Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to the report, A Process Evaluation of the Enhanced Through the Gate Specification, published on 1 October 2020, what steps he is taking to ensure that the Enhanced Through the Gate specification is able to achieve its goals; and what steps he is taking to tackle the challenges noted on pages 11 and 12 of that report with reference to (a) funding for the prison service, (b) loss of long-term staff, (c) the increase in prisoner caseloads, (d) suitability of housing stock available to prison leavers and (e) access to social care.

(a) As part of the probation reform programme funding has been secured for additional Prison Offender Managers and Community Probation Practitioners to ensure delivery of a new resettlement approach giving enhanced levels of contact as part of pre-release work. The approach includes new resettlement services procured via Commissioned Rehabilitative Services which ensures the needs of individuals are met.

(b/c) The approach considers comments raised in the Evaluation and has through a role assignment process, transferred between 70-80 % of Through the Gate (ETTG) staff into the Probation Service as sentence management staff. As the resettlement approach is aligned further with offender management in custody, the Programme has committed funding for the addition of extra Prison Offender Managers and Community Offender Managers to ensure enough staff are available to better manage caseloads.

(d) The probation reform programme has built and learnt from the success of ETTG and a £70m investment programme was announced on Friday 29th January to provide stable accommodation for prison leavers. The investment will bring together the work of Approved Premises and the Bail Accommodation and Support Service with a new tier of provision for prison leavers at risk of homelessness.

(e) To help reduce re-offending and provide health and well-being support, MoJ is launching a new accommodation service, providing up to 12 weeks of basic temporary accommodation for prison leavers who would otherwise be homeless.

(e) As part of the resettlement approach access to social care will be assisted by the sharing of assessments completed within prison with community Probation Practitioners which will enable work to continue to support individuals with social care requirements into those services. The additional time provided to Community Probation Practitioners provides a longer timescale to refer individuals into appropriate services.