Memorandum submitted by Rt Hon David Davis MP, Mr Crispin Blunt MP, James Brokenshire MP, and Mr Edward Garnier QC MP

 

Offender Management Bill Evidence Session hosted by the Conservative Party

Thatcher Room, PCH

Wednesday 10 January 2007

 

Evidence received from:

 

Lord Ramsbotham (LR) - Former Chief Inspector of Prisons

Martin Narey (MN) - Chief Executive, Barnados (Former Director General, Prison and Probation Service)

Dr David Green (DDG) - Director, Civitas

Members/Peers present:

 

Rt Hon David Davis MP (Chairman) (DD)

Dominic Grieve MP (DG)

Edward Garnier QC MP (EG)

James Brokenshire MP (JB)

Mark Hunter MP (MH)

Baroness Anelay of St Johns (BA)

Baroness Stern (BS)

Lord Dholakia (LD)

Lord Bruce-Lockhart (LBL)

John Bercow MP (JOB)

Nick Hurd MP (NH)

David MacLean MP (DM)

 

 

David Davis (Chairman) Order, order good morning everybody, now the purpose of this session this morning is to hear public evidence on issues relating to the National Offender Management Service Bill, which is going to Committee tomorrow in the Commons and will going to the Lords thereafter.

 

We have some very high-powered witnesses in front of us this morning, the first of whom is Lord Ramsbotham who was created a Crossbench Peer in 2005, I think I am right in saying, and was most importantly, in this context, Chief Inspector of Prisons between December 1995 and August 2001 and has clear views on this subject I believe My Lord.

 

Thank you for coming, it is very good of you to come and give evidence to us today, perhaps it would be best if you start by giving us your general view on this subject before we go to questions, would that be, would that be helpful to you?

 

(Lord Ramsbotham) Chairman, thank you very much and thank you for the opportunity, I will try and be brief. I think personally that this Bill that is being discussed is yet another example of a bill that is technically one part of another large problem and I think it is important to try and see the whole problem in a sort of [indistinct] so you can set this in the context of that. I'm one of these people, and I know that you're not in that camp, who actually believe that the Home Office is overburdened, we are the only country that I know of which doesn't have a Ministry of Justice and a Ministry of the Interior of whatever you'd like to call it. And I say that because I personally think that the job of administering in the Criminal Justice system is a full-time job for someone and as an ex-military man I would say this; I think the job of protecting the nation particularly at the moment is also a full-time job and I do not believe that it is fair to expect that one man can give their time to both. And I've seen over the years thee fact the Home Secretaries, successive Home Secretaries, have had to divert from looking at justice to looking at matter of internal security and then back again. And that I think is one of the reasons for a lack of consistency in the direction of the way things go.

 

Now having said that, and I personally when I look at the justice bit of it, I am concerned that so many different ministries are involved in the direction and administration of justice, obviously for the courts you've got the Lord Chancellor, the Department for the Constitution and the Attorney General. And then you've got obviously the Home Office which deals with the police, but also the police are involved in local government and so you have another ministry involved. The Probation Service of course are involved with the courts and involved with local administration as well but they are also involved with the Social Services which come under the Department of Health. And so everywhere you've got a sort of "disconnect" with a lot of people involved in different aspects of the policy.

 

And I must say that when I first came into the job of prisons and looked at the Criminal Justice System as a whole, it didn't seem to me to be a system, it seemed to be a lot of warring tribes competing with each other for ever-diminishing resources, without realising that actually they needed to work together but they needed to be directed together. Now I am one of the people who was in favour, of course, of the general concept of what is called end-to-end offender management, so that anyone who comes into the hands of the Criminal Justice System is handled consistently and that their problems are looked at in a holistic way. But what worries me is that this Bill has left out a lot of major organisation because it is no good having a holistic direction unless the individual parts are going to be directed and capable of carrying out the direction. And my concern is that I don't think that that situation [indistinct] at the moment.

 

(Chairman) Thank you can I just start with two questions before my colleagues; and the first thing is this; yesterday there was an interview in The Times with the Chief Executive the of NOMS, who said her primary function is to cut re-offending and that was her measure of success. The last decade with respect to prisoners, re-offending is up from 56% to something like 67% and the community punishment numbers are in some senses worse, some of the ISSP, the Intensive Surveillance Supervision Programmes, 90% failure rate I think. Could you give us your judgement as to why that has happened and what we need to do to turn that around, what NOMS would have to do to turn that around because it is creating half of all crime now, is re-offending?

 

(LR) Well I think again NOMS had its birth, as you know, from the Carter Report called "Managing Offenders, Reducing Crime" and the idea of the end-to end offender management about which Helen Edward was talking yesterday came from that, now I would have expected in a normal circumstance that what would have happened then would be that that idea would have been studied in-depth and in detail involving all the stakeholders, in other words , you would need to involve the courts, the police, the probation and social service health, education, the voluntary sector, the local government, all the people who are involved, over a considerable period of time, to see what the practical implications of that are. And the practical implications are that basically an offender is not just going to stop re-offending, unless it is decided what is needed to help the stop re-offending and be supervised doing it.

 

(Chairman) But for laymen like myself, in practical terms, what needs to be done, as it were, from the point of view [indistinct]. I mean just as a layman looking at a young criminal, a young man probably, quite possibly on Crack Cocaine, quite possible illiterate, quite possibly unable to do his sums as well, quite likely to have no working skills, his chance of going straight, when he comes out, are near zero aren't they? So, what's your view on what needs to be, I know you've had, you've expressed some strong views on what needs to be done with prisoners and criminals going through the system in the past, could you give us a sort of brief view of that, of what NOMS has to achieve?

