Offender Rehabilitation: Entrepreneurship Training

Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, in winding up this debate for the Liberal Democrats I am aware that there has been a fair degree of unanimity in the speakers before me, since only Liberal Democrats have so far spoken. I join my noble friend Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville in congratulating my noble friend Lord German on securing this debate and bringing this issue before the House, and I look forward to hearing what the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, and the Minister have to say.

This debate takes place against a background of a well-documented and well-recognised crisis in our prison system. I have frequently spoken, along with many other noble Lords, about the need for fundamental reforms in our prisons, sometimes to the apparent irritation of the Minister. Yet we are all agreed on the fundamentals. We all agree about the need to cut prisoner numbers by making more use of rehabilitative community sentences; to improve, indeed transform, the squalid conditions in our prisons; to eliminate overcrowding, so that custodial facilities hold only the numbers of inmates for which they were designed; and radically to increase staffing levels, not just to exercise adequate control, but to provide far more purposeful activity for inmates and drastically reduce the hours they spend locked away in their cells to levels that are humane and sustainable. If these improvements could be made, they would cut dramatically the disgraceful levels of violence in our prisons and would have a marked effect on decreasing reoffending levels, which are far too high. The prison reforms proposed by Mr Gove promised to start addressing these issues, and I join my noble friend Lord German in asking the Minister what is to happen to them with the new Secretary of State in place. I make no apology for spending a little time on this depressing background because it is, frankly, inimical to improvement in offender training of all sorts that prisons should be in this state and I invite the Minister to say how far he agrees that conditions in our prisons, in particular the lack of staffing and the lack of purposeful activity, frustrate the provision of adequate education and training.

For most prisoners, purposeful activity fundamentally means education and training. This debate takes place against the background of Dame Sally Coates’s excellent review. That review started from the limited educational attainment of most prisoners. My noble friend Lady Bakewell has given the figures. Dame Sally’s starting point was to put education at the heart of the prison system. She rightly pointed out that:

“If education is the engine of social mobility, it is also the engine of prisoner rehabilitation”.

She emphasised the need for high-quality vocational training and employability skills to prepare individuals for jobs on release from prison, but she also stressed the importance of enterprise and self-employment support and training.

At a purely practical level, if offenders on release are equipped with the necessary skills it may, as my noble friend Lord German pointed out, often be easier to take up self-employment as a way of securing gainful occupation than to find employment with employers elsewhere, given the difficulty of persuading employers to give jobs to ex-offenders on release from prison.

There are, of course, many employers who as a matter of policy provide work to ex-offenders on release. Among them are Timpson, the shoe repairers, which has a prison recruitment scheme and has had considerable success in attracting and retaining ex-offenders who have settled with them to long-term and successful employment, and many have gone on to success in self-employment as well. There is also Gleeds, the construction company, which has made a special point of finding jobs for ex-offenders on release and which has campaigned to “ban the box”, meaning the criminal records tick-box on employment application forms, which prevents many finding new jobs. I will be interested to know the Minister’s attitude to job application forms.

Employment with helpful and energetic employers may be the best way of equipping former offenders with the skills and confidence to start up in self-employment. However, many will try starting up in self-employment after prison, but it is clear that it takes particular confidence for a prisoner, even a skilled one, to start a business. An ex-offender leaving prison faces many challenges in any case in finding his place in his community and re-establishing relationships with family and friends, so it is a real challenge to set up in any form of a business at the same time.

In this context, Dame Sally’s recommendations on developing mentors in prison may point a way to enabling prisoners to benefit from the experience of other prisoners. I hope that the community rehabilitation companies providing supervision to ex-offenders on release will play a part in building up networks of possible mentors following release who might help newly released prisoners through the first, very difficult, stages of setting up in business. In this context I add to the points made by both my noble friends about the need for a rehabilitation loan fund to provide the vital initial finance and for the co-ordination of training and funding within prisons, which was mentioned by my noble friend Lady Bakewell. Training in business skills and financial management is also necessary.

A lot can be done in prison too with imagination and encouragement from the prison authorities. An example is the Clink Charity’s restaurants, which have been a startling success. The Clink Charity started at HMP High Down in Surrey and now runs restaurants in Brixton, Cardiff and HMP Styal in Cheshire, which is a woman’s prison. The restaurants are very successful and are run by prisoners for the public. The men and women working there are training for their City & Guilds qualifications in food service and preparation. A mentoring service operates following release which is designed to help them find employment in the field. It has also opened a horticultural garden in HMP High Down and another in another woman’s prison, HMP Send in Surrey, where the prisoners train in horticulture and grow the produce for the four Clink Charity restaurants. At HMP Send, they also rear chickens and provide the restaurants with eggs. The Clink Charity boasts an 87.5% success rate in reducing reoffending. The point of all this is that there is a link between training, recruiting, learning the skills to run a business, mentoring and, finally, either finding employment or opening a business in the community on release. But it all depends on people with the imagination, drive and desire to help encouraging prisoners on their way.

So far I have concentrated on education in prisons. However, it is very important, if we are to achieve our aim of reducing the number of offenders sent to prison, that we also develop the potential of community sentences for providing education, including training in entrepreneurship. The provision for rehabilitation activity requirements, which may be imposed as part of a community order as a result of the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014, provides a useful and effective vehicle for training offenders in the community. Some CRCs already offer activities over a wide range. Warwickshire and Mercia CRC provides a care farm skills programme at Willowdene Farm. The programme is set over 25 seven-hour days in a 14-week period. It offers courses specialising in mechanics, woodwork, IT, plumbing, forestry, animal welfare and agriculture—all areas in which self-employment is possible. It aims to prepare offenders to be work-ready and achieve two nationally recognised qualifications by the end of the programme. It works with offenders at high risk of reoffending and deals with those with a history of substance abuse. The London CRC helps offenders to develop basic skills in literacy and numeracy, and gives them training which might lead NVQ awards. It also helps ex-offenders to find employment, assisting with such things as CV writing and interview techniques. However, I suspect that more imaginative schemes, such as the West Mercia farm scheme or the Clink restaurants, are more likely to produce long-term benefits, not just for those involved at the time but also for those who might mentor later. What steps do the Minister and his department propose to encourage development by the CRCs and within prisons of the sort of schemes that I have mentioned? We are a long way off. The central point that I make is that we have to improve the system to give training a chance to flourish. Achieve that we must.