Examination of Witnesses (Questions 840
- 859)
TUESDAY 5 MAY 1998
MS JOYCE
QUIN, MP, MR
JOHN HALLIDAY,
MR MARTIN
NAREY AND
MISS CHRISTINE
STEWART
Chairman
840. Minister, you mentioned a moment ago the
Comprehensive Spending Review. Is there any place in it for diversion?
We are told repeatedly that you can influence the behaviour of
young people if you get there early, perhaps before they start
their offending but where they are obviously vulnerable. We have
looked at one or two schemes which address that problem and they
are also relatively cheap compared to what you have to do later
to get people away from offending, and yet it seems that the Government's
priorities have been almost wholly devoted, for understandable
reasons perhaps, to locking people up or less expensive schemes
to reform them after they have offended. Are there any plans to
devote serious resources, perhaps in conjunction with other Government
Departments, towards diverting vulnerable young people away from
potentially offending?
(Ms Quin) Yes. The approach of early intervention
and trying to boost the diversion element is something that is
extremely important to the Government for a variety of reasons.
We think that in terms of dealing with offenders it can possibly
mean much more successful an approach than the approach that has
largely been followed up to now. Certainly the people working
on the Comprehensive Spending Review were very much seized of
the concern that the Government has for early action and intervention
at an early stage. They were also very much seized of the view
of the Government that the criminal justice system itself should
work much more effectively as a system rather than as a collection
of sometimes competing agencies. The Government did launch a review
of the criminal justice system as a whole with the Home Office
working with the Lord Chancellor's Department and the relevant
Departments of Government precisely to try and get the system
to work more smoothly, more effectively, and also to be capable
of taking effective action at an earlier stage than is now the
case. I very much agree with what you said about the Committee's
impressions of the importance of bail information and bail support
schemes and other examples of diversion schemes. I was somewhat
concerned that the funding formula of the Probation Service tends
to put a lot of emphasis on completions and the later part of
the system rather than some of the valuable initiatives that can
be taken earlier on, and that is also something that we are looking
at, to see what changes can be made in the future.
841. I think we are slightly at cross purposes
here, and it is probably my fault for not explaining clearly.
By "diversion", and this is outwith but relevant to
the terms of our present inquiry, I mean devoting resources towards
vulnerable young people who are not yet offenders, not yet within
the criminal justice system, in the hope that they never will
be. For example, the Breakaway scheme at Pennywell in my constituency,
which will not be very far from your constituency either, helps
700 or 800 young people during school holidays with trips to the
seaside and youth activities on the estate, just to make sure
that they are not likely to become offenders and they have got
something constructive and purposeful to do with their lives.
The whole thing costs around £28,000 a year which has to
be begged and borrowed, and it is the cost of locking up one single
juvenile offender for nine months.
(Ms Quin) I did somewhat misinterpret, although obviously
I still feel that the later diversion elements are still very
important in the system. I think that certainly the identification
of the needs that you referred to in terms of the worthwhile nature
of schemes such as the one in Pennywell are much more likely to
be identified in the future than in the past through the creation
of the youth offender teams and the responsibility that they have
to look at young people at risk of becoming offenders as well
as people who have actually committed offences. That seems to
me to be the purpose behind the youth partnerships at local level,
bringing together such people as the education authorities who
can look at the situation of people who may be truanting or may
be proving difficult in the school system, looking into information
that the health authorities may have because they may have an
idea of for example the scale of domestic violence and those kinds
of issues locally, getting the various people in the local community
to pool their ideas together in order to try and stop people from
getting to the point of offending. I cannot give you a guarantee
on resources for that except of course that the Government has
said that the measures in the Crime and Disorder Bill need to
be resourced, but a lot of resources I think are already in the
budgets of these various organisations together and they will
be able to look at the local situation and identify needs that
are there and see what looks as if it is going to be most effective
in promoting useful initiatives precisely with the group of young
people that you are talking about.
842. My feeling from your answer is that we
are some way from giving this issue the attention it deserves.
It is not just a matter for the Home Office, we all accept that,
and you rightly say that the Education Department for example,
and indeed the Department of Environment, have a big role to play
when it comes to local government, but may I put it to you that
really this ought to be a priority since it is far easier and
far less expensive to divert vulnerable young people away from
crime than to sort them out once they have embarked upon a career
of crime.
