Community Payback Debate

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Department: Home Office

Community Payback

Andrew Gwynne Excerpts
Tuesday 28th June 2022

(1 year, 9 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Ellie Reeves Portrait Ellie Reeves
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My hon. Friend makes an important point. I visited a community payback scheme in my constituency a few weeks ago where offenders were carrying out maintenance on a children’s adventure playground. They all said that they felt that they were giving something back and being rehabilitated. The reality is that there are not enough of those schemes because the Government do not resource them properly.

Done properly, community payback offers both just punishment and firm rehabilitation. Offenders understand that the unpaid work they do not only is visible retribution for what they have done to their communities and their victims, but offers them a chance to repay their debt to society. At the same time, if unpaid work is done well, it starts to fold offenders back into their community and gives them a sense of pride in putting back what they took away, which makes them less likely to offend again. What is more, communities see that the justice system is using its power to repair what has been broken, and victims see that, in the crimes committed against them, justice is starting to be done.

Andrew Gwynne Portrait Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
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Of course, the beauty of community payback is that the communities that experienced the crime are the ones who see the crime redressed through the scheme. I am worried, though, that there is a trend in this country for the hours ordered by the courts not to be completed. For example, in my city region of Greater Manchester, there has been an 84% drop in the number of hours completed. That is not acceptable either for the perpetrator of the crime, who has a duty to pay back, or, more importantly, for my constituents and the communities who were affected by the crime.

Ellie Reeves Portrait Ellie Reeves
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My hon. Friend makes a powerful point about hours not being completed and communities not seeing justice done. He talks about Greater Manchester, but that is a problem up and down the country. I will say more on that later.

Community payback should act as an alternative to short prison sentences, which, under this Government, create only more hardened criminals. That is because our prisons have become colleges of crime: drug abuse in prisons has gone up by 500% in a decade, while the take-up of drug rehabilitation programmes is down by 12%; last year, assaults on prison staff went up by a fifth, but the recruitment of officers was still down on 2010; and inmates’ discipline is low, which means that taxpayer-funded compensation for prisoner-on-prisoner violence is high—it was £4 million in the last two years alone.

Instead of properly punishing and rehabilitating offenders, getting them ready to re-enter society, and preparing them for the world of work, short sentences spit offenders out from prison more immersed in crime than when they went in. That is exactly where tough, effective community sentences and tough, effective unpaid work schemes that are accountable to communities and victims could make a difference—but they are not making a difference, because they have been set up to fail.

The Lord Chancellor knows that community payback does not work because of the mistake that his party made in 2014 in rushing through a privatisation that the probation service did not need. Probation officers work incredibly hard and do an extremely important job, but they are being let down by this Government. The fragmentation that followed privatisation in 2014 dangerously reduced staffing, increased workloads and meant less supervision for offenders. The results have been dire: 4 million fewer hours of community payback were completed in 2021 than in 2017.

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Andrew Gwynne Portrait Andrew Gwynne
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I am really interested in the concept of community and victim payback boards, because the important thing is that the voice of both the community and the victims be heard. Too often they are locked out of decisions made about community payback and community sentences. How does my hon. Friend envisage the voice of the victim, in particular, being part of the proposal that she is setting out?

Ellie Reeves Portrait Ellie Reeves
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Victims would be at the heart of everything a Labour Government do, whereas the Government have time and again promised a victims Bill that still has not made it on to the statute book. Our party is on the side of victims; theirs lets victims down.

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Kit Malthouse Portrait Kit Malthouse
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As I have said, the baseline was at or around 5 million hours a year for quite a period. It fluctuated from year to year because of a number of factors, not just the delivery but also whether magistrates were giving community sentences in volume, which is not something we can influence. But I am more than happy to write to the hon. Lady with the hours as we see them. [Interruption.] I do not have them to hand, but I am more than happy to write to her about those hours. Look, the number fluctuated at about 5 million-odd, and we want to get it to 8 million. We have been given £93 million and 500 more supervisors have been recruited to get us there. I hope that Opposition Members will acknowledge that community payback was impacted, and had to be, by the pandemic. I know that the Labour party would not seek to make political advantage out of the impact of that awful disease when we had to bear in mind the safety of Ministry of Justice staff.

The Opposition have submitted their own proposals on improving local engagement and participation, which the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge referred to. However, I am afraid that her quango-tastic response to the issue is both unnecessary and, I am afraid, overcomplicated. In reality, community payback is already delivering for local communities, and the Government are only strengthening our engagement with key stakeholders. We recognise that local engagement is an integral part of the community payback offer, and the probation service already works closely with local authorities, police and crime commissioners and voluntary organisations to identify demanding placements that benefit communities. We also encourage members of the public to take part and nominate community payback projects in their areas via an easy-to-use form on the gov.uk website. I urge you, Madam Deputy Speaker, to make some nominations in your own constituency.

Furthermore, we have just introduced a new statutory duty via the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 that requires the probation service to consult with key community stakeholders on the delivery of community payback in local areas. The duty will encourage greater collaboration with key partners such as PCCs and ensure that projects benefit communities and are responsive to local needs. The new statutory duty will cement and formalise existing relationships and create a consistent consultation process across England and Wales. That in turn will guarantee that local people have a say in the types of projects delivered in their areas, ensuring that our placements are responsive to the community’s needs.

