Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Chris Grayling Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

I should like to start by offering an apology to the House and to you, Mr Speaker. I shall not be able to be here for the wind-ups at the end of the debate because, in my role as Lord Chancellor, I have to take part in the formal proceedings of the Lord Mayor’s banquet this evening. I have written to the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) and to the Chairman of the Select Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), to explain the position.

I have read with interest the reasoned amendment tabled by the Opposition, and it might be helpful to explain to the House what the Bill will do, and what it will not do. It will make reforms to the sentencing framework so as to bring to an end the situation in which a prisoner can walk out of the prison gates with £46 in their pocket and with no one to meet them, no one to plan for their release, and no one to ensure that they do not return to the same streets and the same people and commit further crimes with no one to try to stop them. The Bill will not make any changes to the probation service.

It is the plans to put an end to prisoners walking out of prison with no support that the Opposition are planning to vote against tonight. They are planning to vote against our plans to end the situation in which drug addicts serving short sentences are simply stabilised on methadone for a few weeks because the prison staff know that they will not turn up for rehabilitation when they leave and therefore think that it is not worth starting it. We also want to put an end to the situation in which a young person freshly out of care finds themselves in our criminal justice system and has no help or guidance to sort out their life when they are released. The Opposition are planning to vote against that proposal tonight.

Despite what is suggested in the completely flawed amendment, which is supported by the Opposition in the other place—and which on one reading would make it impossible for even the current probation trusts to alter their local delivery units without parliamentary approval—the Bill will do nothing to reorganise or restructure our probation services. It is not about probation. The changes that we debated two weeks ago are not part of the Bill. They are about our decision to put into action the reforms set out by the Labour Government in their Offender Management Act 2007, which provides us with the legal basis for our probation reforms. This Bill is not about those reforms.

[Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)]

What will be the additional cost of the Government’s proposals?

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[Chris Grayling]

The proposals contained in this Bill will be delivered within the existing budget for our probation services.

In saying that they want to oppose and destroy the Bill, the Opposition are actually trying to set back for years the task of dealing with our biggest criminal justice challenge. That would simply create more and more victims of crime, which could have been prevented. Their short-sighted wrecking strategy will get them absolutely nowhere.

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for giving way. I declare an interest in that I published a book last year entitled “Doing Time”. I support the Bill. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the policy being proposed in the Bill was originally put forward in the previous Government’s custody plus programme, which was derived from the Offender Management Act 2007?

[Chris Grayling]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. Labour has argued for this, legislated for it and U-turned on it. The shadow Secretary of State has stated endlessly over the past few months that the Opposition now support the principle, but they are going to vote against it tonight. That is a sign of how poor an Opposition they are, how unfit they would be to govern, and how out of touch they are with the criminal justice challenges in this country.

It might assist the House if I started by summarising the issues facing short-sentence offenders. Many need housing; 38% of them need help finding a place to live when they are released. Many are out of work; only 30% have found employment within two years of being released, while 83% will have claimed out-of-work benefits in the same period. Huge numbers of them need help with education, with work-related skills. A fifth had a mental health or an emotional problem, a third self-report as having a drugs problem and 65% have used illegal drugs in the four weeks before going into prison custody. Those are the people who Labour Members want to leave prison with no support at all.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

Does the Secretary of State agree that the reforms in the Bill will avoid what happened to my constituent’s son, who after serving nine months in prison was released with £16 in his pocket, a travel card and nothing else, putting him in danger of committing another offence because he lacks accommodation and the long-term support that he needs?

[Chris Grayling]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I cannot understand why Labour wants to vote against providing 12 months of supervision support for everyone who leaves prison, which should ensure that they do not reoffend.

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

There is one reference in the Bill to the controversial changes to the probation service—found in the new clause 1, which was introduced by our noble Friends up the corridor. Will the Secretary of State reassure those of us who are reassured by that precautionary clause that no change to it will be attempted?

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[Chris Grayling]

The problems with the precautionary clause are twofold. First, it is worth saying that this House voted for the reforms by a substantial majority last week. Secondly, the precautionary provision would prevent any change whatever to the entire probation service from being made. The clause is completely flawed. It would prevent any kind of restructuring or reorganisation within an individual trust, let alone any other part of what is proposed. I am afraid that we will therefore seek to overturn that amendment in Committee because, as I say, it would make it impossible to run the probation service, even in its current form.