 

(LR) I am in danger of not being brief because this is, your getting to the heart of what I think needs to be done, and I mentioned the fact that the two services particularly involved in this need to be made fit for purpose, and that is the Prison Service and the Probation Service. Let me talk about the Prison Service first, because I have long believed that the Prison Service is not correctly structured and organised in order to do the job that's asked of it. And I am not saying that off the top of my head because I think probably my source document would be the marvellous report done by Lord Woolf after the riots in Strangeways in 1990. In which he recommended what he called a community cluster of prisons in every part of the country. In other words, each part of the country should have sufficient prison places, to house all the prisoners from that part of the country, with the exception of high security prisoners on the grounds that there aren't enough to justify high security prisons in each part of the country.

 

Now the reason for that was that he recognised that the three things that are most likely to prevent re-offending are a home, a job and a stable relationship. All of which are put at risk by imprisonment, therefore the nearer you can keep people to home, to maintain the family, and possibly the home bit, and the nearer you can keep them to where they are going to come out so that you can involve all the local community, all the work, all the education, all the drug treatment, all the health treatment, all the other things that are going to be needed to maintain the momentum of what may have been started locally are involved in the treatment inside and outside.

 

Now the Prison Service is not organised like that at the moment and I think until it is, you are going to have this dreadful problem of overcrowding caused by sending people where there's an empty bed rather than sending them where they need to go. It would require re-roling of the prisons to get that right. In fact that has another spin-off because people keep on talking about "we need more prisons", but what type of prisons and where? If you have your community or regional cluster, that will tell you that we are short of places for women in the Northwest or we are short of places for young offenders in the Southeast or whatever, it will add some clarity to solving that problem.

 

(Chairman) Very good, can we just deal with probation if I open things up?

 

(LR) Yes

 

(Chairman) What's your view on the Probation Service, I mean it was reorganised in 2001, do you think that helped, do you think in today's climate it's working, is it functional, is it fit for purpose? What's your view on that as we stand today?

 

(LR) Well my view on the Probation Service is it's rather like a sort of ship that's lost its engines which is being tossed around in a storm, I mean it's at the, it's at the mercy of whatever element happens to be directing it. I mean as you know, it used to be a county service and then it was nationalised. I think there was a certain amount of merit in the nationalisation process but I think unfortunately at the time its ethos changed.

 

The Probation Service had always been an aftercare service. It had always been involved in supervision in the community and suddenly punishment appeared at the top of its agenda, now that is a complete change of role for the service and I think it was a very dangerous step to take. Now what has happened since of course is that the Probation Service has been hammered with all sorts of additional demands on it and I know the government keep on saying they are putting more money into it, but it's not money, it's all about people. And if you look at what the numbers have led to, they have let to a reduction in the number of trained senior Probation Officers and a vast increase in the number of bureaucrats who don't actually do anything to supervise offenders.

 

(Chairman) So do you see it as overwhelmed as the Prison Service?

 

(LR) I see it as overwhelmed in fact more overwhelmed, I am very worried about it because the, obviously thanks to public pressure and other things, the Probation Service have had to direct a lot of attention to what I call the heavy end of the spectrum; the serious offenders, the paedophiles and others who are [indistinct] got to that. But there are 209,000 people allegedly under probation supervision and the Probation Service is simply incapable of supervising those people and it's pointless to put people under supervision if they can't be supervised. And I think that the idea that by putting them into the hands of the trusts run by businessmen who are going to be able to award contracts to the private sector or to the voluntary sector is going to solve the problem, is cloud cuckoo land. I frankly think that there's a, the government have got a very good example of what might be done in the Youth Offending Teams around the country which are the responsibility of local government.

 

(Chairman) On your point on trusts may I bring in Lord Dholakia

 

Lord Dholakia (LD) Chairman, first of all can I say thank you arranging this particular meeting, this is what the government should have been doing a long time ago. But thank you for giving us the opportunity to question witnesses. Can I ask you first of all, I don't disagree fundamentally with what you say; you talked about holistic approach in terms of agencies getting involved do you think the sentencing carried is actually high at the moment and that makes it ineffective on organised crime. Now if you take young people for example, people who are sentenced to a year or less are less likely to receive probation supervision and this is where the largest single rate of re-offending actually takes place. What is it about involvement of sentencers in this particular exercise that seems to be left on one side and looking at the probation service which at one time was one of the best services in Western Europe in this country? What is it that has happened? (Inaudible sentence) Why is it that a certain part of the country is almost at breaking point?

 

(LR) Well I think that they have frankly got too much on their plate. And I mean, take all the things that they have to do, all the corporate reports which they do now and of course, you've got added to that, all the work that they have to do with the people who are on home detention curfew, they have to do all the checks and balances for that. And that takes a great deal of time, they are also involved in the supervision and the maintenance of the registers at the very high end of offending and there seems to me to be more and more also with bureaucratic demands on probation officers which is taking them away from their principle job. Also I am concerned about their lack of clarity and what direction they are going in and I think that their own direction from the Home Office has become clouded and unclear.

 

And I think that the false division between supervision and intervention is not helping and I think that also their own morale is a very important factor in this and if you talk to chief Probation Officers, they will tell you that they are finding it very difficult to motivate their people to go on against this increasing flood of legislation and criticism and of course they deserve it if things go wrong. But the public seems to have the idea that they can supervise people for 24 hours a day, they can't do that. Also there's a lack of clarity in what is meant by community sentencing and what can be done in a community sentence, now I would argue that there's absolutely no reason why the community sentence should not include all the things that are done in prison, Education, work training, drug treatment, physical education and of course all the mental health care could all be done in the community, but they are not getting the clarity of direction or the consistency of direction to enable them to do it.

