Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Lord Stevenson of Balmacara and Lord Ramsbotham

Thursday 9th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, the amendment is tabled in the context of something mentioned in the Green Paper that has occurred many times in statements by the Government relating to what they intend to do with prisoners—in other words, to make prisons become working prisons and to increase the amount of time that prisoners spend at work; the 40-hour working week has been mentioned.

Clause 118 amends Section 47 of the Prison Act, which lays down what may happen. New subsection (2) refers to secure training centres and young offender institutions; new subsection (3) adds that different provision may be made for different cases; and new subsection (4) talks about employment rules made by the Secretary of State in that context.

My reason for this amendment, which may look a little prescriptive, is that from experience I know perfectly well that there is no way in which under current circumstances the Government will be able to enact what they say they want to do. I have known for years and years that the problem is that NOMS and the Prison Service simply are not orientated or equipped, nor do they have the ethos, to provide the business-like structure that is necessary if work is to be provided. They never have and they never will. The NOMS bureaucratic procedures involved in dealing with private contractors are ludicrously complicated and frustrate those who would like to contribute by providing work.

I have always contended that the ideal in a prison is a full, purposeful and active day for every prisoner, designed to tackle what has prevented them from living a useful, law-abiding life, with the idea that they come out and do not reoffend. That is not realised by prisoners spending all day in their cells doing nothing. A census done now of prisons would, I believe, come up with a figure of nearly 50 per cent of all prisoners doing nothing, which means that there is no help for them to live a useful and law-abiding life.

I have said again and again that there is a need for someone to be in charge, responsible and accountable. I have said for years that until and unless a businessman is appointed to be in charge of the overall direction and provision of work in prisons, nothing will happen.

I have spoken to two distinguished providers of work in prison: Mr James Timpson, who not only runs four academies but has taken on almost 200 ex-prisoners in his employment around the country, and Mr Edwin Lucas, who has been working in the recycling trade as well as providing work in prisons for years. I listened with horror to the frustrations that they have expressed about trying to deal with prisons where no one has a clue about how to deal in a business-like way. For example, a van will arrive with deliveries of materials to be used by prisoners only to be sent away because people say, “We do not accept vans until four o'clock in the afternoon. It is now 11 o'clock in the morning, and you will have to wait”. That is not how business works. People do not answer letters. Invoices are invariably late. People bring in pallets of material and are sent bills by prisons.

Until and unless there is proper oversight, run by businessmen, which includes trained people responsible for conducting business activities in each prison, nothing will happen. The present inefficiency of the system, where every governor is allowed to do his own thing, is telling against that, because the businessmen who are working with prisons tell me that probably only 20 of all the governors are capable of conducting the sort of activities that are needed. The others simply do not have the understanding or the ability to do it. There is no reason why they should. It should not be part of the requirement for a prison governor, who is there for another purpose.

In order to make the rehabilitation revolution work, I desperately want work to be provided. I know that a number of things could happen. For example, one of the best programmes in prison currently is Toe by Toe, where prisoners teach other prisoners to read. I seriously believe that in the prison population many skills are held by existing prisoners which could be put to good use in acting as trainers, and which are free and therefore will not act as a resource problem for the Prison Service. You get a double whammy, because the person doing the teaching gets as much out of the process as the person being taught.

For years, there has been an inhibitor on prison governors using their initiative to bring work in: grant in aid, which is required by the Treasury. Under that, a governor can declare that he will make a profit from an activity that he is to conduct, including prisoners making things. He declares that profit and, if he makes it, he is allowed to keep it and apply it within the prison. If he makes more, he has to surrender it to the Treasury. If he does not reach what he has said he will make, he has to provide it from his budget. For years, the impact of this has been that people have not been willing to risk making a loss and therefore they have not encouraged the uptake of work as much as they might have done.

The three additional aspects that I have suggested the Secretary of State should consider are all to do with the provision of work. The amendment would make certain that those contracted were properly overseen and that all the activities, both vocational and educational, carried qualifications of worth that could be used outside. As I said, I admit that this is prescriptive but I feel so strongly that this work ethic must be encouraged and enabled that I could not resist proposing the addition of these paragraphs to Clause 118. I beg to move.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I support the amendment so eloquently introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. From what he said, I got the sense that it is really a probing amendment and that he did not expect to receive much support for it. However, he made such a powerful case that I hope the Minister might be swayed to think again about some of these points. As we have already heard in this Committee, it is obvious that many people enter prison without the capacity to read and write, let alone to hold down a job when they come out on release. Therefore, examples such as the Toe by Toe programme should be mandatory. Indeed, it is a pity that the amendment has not specified that it should be a requirement on the Secretary of State.

We have no objection at all to what is being proposed. Indeed, we would regard its prescriptive nature as being of benefit in the sense of tying down, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said, what is required of prisoners—that they should have a full, purposeful and active day, and that every prisoner should undertake something instead of staying in their cells so as to at least become engaged and appreciate what is necessary in order to succeed outside prison. It would therefore also reduce the level of reoffending.

There are some good examples of work with prisoners having been done by private employers. National Grid had a project at Reading in which I was involved in an earlier life, and I thought it was absolutely exemplary. It provided what seemed to be the critical path forward for those due to leave custodial sentences in the sense that it provided them with housing, jobs and training. It started before the prisoners left in order to bring their reading and writing up to speed, and it allowed them to learn a skill—in this case, fitting—which meant that they were able to operate as soon as they left. As I understand it, that programme is still going. The recidivism rate was very small indeed, so the programme was certainly worthy in that regard. It also had the advantage of satisfying a need on the part of employers—they had realised that they were not getting an adequate supply of people to do the necessary jobs, and they found that this programme provided a ready supply.

Therefore, there can be a win-win in what the Government and private enterprise are looking for. Indeed, one might say that it could apply to charities and public bodies and not just to private companies. However, the essential point of the amendment is that, if it is decided that there will be employment from such activities in prisons, it should be done properly so that those who benefit from it have skills and qualifications that are nationally recognised, and it should be done in all cases so that we have a better outcome from the prison element.