justice and Home Affairs Committee deserves congratulations on producing such an excellent and thorough report. Congratulations are also due to those who have delivered their maiden speeches today, all of excellent quality—and I am sure there is one more to come.
The only thing in which our prison system excels is the number of people it crams into it. That is the root of all the problems we are addressing today. There are too many people who cannot be given enough work to do, or the education or experience they need, many of whom should not be there in the first place.
I am sure many noble Lords, like me, were delighted when the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, was appointed to his post, because we knew that he wanted to do the best possible thing for the country, for the prisoners and for those who offend, many of whom are not really bad people but just find themselves in a bad position. I have every sympathy with him in trying to align his principles and aims with the system he finds himself confronting—in particular the media, which the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, referred to, which is out for blood all the time rather than rehabilitation. It is a very difficult equation to balance. It cannot be done overnight, and I wish the noble and learned Lord, Lord Timpson, all the best still, but it is not to underestimate the problems he faces.
Many of us will have dealt with Timpson, the family business, which has done so much to encourage the employment of prisoners. One of the things that is most notable is that the staff in Timpson appear to feel empowered to do what they believe is right for the customer and to use their initiative. They are not bound in by stupid bureaucratic rules. But it is appalling to read how little autonomy the governors in our prisons have. If a member of staff at Timpson appears to have more autonomy than a prison governor, there is something radically wrong in the system. We are seeing the results of that in the way the staffing levels and budgets in prisons are allocated. They are not fit for purpose. As the committee said, Governments need to give more autonomy to governors. I would be very interested to hear more from the noble Lord about how he is going to address that.
Many people have talked about the drugs issue. It is absolutely crazy that we have the House of Commons Justice Committee saying quite blithely that it is now at “endemic levels. The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, talked about how it manages to flourish. There is a prevailing culture of acceptance of drugs in our prisons. This cannot be right. There were 136 drug-related deaths in the two years to December 2024 in our prisons. If anyone in this Chamber tried to run a drugs racket, our doorkeepers would be on it in seconds.
How is it that such things are allowed to flourish in our prisons? We know: it is the corruption that the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, referred to. There are organised criminal gangs running rife in our prisons, and in part that must be because we do not have the right prison officers. The vetting system has to change. There have to be face-to-face interviews and, as in many public services, there has to be lifelong vetting of those in these positions. These are positions of power, and we cannot afford for them to be in the wrong hands.
I would also like to refer to the plight of women prisoners, many of whom—if any—should probably not be there. Female prisoners suffer not only the cost to themselves; the cost to their families is huge. The reoffending rate for women, if they have been on a short sentence, can be up to 58% and beyond, but if they have a job on leaving, that makes all the difference. Training is all-important for women prisoners. The charity Working Chance does great work in putting women prisoners into work when they leave, but we need that for all our prisoners.
We need more education. It is utterly crazy—as Charlie Taylor, HMIP, has already said—that, at £45,000 a year, we cannot educate prisoners to read. We need to learn more from the noble Lord the Minister about what he is going to do about that.
I would also like to bring up the issue of mentees and mentors, which others have raised. They are all-important. They do not need to be sportspeople, and they do not necessarily need to be other prisoners, but they are all-important in building relationships.
Baroness Hyde of Bemerton (Lab)
I congratulate the noble Lords on their maiden speeches. They were truly excellent contributions, and I look forward to the one that is yet to come in this debate. I am delighted that they have all chosen to speak and make the ground of their maiden speeches the topic of prisons, which is a topic very close to my heart. I am delighted that we have already heard a lot about the particular plight of women in prison.
I have chosen this debate for my first speech after my maiden speech—the difficult second album genre of speeches—having studied and worked in prisons for many years. I will restrict my comments to three particular areas: the purpose of prison, which has been very well covered already, so I will keep that brief; the use of release on temporary licence to enable people to work; and supporting prison staff.
If we want to reduce crime and ensure that there are fewer victims, we have to sort out prisons—I cannot state it more plainly than that. I welcome the report and my noble friend the Minister’s response to it. But there was a surprising omission, and that is the critical role of experts and those with experience in helping policymakers to get this right—that is both people with lived experience in the justice system and those who work in it.
We have already heard that the context is truly grim. I will not repeat all the things we have heard, but I just make your Lordships’ House aware that the current rate of self-harm in our prisons is 859 incidents per 1,000 prisoners.
I now turn to the second recommendation in the report, which states that
“the Ministry of Justice … should set out a clear and consistent … purpose of prison”.
As others have eloquently stated, if we want the public to understand the decisions being made about prisons, they have to understand what prisons are for. What is the primary purpose? It is an urgent, practical question; it is not an esoteric, academic ponderance, because the answer to that question then dictates a load of answers to what actually happens in our prisons, day in, day out.
I raise this particularly because most people in our prisons now will be released back into wider society. About 14,000 people are released every three months. What each prisoner experiences in prison then shapes how they go on to live after release. We must communicate that purpose and ensure the visibility of evidence for what reduces reoffending and restores communities and lives.
That brings me to my second theme: the increased use of release on temporary licence to unlock employment opportunities. I know that my noble friend the Minister is as passionate as I am about the role of employment in preventing reoffending. Indeed, I first encountered him when I worked for Working Chance, which we have already heard about, supporting women with criminal convictions into work while he was becoming a household name through his pioneering employment schemes in prisons and after. We know that work can provide dignity, purpose and a reason to get out of bed in the morning, and it gives you new skills.