We are talking about people who have offended before, some of whom are often highly persistent offenders, and far too many of them go on to reoffend. In 2011, about 50,000 adult offenders were released from short prison sentences. Nearly 60% of that group went on to reoffend, committing a total of 85,000 crimes. That is 85,000 crimes too many—a depressing merry-go-round of offending, blighting the lives of men, women and children in all our constituencies.

Labour Members have talked about us taking risks with public safety, so let me tell them what really is taking risks with public safety. It is leaving the situation unchanged. Those 85,000 crimes include some of the most serious crimes that our society knows—thousands of them each year, including hundreds of serious sexual and violent offences. Yet we are leaving the people who commit those crimes to go on and on unsupervised.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

The probation service, of course, has never been asked or required to supervise that group of offenders before, so is there any reason why the Justice Secretary could not give the public probation service the opportunity to carry out this supervision when the legislation passes?

[Chris Grayling]

I refer to what Labour said in 2010—that it could not do that. The hon. Lady and her colleagues said very clearly that they could not afford to proceed with custody plus—the scheme that they brought forward that would enable the probation service to provide supervision for these offenders. We have come up with a way of doing that. Labour said that in 2010—just before the last election. That is the reality of what we are dealing with. We are talking about people who go on and on and on committing crimes, unsupervised. I see that as the real public safety scandal; it is a flaw in our system that I want to solve and Labour Members seem not to want to solve.

Sadly, it is no surprise that reoffending rates for this group are so high. The average time served in custody for that group is only nine weeks—not nearly long enough to tackle these issues while in prison. After that, they are released at the halfway point with £46 in their pocket and little or no support. Some engage with voluntary rehabilitation programmes after their release, but at the moment there is no mandatory period of supervision in the community. That is what this Bill changes. The core of the change in this Bill is the delivery of 12 months of supervision for those people.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

The 35 probation trusts across England and Wales have been judged either good or excellent. Why is it not right that they cover serious and persistent offenders who have served short sentences? The right hon. Gentleman feels that this change can be done within the current £8 billion decade budget for the probation service, but how can there be no cuts to probation and such an extension into short-term sentences unless the task remained with the probation service? Otherwise, probation services would have to be cut.

[Chris Grayling]

I am afraid that the hon. Lady has not understood what we are seeking to achieve. The Select Committee observed, in a good piece of work, that the present system was far too bureaucratic, and that only a minority of probation time was spent on working with offenders. We are seeking to create a simpler system in which we give much more professional freedom to those on the front line. We want to deliver an environment in which we can mentor and support people, and we want to bring together the best of the public, private and voluntary sectors, not only to make the system more efficient but to deliver high-quality mentoring.

The hon. Lady raised the question of performance. The probation trusts are currently hitting many targets, but there is one simple reality at the heart of all this: reoffending is currently increasing, and I do not think that that is good enough.

Let me explain some of what the Bill will actually do. Clause 2 provides for this group of offenders to spend the second half of their sentences subject to licence conditions in the community, like all other prisoners. Clause 3 creates an innovative period of additional supervision, which is added to the licence to make a total of 12 months' mandatory rehabilitation and support after release. I think that that is the least that we should have in our system; it is extraordinary that we do not have it already.

The supervision period is there not to punish offenders, but to help them to move away from crime. We want those who work with offenders to try new, innovative approaches to rehabilitation. I look forward to seeing the voluntary sector, for example, playing a much larger role. We all see good work done in that sector, and I want to see more of it being done in our formal systems.

A range of flexible requirements can be imposed during the supervision period. They are set out in schedule 1, and include participating in rehabilitative activities including restorative justice, being tested for drugs, and attending appointments to address drug misuse. Those requirements are designed to give those who work with offenders the ability to steer them during the months after their release from prison. The freedom to innovate will be critical to the driving down of reoffending rates in this group.

We are focusing particularly on drug use, which is common among offenders who are serving custodial sentences. Two thirds of those who are serving sentences of less than 12 months have used class A drugs, while three quarters have used class B or class C drugs. Drug use among prisoners is also strongly associated with reconviction on release. The rate of reconviction among prisoners who report having used drugs in the four weeks before custody is more than double the rate among those who have never used drugs. That applies to drugs in class A, class B and class C.