(Ms Quin) I do agree with you. I am somewhat perplexed
that you think I am on a slightly different wavelength in replying
to you. It seems to me that the Crime and Disorder Bill is more
about crime prevention than any other crime legislation that I
can think of going through Parliament in the time that I have
been here. I think it also is very much about bringing in the
other relevant parts of local communities to tackle these problems
at an early stage. The emphasis is very much on crime prevention
in that whole approach and it also needs to be taken into account
with the other initiatives of the Government in terms of combating
social exclusion, in terms of educational changes and so on, and
that it is part of an overall social strategy which is very much
aimed at identifying the situations you have described and taking
action at the most appropriate stage. Obviously, in advance of
the Comprehensive Spending Review I cannot give you guarantees
even if, as a north easterner, I would be very tempted to do in
the case of Pennywell or anything else in that area, but our approach
is absolutely along the lines that you have mentioned.
843. I am not looking for guarantees about particular
funding but for evidence that it is a serious issue in the Home
Office. We had Sir Richard Wilson here two or three years ago
when the subject was raised and we felt there that we were on
an entirely different wavelength, which I do not feel as far as
your answers are concerned, but I just feel there is some scope
for progress.
(Ms Quin) I will ask Mr Halliday to comment on the
kind of machinery in terms of the Government's decision making
process, but I feel that what you are saying is very much the
priority of the Government, and actually going round different
local areas as part of the consultation that we have been doing
on the Crime and Disorder Bill, the enthusiasm for taking the
kind of approach that you have mentioned, seems to me to be very
real at local level on the part of the agencies, that they do
see their role not simply in terms of tackling offending but in
trying to prevent the situation where offending is likely to occur
and that they see that as a big change in the way that they are
going to be co-operating together in local partnership for the
future.
844. Yes, we find the same enthusiasm at local
level, but the thing they all say to us is that all the funding
is short term, it is hand to mouth, they have to beg and borrow.
In Pennywell for example the police and the local authority find
money from various other parts of their budget to keep some of
these good schemes going, but the people who are organising them—one
said to us in Blackburn last week that he had to spend much of
his time raising his own salary rather than doing the good work
that he is doing. There is a strong feeling that the Government
has not yet got the message about the value for money that can
be obtained from such schemes and then funding them in a sensible
long term fashion.
(Ms Quin) I think we are seized of the fact that money
that is spent at that early stage can save expensive, costly options
at a later stage and certainly, as I said before, the Comprehensive
Spending Review has approached its task very much in accordance
with the Government's preference for early effective intervention.
845. A moment ago you touched on school exclusions
and this seems to me a whole new area where we are building up
big problems for the future in that there has been a huge increase
in school exclusions, that it is entirely predictable that these
are the children who are going to end up becoming serious criminals,
and yet we appear to be manufacturing a new breed of criminals.
I had a letter which I read yesterday from a police superintendent
in my constituency. He said they had a project on April 1 this
year to stop all schoolchildren wandering the streets of Sunderland
on that day and ask them whether they had permission to be doing
so and under what circumstances. They stopped 301 in a single
school day who had various explanations for their presence on
the streets, some of which were legitimate, but 29 of them were
excluded schoolchildren, who could not go to school even if they
wanted to and for whom no serious alternative provision appears
to exist. I have no doubt this is replicated nationally and it
is a very serious problem for the future. What I am seeking from
you is some sort of assurance that the Home Office is talking
seriously with the Education Department about how to sort out
this problem before it gets out of hand.
(Ms Quin) Well, we are. Obviously the partnerships
that we are wanting to see at local level do need to be matched
by good co-ordination at governmental level and certainly I know,
having attended the launch of the Social Exclusion Unit, that
one of the key issues that was discussed in the first session
we had, which was a kind of round table discussion with various
community and statutory agency representatives, was the importance
of the school exclusion issue and how that could feed into a proper
strategy to combat social exclusion, including of course the strategy
within that for tackling offenders and trying to tackle people
before the stage of offending.