The use of release on temporary licence, which is often limited to day release—people going into the community to work or volunteer, then returning to the prison at night—can help build confidence and get people ready for release. The scheme is available only to some prisoners, appropriately vetted near the end of their sentence, but government data shows that, in 2024, 99.8% of those released on temporary licence completed the period successfully and safely, and those prisoners given release on temporary licence have lower rates of reoffending on release.
When I worked at Working Chance, I had a colleague who had been on release on temporary licence who came in every day to work with us, and about a month in she was finally released from prison. Let us call her Katie. On the day she was released from prison, her whole world shifted. She was struggling to navigate new relationships and thinking, “Where am I going live? How will this go?” But in the midst of that, she continued to come to the job that she had done for several months, from nine until five, Monday to Friday, sitting at the same desk and drinking her tea from the same mug with familiar colleagues. She continued in that role for several years and then got a better job in a large public sector body. The reoffending rate at Working Chance, when I worked there, was 3%.
Witnessing Katie’s transition from prison on that day-release programme gave me a front-row experience of what the data already showed us. It showed somebody able to successfully transition into normal life and make a contribution. Most people in prison today are going be released, so let us crack on with that.
I have left myself with no time to talk about the importance of staff. They do a very tough job. I ask that my noble friend the Minister consider meeting with me to discuss how we can help staff exposed those traumatic events. I welcome the recommendations around sickness levels.
We all agree that it would be better for staff to work in less violent, less understaffed and less traumatising environments, so let us get a clear purpose for prisons, increased use of ROTL and greater support for our prison staff, because most people in prison today are going to be released.
Baroness Neate (CB) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, I feel acutely the responsibility to use this privilege for good and to represent the vital role of civil society in addressing the troubling challenges our country faces. My father often said—really often—“You’re not special; you’re just lucky”. It sounds harsh, but not when you think of the many people who are very special and not at all lucky. I have met many of them in my career. I know full well that great good fortune has brought me to this place.
I thank my noble friend Lord Kinnoull, the staff of the Convenor of the Cross Benches, Black Rod’s office, and the doorkeepers, who showed such amazing kindness to my family on my introduction. I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Hunt of Bethnal Green and Lady Casey of Blackstock, for supporting me, and to the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and the Appointments Commission.
I applied to join this House because, for decades in front-line charities, I saw families beset by crisis after crisis, while policy changes were not helping. Charities working in communities know how housing, domestic abuse, child protection and criminal justice collide in real lives. I believed I could bring that experience into legislative debates that too often treat these issues in silos.
Prison is where many of our most pressing social problems collide. I will explain that in a minute through the story of a young woman who I will never forget.
I began my charity career at Action for Children, supporting families in crisis. I was stunned by the scale of domestic abuse at the heart of that damage, unrecognised or minimised as a volatile relationship rather than systematic control and victimisation.
That led me to become chief executive of Women’s Aid. There I helped achieve the criminalisation of coercive and controlling behaviour, more funding for refuges, and changes in the family courts. At Women’s Aid we heard daily from women who were staying in terror because they feared homelessness and losing their children. I came to see that insecure private renting and the shortage of social homes trapped survivors between life-threatening abuse and unliveable temporary accommodation. That is why I became CEO of Shelter.
To return to prisons, Action for Children ran the mother and baby unit at Styal prison. There I met a 20 year-old woman and her six month-old daughter, born in prison. It still chills me that she said that she herself had been born in Styal two decades before. Her mother had offended in a coercive, controlling relationship. She grew up in and out of care, was later homeless, convicted of shoplifting and pregnant when sentenced. She was likely to be homeless after release. She was parenting with confidence and love, but I knew she might well lose her baby.
You see how policies intersect to create those we label “complex needs” or “hard to reach”. But it is systems that are complex and help that is hard to reach. We blame people for the spiral of trauma and harmful or dangerous behaviour, but with comfort, resilience and support when problems first arise, things would be different.
We often talk about charities changing lives, but people’s own courage and tenacity are what change their lives, given the chance. Charities can help achieve the resilience that many of us have from childhood, which for others has been eroded. What I have learned is that policy silos do not help us find answers. Before changing policy, we must understand how lives are unravelled by the systems we create. Unintended consequences are avoidable, but it takes engagement with front-line expertise and experience.
I am not a politician. I am proud of what I have achieved in respectful partnerships with senior politicians of all parties—who trusted that my priority is people facing the hardest circumstances. I am honoured to serve both you, my Lords, and them.
Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green (CB)
My Lords, it is a source of pleasure and pride to follow the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Neate and to welcome her to this House. We have truly just heard a speech of clarity, authority and lived experience, and many of us will feel that her presence strengthens the best tradition of this house, bringing front-line public service insight into national policy and legislation.
Polly—my noble friend Lady Neate—comes here after decades at the sharpest edge of social policy. As chief exec of Shelter, she has made the case that housing is not a side issue but the foundation of stability in people’s lives. Before that, at Women’s Aid, she helped shift our understanding of domestic abuse from private tragedy to systemic coercion, requiring a systemic response.
Earlier still, at Action for Children, she worked with children and families in acute crisis, seeing how poverty, violence, housing insecurity and state systems collide in young lives. I worked with my noble friend when I was vice-chair of Shelter; she combines policy precision with an instinctive focus on what it feels like to live inside our systems. She will be a powerful voice here for those shaped by housing insecurity, abuse and contact with the care and justice system. I very much look forward to her future contributions and to working with her.
I note the wonderful contributions from all five noble Lords who have made their maiden speeches today. The breadth of experience that we have heard just from those five—the different perspectives, different experiences and different ways of seeing—is indicative of the strength of this House and what makes this place truly remarkable. It is of great regret to me that the wider community and population do not understand the richness that this place offers to our country.
