Offender Rehabilitation: Entrepreneurship Training

Lord Beecham Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lords, Lord German and Lord Marks, have referred to their regret, which I share, about the departure of Mr Gove, who made what seemed to me a very promising start, in contrast to the dreadful years under his predecessor, in looking at the position of prisoners. It is a case of being gone but not forgiven, I suppose, by the party opposite, or at any rate its leadership.

Concerns about the Prison Service which form the background to this timely debate have been raised with troubling frequency during the six years that I have served in this House, and before. It is perhaps tedious, but nevertheless necessary, to remind ourselves of the size of the prison population—it encompasses some 86,000 people at any one time—of the problems of overcrowding and understaffing, of violence and drug abuse, and of the high rates of re-offending, all of which were touched on during Questions this week, as they have been with depressing regularity over the years. It is as well to recall, too, the high proportion of prisoners with one or more mental health disorders, and low levels of literacy and numeracy and of any engagement with further education.

Today’s welcome debate draws attention to one aspect of penal policy that has been the subject of discussion and of some developments in recent years. However, we need to be mindful that while promoting entrepreneurship may help some prisoners to return to society and lead a more useful and rewarding existence, just as in society as a whole, the majority are likely to derive more benefit from being equipped with the basic skills, enhanced wherever possible, to take their place in the labour market as well-trained contenders for employment.

A report of the Prisoners’ Education Trust in 2013 stressed the need to promote both employability skills and what it termed soft skills, such as a positive attitude, communication skills and reliability and, while referring to self-employment, stressed the experience of three prisons in helping offenders to acquire particular skills in demand in particular trades and areas. The business department published its Evaluation of Enterprise Pilots in Prisons last October, since when Dame Sally Coates’s review in May this year provided an interesting picture, to be seen alongside the CentreForum report entitled Transforming Rehabilitation? Prison Education: Analysis and Options, published in March. The BIS report highlighted the need for IT access, and the Coates report referred to the glass ceiling beyond level 2 of standard vocational qualifications, noting that a mere 200 achieved level 3 or above in 2014-15, via the Offenders’ Learning and Skills Service, or OLASS, an 85% reduction from 2013, the last year before loans were introduced to pay for courses. The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, rightly referred to concerns over the fragmentation of OLASS’s role under the Government’s present policy. This was even worse than the 42% decline in prisoners taking higher education courses with the Open University after 2011-12 when they had to start self-funding at a cost of £2,700 a module, or £14,800 for a degree.

Dame Sally suggested in a cautionary note that, in relation to the BIS enterprise pilot scheme promoting start-ups by prisoners with support and loans,

“participants needed to be carefully selected to ensure they were able to engage effectively”.

In other words, she implied that there is some scope for entrepreneurship and self-employment, but it will not necessarily be applicable to the majority of prisoners.

The BIS report covered only 58 prisoners from four prisons and noted a lack of connection between providers and the DWP on the issue of benefits. Importantly, and directly relevant to the terms of the motion under debate, BIS analysed the start-ups and loans secured by prisoners looking to progress to self-employment on release. Of 114 prisoners in the north-east, two started businesses without funding; one failed to obtain a loan and another’s application is pending. In a southern prison, of 40 who participated, two began start-ups with the aid of funding, and 19 had loans approved in 2014 and 2015. So the picture is not entirely convincing that, even with support of training, people will necessarily make it into self-employment or business.

CentreForum’s report affirms these worrying trends. The percentages of institutions needing improvement in education rose from 50% to 75% between 2011 and 2015, while the proportion engaged in prison education courses dropped from 42% in 2008-9 to 23% in 2014. At the basic level below level 2, participation rates improved but, worryingly, the rise was much higher in subjects other than English and maths, which were the Government’s priorities, having regard to the low levels of literacy and numeracy, clearly key to future employment prospects. CentreForum also points to Ofsted reports showing a steep decline in performance ratings, with the proportion of findings of inadequacy or requiring improvement rising from a bad enough 50% in 2011-12 to 72% in 2014-15. Imagine the outcry if Ofsted’s reports on schools had followed a similar trajectory or reached such heights of inadequacy. The report summarises the position as indicating,

“consistently poor quality provision and a decline in quality over recent years”.

All this is consistent with the NOMS finding of a “stark decline” in purposeful activity outcomes and educational quality, in turn reflected in the stagnation of reoffending rates since 2009. We seem locked into a downward spiral of declining opportunities and outcomes. What appears to be lacking, apart from the basic requirement of adequate funding to secure a safe environment for prisoners and staff, is a properly integrated approach to penal policy across government. This needs to involve the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office, the departments of health, business, and education, and the courts. It needs much greater sharing of experience, perhaps by extensive use of peer review, and it needs a determined effort to reduce prison numbers without which airy aspirations of a rehabilitation revolution, or worthy and desirable objectives, such as increasing entrepreneurship and self-employment by prisoners, are unlikely to be achievable. I hope that the noble and learned Lord will be able to persuade his colleagues in the department that these are achievable objectives but that they require a degree of commitment that is yet to appear in government policy.