846. Did Mr Halliday want to come in?
(Mr Halliday) If I can help the Committee I will try
on the machinery question just to illustrate how the Home Office
has tried to respond to the Government's—one slips into
the current buzzwords of holistic and joined-up Government and
all those sorts of things. There is a new Director in my Directorate
who was appointed some months back with other additional resources
to make sure that we are fully engaged with the interdepartmental
efforts that are addressing the sorts of problems that you, Chairman,
were describing. Of course the Social Exclusion Unit picked up
school exclusions as one of its three priority topics but we can
plug into their work with our research and statistical background
and our knowledge of the criminogenic aspects of these topics
and bring all sorts of contributions to bear. We have also now
of course got responsibility for Government interests in the voluntary
sector and volunteering back in the Home Office and that comes
within the same ambit of responsibilities as the new Director
I have just mentioned, so we can bring that interest to bear as
well. The mood is very much one of Departments seeking to work
together and construct programmes at national level which match
and support the local initiatives the Minister was describing
where we have of course a lead responsibility in youth justice
and crime reduction. Some of these issues, as the Minister said,
have been energetically grappled with as part of the Comprehensive
Spending Review but of course at this moment it is not possible
to go further on the product of that work.
Mr Cranston
847. I want to associate myself with the remarks
of the Chairman. This is the third leg of the stool as it were
and the Government has done splendid work in terms of promoting
local partnerships, social exclusion units, summer schools and
all the rest of it, but I guess the Chairman was saying, and I
agree with him, that just as we have a Minister for Prisons and
Probation, we really ought to have a Minister in charge of diversion
and prevention.
(Ms Quin) Largely those areas fall to my colleague,
Alun Michael, and his work in terms of the measures in the Crime
and Disorder Bill and his work in terms of liaising with other
Departments on children's policy, family policy and indeed he
is the Home Office representative on the Social Exclusion Group.
I think are all very relevant to your concerns. I know you probably
say well I would say this, would I not, but I do feel that there
is a very strong willingness on the part of Government Ministers
to co-ordinate. Ministers know that their own areas of responsibility
are not some kind of neat compartment which does not impinge on
other people's areas. Obviously co-ordination is an enormous challenge
for Government in so many policy areas but I actually see an enormous
willingness on the part of Ministers to make that co-ordination
work effectively, given the inter-relatedness of the problems
that we are talking about and therefore the inter-relatedness
of the measures needed to tackle them.
Chairman
848. You are quite right, Minister. We have
possibly been a bit unfair. We should have pursued this a bit
more with Mr Michael than with you, although I think our feeling
is that what is required is a large change in the culture at the
Home Office and perhaps in other Departments as well, and to that
extent it is going to be the responsibility of all Ministers if
we are going to make any serious changes in this area.
(Ms Quin) New Ministers are not imbued with long existing
cultures and therefore I think that the work that we have done
in terms of co-ordination is very much part of our own personal
commitment to make that a success.
Mr Winnick
849. While it is totally unacceptable for children
who have been excluded to be roaming around, and you explained
the need for co-ordination: the more the better, I hope, although
you are obviously not the Minister for Schools in any way, you
will take on board that the complaints that I and others get is
the way in which a number of pupils seriously disrupt classes
which would never be allowed under any circumstances in fee paying
schools, and therefore social exclusion of one kind or another
is absolutely justified. It is a question of finding an outlet
for these people so they are not roaming the streets, as the Chairman
has indicated.
(Ms Quin) You are leading me on to dangerous territory
but again I would simply reinforce the fact that we need to look
at the overall picture in order to tackle it properly.
Mr Winnick: That is the other side of the picture.
Ms Hughes
850. Getting back to alternatives to custody,
Minister, I just wanted to ask you about the issue of national
standards and enforcement in the Probation Service at the moment.
We heard from the Inspectorate's annual report and also from oral
evidence by the Chief Inspector to this Committee about the very
considerable variance between different probation areas in the
extent to which they both comply with national standards and also
use enforcement when their standards of contact are breached by
offenders. What is the Department doing at the moment to address
this issue?
