Chris Grayling
Main Page: Chris Grayling (Conservative - Epsom and Ewell)Department Debates - View all Chris Grayling's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(10 years, 6 months ago)
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The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)
I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “House” to the end of the Question and add:
“applauds the work already carried out by probation trusts and other agencies to turn offenders away from crime; and welcomes the Government’s proposals to build on that work to further reduce re-offending by extending support after release to offenders given short custodial sentences, introducing an unprecedented nationwide through-the-prison-gate resettlement service so that offenders are given continuous support by one provider from custody into the community, harnessing the skills and experience of trained professionals and the innovation and versatility of voluntary and private sector providers to support the rehabilitation of low and medium risk offenders and creating a new National Probation Service that will work to protect the public and will directly manage those offenders who pose a high risk of serious harm to the public.”
It is an enormous pleasure to be debating under your chairmanship, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is great to see you in the Chair. The amendment is in my name and the names of the Prime Minister and our right hon. Friends.
The House has sat and listened for the past half hour to a party that has absolutely no idea how to tackle what I believe to be Britain’s biggest crime problem. The Labour party did nothing about the problem in all of the 13 years it was in government. This Government will not repeat that record of failure. We are determined to break the depressing merry-go-round of crime. In this country, we have a cycle of reoffending that has a dreadful impact on the lives of decent, hard-working members of society, and that creates needless numbers of victims in our communities.
Chris Grayling
I will make some progress before giving way to hon. Members. Let me get established first.
The reality is that crime in Britain is falling, which is good. There are fewer first-time criminals, which is also good. However, increasingly, crime is committed by people who have offended previously, who are going around and around the system. Reoffending in Britain has barely changed in a decade—it rose again in the past year. It is as high as it was five years ago when the trusts were formed and the reforms were introduced.
Just yesterday, we released statistics that paint a grim picture of reoffending in this country. More than 148,000 criminals convicted or cautioned in the past year had at least 15 previous convictions or cautions. More than 500,000 offenders had at least one previous conviction or caution, including 95% of those given short sentences of less than 12 months. That group of offenders—prisoners who are released from short sentences of less than a year—have long been neglected by the system. They are at the heart of what we want to achieve.
Chris Grayling
I will give way in a moment.
The overall reoffending rates of that group are shocking. In the year to September 2011, nearly 60% of them went on to commit a further crime. Nearly 85,000 further crimes were committed by the group who walk out of prison with £46 in their pockets and get little or no support to get their lives back together and turn away from crime.
Toby Perkins
It is possible that the Secretary of State is right and that the experts whom he believes are wrong are wrong. However, surely in the interests of democratic accountability, a radical change of the sort he proposes should be debated properly in the House and the other place. Why is he so frightened of proper scrutiny of his policies?
Chris Grayling
I am not frightened, and I will talk about the legislative base later. I am not frightened to debate—I am here today debating. We are doing the right thing.
Steve Brine
The figures that the Lord Chancellor gives are shocking and, in many ways, a disgrace to our country. Is not one reason for the figures that there is no through-the-gate system from custody to community? The new resettlement prisons—I am glad that Her Majesty’s prison Winchester is part of the proposals—are part of putting that failed system right.
Chris Grayling
We are trying to do the things that experts have told us need to happen. They tell us that we need to support people through the gate and support those who have sentences on the edge of 12 months.
Chris Grayling
The right hon. Gentleman says that he is not against that, but Labour Members have come up with no suggestions whatever on how to achieve it, and did not do so in 13 years in government. This Government will make that difference. The reason is that that group of people—the ones who walk the streets with £46 in their pocket—are being abandoned by the system. Many have deep-rooted problems, such as drug, mental health and educational problems. We currently expect them to change on their own. When we do nothing, they carry on reoffending, which means more victims and more ruined lives. As my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) has said, it also means a cost, as estimated by the National Audit Office, of between £9.5 billion and £13 billion a year.
Richard Graham
Is my right hon. Friend as surprised as I am that the shadow Justice Secretary gave little recognition to the gravity of the problem; that, in his motion, there is nothing—not a single word—on how to reduce reoffending; and that the motion is simply a negative approach to the Government’s proposals?
Chris Grayling
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. All the Opposition are doing is opposing. I hear no suggestions, but we heard no suggestions from the Labour Government. We have heard from the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) on many occasions in the past few months. On 17 July, he said:
“But I also know that the status quo is not an option. Re-offending rates are too high.”