Turning to prisons, the committee’s report shows a system under strain, where leadership, staffing and clarity of purpose will determine whether we reduce reoffending or simply manage crises at huge human and financial cost. I want to focus on the people who sit at the heart of that question—prison staff. Prison officers, like social workers, nurses and firefighters, do work that is complex, emotionally demanding and essential. Yet we persistently treat these roles as low status, modestly paid and peripheral to public life. The report highlights the recruitment and retention crisis, low morale and the reality of violence and trauma facing staff. We ask them not only to keep order but to help change lives, then we underinvest in those very people whom we expect to deliver that change. If we genuinely see prison staff as central to public protection and reducing reoffending, should that not be reflected not just in pay and training but in how their role is understood and valued across society?
Can the Minister say more about what the department is doing and what further steps it might take to raise public awareness of the importance of prison staff and the contribution that they make to public life? I am acutely aware that at the same time we face a profound labour market shift. We tell young people that the future—their future—lies in learning how to use AI, yet many white-collar pathways that shaped the aspirations of the next generation of workers are likely to contract. We are already seeing and experiencing that contraction. Large numbers of young people will face a more precarious landscape than we are ready to admit.
Here is the paradox. Sectors such as prisons, care, health and community safety urgently need capable people. This is work that AI will not replace, regardless of what Foucault may have fantasised about, yet we signal that success lies elsewhere. If we are serious about safer communities and reducing reoffending, we should be making careers in the Prison Service and allied public service roles high-status, well-paid, properly supported professions with clear pathways and recognition. This is not fall-back work; it is nation-building work.
This points to a seismic shift that we are facing not just in the prison sector but across the public sector. We need to start revaluing human relational work to align education and workforce policy with social need, and to see affordable housing as part of the infrastructure of prevention. If our public service staff do not live where they work, how can they connect with the communities that they are trying to serve? This is consistent with the report’s central argument: the system must be organised around reducing reoffending and protecting the public, not managing failure at scale.
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)
My Lords, I rise to speak with some deference after the wealth of contributions that have been made thus far, but I want to begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath—I want to call him my noble friend; we worked on a committee together not so long ago—on this redoubtable, detailed report, which has fed the debate. The biggest commendation we could make for it would be that we do not now file it away so that it can gather dust but that it could continue to be in a dialectic relationship with government, as it has already been, as we find our best way forward to the next steps that we have to take.
The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, was bold enough to quote from speeches she had made 20 years ago; emboldened by that, I wish to refer to actions of my own that were 30 years ago—I know I do not look old enough to have that age gap, but, take my word for it, it is absolutely true. Why, when I was working 30 years ago as the president of the Methodist Church in Britain, did I choose prisons to be one of my key subjects? Homelessness was the other, but that will wait for another day. There were several reasons.
I had been responsible for a Home Office-endorsed hostel for remand prisoners. This was an alternative to prison where about 30 people who would otherwise be in a prison cell had structured time with a criminologist, I remember, from Cambridge University, and various things like that, to help to take the weight off the prison and perhaps help some of the people inside to be seen in a better perspective. In addition, we had halfway houses for young people who had been in trouble with the law. Again, we saw to it that there was discipline—it was warden-controlled—but, at the same time, giving young people the freedom that young people will have whatever you do.
I had those responsibilities resting on my shoulders, and one or two other factors too. My schoolmate was Home Secretary at the time—the noble Lord, Lord Howard. I was firmly against his slogan, “Prison works”. He knew that; it was not the only thing we disagreed about, but friendship survived. I hope that the fact that I take a different stance from his yet again today will not threaten our ongoing relationship. He is a fine man, and I am proud to know him personally.
In addition to all that, at Wesley’s Chapel, where I was the minister at the time, I interviewed David Ramsbotham, who was also mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe—not, alas, in her place. He just swept me off my feet. I read his first report as Chief Inspector of Prisons—I have it here. He told me that he wrote every word of it himself. For the six years that he held that office, this was his pellucid thinking about the experiences he had had and the conclusions he had been driven to. He was a remarkable man. I remember him sitting over there in the corner—the noble and gallant Lord by then—and continuing to regale us with his wisdom, strength of character and goodness of heart.
All that led me to be interested in prisons, and, in the course of my presidential year, I visited Lincoln, Leyhill, Blakenhurst, Walton, Garth, Doncaster, probation officers in Leeds and a detention centre in Rochester, as I tried to understand from alongside those incarcerated how it was affecting them and shaping the direction of their lives. I have never forgotten it. I have been in many prisons since, but that was a concentrated introduction to the whole dimension of British social life.
What can I say, other than that, if that speech of David Ramsbotham had been substituted at the last minute by an act of terrorism for the report that we are looking at, it could have done the trick? It is the same stuff, for staff, governors, conditions within prison, pay and pensions. It is all in there, his first report; here we are, 30 years later, debating the selfsame issues. I hope, if I live another 30 years—my wife dares to shrink from the possibility—that I may be back and just see whether we have made any progress then.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate our five maiden speakers. They are the future of this House, and the future of this House is clearly effective.
I congratulate, too, the committee on this well-researched and hard-hitting report. I absolutely join in the welcome that this House gives to the noble Lord, Lord Timpson—he enjoys support all the way around the House, and I very much hope that he never qualifies for early release—but I was rather disappointed by the lack of urgency, commitment and humanity in the Government’s response to the committee’s report. I rather suspect that the Minister did not write it himself.