(Ms Quin) There are various initiatives under way
in order to try and ensure as much compliance with national standards
as we can get. Certainly we are looking at the variations in performance
between probation areas and seeking to analyse the reasons for
that. We believe that the consultation which will take place as
a result of the Prisons/Probation Review will among other things
focus on the need to have a system which ensures compliance with
national standards. Certainly that is a very important part of
the Prisons/Probation Review as far as I am concerned. We also
have to get a better system under way for disseminating good practice
and awareness of good practice throughout the system and also
build on the What Works agenda which I know the Chief Inspector
of Probation talked at some length about during his own appearance
before the Committee.
851. At the lower end we heard that in some
probation areas the extent of compliance and using enforcement
is as low as between 20 and 30 per cent. Do you think that is
acceptable?
(Ms Quin) No, I do not. I think we have got to aim
for an improvement in standards across the board. In some cases
it may also relate to improvements in other parts of the system,
for example in terms of enforcement of warrants and how that is
effectively done, and that is an area that we are at the moment
discussing with the Lord Chancellor's Department which has an
interest in that particular area. Certainly the kind of variations
we have seen are very considerable and I think it is fair to say
that the existence of those variations is one of the stimuli pushing
us in the direction of at least, whatever form the Probation Service
organisation takes in the future, having good national standard
setting and enforcement mechanisms. In terms of the key performance
indicators and the standards that Services are required to meet,
I seem to recall that in your session with Graham Smith there
was some discussion about the fact that completions had been a
key performance indicator in the past, and yet completions can
often act as a perverse incentive not to take effective action
against breach at an earlier stage and therefore we have done
away with that particular measure and introduced a couple of other
measures which are designed to measure more exactly what is going
on in terms of failure to enforce.
852. You said that you are going to analyse
and look into reasons for variations and low levels of performance
where they exist. One of the arguments put forward by NAPO to
us is that one of the issues has been the level of resources necessary
to apply national standards in terms of frequency of contact and
so on. Do you accept that view?
(Ms Quin) Not entirely because it does not seem to
explain quite the variations between Services and the level of
budgets of those particular Services and how effective they are
in meeting the standards. I think the analysis therefore has got
to go more deeply into things than that.
853. Do you think there are too many national
standards? This was one view put by the Chief Inspector.
(Ms Quin) To be honest, I am not sure. It is an area
that we are looking at but I have not come to any firm conclusions.
Obviously we do not want to multiply unnecessarily the various
standards that Services are supposed to comply with and we certainly
want to avoid standards that build in some kind of perverse incentive
of the kind that I described a few minutes ago. We need to make
sure that the standards are appropriate. I do not know that I
could say at this particular stage that we have necessarily got
too many.
854. A final question, linking it to our concerns
in this inquiry about custody: do you have any reservations about
the validity of the standards themselves in relation to the effectiveness
in terms of probation and community sentences generally as alternatives
to custody? I ask this question because on many of the projects
we have been visiting there is a paucity of data as to how effective
they are because many of them are at quite an early stage, certainly
in terms of an alternative to custody for persistent offenders,
which is the nature of many of the projects we have looked at,
and the intensity of contact and supervision and surveillance,
whether it be on an individual basis, on a group basis or both,
is much greater than the national standards say for probation,
or indeed really even for community service orders. I just wonder
whether you have any view about whether the national standards
themselves, certainly for persistent offenders, offer anything
that could be anywhere near effective in terms of what some of
the experimentation that is going on might be telling us about
the level of supervision you need in the community to have a really
effective alternative to custody for persistent offenders.
(Ms Quin) I am not sure I have completely understood
the question.
855. What I am posing is that, say for probation
orders, the first three months of an order a weekly appointment
does not begin to touch what some of the experimental projects
are saying about the level of contact necessary to have an impact
on changing the behaviour of persistent young offenders in the
community as opposed to putting them in prison.