Clause 12 expands the current power to test offenders for drugs while they are on licence to include class B as well as class A drugs. Schedule 1 creates an equivalent testing condition for the supervision period that will follow the licence period. All that is an essential part of trying to ensure that when people come out of prison, we do all that we can to move them off drugs as quickly as possible, in a regime in which they are obliged to take part.

Let me now explain what will happen if an offender does not engage with supervision. Breach of any of the supervision requirements will be dealt with by the magistrates courts, and there will be an important new role for lay justices and district judges. Clause 4 provides a flexible set of sanctions that magistrates may—not must—impose if a breach is proved. They can impose a fine, between 20 and 60 hours of community payback, a curfew with an electronic tag, or committal back to custody. There is no “escalator” approach requiring a more onerous sanction to be used if a lighter-touch one has been imposed before.

The Bill also makes reforms to the two types of sentence that are served in the community—suspended sentence orders and community orders. Reoffending rates following those sentences are less stark than those following short prison sentences, but it is no less important for us to address them. Nearly everyone who ends up in our prisons has previously served a community sentence, and many of those people experience problems similar to those experienced by short-sentence offenders: problems involving mental health, alcohol consumption and drug misuse. Clause 15 creates a new rehabilitation activity requirement to mirror the new supervision condition that will be available for offenders who are released from short prison sentences. As with the top-up supervision period created by clause 3, that will provide maximum flexibility for those working with offenders, enabling them to instruct them to attend appointments or participate in activities.

[Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)]

I have a question concerning the flexibility in the new rehabilitation requirements. Can the Justice Secretary give me an assurance about the current 2003 requirements, in particular the mental health, alcohol abstinence and monitoring requirements that have not yet come into force, and where there is a real need for the courts to ensure that the orders are carried out? I know from my own experience that, sadly, orders have not always been complied with. Can he assure me that those powers will still remain even though there will be that flexibility?

[Chris Grayling]

The powers will certainly remain. What will be different is that having a 12-month supervision period—a period of mentoring—for people once they have left prison, or for those going through a community sentence, will provide much more of a pressure-point to get them to turn up for rehabilitation and go for mental health treatment, because there will be someone working alongside them who gets to know them and to understand them, and who can cajole and encourage them.

It is worth highlighting the experience we have had so far in Peterborough. There has been a huge drop in the relative level of reoffending; the number of crimes committed by the cohort going through the Peterborough trial is much lower than that committed by their equivalents in other parts of the country. The overall reoffending rate has fallen as well. That is a success story we should build on, and we will build on it.

[Guy Opperman]

It is not just Peterborough, is it? There is also Doncaster prison, which is the flagship of modern prisons—and I should say that it was set up in its present form under the Labour Government, and rightly so. It has also seen drug-use figures fall. Some 80% of the prison intake was drug addicted or committed drug crimes, and that figure is now down to approximately 30% upon release, under the current programme. Does the Justice Secretary agree that that is a good thing?

[Chris Grayling]

I join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to the work being done in Doncaster. There is good work being done in many parts of the prison estate. The Doncaster model is slightly different from what we are looking to deliver across the whole of the justice system, but it is equally delivering reductions in reoffending and that is to be welcomed and supported. Anything we can do to bring down reoffending rates has to be the right thing to do.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend mentions the situation at Her Majesty’s prison in Peterborough. Is not the moral of the story there that non-state actors can have a very important role to play in driving down recidivism? Indeed, both Peterborough prison as a private prison—with male and female co-located—and the social impact bond in Peterborough were pioneered by the former Labour Government, and it is sad that Labour seems to have engineered a U-turn on what is, and was, a very good initiative.

[Chris Grayling]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend. The sad thing is that a partnership of the private sector and the voluntary sector and the state has been proven to work in many cases. In Peterborough it is working really well. When the Labour Government passed the Offender Management Act in 2007, they talked extensively about the benefits to be gained from such a partnership. It is sad that they are now seeking to block such a partnership in other debates, and today they are using that as an excuse to try to block a measure that they themselves say they support. Frankly, they are all over the place.