He has also said that we need to target specific groups, such as those who receive short sentences, many of whom are in the revolving door of reoffending. However, we heard nothing about that in his speech to his party conference this year, and there is nothing about it in the motion. The truth is that he has no plan.
Worse than having no plan, the Opposition did nothing in government. They had the chance to tackle the problem of support for short-sentence offenders when they were in office. In 2003, they legislated for custody plus, a highly complex and bureaucratic system, but at least it was trying to address the problem. However, in February 2006, the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), who was the Minister at the time, said:
“We intend to introduce Custody Plus in the autumn of 2006.”—[Official Report, 6 February 2006; Vol. 442, c. 934W.]
Only five months later, the then Government said that they would not implement the new sentence of custody plus. In November 2007, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) said:
“No decision has yet been taken as to when custody plus will be introduced.”—[Official Report, 21 November 2007; Vol. 467, c. 946W.]
In February 2010, just before the general election, Lord Barker said in the other place:
“Resource constraints have meant that we have been unable thus far to implement custody plus and there is no prospect of doing so in the near future.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 3 February 2010; Vol. 505, c. 17WS.]
They opted out of their plan to tackle the problem that we are going to solve. They said that they could not do it, and it has been left to this Government to come up with a plan that will deliver real change.
Mr Gerry Sutcliffe (Bradford South) (Lab)
I was a Minister in that Department, and the Lord Chancellor is wrong to say that nothing was done in our 13 years. We created the probation trusts, in the face of great resistance from his party, which voted against the Bill. In the Government’s plans, the multi-agency protection agreements between the police, the probation service and the criminal justice system will be kept in the public sector for the most serious offenders. Why will the rest go to the private sector when the risk register shows that there is concern about those people who go from a low or medium risk to high risk?
Chris Grayling
Let me address the issue of the risk register. The previous Government produced risk registers, but they never published them. A risk register is an internal working document designed to tell the team working on a project the steps that they need to take to ensure that untoward things do not happen. One of the things that we are doing in planning this project is, of course, aiming to deliver a transition that is as seamless as possible and protect the public. The difference this will make is to provide supervision for those people who are walking the streets and committing crimes, leading to more victims of crime today. That is what these reforms are all about.
Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)
If the Minister is interested in providing a quality service, why have probation trusts been forbidden to bid to run the new community rehabilitation companies? The trusts have the expertise.
Chris Grayling
Our probation staff are not prohibited from bidding. We have teams of staff who are preparing mutual bids, some of which will, I hope, be successful. They are receiving help from the Cabinet Office to do so, and we are hoping to see members of our current team take this opportunity, win contracts, and go on to make a real difference.
Caroline Lucas
The Government claim that private providers will have the tools they need to assess offender risks, but the proposals refer to a new and untried risk of serious recidivism model. Is the Minister aware of concerns that that could lead to private companies wrongly assessing the most serious cases—those with low risk of recidivism but high on the risk of harm, such as convicted murderers and rape offenders—and will he commit, in the interests of public safety, to proper piloting and external validation of any new tool before its implementation and before the creation of community rehabilitation companies?
Chris Grayling
We intend to use the same systems across the public, private and voluntary sectors—that is enormously important—so that there will be no question of people using different systems. It will be part of the contracting structure that what the public national probation service, working with the most serious offenders, uses will also be used by contractors.
Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)
Does the Secretary of State agree that the Opposition have no right to lecture us on the criminal justice system, as they released tens of thousands of prisoners early, which undermined the public’s trust in the criminal justice system?
Chris Grayling
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course, what we hear is a party that has changed completely. When Labour Members talk about the outsourcing agenda, they tend to forget that they were the people who drove the outsourcing agenda. They were the people who said that prisons could and should be run in the private sector. They were the people who said that electronic monitoring could and should be run in the private sector. A volte-face has taken Labour back to being an old-fashioned left-wing socialist party, and they are now pretending that none of that happened, but I can assure them that it did.
Mr Burrowes
Do not the Opposition have a one-sided view of expertise? From my involvement in the criminal justice system as a defence solicitor, I know the expertise of probation officers. That needs to be shared and transferred, and they need to be able to bid for contracts, but we have to recognise that expertise is not just in the public sector—there is expertise in the voluntary sector and the private sector. For example, is anyone saying that St Giles Trust, which supports people into work and housing, does not have expertise? Let us have a balanced view about allowing more people to be involved in the business of rehabilitation.