My connection with prisons comes from my wife, Antonia Rubinstein, who co-founded and ran the charity Safe Ground for 17 years. We were lucky; prisons were reasonably well funded in those days, and we had a fine succession of Labour Prisons Ministers. I remember with particular admiration Lord Williams of Mostyn, the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, and Hilary Benn. They all, as I remember them, exercised their distinctive voices. That allowance for Ministers to speak in their own voice seems to have been suppressed over the last 25 years, and I very much hope that the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, will reverse it.
In the same vein, I hope that, as the report asks, the Minister will swiftly restore discretion and responsibility to prison governors, who should also stay in post for a sensible time. A lot of my working life has been with the Good Schools Guide, and I reckon that seven years is about right for a headmaster; it is long enough to do big things and not too long to get stale. That same period ought to apply to prison governors. Given discretion and longevity, governors would be much more effective in running prisons and instilling a strong ethos into the staff, and they would collectively become a strong, self-improving community of capability, expertise and experience available to the Minister. As the president of the Prison Governors Association said at its 2024 conference, recalling what it was like 20 years ago:
“My team … were mine to deploy into whatever role I chose for them. The SMT could be as large or small as I liked, provided changes were properly consulted upon … I didn’t have to choose from a restrictive list of job descriptions … teams were resilient and … the senior management team was small …. decisive and executive … The staff group was well established, experienced, confident and capable … also occasionally grumpy and intransigent where change was required. The prison was reasonably safe for both staff and prisoners”.
Responsibility and trust have gone and been replaced by a central bureaucracy. We thought in doing that—this was largely under Conservative Governments—that we were buying safety, but look at our prisons now compared to 25 years ago: we have achieved the opposite. All through public life, we can see that this pursuit of imaginary safety has hugely increased expenditure, from £100 million bat tunnels to our own £10 million front door, and our nice but utterly pointless traffic marshals. We need to get back to a culture of trust and responsibility. We would free up a large amount of money that could then be applied in our prisons without troubling the Treasury.
As chapter 4 of the report describes, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Hunt of Bethnal Green, said, staff in prisons need to be much better supported. I will say only that I very much agree with what was said about the Belmarsh buddy system and other advocated forms of mentoring. My wife was talking to a couple of Timpson employees the other day—always an enjoyable thing to do—and asked them what they would do to improve the lives of the staff who had looked after them when they were in prison. They both said mentoring. I hope that is a theme that the Government will take up.
I end with one other suggestion. In 1997, the Prison Service commissioned Safe Ground to produce a programme for prison staff to deliver family relationships education to prisoners. It was called Family Man. It was hugely successful. It helped prisoners build a network of family relationships to support them post-release and made prisons safer places because of the effect on the motivations and attitudes of prisoners. This is a Prison Service course; it owns the copyright of it. It should be revived.
Lord Tope (LD)
My Lords, I should first declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and co-president of London Councils, the body that represents all the London boroughs and the City of London. I wondered whether that interest was relevant to this debate, and then I realised, of course, that local government, its many services and the people who work there, and the councillors who are elected there, are hugely relevant to the Prison Service—more relevant than many of them may realise. I will say a little bit about that later.
Something else I need to say to people present, especially in view of the difficulty nearly everyone has had in trying to deal with such a wide-ranging and important subject as this in only five minutes—I sympathise—is that I did not know that I was going to be replying to this debate until I arrived here and got the speakers’ list this morning. The good news for Members present is that, like everyone else, I prepared for a five-minute debate and, when I checked with the Table here, I have 20 minutes. I will leave noble Lords to think about the consequences of that over the next 18 minutes. I will, of course, keep much closer to the original four minutes and 50 seconds that I had planned.
I expected to hear, and now have heard, very much about the difficulties and shortcomings of the Prison Service. The committee made a lot of recommendations. I am pleased that 19 of them were accepted by the government; 15 more were partially accepted. The only one that was not accepted at all was about the rank of the Prisons Minister. We felt they should always be a Minister of State but, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, the Prime Minister is not yet ready to agree to that for all times.
The recommendations are good and sound. Reference has been made to them and I think it is fair to say there has been general support, as far as I am aware, for all of them. The Government have accepted nearly all of them. That is the easy bit. What we want to know from the Minister in a few minutes is: what is going to happen now and when will those recommendations be implemented? There has been much praise for the Minister today—so far—and certainly much welcome for his appointment. His interest and that of his family business in this whole issue is well known. I welcome that too.
That brings me to the committee’s first recommendation, which flowed from our consideration of the committee’s purpose. It struck me at the time—this meeting may be exceptional—that generally most people, and certainly most of the public, do not ever think about what the purpose of prison is. They would perhaps be surprised to be asked that. They would say, “Well, it’s to lock people up”, and so on. The committee took the view, as we were urged by a number of former prisoners who gave evidence to us, that that is not the purpose of prison. Locking people up and the deprivation of liberty are the punishment. The purpose of prison—something I think we were unanimous on—is to reduce reoffending. I congratulate the Minister on insisting that that should be added to his job title; both he and we should make more of that.
We should emphasise that the purpose of prison, and of putting people there, is not to punish them—they are punished by their deprivation of liberty—but rather to reduce reoffending. We state in the report, and sadly it is a well-known figure, that 80% of offending is committed by people reoffending. That statistic is shocking, and is becoming better known. I was surprised and, indeed, shocked to learn, through a report made a few years ago by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, that 63% of prisoners’ sons become offenders themselves. That is the continuation.