The other part of what we are looking to do involves the creation of a proper through-the-gate system. It is a key part of a wider programme to transform how we rehabilitate offenders. The providers that we will bring into the system will offer a resettlement service for all offenders in custody before their release of the kind that is being provided in Peterborough. It is important that we align the prison system and the geographic areas for release afterwards to make sure these reforms can be as geographically synchronised as possible. The changes we are making to our prison system to create a network of resettlement prisons will ensure that, where possible, the same offender manager will work with offenders in custody and continue their rehabilitation work in the community. I believe that can make a significant difference and can help reinforce the measures in this Bill.

[Mrs Moon]

There are no prisons for women in Wales. All women offenders sentenced to a prison term serve their sentence outside Wales. How will that be managed if we are looking at offender managers working from prisons and back in the communities? The majority of offenders are men, and the probation service has a proven track record of working well with women. How will the Justice Secretary ensure that the private sector does not just look at offenders as male, but has programmes designed specifically for women returning to Wales?

[Chris Grayling]

Clearly, we will see the same level of support provided for women and men. The hon. Lady will, of course, have seen in the document we published recently on women offenders that our direction of travel is clearly towards creating smaller units close to where women live, so that we can maintain the family ties. We are trialling a new approach at HMP Styal in Cheshire, whereby we will have a hostel under the wing of the Prison Service, but outside a prison institution, with open conditions. We are looking to see whether we can deliver a different kind of model for the detention of women offenders that can make a genuine difference to them. Successive Governments have wanted to achieve support through the gate for short-sentence offenders, and we will seek to achieve it for men and women alike.

[Mr Burrowes]

The model of good practice on through-the-gate mentoring is the transitional support service, the longest-running and largest mentoring service. G4S, which delivers the service, does get a bad name, but when one looks at the results and the evidence from the evaluation, one finds that this is a very effective practice model which works alongside the public and voluntary and community sector organisations to deliver through-the-gate mentoring for men and women. That example needs to be followed in Wales—[Interruption.] This is all about women in Wales. [Interruption.] That is exactly what the transitional support service does.

[Chris Grayling]

Of course, new Labour believed in public and private and voluntary sector partnerships, but those days are long gone. Such partnerships can make a real difference. Large swathes of Wales have no prison capacity at all, and this Government are seeking to address that by building a major new prison in north Wales, so that many prisoners currently detained elsewhere can be detained in Wales.

Successive Governments have wanted to achieve support through the gate for short-sentence offenders, and this Bill will finally deliver it. This Bill will provide rehabilitation to a group of offenders who desperately need it; it will give those working with offenders the freedom to innovate and tailor their interventions to what each individual needs; and it will stop the cycle of reoffending that creates so many victims in our communities. Its provisions should command the support of hon. Members from all parties. The fact that the Labour party wants to destroy it is just a further sign of how far that party has moved back to its political roots and away from a world of common sense. If the Opposition have their way, the losers will be victims of crime up and down this country and young people whose lives will be wasted.

Let us finish by reminding Labour Members what they are voting for tonight. This Bill does not reform the probation service—it does not create a new structure for the probation service. It simply provides support for people who get short prison sentences for 12 months after they leave prison. The Labour party has always said that it supported that and has said so all year, but tonight, in this House, Labour Members are to vote against it. I think that that is disingenuous to say the least.

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[Sadiq Khan]

I will; I will come to that in my speech, if the hon. Gentleman gives me time, but as the Justice Secretary would know if he got out of his office, some probation trusts supervise short-term prisoners now, within their budgets, because they believe that it is very important to do so.

On one side of the debate, there are at least three probation trust chairs warning the Justice Secretary to delay probation privatisation or risk deaths: the chief inspector of probation warns that the plans will lead to

“an increased risk to the public”;

The Economist magazine calls the Justice Secretary’s plans half-baked; and probation staff warn that the fragmentation of the service goes against everything that we know about what works in supervising offenders. The Ministry of Justice’s own risk register warns that there is an 80% risk of an unacceptable drop in operational performance; with regard to dealing with offenders, that can only lead to higher risks to public safety. [Interruption.] The Justice Secretary is saying “No.” Will he publish his risk register?