 

On the sentencers thing, I have always found it very interesting that the sentences, I'm one of the people who think that sentences ought to be involved if possible in what happens and account should be given to the sentencer. And I also think that this happens in Scandinavia for example; if somebody's shown that they have gone through all the hoops and there's not much point in continuing with either the expensive the expensive custody or the expensive probation, I think consideration ought to be given for them being going back to the sentencer and being considered for early release on licence which would ease the overcrowding problem in prisons, because there are a lot of people in prison who are doing nothing and going nowhere because there is nothing that can be done with them other than incarceration.

 

Mark Hunter (MH) - Thank you Lord Ramsbotham for being here this morning, it's a great help to have the opportunity of putting these questions to you directly. I'd specifically like to ask you about contestability because it seems to me that this rather interesting concept goes to the heart of the government's proposals with the Bill on probation services. Could you tell us a little bit about your own views about the relevance of this concept of contestability perhaps what you understand by it and maybe what you think the government is driving at, and also I'd be particularly interested if you know of any evidence or research that supports the government's view that contestability would work in the probation sector?

 

(LR) Well I think it is a very interesting point this and I must admit that when I first took over as Chief Inspector of Prisons I was very concerned about the concept of private sector prisons because I believed that locking people up was the job of the state and you shouldn't make a profit out of doing it. But at that time there was one prison which the press kept on talking about as "Doncatraz" which was Doncaster, and it was said to be a drug-crazed hell in which bullying was rife, well I went to Doncatraz and I found not only was it not a drug-crazed hell, but it was there was no bullying, in fact it was a frightfully well-run prison. It was very clean, and the staff had extremely good relationships with the prisoners and the organisation running it had done all sorts of imaginative things with education, with the chaplaincy, with work, with health and so on, which weren't happening in the public sector. And when I asked the Governor why he was doing this, which conflicted with what I'd seen at prisons in the public sector, he said he's not allowed to do it in the public sector prison.

 

So therefore, seeing this and seeing that the private sector was allowed to produce initiatives which could act as catalysts for change, if the system and the prison service allowed change to be implemented, I was in favour of certainly a small part being private sector because of the attention it created and the improvements that I hoped would follow. I think that unfortunately the word "contestability" has become very confused in people's minds because when it first came out, everyone thought that it meant market testing which was something that was happening at that time, that if something was failed, failing, you'd threaten it with being privatised. I don't believe you should threaten.

 

But I think that contestability now has become a sort of mantra and I think it's a great pity because, at the heart of what they talk about in managing offenders, reducing crime and all the development of the initial NOMS was the fact that work with offenders can be done equally well by the public, the private and the not for profit sector as they're called. And I think that what is important is that there should be a clear decision on what needs to be done with and for each offender based on a careful analysis of what it is that's prevented them from living a useful and law-abiding life and then the people who are best able at delivering that service should be hired to do it from wherever they come. But what I don't like about the contestability agenda is it seems to be wedded round with targets; you've got to have so much of this and so much of that.

 

Now I think that that is nonsense and dangerous nonsense because I don't know of any private sector company which is capable of carrying out the probation task in the way that probation officers do, for example, I would not like to see the writing of pre-sentence reports for judges handed down to a private sector company which private sector company might also be the company which provided the transport to move people around or do other things. There are certain tasks which certainly should be contracted out and I would particularly like to see a much more structured approach to the voluntary sector, but to talk about contestability in the voluntary sector seems at the end to be dangerous because it misunderstands the ethos of the voluntary sector, which is they're not competing for contracts, they're offering to do work that they are capable of doing.

 

Edward Garnier (EG): As a military man you'll have heard of the expression "order, counter-order and disorder". Would you suggest or, indeed, would you agree with me that is the state of morale and effectiveness of both the probation service and the prison service as a consequence of precisely that over the last ten years, a constant changing in orders from above?

 

(LR) I think that's very true.

 

(EG) Is that a consequence of policy or operation?

 

(LR) Well I think, I am glad you mentioned policy and operations because one of the things that concerned me, from the very word "go" when I went into my first prison, was that, I would say this as a military man, I did not find a chain of command. For example when I asked for a person, I asked to see the director of women after going to Holloway and was told there wasn't one. So I said "who directs what happens to women in prison?" and he said "A Civil Servant", this is the Director General speaking not Martin, his predecessor, "in the policy department who decides what's going to happen" and I said "that's not the point, who sees that what happens to women in Lancashire is the same as what happens in Kent?" and he said "The Area Manager" and I said " But the Area Manager is only responsible for the prisons in Lancashire or the prisons in Kent. Who sees that programmes for women are provided, who sees that good practice is spread? No one."

 

Now there is, currently, and this is my biggest gripe about the Prison Service, and Martin knows this very well because we have talked about it many times. I believe that the prison service is suffering form the fact that there is no clear chain of command with people actually responsible and accountable for every time of prisoner wherever they happen to be and responsible for seeing what happens to them is consistent, that the programmes are appropriate for that type of prisoners, that the resources are enabled, that the staff are trained and that there is this thread of consistency so that everyone knows to whom they are responsible for what, the officer on the landing knows all the way up. Now if you've got such a structure, then there's less impact of the sort of order, counter-order disorder that you mentioned because the order can go to the top and one of the things the top has to do with the order is to decide how that is going to get down to the person at the bottom. Now there is no structure for doing that.