I was going to say, in my original five minutes, that for most of my life I have lived in the London Borough of Sutton. Around a mile outside of our borough boundary and from where I live is High Down prison, as is Downview prison, one of the relatively few women’s prisons in the country. Both were built in the last 30 years when, as it happens, I was leader of the council. During our committee’s inquiry, I went to visit High Down to refresh my experience and my knowledge of it, and to talk with some of the staff, particularly with the governor. I wanted to talk about one particular experience from that visit—I still want to do this, even though I am supposed to be replying to the debate.
Along with my wife, I was invited to join the dads’ group. This is a group for prisoners and participation is entirely voluntary. Several prisoners told us that they had been reluctant to come to the dads’ group, probably because they feared being lectured, or what their fellow inmates would think about it. They all said, however, that the course had changed the way that they viewed their lives. It had been life-changing to them. There is now a waiting list to come along because they had been recommended to do so, in the best way possible, by their fellow prisoners.
All of those prisoners told us of their individual experiences. I will not repeat them, but one that struck me particularly was a man telling me about his experience with his son, who had autism. He simply did not know how to talk with his son until this course gave him that wherewithal. That was something we heard repeated by several others in various ways. The change that this voluntary course made to those men’s lives was enormous. They were all desperate to get out: not to reoffend, but to start again with their families and their children. I hope that it affects reoffending. It must, surely, bring down that figure of 63% of offenders’ sons who apparently become offenders themselves. The men talked about how much the course had helped them, and how much they could not wait to get out and put it into practice.
They did not entirely have to wait to get out to put that into practice because, as a corollary to that, the visitors’ area in the prison had been completely revamped and restyled to make it much more comfortable for families, so that they could meet as families and talk to each other in a more intimate way. In other words, it was a proper corollary to what the dads’ group had been doing. That was just one example.
If I had had time, I was going to mention that I was shown around High Down Prison by a man with the title “community engagement manager”. I am not familiar as many noble Lords will be with the Prison Service. Is community engagement manager a usual term in a prison? I am not aware that it is, but I think it should be as there is a very important role for engaging with the community—not just the prison community, but the area in which the prison is located.
I referred to the fact that I live within a mile or so of the prison. It is in a greenbelt area, surrounded by trees and bushes. That creates a bit of a problem in respect of drones, but that is the negative side. I suspect that most of the nearly a quarter of a million people who live in the London Borough of Sutton, as I do, have no idea that there are two prisons within a mile or two of them because they are tucked away out of sight. Part of the community engagement manager’s role is to have more engagement with the wider local community. He is able to do that in part because, before he became community engagement manager, he was the manager of a local employment agency. He knows many of the local businesses well and still works with them; he knows what they do and how they do it.
I see the Whip standing up and I am afraid he is about to tell me that I do not really have 20 minutes. I will be brief. It is part of the manager’s role to engage with the local community. That is very much a job that the Prison Service, and the Minister, needs to have in order to demystify prisoners. Most people, thankfully, have no personal experience of prisons. What they know and think of prisons is usually what they see on television or hear in the media. The reality is not always the same, so whatever can be done to connect prisons and the public must be all to the good.
The report states a lot of what could and should be done. We all wish the Minister every success in trying to implement that. I hope that this excellent report is not simply going to gather dust on the shelves, meaning that we come back in 20 years and say, “If only we had done that”.
Lord Sandhurst (Con)
My Lords, this has been an illuminating debate on a most important report. I will come to the report shortly, but first I will address the five compelling and varied maiden speeches.
First, the noble Baroness, Lady Bi, comes with an exceptional career in the law behind her, and no doubt still ahead. I am sure she will, from what I have heard and read, give voice not just to the important interests of the City of London but to the interests of the vulnerable and of the arts.
Secondly, my noble friend Lord Redwood is an eminent parliamentarian of 36 years’ standing. He was astute to identify that failures in productivity in public service are a central issue today, as they have been for many years, not just in the field of prisons but across our society. He was right to stress the importance of quality and efficiency. We will all benefit from his experience and insight.
Thirdly, we had the noble Lord, Lord Babudu. He is the executive director of Impact on Urban Health, which works to develop the potential for cities to be healthier. His experience in that, and more particularly at the sharp end of knife crime, of which he told us a little, will give the House valuable insights, and we should listen to him.
Fourthly, we had the noble Baroness, Lady Davies of Devonport. She was a remarkable athlete and an Olympian of great distinction. She has built on that platform to campaign on and highlight, based on her own experience, the misuse and particular dangers of hormonal drugs, both in sport and for teenage health. Further, she understands the importance of a level playing field in all respects and the need to provide decent facilities for women prisoners. We will surely benefit from her experience and wisdom.
Last but not least, we had the noble Baroness, Lady Neate. She is the newest of our Cross-Bench people’s Peers. She will be a valuable addition, not least because she was the chief executive officer of Shelter, a charity of which I am a long-standing supporter. Her expertise in the important field of delivering legal services for social welfare will be valuable to this House, as will her work with Women’s Aid.
I turn to the report. I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Motion and acknowledge the hard work of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee in producing the Better Prisons: Less Crime report. I declare that I was a member of this committee until December 2024, and that I took part in the first stages of its evidence gathering. I congratulate its chair, the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, on not only his truly compelling speech today but his work as chair of that committee when I served on it.
The report—noble Lords will be glad to hear that I shall not attempt to address every facet of it—provides a stark account of a system under acute pressure and engaged too often in firefighting. I am grateful to the committee for laying out their recommendations so clearly. The consequences of doing nothing are real for us all: offenders, staff and the public. Something must be done.
