Probation Service

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

We all know that when probation services do good work most people do not find out about it. On the odd occasions when things go wrong, however, the entire world is made aware. When I visited Derbyshire probation service I was blown away by the commitment, imagination and bravery of our probation officers, and that is why they command such respect across both this House and the country. These changes appear to be lacking in evidence base. They fly in the face of all expert opinion and are so dangerously misguided that they are very worrying indeed.

The fact that my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) had to initiate this debate to allow the House to discuss these changes is a matter of shame for the Government. That the other place had to table an amendment to the Offender Rehabilitation Bill to prevent the Government from making changes to the structure of the probation service until it was debated by this House, and that the Justice Secretary failed to bring that Bill back to us, speaks volumes about his political cowardice and the lack of support that the reforms command.

The Secretary of State tells us that we should trust him because he believes his proposals are right. His approach seems to be this: we have a problem—reoffending rates—and we need a policy; this is a policy, therefore it is right. He has not explained in any way why his intention to extend services to offenders sentenced to less than 12 months must coincide with the creation of a load of new companies and a privatisation. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting asked, why can we not have the extension of those services—it is already happening in some cases—within the realms of the current successful probation service?

If the Secretary of State has confidence that wholesale privatisation is right—it is privatisation not just of probation provision, but of commissioning the services—why did he not let the pilots run their course? Why cancel the pilots and then embark on the policy? If that was because he has an unblemished track record and a Midas touch, Opposition Members might be a little less nervous. However, as my right hon. Friend made clear, the Secretary of State was responsible for the shambolic Work programme, under which people were better off if they were not on it. He was also the man at the heart of defending the operation of the work capability assessments when dead people were found to be fit to work. One would have hoped that, with a track record like that, he would show a little caution before ripping up a service on which so many people depend.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) made a wonderful speech and asked why the time scale was so urgent. However, he missed the point. The Secretary of State is clear that the Conservatives are on their way out and that he has to introduce his proposals before he is out of power, when he will not have the chance. He is rushing through this ideological and dangerous move before he is thrown out of office, as he so thoroughly deserves to be.

The probation service has a limited budget that has to stretch a long way, but it is performing. Every single service is ranked as good or outstanding. Its success is built on partnership working with local authorities, the police, prisons and other services. Many people are worried about that partnership working. The probation service operates as a seamless whole. As we split the service in two, the services will not have the partnership aspect that is so important to its success. The Women’s Work programme in Derbyshire brings together all women who have been in prison, regardless of their sentence. That is exactly the kind of specialist work that will be under threat when the service is split in two.

The implementation of the integrated offender management programme involves collaboration with the police in working with offenders who are at a high risk of reoffending. That often means burglars, thieves and serial perpetrators of acquisitive crime, but not the people who are considered to be at a high risk of causing harm—the sort of people about whom the entire community breathes a sigh of relief when they are banged up. They are capable of creating a spike or a rut in local crime figures depending whether or not they are inside. Those people—walking crime machines—are the sort who are likely to fall through the net because of the changes being introduced.

The changes are dangerous and could create a huge problem. The Secretary of State has said that his proposals are not about giving probation to big companies, but I bet we will see the big companies getting all the services. The idea that the voluntary sector will pick them up is a mirage. The Secretary of State is involved in a dangerous experiment and has a track record of failure. He should stop listening to the voices in his head that are telling him he is right. Instead, he should listen to the wide body of opinion telling him that he is getting this wrong, and protect our probation services now.