(Ms Quin) When the Chief Inspector was before the
Committee he did talk about the importance of the intensity of
programmes with some of the difficult offenders. It certainly
seems to me that those are the standards we have got to take into
account in developing that agenda, particularly the What Works
agenda, and the existing standards may need modification as a
result. It certainly seems to me that the standards are perhaps
slightly behind changing practice and what we do need to do is
ensure that the standards are at least keeping pace with changing
practice and possibly even trying to help steer in the direction
that we want to go. Certainly when I looked at some of the standards
originally I felt that some valuable activity by the Probation
Service was not being adequately recognised by them. There is
the point you make in terms of the difficult offenders and intensive
training. There is also the point which relates to the earlier
discussion we were having about diversion and the fact that proper
recognition is not given to bail information schemes, for example,
which have therefore suffered and declined as a result and certainly
the standards need to meet the priorities both of the Government
and also of the What Works agenda.
Ms Hughes: Thank you.
Mr Howarth
856. Minister, looking to the effectiveness
of non-custodial sentences you will know that your Department
concluded that there is currently no significant difference between
reconviction rates for custody and community penalties. Professor
Ken Pease came to this Committee and told us that by the time
a prisoner having served an average sentence length is released,
some 28 per cent of those given a community sentence will have
offended again, at least once. And he made the argument that at
least while they were in prison they were not out burgling people.
I wonder what your assessment is of the relative merits of prison
and community sentences. Is this not a case where it could be
said that prison does work?
(Ms Quin) Certainly prison contains people and if
somebody is in prison then self-evidently they cannot be out in
the community reoffending. I do not see any way I can argue with
that. However, given that the reconviction rates are broadly similar
my own conclusion would be that both the prison system and the
probation system are capable of doing good work in tackling offending
but that neither do it in the proportion that we would like. Now
I have to say that my impression, although I have not got the
information with me, is that reconviction rates in other countries
tend to be a problem as well. All countries are grappling with
the problem of how to try and reduce reoffending and produce lower
reconviction rates and we are all looking at trying to find the
most effective ways of challenging offenders, making them face
up to the consequences of their behaviour, getting them to think
of the consequences of their behaviour on the victims and the
cost to society and often the cost to themselves ultimately in
terms of blighting their own lives. So there is valuable work
being done both in prisons and on probation but we need to try
and maximise its effectiveness by every possible means. Prison
can work and probation can work but neither of them perhaps work
as frequently or as effectively as we would like.
857. Are you satisfied with the research that
is going on into the effectiveness of some of these alternative
treatments? This Committee has seen some very interesting schemes
around the country where claims are made they do work rather more
successfully than the average. I understand that a nationwide
survey was carried out amongst chief officers of probation and
they identified only 33 programmes which had been sufficiently
evaluated and only four of those could be said to constitute good
practice. That is pretty damning indictment it seems to me of
the level of evaluation that is going on. Are you satisfied with
that? Do you have any plans to do anything about it?
(Ms Quin) I am satisfied there is now a big impetus
in the system to evaluate properly and build on the What Works
agenda. I think it has been very slow in getting underway but
I think there is now a real head of steam to evaluate what works
most effectively and then to build on that in terms of getting
national guidelines, national modules, national programmes which
can then be followed in different probation areas. A few months
ago I attended a What Works conference where there were
representatives of all probation areas. Although I think there
had been in the past almost a feeling of cynicism that this was
just another new idea, I detected that they now felt that this
was going to be a very productive way to go down in the future
and actually looking at the programmes which had been shown to
have a demonstrable effect and then applying those programmes
more widely was something that services were very keen to do.
858. You are going to press ahead with that,
are you?
(Ms Quin) Indeed.
859. I gather your Department's research budget
is about £120,000. I do not know whether that is adequate
or not, the suggestion is it is not and with all this myriad of
schemes going on which many of us round this table have seen,
that more work needs to be done here. I would certainly appreciate
a note from you indicating just what level of evaluation there
has been taking place which contradicts this nationwide survey.
(Ms Quin) You mentioned a figure and I have got to
say I do not have the figure with me. I am not sure if any members
of the Department do.
(Mr Halliday) I imagine Mr Howarth is talking about
that bit of the Department the Research Statistics Directorate,
where the figure would be quite close to what you said but there
are other funds that go in. I do not make any particular claims
for these. We have estimated in 1998-99 that we are spending about
£275,000 on probation research. There is a wider research
programme of course on crime, criminal justice and indeed the
effectiveness of prison programmes which will have spin-offs for
the prison population generally. But, yes, that is the order of
magnitude.
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