Our prisons are now at a critical point—we all know that; we hear it too often, but they are strained to the point where their core missions of public protection and rehabilitation are compromised. Those conclusions mirror what has been reported by HM Inspectorate of Prisons. At times they go further. Overcrowding and violence are persistent realities and too many prisons are quite unable to provide regimes capable of reducing reoffending. Apart from locking people up to keep them away from us and keep us safe, prevention of reoffending is what prisons should be about. As my noble friend Lady Buscombe, in her elegant speech, showed by reference to what she had said over 20 years ago, in 2005, the political class in this country has failed to address the issues that this report brings to light.
I turn to the newish issue of Islamic extremism in prisons. Last year, the Conservative Party raised concerns about the threat posed by Islamist extremist inmates. We were not the only ones to do so, but it is an important issue. This followed violent attacks on staff by high-profile extremist offenders and evidence of organised radicalisation within the estate. Indeed, I myself asked a Question on this in this House. Islamist gangs inside prisons have held makeshift sharia-style trials and groomed vulnerable inmates. Some prisoners apparently seized power in certain wings.
That problem sits alongside other well-recognised safety problems, and these have to be tackled robustly. The Government and His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service must work better together as a united team. They must ensure that effective specialist counter-extremism units exist, and staff must be trained to identify and respond to radicalisation threats before they metastasise into actual violence. The attack in April 2025 at a separation centre, where extremist inmates used hot oil and improvised weapons against officers, was horrifying and underlines the urgency of this issue.
On reoffending and purposeful activity, the committee’s analysis of these issues—and we have heard other speeches from noble Lords on this—cannot be faulted. As for purposeful activity, the report is spot on. It rightly identifies and links lack of work, education and training with higher levels of self-harm, unrest and, most importantly for all of us, reoffending. The Government appear to recognise this. In their manifesto for the last election they pledged to
“work with prisons to improve offenders’ access to purposeful activity, such as learning, and ensure they create pre-release plans for those leaving custody”.
Much has to be done. There is a worrying new dimension. The Chief Inspector of Prisons recently stated that, in Manchester, 35% of prisoners were locked up all day. That is absolutely staggering and terrible.
On education, I was disappointed to read that independent watchdogs and monitoring boards, to which we should listen, have described seismic cuts to prison education provision. Some 300 education staff were recently made redundant—that is not the way forward. Reports indicate reductions in core classroom education of 25% across the country; in some prisons, the drop is as much as 60%. Governors have had to make teaching roles redundant and to slash the number of courses available, yet this Government have acknowledged that education is one of the most effective tools to break the cycle of offending. Something must be done; this must be put right. The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, was right to stress this and to draw on his own experience and expertise in this field. We want to stop reoffending—we all do.
The cuts here undermine the principles that we all support. Prisons should not be a revolving door into further criminality, as noble Lords have explained. Reduced education opportunities reinforce boredom and frustration, and they do not put people on the road to improvement. Too many people in prison have low or non-existent literacy and numeracy; that has to be addressed. It should be a core aim in prisons. It also, as we all know, makes violence more likely. People who cannot articulate in words turn to physical means. Cuts have left offenders without the skills to reintegrate into society. If our aim is to reduce reoffending then cutting education is at odds with that aim. The noble Lord, Lord Timpson, himself told the committee that he had walked past too many classrooms and workshops with no one sitting in them.
To turn to the issue of staffing, the Justice and Home Affairs Committee has underlined its alarm at the reductions. It has warned that they could jeopardise rehabilitation efforts and make reoffending levels harder to change. My noble friend Lady Bertin was absolutely right to stress the importance of recruitment and getting it right—recruiting enough of the right people in the right way and then keeping them. On staffing the evidence is unambiguous. Morale is low and experience is thin in key areas. Officers spend their shifts just trying to maintain order, with no time for purposeful engagement with prisoners—which is what we all want. Training reform must be accompanied by career progression improvements which recognise the professionalism of the job. Here I should mention the observations of my noble friend Lord Lucas. In his valuable contribution, he highlighted the importance of having the right governors in the right place for long enough, but not for overlong. From his experience in education, he stressed the value of mentoring. To conclude on the issue of staffing, we welcome the proposals for a Prison Service medal. I urge the Government to give this serious consideration.
Finally, I turn to accountability. The current independent inspection framework lacks effective enforcement powers when standards slip. Too many good recommendations from the Inspectorate of Prisons and independent monitoring boards are acknowledged but not then implemented. They lie in the shadows. The committee’s call for enhanced powers for inspectors and formalised collaboration between inspectorates must be taken seriously.
What matters now is for implementation reforms to work. We must prioritise education and training programmes, not cut them. We must support prison staff and not see them leave for better-resourced jobs. We must bolster the security and rehabilitation framework to deal with extremist threats concretely, consistently and effectively. We want a system that protects the public and gives those who can be reformed a genuine chance to go on to live a crime-free life.
This experienced committee’s report contains many wise recommendations—I can touch on only a few core points. The Government must now act on them. They have accepted the recommendations and we want action. I urge members of the committee to check on delivery. I hope that, in a year’s time, they will be asking questions in the House if this has not happened.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Timpson) (Lab)
My Lords, it is a privilege to close this debate on a topic that is very close to my heart. I was thrilled to see that so many new noble Lords chose this occasion to make their maiden speeches. It was heartening to hear references to the late Lord Ramsbotham, who many of us have so many fond memories of.