 

(EG) Now, under this Bill, under the Offender Management Bill, it seems to me on reading the Bill, that the direction for the management of probation services, plural, is to come from the Home Secretary through the Chief Executive of the Offender Management Service, the NOM, through the Regional Offender Manager, down to the Probation Trust, but there is no involvement of a meaningful sense it seems to me, from the ground up. Now does that structure as outlined in the Bill comply with your requirements, or is it merely a structure written in air?

 

(LR) No, it's a structure written in the air because as I said at the beginning, I don't believe there's an overarching thing, now the framework for the overarching is there, there used to be a criminal policy group in the Home Office which was responsible for issuing the political direction, down through the Director General of the prison service and now they have the National Offender Management service. And I see no difficulty in that and then the prison service and the probation service need to have an appropriate chain of command to make certain that what comes down form the criminal policy group, what comes down from the Home Office, goes down to the various types of prison in the parts of the country when it is.

 

And you need a structure to do that, in the case of prisons I believe you need two structures, one is the functional one if you like, saying what should happen to women, or children, or young offenders, or foreign nationals, or lifers, or whatever. And then out in the country in each of the regions that I mentioned, someone who is the senior, Prison Service Provider, if you like, responsible for coordinating the delivery of what is needed to implement the programmes from the area so that it is appropriate for the people who are there. And as far as the probation service is concerned, they need someone to direct the Probation Service within those regions. Now there are in existence now, they used to be called, Area Criminal Justice Liaison Committees, they are now Area Criminal Justice Boards who are responsible for coordinating the policy in each of the regions, working to a National Criminal Justice Board in London.

 

And the minister keeps on extolling the virtue of this process and I agree with her that I think essentially you have therefore got the framework and it seems to me that you don't need any more than that, because if the Area Criminal Justice Board is responsible for deciding what happens in those areas and how it is delivered and it's then they've got a clear chain of command direct to prison and probation offices, what on earth do you need all these Regional Offender Managers for? And what do you need an Offender Management staff of 1647 people on top of the existing bureaucracies of the Prison and Probation Services, what are they doing?

 

(EG) On the subject of "What are they doing?", you mentioned the split between punishment and supervision and the probation service, since 19, 2001 or whatever it is appears to be confused if I paraphrase what you're saying, over what it's supposed to be doing. How do you say the supervision of offenders who have not been sent to prison, that's to say those not in custody, those doing punishments in the community, how should they be supervised? Should they be supervised by some other body than the Probation Service or should the Probation Service be allowed to continue to supervise these people, but somebody else should do the post-release of custody supervision, that's to say people on parole or those on licence. How do you envisage the carrying out of those supervisory/punishment functions?

 

(LR) Well this is again where I cite the example of the Youth Justice Board and it's Youth Offender Teams who are actually the responsibility of local government and I think they've been one of the success stories of probation boards over what has happened in recent years, because I think that by involving local government, you have automatically brought in all the local providers whom I've mentioned as being so essential to deliver a complete programme. And I would like to see and certainly this is one of the things I would have liked to have seen examined, if there'd been a proper study of the original proposal followed by a pilot to see whether it worked, whether is wouldn't be possible to have Adult Offender Teams - Male and Adult Offender Teams - Female running in parallel with the Youth Offender Teams locally. On which there is probation representation because I put the responsibility if you like, for deciding what's done, on probation, who could advise local government in this. That would release the very hard-pressed senior, trained probation staff to supervise what I call the heavy end, which you can't delegate to another lot, but you would then have, it seems to me, a much better likelihood of supervising all the people who currently aren't supervised, because you'd be involving a lot of people working in the community and in the voluntary sector doing the work under probation direction.

 

 

James Brokenshire (JB) Lord Ramsbotham, I just want to stay with the period prior to prison. There's been criticism this week by the judges in terms of the plethora of interventions that are available for dealing with offenders, whether that be penalty notices for disorder, ASBOs, community sentences, with the suggestion that by the time an offender comes to prison that they are some way immune to it, that they are not fearful of the Criminal Justice System at all just because of the range of interventions they've gone through. Do you agree with that analysis?

 

(LR) Well, I am not an expert in this area but I mean I must admit I am terribly confused about what's going on and the vast numbers of different kinds of orders that seem to be promoted. But what worries me is that each one attached to them and this is what worries me about this is the number who are breaching them and the fact that they are all being led into disrepute and I am also worried about the side effect of that and the breach and I've particularly mentioned the Anti-Social Behaviour Order and also briefly Community Orders is that people when they breach get sent into prisons and the people who have breached these orders are one of the overcrowding problems particularly in local prisons and the prisons can do absolutely nothing with them; they're not structured, they're not resourced to do it and it seems to me that we've got a sort of plethora of what I would call "knee-jerk" interventions without thinking through the consequences, I mean the [indistinct], what is it actually doing? And I am concerned that this is actually undermining the credibility of and the confidence in the Criminal Justice System as a whole. It needs tidying up.

 

John Bercow (JOB) Thank you David, Lord Ramsbotham, given the fact that you yourself have already highlighted the incidence of prisoners and people in Young Offenders Institutions who've had very severe communication problems, I wonder whether you could give colleagues an idea of the importance that you attach to speech therapy in such institutions and how you think the Bill might be amended to allow that to happen. And secondly, on the subject of prisoner education and training, I wonder if you could give us some idea of how you think a pattern and quality of universal provision might be developed, because there do seem to be a number of problems. There's a problem perhaps with a lack of coordination between the Home Office and the Department of Education and Skills, the latter now, as I understand it, having primary responsibility but perhaps not regarding it as one of its top priorities and a related problem under successive governments being that very large numbers, I think almost half of prisons, pay prisoners more for doing work than for undertaking educational training. It therefore not being very surprising if there is such a financial disincentive to be educated or trained, that large numbers of prisoners remain uneducated, untrained, unreformed and go out and do their ill deeds accordingly all over again.