[Chris Grayling]

Will the shadow Secretary of State remind the House how many times the previous Government published risk registers, which are, after all, only a management tool?

[Sadiq Khan]

Let’s make a promise: if the Justice Secretary publishes his risk register now, when I am Justice Secretary, should I do what he is trying to do —God forbid—I will publish the risk register. He crosses his arms, but he cannot deny that his risk register says that there will be an 80% risk of an unacceptable drop in operational performance. That is playing fast and loose with public safety. He is not willing to publish his risk register.

I have not finished listing those who are on the first side of the argument. I have mentioned the probation trust chairs, the chief inspector of probation, The Economist, probation staff and the Justice Secretary’s risk register. The former chief inspector of prisons, Lord Ramsbotham, said that the Bill was “being rushed through”, and that “Many…questions remain unanswered”. That is not all. The former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, has said:

“I am afraid it is obvious that, because they are…in a hurry, the preparations that the Government have made for the introduction of this scale of change are very modest indeed.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 May 2013; Vol. 745, c. 653.]

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[Sadiq Khan]

I want to make some progress, then I will give way.

The Bill does make specific mention of the probation service, and I pay tribute to those in the other place for their work in trying to get proper scrutiny of the Justice Secretary’s plans. Clause 1 says that no changes may be made to the probation service without the approval of both Houses. That was the result of a successful amendment tabled by Lord Ramsbotham in the other place, not of anything that the Government did. It has taken almost five months since the Bill’s Third Reading in the other place for us to have a Second Reading debate today. Could the reason for that delay be that the Justice Secretary was desperate to begin the tendering process by which privatisation could occur before this important clause could be debated, because he was afraid of Commons scrutiny?

We understand why the Justice Secretary wants to get on with his plans and avoid proper scrutiny. Just two years ago, the Ministry of Justice—none of its then Ministers are now in post; all have been sacked—published a comprehensive competition strategy for probation services, and proposed

“the commissioning of six new PbR pilot schemes to carefully develop and rigorously test PbR for reduced re-offending”.

Note the phrases “pilot schemes” and “rigorously test PBR”. The Ministry of Justice knew that the Peterborough pilot, which was designed by Labour and began in 2010, was a very different beast altogether, and its results are not directly comparable with the Government’s probation plans.

In March last year, the Ministry published a further paper, proposing

“a stronger role for Probation Trusts as commissioners of probation services and a stronger emphasis on local partnership working”.

Note the reference to “probation trusts as commissioners”, not abolition, and to “local partnership working”, not control freakery from Whitehall. I have got to honest: we agreed with that approach.

[Chris Grayling]

As the right hon. Gentleman will know, something like 3,000 serious, violent, sexual and similar crimes were committed by people who received sentences of less than 12 months and were released unsupervised last year. He talks about testing. Given that situation, how many years would he wait before he introduced a scheme that supervised those offenders?

[Sadiq Khan]

If the right hon. Gentleman had taken the trouble to speak to the probation trusts, he would know that in Manchester, for example, the trust is already working with the voluntary sector, the private sector and charities to address those who receive sentences of less than 12 months. If he had spoken to those in Avon and Somerset, he would know that the probation trust is already doing that. If he had spoken to the South Yorkshire trust, he would know that it is already doing that. If he took the trouble to speak to them, rather than G4S and Serco, he would know what works and what does not work. Instead, he wants to give contracts to untried, untested private companies, with no experience in criminal justice. If I were the Justice Secretary, I would have consulted the probation trusts. What does he do? He does not wait for any evidence or trials. Forget testing or rigour; he cancels the pilots and does a complete somersault, hoping that no one will notice either his change of mind or the fact that it is being done without any evidence, taking huge risks with public safety and reoffending rates.

Another important issue is how the plans will be resourced. A number of Back Benchers, reading the script, have asked about resources, and how we will we do this in the public sector and not use G4S and Serco to save money. As I have already said, extending supervision to those on short sentences is to be welcomed, but this cannot be taken as a resource-free commitment. An additional 50,000 offenders on top of the current 250,000 a year would need support and supervision. The impact assessment is of no help at all in shedding light on this issue. It says that

“the cost will be dependent on the outcome of competition”.