We clearly have a super-talented bunch of new noble Lords. My noble friend Lady Bi is a champion for the active participation of disadvantaged communities in public life. The noble Baroness, Lady Neate, has worked tirelessly to raise awareness of homelessness, and on behalf of domestic abuse survivors and their children. The noble Baroness, Lady Davies of Devonport, has been a determined campaigner on behalf of disabled sports in England and SportsAid. The noble Baroness is no stranger to navigating choppy waters, so I am sure that she will fit right in here. My noble friend Lord Babudu has brought about lasting change to the lives of countless young people as a former chair of the Blagrave Trust. The noble Lord, Lord Redwood, brings a wealth of experience, after almost 40 years in the other place. It is a privilege to welcome these noble Lords to your Lordships’ House, along with the expertise that they bring.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, for his opening remarks and for securing this important debate. I thank the whole Justice and Home Affairs Committee and its officials for the report, as well as everyone who has contributed to the inquiry, including our recognised trade unions.
The strength of feeling in this report is clear and justified. This Government do not shy away from the fact that our prison system is in crisis. Years of underinvestment and mismanagement meant that we inherited a system on the verge of collapse. At one point, we had fewer than 100 places left in the adult male estate—that is one bad weekend or one surge in remand away from a total breakdown of law and order.
The previous Government could have tackled these problems, but they were more concerned with looking tough on crime, blindly slashing budgets and engaging in disastrous and costly ideological reforms. As a result, this Government were forced to take urgent action. Through the Sentencing Act and an historic expansion of the prison estate, we are putting the system on to a sustainable footing, but that is not job done. I did not accept this role just to prevent disaster. I took the role because I want to make our Prison and Probation Service a world-class organisation—and I mean the whole organisation: prisons and probation, working together as two sides of the same coin, because the public deserve better. They deserve a system that punishes offenders and protects the public but also rehabilitates and reduces reoffending—but we are a long way from that.
Reoffending rates are still far too high, creating more victims and costing billions to the British taxpayer. We need serious reform, and we are doing serious reform. We need to tackle the underlying causes of crime and help offenders to find a new path out of crime. We need to make sure that our hard-working prison staff and leaders have the time and resources to make a real difference. That is what they joined the service to do. Most importantly, we need to put victims first, to make sure they are protected and can see justice is done, but also to make sure that others do not suffer as they did. There is a long road ahead. I am therefore grateful for the committee’s report and this opportunity to take stock. I recognise the problems that it identified. I am in the business of finding solutions and championing the green shoots that we are beginning to see.
We accepted, or partially accepted, all but one of the committee’s recommendations and today I will address each of the report’s key themes. The report, as many noble Lords have raised today, rightly stresses the importance of clearly articulating the purpose of prisons and the importance of reducing reoffending. I completely agree. That is why I insisted on adding “reducing reoffending” to my job title. When we release someone, we should be confident that we have done all we can to make sure that they do not end up back inside. That means treating addiction and mental health issues, ensuring they can learn new skills and prepare for work, and making sure that they have somewhere to live upon release. For far too many, however, we are failing to meet these basic needs, leading many back to the revolving doors of crime. That means we are also failing victims.
However, this is not always straightforward to communicate, so we must do more to communicate the purpose of prisons and the work that our amazing staff do. That is why the “extraordinary jobs” campaign highlights the vital work our staff do to change lives. It is why our communications focus on proven approaches to cutting crime and reducing reoffending. It is why our Sentencing Act incentivises rehabilitation and prioritises punishment that works. It is also why we are investing up to £700 million more in probation by the end of this spending review period.
The committee highlighted the need for more collaboration between public and private prisons. I agree that there is a lot more room for improvement, and we have made progress. We are developing a digital platform for sharing information and good practice across the public and private estate. We will also build on events such as the HMPPS Insights Festival, where over 8,000 staff from the public, private and voluntary sectors registered. It will take time and commitment, and I am determined to get it right.
The committee is absolutely correct that all our staff deserve to be supported by strong leadership. It is also vital to say that prison governors have uniquely challenging jobs. Every time I visit a prison—something I do most weeks—I am reminded of the stark reality of the job. It is difficult enough at the best of times, but when you are constantly struggling for spare beds, your buildings are crumbling, and you cannot hire or keep staff, then even the best cannot lead; they can only cope. We are therefore bringing stability and increasing capacity. This space enables governors to drive performance, to set their culture and to lead. I also recognise that we need to trust and empower governors to do what works for them, their prison and their staff. That is how I ran the Timpson business. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, for her kind words—if I ever went back to the business and had an advertising department, I would like to consult her on how I should approach things. Let us take Mick, the governor of HMP Hatfield. He is often out and about all day meeting employers, working with local partners and seeing how employment benefits offenders out on licence. Six months after release, 86% of his prisoners are in employment. Mick is doing it his way, and it is clearly working.
We will prioritise autonomy through the HMPPS’s “free, flex, fixed” framework, and we will give leaders more flexibility with their budgets, including introducing a new self-service procurement process for low-value items, allowing governors to source routine goods and services more quickly. The committee also emphasised the importance of governor development and succession planning. Through our Enable programme, an induction programme is now in place for first-time governors and those moving to new posts. And we are producing a development scheme for governors ready to take on the toughest challenges.
We are also tackling what I call the “EuroMillions problem”. If a dozen governors won tomorrow night, that would be a serious loss of leadership. We need more future leaders lining up, ready to lead. That is why the first cohort of our Future Prison Leaders programme has started, and our national talent committee is identifying high-potential individuals as well as prisons where succession risk is most acute.