Chris Grayling
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is what we hope to achieve. This is not about handing probation to big companies, but bringing in the right expertise from the private, voluntary and community sectors to reinforce the work of the public sector, and to bring new ideas and approaches to rehabilitation. The great irony is that in the debate on the Offender Management Act 2007, Labour Members talked about the benefit of bringing together the skills of the public, private, voluntary and community sectors. Owing to the new, union-dominated agenda they are pursuing, they have abandoned all that and are now saying that anything that involves anybody else is simply not good, and that is not good enough.
Chris Grayling
I will make some progress and then take some interventions.
There has been talk about the categories of low and medium risk, something the right hon. Member for Tooting refers to regularly. The categories come from the current system—it is how the current probation system works. We will build on that in the new system.
We will not do business with anyone who cannot demonstrate the right expertise in preventing reoffending. The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) made the valid point that there are many good community and voluntary sector organisations doing excellent work in this field. I want more of that work to be part of what we do in the probation sector.
Richard Graham
What my right hon. Friend says about the variety of organisations that have something important to contribute on rehabilitation is surely something we all recognise in our own constituencies. Will he confirm for the record that there is nothing to prevent—indeed, lots to encourage—the Gloucestershire and Wiltshire probation trusts from getting together and bidding with a business for rehabilitation contracts?
Chris Grayling
Not only that; we are encouraging our management teams from trusts. We cannot contract on a payment-by-results basis with ourselves, but the Cabinet Office is investing money to encourage and support teams of staff who want to take over the business, run it and be free to innovate.
Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)
The Lord Chancellor is being generous in giving way. Let me make it clear that I believe there is valuable expertise among the many charities that work with offenders on some of the problems he has raised—on mental health, alcohol and drugs—but can he define medium-risk offenders? What offences is he talking about? How does he deal with the point that was raised earlier about offenders who fluctuate between medium risk and high risk? If there is a logic to keeping the management of high-risk offenders in the current system, what is the logic for those who fluctuate between the two?
Chris Grayling
Let me answer that question specifically. First, the categorisations are existing categorisations—they are not mine—and are part of a triage process within the existing probation system that we will continue to use. Secondly, on moving people from one category to another, it will be the responsibility of a national probation trust to carry out risk assessments at the beginning, or later if circumstances change that require a new assessment to take place. The two organisations will be in part co-located, so it will not be a complicated bureaucratic process—people will be sitting in the same office. The national probation service will carry out assessments when they need to be carried out. I can explain this to the right hon. Gentleman separately and at much greater length if he would like, but that is how it will work.
On voluntary sector organisations, we are making absolutely sure that smaller organisations have a place at the table.
The shadow Justice Secretary’s comments about the Work programme were complete nonsense. When I left the Department for Work and Pensions, the voluntary sector was supporting about 150,000 people. It was by far the biggest voluntary sector programme of its kind ever seen in this country, with organisations such as the Papworth Trust delivering the programme across large areas of the country and making a real difference. I pay tribute to those charities. The story about bid candy is simply not true. In the two years I was employment Minister, fewer than 10 of the 250 to 300 voluntary sector organisations involved left the programme, and all of them did so for reasons unconnected with the programme. So I am afraid he is plain wrong.
Chris Grayling
Well, I did the job.
Section 3 of the 2007 Act provides a clear and unambiguous power for the Secretary of State to
“make contractual or other arrangements with any other person for the making of the probation provision.”
On Second Reading, the then Home Secretary said:
“The Secretary of State, not the probation boards, will be responsible for ensuring service provision by entering into contracts with the public, private or voluntary sectors. With that burden lifted, the public sector can play to its strengths while others play to theirs.”—[Official Report, 11 December 2006; Vol. 454, c. 593.]
I could not have described our plans better. Furthermore, on Report, the hon. Member for Bradford South (Mr Sutcliffe) said:
“Most services will be commissioned from lead providers at area level, which will sub-contract to a range of other providers.”—[Official Report, 28 February 2007; Vol. 457, c. 960.]
Again, that is very close to the plans before the House today. The shadow Justice Secretary must also know that in another place Baroness Scotland said that the Act
“places the statutory duty with the Secretary of State, who then commissions the majority of services through a lead provider”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 27 June 2007; Vol. 693, c. 639.]
We have two options. Either the Opposition are not being up front with the House about what they really intended to do in the 2007 Act, or they were so incompetent they did not know what they were doing. The House can choose which is most likely.
Mr Hanson
The golden thread through the 2007 Act was public sector management of all offenders—low and medium-level and serious offenders—supported by the commissioning of the type of services the Justice Secretary wants on health, mental health and alcohol and drug treatment from the voluntary and private sector, but the public sector has to be responsible for managing offenders.