So, basically, the Government are asking for Parliament’s support, but will not say what the cost implications are of implementing the plans. Call me old-fashioned, but I would like to know how much it will cost before I decide to vote for it.

That is important for two reasons. First, if it is the case that there is going to be a considerable additional resource demand for these plans, but the Government do not want to commit more money—they may indeed wish to save money—existing resources will have to be spread more thinly. So while the Justice Secretary refers to the 3,000 short-term offenders committing offences, that could increase exponentially, because medium and low-risk offenders will be supervised less well because of his plans to increase supervision without proper resources. There are implications for the quality of supervision, and it is important that Parliament debates this.

Secondly, if the Government need to commit more resources, it is only right that Parliament should scrutinise those plans. Either way, the Justice Secretary must be honest with Parliament about the cost of the plans he wants us to vote for today. I find it hard to believe that the Ministry of Justice has not done any number crunching on those issues. Why is it not being made public?

That is all the more pertinent given the excellent contribution my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) made in the Opposition day debate 12 days ago—I am not sure whether the Secretary of State was still in his place, but the Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright), was. My right hon. Friend pointed out that Labour had a similar scheme for extending supervision called custody plus, which a number of Back Benchers who have read their Whips’ briefing have referred to. He said, because he is an evidence-based politician:

“Ten years ago, it would have cost £194 million a year”.

That would have been for 50,000 offenders, the same figure the Government are proposing. My right hon. Friend went on to attack the lack of costings for the Justice Secretary’s similar plan—he will forgive me for embarrassing him—stating:

“I can put a figure on it, but he cannot. All we are told is that it will be paid for by the savings generated by the competition for low and medium-risk offenders. Frankly, I just do not believe it. Either that supervision will be inadequate or the existing provision will be weakened and reduced in quality.”—[Official Report, 30 October 2013; Vol. 569, c. 1003.]

The Justice Secretary, who is still here for a change, has an opportunity today to respond to that stinging criticism from a respected and senior Member of this House with considerable experience in this area, because so far he has failed to do so. I know that he has a supper to go to, but he still has some time to respond to that point before he leaves.

The Justice Secretary’s incompetence is compounded by his calculations on other matters. According to the MOJ’s impact assessment, extending supervision to prisoners serving less than 12 months will lead to around 13,000 offenders being recalled or committed to custody, increasing the number of prison places needed by around 600, at a cost of £16 million. Where will that £16 million and those additional 600 places come from? Last Friday we were told that there were only 658 prison places left in England and Wales, and next March he will close a further four prisons, with the loss of a further 1,400 places. That is from the Government who cancelled our prison building programme. He will forgive me if we lack confidence in his plans for probation.

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[Sadiq Khan]

Well, I lost the trail of the hon. Gentleman’s intervention after the third minute. His party has been in government for three and a half years. It has had three and a half years to change the way probation trusts are measured. According to his measurement, every trust is either good or excellent. What is his policy solution? It is to abolish them. Call me old-fashioned, but that seems absurd, bearing in mind the evidence. Why not speak to the probation trusts and say, “Listen, we want to try to supervise those people who are not currently receiving supervision, so are you going to consider doing that?”, rather than taking forward back-of-the-envelope policies that all the evidence suggests will not work.

[Chris Grayling]

The right hon. Gentleman’s policy appears to be to ask the probation trusts whether they would consider supervising people sentenced to less than 12 months. Will he say very clearly before the House whether or not, if this country is unlucky enough to have a Labour Government after the next election, he will commit to providing supervision for those prisoners sentenced to less than 12 months?

[Sadiq Khan]

If the Justice Secretary has his way, within the course of 12 months those who receive a sentence of less than 12 months will be supervised and we will have to wait and keep our fingers crossed that there will be no risk to public safety. If there is no such risk and the Justice Secretary finally oversees a rehabilitation revolution, of course we will not stop that supervision—that would be ridiculous. The Justice Secretary’s problem is that he cannot tell us how much it will cost, how much reoffending will go down by, or how many fewer crimes will be committed. That is the big flaw in his plan. It is not evidence-based. It has been worked out on the back of an envelope. The last time he tried to do that was the Work programme, which was not a huge success.