 

(LR) Well thank you, again it's very interesting and I'll try and the moment I started going to prisons, I said that all the interventions that could and should be made in prisons, education was by far the most important and could be the most effective in preventing re-offending. Therefore I started asking how many people there were in prison who needed education intervention of some kind, and of course no body knew the figures because that sort of assessment wasn't done, there was a sort of basic skills test, which was sort of, can you add and can you read? But it wasn't more than that and I realised a number of things, first of all there was total inconsistency in the provision of resources and when I asked a parliamentary question, Mr Boateng answered that for example the young offenders in Brindsford were funded at £438 a year, young offenders at Werrington just up the road at £1500 a year and the young offenders at Thorn Cross were funded at £2400 a year, but why? They were the same people. And this was because there was no clarity of direction that education is the key, you must assess what is needed and you must provide it. But then I went further than that and I looked underneath this and found that the question that was not being asked was "Why have they got into this state?", well of course, you've heard all about exclusion and eviction but then you realise that there were a large number of people with very serious learning difficulties, people put the blanket "dyslexia" on it, but it's not dyslexia, dyslexia is one part of it, but there's a whole lot of other learning difficulties. And then it was that 'n Scotland, I was introduced by the governor there to the person that he said if they had to get rid of all his staff, the last one out of the gate would be his speech and language therapist, Because too many people were unable to communicate, not only with each other which had huge influence on relationships and they were using that rather than this to communicate but also on the ability to explain what it was that was wrong or that needed intervention in order to help them live a useful and law-abiding life.

 

And having gathered the speech and language therapist in with me, who did and amazing analysis of the establishment and found all sorts of things which up till then the Prison Service weren't finding, I mean 50% had substance abuse memory-loss, lots of them couldn't hear, lot's of them couldn't see the blackboard, grammatical difficulties, but most important, 100% had the sort of communication difficulties associated with 1% of the population.

 

Now it seems to me that it is terribly important first of all to have those speech and language therapists in Young Offender establishments, because the one part of the system where you are dealing with people who you have a hope of preventing from going on to the adult system is them, and if you don't throw all your resources at it, it seems to me you're being irresponsible. And I'm very disappointed that still that is not happening, and why is it not happening? It's not happening because the Home Office say it's not their responsibility to fund them. The Department for Education and Skills say it's not their responsibility to fund them because it's not only education, and the Department of Health say it is their responsibility to provide speech and language therapists but Primary Care Trusts must decide where in their overall priority their own speech and language therapy comes. Now this seems to me to be nonsense and I would say that it should be up to the Home Office to say that speech and language therapy provision is an essential part of the assessment of every young offender, in particular and they should be funded from the Home Office.

 

(JOB) May I just ask Lord Ramsbotham, what piffling some are we talking about in any case?

 

(LR) We are talking about a sum of £33,000 a year per therapist and so seventeen establishments, and I would add the secure training centres, so nothing when I look at how much money the Prime Minister regarded for his Respect agenda.

 

As the Minister for Social Exclusion says, there's nothing more socially excluding than being unable to communicate. I would have thought this was a fundamental. Now in parallel with that, there are a number of organisations in the country who are providing oral communication tutors for adults because for example a very, very fine study which I commend to anyone who hasn't seen it, done by a professor at Newcastle University last year, 65% of all those attending or detailed to attend Offending Behaviour Courses lacked the listening and speaking skills to be able to take part in the course which was an essential element of their rehabilitation. Now why should individual governors have to try to decide how much of their limited budget should go on this?

 

This again should be standard provision. I was one of the people who was very keen that the Department of Education and Skills took over the funding of education in prisons because as I mentioned I was very concerned, in addition, about what was available in each place and I spoke to Lady Blackstone who was Minister at the time and I suggested to her that the first thing that she did when she took over should be to do a needs assessment of every prison to decide what educational provision each prison needed in relation to its particular population and then see what that would come out to in terms of provision. Now I hoped that was going to happen because they set up an Offender Management and Skills Unit in the Home Office which was meant to do that but it hasn't actually done it, in a way the policy seems to have been delegated from the Home Office and now resources are delegated not to the Department of Education and Skills but to individual learning and skills councils throughout the country. So each governor has got to go and have a contract discussion with an individual Learning and Skills Council and competing against all the other demands that there are on Learning and Skills Councils and it seems to me again that this is the sort of thing that ought to have been centrally directed from the Home Office based on the needs firstly of prisoners in prisons and secondly because of what I said about the content of community sentences, of the individual probation or offender teams to make certain the educational provision is part of community sentence. And this is why I feel that this Bill quite frankly doesn't tackle any of this, it's nothing to do with it, it's more about the management of the management of offenders than the management of offenders themselves based on their needs.

 

(Chairman) May I say that answer made this whole morning worthwhile, Lady Stern

 

(Lady Stern) Thank you very much. Lord Ramsbotham, can I come back, following that very interesting discussion to look again at the relationship between national and local, because you said something very interesting which we haven't had time to explore about the success of the Youth Offending Teams which are of course based in the Local Authority where the services are and the possibility of Adult Offender Teams. Can I ask you another question about, the local, which is the relationship with the local Magistrates' Courts and you may well say that's not your area of expertise but I am sure you have a view. Would you agree that the relationship between the Probation Service and the local Magistrate's Courts it is very important for us to have confidence in community provision? And do you imagine that Magistrate's Courts will have the same relationship with the Probation Trust, which is basically a central body, as they would have with the Probation Board which represents the wider community?