Chris Grayling
I repeat, from the 2007 Act:
“The Secretary of State may make contractual or other arrangements with any other person for the making of the probation provision.”
That is clear, to my mind. It might not have been what Labour intended, but it is what the power does, and it is the legal basis we are using for pushing ahead with these reforms.
We will give providers the flexibility to do what works and free them from Whitehall bureaucracy, and the deal is that they get paid in full only for real reductions in reoffending, which is a good deal for victims and the taxpayer. Despite what the shadow Justice Secretary says about the Work programme, it has now helped many hundreds of thousands of the long-term unemployed. He talks about low-hanging fruit—these are people who had been unable to find a job through Jobcentre Plus in over a year.
The Opposition are missing one other important point. The shadow Justice Secretary talked about piloting, but the pilot programme delivering clear improvements in the level of reoffending that is closest to what I want to achieve around the country is in Peterborough. It is so far achieving very good results. It is impressive and I encourage Members in that area to visit. One cannot but feel that it is the right thing to do, but what the Opposition have not admitted is that it was started by Labour. I know it does not want to admit it now, but it started us on this path, and it is a sign of how absurd it has become that it wants to walk us off this path today.
On the point about public protection, the national public sector probation service we are establishing will, of course, be responsible for risk assessing all offenders supervised in the community and will retain the management of offenders who pose a high risk of serious harm to the public, who have committed the more serious offences and who require multi-agency supervision. That is right and proper. An hon. Member—I cannot remember which one—made a point about the working day. I would rather the supervision of highest-risk offenders was in the hands of dedicated experts—and it will continue to be—but having listened to people talk about inexperienced individuals and companies coming in, I think it is worth pointing out that after these reforms, it will be the same teams looking after low and medium-risk offenders as are looking after them now. Only over time will we see the work force evolve so that the expertise in the voluntary sector becomes part of the mix, with former offenders who have turned their lives around influencing young offenders and encouraging them not to do it again.
Natascha Engel (North East Derbyshire) (Lab)
What I cannot understand is how the transition between low, medium and high risk will work. We all know that people’s circumstances can fluctuate in those situations. If, as the Secretary of State said in response to my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden), the changes are not particularly dramatic, why are the Government pushing them through? If, however, they are dramatic, there will be a disjoin. How does the right hon. Gentleman propose to deal with that?
Chris Grayling
As I have said, it will be a simple process. The national probation service team will be responsible for risk assessment. They will have a duty to carry out a new assessment when a person’s circumstances change, and it will be the duty of the provider to notify the team of any material change of circumstances. They will be co-located, and when an offender becomes a high-risk offender, they will be taken back under the supervision of the national probation service. This is about people sitting in the same office and working together, just as people work together in any office environment.
Steve Brine
We have ascertained that Labour accepts the need to bring in other providers to deal with people who are serving fewer than 12 months. The Secretary of State has read out the relevant legislation; it is there in black and white. The Peterborough pilot was introduced by Labour, and we understand that Labour Members are very proud of it. So what does my right hon. Friend think lies behind the outrage being expressed this afternoon at our proposals to drive down the reoffending rates that are costing our constituents billions of pounds?
Chris Grayling
I can only think that it is because the Labour Government could not find a way to do that themselves, or perhaps because Labour has reverted politically to where we all know it belongs and is now ideologically opposed to this kind of approach. It is a party that used to believe that outsourcing part of what we did could make a difference, but it has clearly changed that view now.
It is worth mentioning the creation of resettlement prisons. If we are to deliver rehabilitation that prevents reoffending, it is really important that we have a proper through-the-gate service. My hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) mentioned the prison in Winchester, which will be one of the network of 82 resettlement prisons in which people will, whenever possible, spend the last few months of a longer sentence, or the whole of a shorter one. Those prisons will provide a proper through-the-gate service that will also prevent reoffending.
We must remember why we are doing all this. The Opposition want us to wait for years before doing anything; they do not want us to take this approach. I have a different view: I think that we cannot afford not to act now. Every day of every week, innocent people are the victims of crimes committed by offenders who have just left prison without getting any supervision whatever, and with wholly inadequate preparation for life back in society. Every day of every week, innocent people are the victims of crimes committed by offenders who could be turned away from a life of crime if only there were someone there to help them to do that. That is a scandalous situation, but there are ways for us to solve it. This should never have been allowed to happen in the first place, but our reforms will change things for the better.