Prison staff are some of our finest public servants, but they too need the space to succeed. They need opportunities to build real relationships with the prisoners they manage so they can make a real difference, but they too are often just trying to get through the day. So, as my noble friend Lord Moraes and other noble Lords pointed out, we need to boost recruitment, fix vetting and bring down sickness rates. We have secured a temporary exemption to the visa rules for foreign nationals working as prison officers to prevent an urgent staffing crisis, but that is not a long-term solution. We will improve training and make sure staff get the recognition they deserve. Of course, that is easier with consistent leadership, and I hope I am doing my bit. My goal is to be the longest-serving Prisons Minister. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas: I hope that I am not offered an early release.
We are also helping potential officers to understand the realities of prison work. This includes supporting governors to offer familiarisation visits to applicants. Informed by my own independent review, we are improving training through the Enable programme, and we are rewriting initial prison officer training so that it goes well beyond the current 10 weeks. It will instead become part of a year-long induction. This means that officers will get the best possible start.
We also know that, despite brilliant work, prison staff can often go unnoticed. I will continue to champion their work in public life, which is why our proposal for a King’s Prison Service medal to recognise excellence in the Prison Service is going to the honours committee this month. We are seeing continued progress in retention. In the latest published data, the resignation rate for officers in bands 3 to 5 was 7%, the lowest in four years. These green shoots are very welcome.
Let me turn to the power of purposeful activity. Noble Lords will be aware of the importance I place on prisoner skills and employment. I saw at first hand in the workshops I opened and the prisons I recruited from in the Timpson business how employment helps. The data is clear. Access to in-prison education and employment upon release can both reduce reoffending by up to nine percentage points, but, once again, we also need to tackle the broader issues. Prisons cannot run consistent and meaningful programmes if they are at full capacity or if their facilities are falling down, so we must bring stability and sustainability to the system.
But I know that is not the only challenge. The education budget has not kept pace with rising costs. Despite contracts that improve quality, we can buy fewer hours overall, so we are making sure that as many prisoners possible can access the training on offer. We are increasing the potential of digital systems to help more prisoners learn, and we are expanding literacy initiatives—I am delighted that Lee Child is our first ever Prison Reading Laureate. We will continue to support governors to commission vocational courses and link up with employers, charities and local partners. That includes our new regional employment councils which are furthering the work of prison employment advisory boards. It is also important that prisoners maintain positive relationships with their family and the outside world, as the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, continually champions. That is why I negotiated a 20% reduction in phone call costs for prisoners—because maintaining those links helps to turn lives around.
The committee’s final theme was accountability and oversight. I greatly value the independent scrutiny of our chief inspectors, Charlie Taylor, Martin Jones and Martyn Oliver. I meet them regularly, but I agree that there is room for more collaboration. We are reviewing the role of the independent monitoring boards, alongside other oversight bodies, and I will update your Lordships’ House on our conclusions in due course.
Parliamentary accountability is also vital, and the Deputy Prime Minister and I regularly appear before Select Committees. I hope noble Lords know that I am always keen to discuss any proposals to reduce reoffending and help people turn their lives around. It is important to note that we are seeing an uptick in HMIP scores, but there is still a very long way to go. I do not want to settle for “good enough”. I am really competitive and I want to run world-class prisons. We are starting to see things move, and that deserves recognition.
It is clear that we inherited a system in crisis and we are putting in the hard work to fix it, but we are also being incredibly ambitious, with our target to halve the number of prisoners released with nowhere to live—an agreed cross-government commitment—our once-in-a-generation reforms of our courts and sentencing, and innovations such as intensive supervision courts. Transformation will take several years but, if we get this right, reoffending will fall, the public will be safer and we will have fewer victims.
I thank noble Lords again for the opportunity to respond to this important debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Foster, for securing it and the members of the committee for the work that has gone into this report. I confirm that I will provide them with an update in March. I also thank noble Lords who have contributed today. I am very happy to meet the right reverend Prelate in due course. I have tried to respond to as many of the points raised as possible but, due to the fantastically high number of noble Lords taking part and the limitations on time, I regret that I cannot cover everything. I will specifically update the noble Lords, Lord Hogan-Howe and Lord Farmer, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hyde, on the points that they raised. Of course, I also give my continued thanks for the dedication of our prison and probation staff who keep the system running day in, day out. I am proud to have them as colleagues.
Lord Foster of Bath (LD)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken, not least those who have given us five excellent and thought-provoking maiden speeches. I am sure that all will make valuable contributions to the work of your Lordships’ House. I was somewhat concerned on their behalf by the opening remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Hyde of Bemerton, who instead of praising the maiden speeches and leaving it at that, went on to put fear into their hearts by telling them that they now have to go away and come up with their difficult second album. Based on their performances today, I am confident that they are up to the task and we look forward to hearing them.
It is often said that a society can be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members. Prisoners, despite having committed acts deserving of opprobrium, often represent some of the most vulnerable, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, pointed out. Frankly, at present we are failing them. We are failing the staff working in our prisons and the public, not least because we are failing to help prisoners prepare for life outside prison or to provide adequate measures to reduce reoffending. As I pointed out, it was happening 43 years ago and we have heard that it was happening 20 years ago. Sadly, it is happening today.
Despite the gloomy picture that I and our report paint of the situation, I have genuine optimism about the future. One of the reasons for that optimism is the Minister. He clearly gets it. All noble Lords who spoke clearly get it. The task is to persuade the rest of the Government to get it and ensure that the Minister and his team are provided with the support to take forward all the recommendations in our report, which I hope will not stay on a dusty shelf. I am sure it will not because, as the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, pointed out, I will be having a dialectical relationship with the Minister to ensure that. I am optimistic. I hope the Minister is around for a very long time. I thank him for what he has done and for his energy and enthusiasm. I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this excellent debate.