 

(LR) I absolutely agree with you I mean this is where I always thought the idea of merging the Prison and Probation Service was most unwise, quite apart from the fact the they were dealing with entirely different problems, one was dealing with people in custody, and one was dealing with people in the community and the Probation Service, the courts and the police must work closely together every day and the prisons don't work with that group, so why try and merge them an confuse things?

 

Now I believe that this is, I am very concerned about what's been happening about the direction of the probation boards being told that their number of magistrates should be reduced and that they shouldn't have this and that and they should only have businessmen who have experience of letting contracts. And unless you have board which is responsible for deciding what probation provision is and actually understands what the provision is but not just the understanding of what probation does but what the Magistrates and the police should expect, you're not going to have a functional board and it seems to me that the Probation Boards as currently [indistinct], yes of course, because we're all human, some are better than other, but I think it's very wrong to destroy something that has actually been working and is working well with the local Criminal Justice Board, because they are all local people and understand the way they work. I think to undo that for some sort of strange commercial mantra, seems to me, very foolish.

 

(Chairman) Sir Sandy, Lord Bruce-Lockhart

 

Lord Bruce-Lockhart (LBL) Lord Ramsbotham thank you and I was grateful for what you said about some progress by the NOMS service and by local government. I had some meetings in December with some young, up to the age of 25, prison re-offenders with some prisoners who had been released and just as David Davis said, they were young people with immensely difficult backgrounds, many of them out of care, no education or qualifications. But very often with a real vitality and independence, which is actually partly why they were there, and I asked them what it was that they looked for, firstly while they were in prison, the issue of relevant education, the problem being that their hopes of getting employment really were not high and the education they were offered simply didn't feel relevant to them, to the possibility of getting a job, secondly, effective pre-release consultations including with the one person who was going to look after them from the day of release onwards, and most importantly it was the consistency of having that one person, that trusted individual who would look after them from the day of release onwards including looking after the housing, the employment, the relationship issues and I don't see how contestability is going to add to that need for that singly focused individual support.

 

(LR) I agree with you and I mean one of the remarks made yesterday by Helen Edwards that sent shivers up my spine was her assertion that the whole of this depended on a computer system, through which information would flow freely. But it's not computer based, it's exactly what you say and I do find it absolutely fascinating I am involved with a number of organisations who provide, some people call it mentors, it's not just that, it's sort of post-release support. Trailblazers for example which recruits young people from the city who give up their time to be at the end of a telephone to support people, it's this ort of feeling of support which has got to be provided which I don not believe that contestability has anything to do with, anything at all. And to me it's a diversion, if those sort of services are required and they should be, this is where I believe that the young offender institution, having established what it is that people need and I also include in that assessment an aptitude test to see what they're capable of doing so that they are trained to do something appropriate in accordance with their skill and also link to job opportunities in the area, it must be relevant.

 

And I think that again, rather like the argument over secondary education, I happen to be on the strategy advisory board for City and Guilds and therefore am very interested in vocational training and when you look at the sort of people who come into our prisons, most of them I think come from the vocational rather than the academic spectrum, if that's the right word, and the appropriateness of it, but it's no good just showing them the door and saying "go on get on with it", and I do find it interesting every year in Trailblazers which is one of the organisations I am involved with, we have an annual meeting where some of the ex-offenders come back and tell what the support has meant to them particularly at tricky times. And this is something I think that ought to be built into any provision of young offenders particularly, but I don't see any mention of it in the Bill, but if you are talking about offender management, it's an absolutely key ingredient of what really the whole thrust should be.

 

Mark Hunter (MH) I wanted to pick up on the point that you touched on earlier Lord Ramsbotham about the importance of effective end-to-end offender management. Do you actually think that there's any proposals at all within the Bill as it stands, that are going to help improve effective end-to-end offender management?

 

(LR) No because I don't, every time I've asked "How many peoples it going to need to do this supervision? And who is actually going to be responsible for this end-to-end management?" I don't get a straight answer because I don't in fact believe it's been thought through properly because if they say "Yes there's a Probation Officer, the senior Probation Officer to which the person goes is responsible for making this plan.", well before you can blink, that prisoner's gone, and who is then going to see that, you may make a plan and say that they need to have this, that or the other, who's going to see that they go to a prison where that happens? And the idea is fine but it hasn't been thought through impractical terms and I'm also very concerned about building something on a myth, because it's taking resources away from what's needed actually now and what's needed now is a proper assessment when people come in of what it is that has prevented them from living a useful and law-abiding life, which includes not just the offending behaviour, but the risk and it includes education and work training and social skill and mental and physical health and substance abuse.

 

Now that can be done for everyone and it should be done in a standard way on a standard form, and then, the person on the point where that is done, can decide what priority should be given to the various needs and in what order they should be tackled, and very often can be sent to somewhere in the system to follow that plan an the plan can go with them. And as they move, the person where they move to is responsible for the continuation and updating of that plan, but to say that the person who started it is then going to be responsible for this all the way through, seems to me to be utterly impractical, quite apart from anything else the individual Offender manager will be promoted, will move, will change, so it is a nice idea and I know what they mean but I think that one ought to realise the practicalities of what that means rather than try and say its' going to be done by one overstretched person who can't possibly do it.

 

Dominic Grieve (DG) Can I just turn to the issue of overcrowding? This whole measure is against the background of the knowledge of overcrowding of the prison system and it's often said that you can't manage a prison system as long as it is overcrowded. Is that an exaggeration? What is the impact of overcrowding on any measure which is introduced to change or improve the prison system?

