Better Prisons: Less Crime (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)

Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts

Thursday 12th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[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.

Children and Families Bill

Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and I congratulate him on such a novel and neat proposal. I will not delay the Committee because I suspect that we will have a very full debate on PSHE and the role that schools can play in developing these aspects of children’s well-being. Indeed, the noble Lord has himself already pointed that out. However, Amendment 57 fits closely with the concerns we have on this side about better preparing children and young people for the challenges of life, and about maximising their potential academic success through extracurricular activities to develop their confidence, self-esteem, leadership skills and so on. Those are actually two sides of the same coin.

So-called “soft skills”, which in my view is a rather derogatory term because we are talking about non-cognitive development here, are very important and have been shown to be extremely valuable not only to meet challenges better, but also to maximise their potential academically. Why else would some of our best fee-paying schools have extensive programmes of such activities? They have them because they are aiming to produce rounded individuals by developing these important aspects of character and resilience. It is a great pity that the Government have taken away much of the funding that schools had been provided with for extended activities, as well as reducing the emphasis being placed by the department and the current Secretary of State on these and other extracurricular work. As the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, said, Ofsted has highlighted the huge variation in provision, with much of it being of very poor quality.

The reason that this amendment is so novel and neat is that it is not prescriptive. It simply asks schools to discuss and debate these issues, and to review them every year. That will involve a conversation with parents and with the pupils themselves. They should then publish what they intend to provide. It will not cost schools any money to do that, but it will put this issue on the agenda and make it more transparent for parents and pupils alike. I am therefore very happy to support the amendment.

[Baroness Benjamin]

My Lords, I support this amendment. There is something close to my heart that the noble Lord also supports. Twenty years ago my production company tried to get a schools programme on parenting commissioned. I was told that could not happen because it was not part of the national curriculum. Thankfully it now is. Some schools are attempting to address this important issue. Parenting is not about sex education, but about teaching young people about life skills, relationships, respect for one another, responsibilities, basic money matters, social policies and solving domestic problems. That applies to everybody’s family life, no matter what their background is. All schools should promote parental responsibility and make it an essential part of delivering holistic education to all our children. That is why I support this amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)]

My Lords, as an amateur and a non-lawyer, I hope that the Government will be able to accept the noble and learned Lord’s amendment. How very fortunate we are to have people like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, with us in Parliament; how important it is that people with experience as Law Lords should be able to return and give us the benefit of their expertise. I was entranced by his exposition of the amendment because, as an amateur, it is clear to me that people who abuse children do not stop: if you have abused one child, you will undoubtedly go on to harm another.

In the kind of case that the noble and learned Lord described, where a couple split up, we do not know which one of them was harming the child—perhaps it was both. They move into a new family with other children, that harm will continue and the new child will be at risk as well. It has been made clear to us that the Court of Appeal cannot at the moment understand with clarity what it is supposed to do. This would help enormously and I hope that the Minister will be able to accept it. However, he is looking very grim, so perhaps he will not.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

My Lords, I want to make just a couple of remarks. First, I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, for the note that he has sent to us and for his very clear exposition today of a very complicated issue.

There is an issue here. In my own previous academic experience I did a considerable amount of government-funded research into child abuse, and child sexual abuse in particular. Apart from any other kinds of cases, we found a very significant although small number of men who quite deliberately target families and go round seeking one woman after another. In each case, there is harm to the child but it cannot necessarily be definitively proved which individual committed the harm. For a small number of children this is a problem.

It is quite difficult for those of us who are not lawyers and who have not followed the detail of the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court and are not steeped in all this language and the issues to evaluate precisely—I cannot do so—whether there is an issue here and, if so, how the Government should act. It seems that there may be an issue here. I would be grateful if the Minister could say whether he thinks there is a problem and that it is the problem that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, has identified. Is there a potential problem now where some children could be left in situations of risk when perhaps previously there might have been an intervention to protect them? If so, what is the best course of action for the Government to take?

I can perhaps understand the Government’s reluctance to intervene in or be seen to meddle with Supreme Court adjudications. None the less, if there is an issue here, clearly it is within the Government’s power to rectify or revert to the original intention of the Children Act, whether by Amendment 64 or by some other course of action. I certainly feel, as I suspect do other Members of the Committee, that it would be very helpful to have the Minister’s clarification on whether there is an issue here and, if so, what is the best remedy.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I am not a practising lawyer either but I was a social worker of long standing. I want to say very briefly that the social work organisations are extremely concerned about this situation, and we should have that on the record.

The concern is that in the past, social workers would have been able to move cases forward through the courts easily because of the previous judgments, but now they cannot move to the welfare principle quickly enough, which means that often they cannot gain access to the home where the perpetrator is living. The issue is actually being able to ensure that children can be protected by social care staff or voluntary workers, if that is where the work is, being able to gain access to a home quickly and simply through a court order such as that proposed in the amendment.

Prisons: Population

Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts

Wednesday 27th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, yes indeed. The Ministry of Justice is working with the Department of Health and the Home Office to ensure that front-line criminal justice and health agencies focus on identifying those people with mental health problems at an early stage of the criminal justice pathway, and is exploring ways of diverting into health and social services those for whom this would be the better option.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

My Lords, the Minister will know that at long last the Youth Justice Board has had some success in reducing the very large number of young people whom we incarcerate in this country. Given the Government’s announcement that they will disband the Youth justice Board, who now will be responsible for continuing this very welcome downward trend in the number of young people in prison in this country?

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the work of the Youth Justice Board. As the noble Baroness said, during its time it has overseen a very welcome drop in youth offending. It is not disappearing: its work will be reabsorbed into a unit within the Ministry of Justice.