The impact of such collaboration was evident during the community payback spring clean week, which was delivered in support of Keep Britain Tidy’s campaign in March. Between 25 March and 1 April, community payback teams were mobilised across England and Wales to deliver clean-up projects that visibly improved local areas and green spaces. More than 1,500 offenders collected 2,200 bags of litter, removed eyesore graffiti and cleared vegetation from public spaces. They delivered 10,000 hours of hard and productive work at about 300 projects. The initiative was widely supported by many hon. Members and PCCs who visited projects. The spring clean week is a superb example of the impact that meaningful and robust community payback can have on local areas.

Andrew Gwynne Portrait Andrew Gwynne
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I want to take the Minister back to the 8 million hours of community payback that he set out. We all support more hours of community payback, particularly on meaningful projects such as some of those that he has just listed. He skirted over the fundamental problem, though, which is that in June 2011, 185,265 community sentences were handed down—13% of all sentences—but by June 2021 that had fallen to 72,021, which was just 7% of all sentences. He said that there is little that he can do to make the courts award community sentences, but, if he is to make those 8 million hours a reality, he will have to do something to encourage them. What is he doing to ensure that more community sentences, where appropriate, are given out to perpetrators of crime?

Kit Malthouse Portrait Kit Malthouse
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The hon. Gentleman is quite right that the decision on a sentence is a matter for the magistrate or for the judge at the time. It is for them to decide what is a fitting punishment and, indeed, what is likely to deter the offender from reoffending. The fall that he pointed to will be entirely down to judicial discretion.

We can do a certain amount of marketing to judges and sentencers. In promoting my own pet project of alcohol abstinence and monitoring orders—the new sobriety tags that have been brought in—I have been attending judicial training courses to explain to sentencers how the sentence works and its effectiveness. In the end, a judge or magistrate wants to know that a sentence is effective, and if we can demonstrate through our work that it is effective, punitive and satisfies the public interest, and the local community sees value in that sentence, I am sure that magistrates and judges will step forward with much greater enthusiasm and help us to fulfil that 8 million hours target. The hon. Gentleman identifies the interesting point—no doubt it will be embarked on with the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge)—of explaining to those who give out sentences the growing importance of this work across the whole of the country.

I hope that all hon. Members in the Chamber will become my Twitter followers. One of the great pleasures of my day is to tweet my “payback of the day”. Pretty much every day, I put out “before” and “after” pictures of a project taking place somewhere across the country showing the fantastic work that offenders have done. We seem to specialise in cemeteries—a lot of work is going into cleaning them and smartening them up. Some of the transformations have been extraordinary. I visited a project in Eastleigh, near my constituency, and what struck me was the value that the offenders themselves saw in the work. Local residents had been over to congratulate them, thank them and understand what they were doing—the offenders all wear high-vis that has “community payback” written the back—and the offenders felt a sense of pride. They had been working in a churchyard, making it look very smart and tidy, and in fact a couple of them said that they were interested in a career in landscape gardening as a result.

Across the House, we agree on the value of community payback. I hope it is agreed that the service suffered during the pandemic because of the nature of this group-based work, but that the staff at the probation service and the community payback supervisors were innovative in inventing solutions to help us deal with the backlog. Nevertheless, we all need to put our shoulder to the wheel to get us from 5 million hours to that target of 8 million hours, by which time I hope there will not be an area of the country that is not clean, scrubbed and free of graffiti and litter.

While I realise that the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge is trying to use the debate to confer some kind of political advantage, I know that she recognises—she is generally a fair-minded individual—that the staff were struggling during the pandemic, as were so many services. Now that her party has happily reversed its position, we share the view that the community payback is an incredibly valuable part of our criminal justice system, and I hope that we will all work together to promote it. I look forward to receiving a nomination from her for a scheme that she would like to see done in her constituency. Perhaps she and I could visit it together and congratulate the offenders on their work.

As for the hon. Lady’s overall claim that somehow the Conservatives have gone soft on crime and are no longer the party of crime and order, I gently remind her that she voted against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and its measures to put rapists and other serious offenders behind bars and to deal with a variety of other criminals. Until the Labour party becomes more action and less talk, I am afraid that it will not be able to aspire to the crown, which we currently proudly hold, of being the primary defender of law and order in this country.

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Andrew Gwynne Portrait Andrew Gwynne
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My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. There is another bonus because, when community sentences are done correctly, they provide payback—the clue is in the name—to communities affected by crime and they provide a form of restorative justice to victims of crime. A price cannot be put on that. It is justice in action, is it not?

Lyn Brown Portrait Ms Brown
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My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Community sentences work because they include punishment while maintaining a link to the community and enabling progress on the problems that drive crime in the first place. The link to the community is perhaps the most important thing, because it helps people to maintain the hope that is necessary to change their life. Community payback orders can give people experience of work that helps their neighbourhood to thrive. The work can and should be hard, but it should also be rewarding, which can, in and of itself, create a motivation for further change.

What are the barriers to making this kind of sentence work well? A lack of investment in the probation service is part of the problem. When I was a shadow probation Minister, I frequently heard of probation staff taking on huge, extraordinary numbers of cases. Good, valued probation staff are not just an early warning system for when an individual is going off the rails; they are agents of hope, healing and personal change. That can only happen if professionals are given the time and resources to develop the real relationships that are essential if we are to turn lives around. It is about understanding the needs, vulnerabilities and risks of the people they are supervising. We need probation staff who organise unpaid work to have good links with employers, councils, colleges and local charities. They need a range of opportunities to be available so they can tailor the service to a person’s skills and needs. Most of all, they need the necessary time and trust to inform the courts of the most effective, most appropriate and fairest type of sentence.