 

(LR) Well I mean I think it's something which is very fundamental and needs to be taken very seriously and it needs to be analysed with care because I've always thought that you can bear a certain amount of overcrowding in cells at night when you've got more people sleeping a room than may be desirable, provided those people are occupied by day. And if there's a full, purposeful and active day which keeps people busy and doing what I think ought to be done, then I think you can tolerate a certain amount of overcrowding by night.

 

Where overcrowding becomes intolerable is where people are left sitting day after day after day doing absolutely nothing and that is of course, it's in those conditions where all sorts of things like substance abuse and bullying and homosexuality and all the other things develop and it undermines the whole of the morale of a prison and the relationship between staff and prisoners, everyone gets tetchy and of course the danger of having too much overcrowding on limited-resource prisons is that those resources are stretched even further and they reach fewer people and therefore they are contributing to overcrowding. And I was amused that somebody suggested that there were three policies in the Home Office at the moment: sentence people more severely, arrest them more quickly and reduce prison overcrowding. I think this is symptomatic, now I believe you see, that if you go back to what I said about the community cluster of prisons, that if you had that, then I think you would encourage more people to become involved in the supervision of and work for their own people. For example the Leyland truck company up in Preston had a skills shortage coming up and very sensibly went into Preston prison and the identified people who had the ability to fill that skills shortage in the future, they sent in members of staff to help train people and so people were being prepared for a job that was going to help not just now, but in the future, now that seems to me to be very sensible. But as the firm said to me "Of course we'll do that for people who live in Preston who we know that we can employ, but we're not going to do it for people who come up from Kent because Kent is overcrowded.

 

Now if you make every region, the military phrase is "swallow their own smoke" so that they should cope with the overcrowding in their region and you then cut out a lot of this sending people all over the place because there are beds free here and you encourage all the local organisations to become involved in the delivery of services, I don't say you're going to "crack" overcrowding, but I think you're going to mitigate some of the things by providing, there is more chance of providing a full, purposeful and active day, which is the one things I believe which helps to resolve some of the other problems that come when people are sitting there doing nothing.

 

(Chairman) Lady Stern

 

(LS) Earlier on, I was interested when you talked about the voluntary sector and you were saying that it could be expanded by using a more structured approach, rather than going down the lines of the government's proposals in the Bill. I wonder if you could expand on that on how a more structured approach would encourage the involvement of the voluntary agencies. Also could you comment on whether you think the government proposals are going to hinder the ability of the smaller charities to compete effectively with the larger ones, bidding for work in the prisons?

 

(LR) Well, thank you very much. Again, I come back to this idea that the assessment leading to what needs to be done and that assessment being turned into a full, purposeful and active day. If that is the case, then I would like to see governors of prisons analysing the provision of those things for a full, purposeful and active day and deciding what it is that the public sector can provide and what they've got to go and seek on contract. Now some of it will come from the private sector, some of it will come from the voluntary sector and, let me quote an example because I am one of the people who believe that actually The Arts have a valuable role to play in building self-esteem and encouraging people to become involved in work, education and training, as a result of the self-confidence and actually doing something.

 

Now the arts organisations will come in to do the work if asked, but too often, you find the arts organisers knocking on the door saying, "We know we can help, can we come and do it?", and everyone says they can't think how they can be accommodated. So I would like to see very clear direction to each governor of each prisoner as to what they are to do with and for each prisoner and they've got to devise the programme and involve therefore the local providers which could include the voluntary sector.

 

Now once you've done that and you start drawing them in, you're then inviting the voluntary sector over a period of time to continue delivering a service and at the moment one of the problems is that the voluntary sector is brought in to do something, and it may last for the time to governor's there, it may be for a year, it may be six months, so they have no continuity of tenure and that means that there's no development of what they're doing and so people are losing out on lots of good prospects.

 

As far as the present proposals are concerned, I absolutely agree with you, a vast amount of the really good work is done by tiny little focused charities in different parts of the country focusing on their own people. They're not in a position compete for all these contracts, they haven't got the skills, they haven't got the resources to fill in all the vast amount of bumf and they are in danger, I think, of being swallowed by the bigger ones who are competing for rather bigger contracts.

 

Well this may or may not be a good thing, I mean it could be that the bigger charities could take on some of the smaller charities as sort of sub-charities but then you get involved in the frightful issue of sovereignty which always raises its head with the [indistinct], but I also think it might be that some of the groups of voluntary sector organisations might form alliances like the extremely successful mental health alliance which is capable of delivering a service but also representing that part of the sector in discussions with government, to make certain that when policy is made, the role that particular part of the voluntary sector can play is properly understood and represented in those discussions.

 

Lady Stern (LS) Thank you

 

(LS) Can I just pursue that particular point with a very practical example, and I do appreciate what you're saying. Has the government got confidence in voluntary organisations because as part of an NACRO that I've belonged to for the past 20 years, I have seen thousands of people working for a charity for the re-settlement of offenders they literally have to give notices after notice for redundancy because there were no funds coming from the government, and I believe that this whole issue of building the confidence of the voluntary organisations is important, but there is no evidence on the part of the government that they are prepared to do that and that is why it is extremely difficult to compete in part with the private sector in terms of applying for contracts.

 

(LR) I agree with you, hugely, and this worries me because I mean I think that we've talked about inconsistency many times this morning and I think the inconsistency of the approach to the voluntary sector is something that's really worried me and I don't think there's a real understanding of what the voluntary sector is all about and how it functions, and I mean, you find so many Ministers have got some finger in this pie and they claim to be responsible for this, or that, or the other, and I think that this is something which really needs teasing out and incidentally as a subplot to that, I think it really needs to involve the foundations who don't actually do work but provide funds to help voluntary organisations do this in discussion on all this because they're being bombarded now with pleas from small and larger organisations to help with core funding in order to stay alive to be able to do anything,. Now that's not where people give their money to, they give their money to people to go and do the work and it seems to me again, well, this was the debate actually I was involved in the day Charles Clarke had to admit he was missing a few foreign prisoners and we have not been able to continue this discussion with his successor, but I mean if I was looking overall all at offender management, which this bill doesn't, I would want to include all that in the structure of what I wanted to put in place.

