Farmer Review

Baroness Vere of Norbiton Excerpts

Wednesday 11th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Farmer on securing this debate and the contributions made by noble Lords to this important subject. I also pass on best wishes to the ailing noble Lord, Lord Beecham. I have not a hope of covering all the wide-ranging issues raised today in the time available, and I want to focus on my noble friend’s review. However, I will of course write if I am not able to respond.

The debate has demonstrated powerfully why we need to do much more to strengthen prisoners’ ties with family and significant others—not just because it helps prisoners move away from crime but because it helps families to maintain relationships with their loved ones. My noble friend’s report also reminds us of the need to tackle intergenerational crime, summed up by the study mentioned by numerous noble Lords that found that 63% of prisoners’ sons went on to offend themselves. That is astonishing.

I start by thanking my noble friend once again for his full and informative report, firmly rooted in evidence and best practice, which challenges us to make families the golden thread running through our support for prisoners. Although the review focuses on male prisoners, we recognise that the recommendations may be equally relevant to women, as raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Healy, and, of course, to young people.

The Government are committed to taking forward the review’s recommendations. Important progress is being made and I will update noble Lords today. As part of our prison reform strategy, we are empowering prison governors. They are able to take the decisions that are most appropriate to their prisons. This means that prison governors now have control over their family service budget and the flexibility to spend their resources to best support prisoners to keep and develop important family ties.

Governors took part recently in a procurement exercise to select a group of family service providers and the contracts with these providers began at the start of this month. The contracts cover a wide range of services, including services involving children, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, and the noble Lord, Lord Morrow. These services include family centres, play areas for children, schemes to promote ties, such as Storybook Dads or Storybook Mums, and family days, also known as extended visits, on which families can spend more time together.

The noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, mentioned IEP and families and I am very happy to confirm that we are reforming the current IEP framework to give governors greater discretion to encourage all prisoners, whether enhanced or standard, to engage with their families and significant others. I would welcome the chance to talk to the noble Baroness further about this because it is a very important issue.

Alongside this, the Government will pilot new family and significant relationship performance measures. Analysis of these will provide crucial information about the most effective ways to deliver more consistent and effective contact with families. To encourage best practice, this information will be shared across the entire prison estate.

Alongside holding governors to account, it is also right that Ministers are held to account for improvements in this area. That is why I am grateful to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons for updating the expectations it inspects prisons against each year in light of my noble friend’s review. This was mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester and the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield. The standards now include a number of areas relating to family and significant others that the inspectorate will consider when deciding inspection ratings.

In his report, my noble friend refers to David Lammy’s recent review of the treatment and outcomes for black, Asian and minority ethnic prisoners. It is worth referencing at this point the race disparity audit recently published by the Government. We will take steps to ensure that BAME prisoners have equal access to culturally competent services that support and develop sustainable relationships with their families and significant others.

Looking ahead, we are working on a new family and significant other policy framework for governors, which will take into account a number of my noble friend’s recommendations. Within this framework, each governor will develop a strategy—a local family offer, as my noble friend referred to it—for family and significant others for his or her prison. They will then engage dedicated and appropriately trained staff, perhaps akin to the FCDOs referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, to work in partnership with family service organisations, such as chaplaincies and voluntary organisations, so that prisoners can develop positive relationships. Feedback from those who have used the system, such as family members, visitors and prisoners is important and will be used to shape the system in the future.

As mentioned by a number of noble Lords, some prisoners do not or should not receive visits, perhaps owing to the nature of the crime, because they do not have family or significant others or because visits from their family might encourage further criminality. Family engagement workers will work with prison staff to support the development of other positive relationships for those prisoners.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Healy and Lady Masham, mentioned release on temporary licence—an important tool in our armoury in supporting the transition back into the community. Release on temporary licence can get offenders back to work and can help build positive family ties, both of which can lead to a reduction in reoffending.

Some of the recommendations made by my noble friend Lord Farmer will take longer for us to deliver—for example, because they suggest changes to legislation or require changes to the physical estate. We are ensuring that these recommendations are picked up in our longer-term reforms, such as the estate transformation programme.

To keep track of progress in delivering the recommendations, officials from Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service and the Ministry of Justice will meet regularly with my noble friend. This group will include the director of public sector prisons, who leads the family strategy working group. So someone is accountable—something that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, mentioned he would quite like to see. This also means that if we encounter issues that might delay or prevent implementation for whatever reason, we can discuss alternative ways forward. I am sure that my noble friend Lord Farmer will hold our feet to the fire on this.

My noble friend’s review also highlights three wider issues in our prisons that we need to address. The first is staffing. We need the right number of staff with the right skills to develop consistent and constructive relationships with prisoners. We committed to recruiting an extra 2,500 staff by the end of 2018. As the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, mentioned, there has been a net increase of 868 new prison officers. That was up to June, and obviously there have been more since then. In June there were nearly 18,800 full-time equivalent band 3 to 5 prison officers—the highest number of officers in post since September 2013.

We must retain and recognise our more experienced staff. To do so, we are making better use of financial incentives, improving opportunities for promotion, and reviewing and strengthening learning and development opportunities for governors and officer grades. Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service is a professional service, and we want to make sure that it offers attractive and long-term careers.

It is a question not just of the numbers of staff but of how we deploy them. As noble Lords will know, we are reforming how we manage and supervise prisoners by introducing the key worker role. Each officer will have a small caseload of around six prisoners whom they will support. Having a consistent key worker who knows a prisoner well is critical both for family engagement and for keeping prisoners safe. As my noble friend Lord Farmer reminded us, the impact on the family can sometimes be a significant burden on a prisoner, so support to maintain these relationships is sometimes essential.

The second issue, raised by my noble friends Lord Farmer and Lord Shinkwin, is prison overcrowding, which your Lordships’ House discussed recently in a debate moved by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood. The Government recognise the need to address this long-standing issue. That is why we are replacing old, inefficient prison places with 10,000 modern and better-designed places that support prisoner rehabilitation and can, for example, incorporate disability access—an important issue raised by my noble friend Lord Shinkwin. It is very difficult adequately and comfortably to refit a Victorian prison.

We are also continuing to support effective community sentences that both punish offenders and address their needs. For example, we are working with the Department of Health and NHS England to develop a new health and justice protocol so that courts can increase their use of treatment requirements for mental health, alcohol and drugs as part of a community sentence. This will mean that we can intervene earlier with mental health and substance misuse issues.

Thirdly, we come to the subject of drugs, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Bird. We are tackling the supply of drugs through joint working with the police and other law enforcement agencies. As I mentioned, we are also cutting the demand for drugs by working closely with the National Health Service to deliver drug treatment services.

I will quickly turn to some of the points that I might be able to cover in the time available. On the point about care leavers, raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service has appointed a senior civil servant as the care leavers’ champion for the prison service. The first national conference for care leavers attended by prison governors will take place next week.

On the issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, about sharing the report with the Northern Ireland Prison Service, I would be absolutely delighted to arrange for my noble friend’s report to be shared formally with our counterparts in the Northern Ireland Prison Service.

The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, noted, with a heavy heart, that many of the recommendations were mirrored in the report by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, many years ago, and he is right. I hope that our actions at this time will go some way to rectifying the oversight of successive Governments in the past and will assure the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, that action really is being taken.

My noble friend Lady Sharples asked whether progress has been made in recent decades. I feel that it has, not least in understanding why people commit crime, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Judd. But of course there is much more that we should be doing.

To sum up, the Government welcome this review’s recommendations and are acting on them as part of our commitment to modernise and reform our prisons. As my noble friend Lord Farmer put it in his report, families and significant others are, along with education and employment, the three legs of a stool that provide a stable foundation for preventing reoffending and breaking the cycle of intergenerational crime. I look forward to working with my noble friend and, I hope, with other noble Lords as we follow through on his recommendations.

House adjourned at 7.16 pm.