 

(EG) Thank you. Now, may I get back to Dominic's point about overcrowding; will your proposals for cluster prisons address the problem of churning which is such a terrible problem, particularly for female prisoners and will it address the problem of long distances which the families have to travel very often to see prisoners.

 

(LR) Well I hope so, well this is what it's designed to do, it's designed to cut down, the vast amount of churn there is. I mean the only churn there will be will be within a region and limited to that region, but that is why it is so important to work out the provision of sufficient places to house the population of that area. I mean, it will never be absolutely exact, of course it wont, but that's why I say that we encourage regions to "swallow their own smoke" on overcrowding, but also I believe that if you have this provision, and I've talked this over at length with Lord Woolf, that in fact it helps you to come to much clearer decisions on what places you need and how many, in order to reduce the problems we described. When I think of the hideous waste of money that there is at the moment for stagging people all over the place, and assisted family visits and also the number of letters I get from prisoners of people saying, "Why on earth am I in County Down when I live in Cornwall and I haven't seen my family for three and a half years?", this sort of thing would be avoided if you could close ranks, and I think it would make the management issue much easier, I mean, what worries me about having big organisations is that they demand vast amounts of information and you have a bureaucracy to feed that insatiable demand, if you delegate responsibility entirely to the regions, then they will [indistinct] their own and all you have to is ask the region and get off the back of the wretched governor.

 

(Chairman) Well, we've used up our allotted hour, can I say, thank you very much indeed, it was a really very informative briefing from you, from my point of view, it has given me about four different insights, so can I say thank you on behalf of everybody here and I hope we get a better Bill out of the end of it. Thank you very much.

 

Our next witness, we'll give him a minute to gather his breath and we'll carry on. Can I welcome Martin Narey, Martin and I have a long-standing relationship, when he was the head of the Prison Service, I was the Public Accounts Committee Chairman and I shall tell you that when I talked to him about coming he said "I hope that you shall treat me better now than you did when you were PAC Chairman". What I will say about Martin is he gave the most straightforward and useful evidence I think almost any Civil Servant who has appeared before the Committee even when that was uncomfortable for him. So welcome, Martin was, let me just check, my facts, was, Director General of the Prison Service in 1999, until 2003, Chief Executive of NOMS in 2004 and he became Chief Executive of Barnardo's in 2006. So thank you for coming this morning. Do you want to make any statement before we start or shall we go straight into questions?

 

(MN) If I may very briefly, thank you for those kind comments, first to remind members that I'm no longer here to defend necessarily what's happening as I'm Not the Chief Executive, but I am very happy to describe my role up until October 2005 and why in broad terms I very much support what is being done. I think Offender management if hugely important, that's not part of the Bill but it's the philosophy behind what has been tried to be done. When before I left the Home Office, I spent time for example at Thorn Cross in the Northwest, watching a Probation Officer chair a training board for a young offender and having a responsibility and an influence on what happened to that young man in custody so that better preparations could be made for that person's release. I thought we were really beginning to make progress and Offender Management I think, can make a big difference.

 

Secondly I think competition, or contestability as it's been called, is very important, I am a convert to this, as a young governor I campaigned vociferously against the involvement of the private sector and private prisons, I once described it as immoral, I was completely and utterly wrong. Competition in the running of prisons has proved the quality of public sector prisons as providing a significant number, 11 now, of very good value for money prisons, one or two which are excellent. But if I can say or get over one thing this morning; actually those two things don't count for much unless we can get a balance between sentencing and the prison population. I have not changed my views about prisons. In the right circumstances, and this is an unfashionable view, in the right circumstances, I think prison can be very constructive; it can take the chaos out of a young person's life, it can get the off drugs, it can get them on a route to education. The possibility of doing that in the sort of overcrowding which has been experienced at the moment is minimal. In about 2002/2003, I really thought we were beginning to make progress, I remember reducing the capacities of two establishments holding children; Huntercombe and Ashfield, reducing the capacities by one third.

 

There was a real difference in access to education, to work, to train, a real difference to the time the Prison Officers had to spend with offenders. And it's not insignificant that during that period, we did see some falls in the re-offending rate and more importantly, we saw significant increases in the proportion of prisoners finding work on release. Now when prisons are so desperately overcrowded as they are now, the amount of rehabilitation, the amount of activity which can be extended to each individual is very, very insignificant, And we expect a great deal of prisons, an analogy would be putting people into a hospital, not giving them any treatment whatsoever and expecting them to get better. That's what we do with prisons, we lock people up, we give them no treatment, no rehabilitation and we believe that they'll get better and it's simply naive to believe that can be the case. And finally, and I would welcome questions on the important issue of re-offending.

 

I think one of the grave problems we have in measuring the effectiveness of prison or probation is this wholly unhelpful measure of the reconviction rate. Frankly, if prisons or probation reduced re-offending by 40%, they would be miracle workers. They do nothing like that, the re-offending rate is much higher that the proxy reconviction rate which is used. What we need is no a measure of nil offending, we need a measure of reduced offending. And some of then innovations in Criminal Justice in recent years, such as the drug testing and treatment order, are routinely vilified for having very high reconviction rates. Actually, when one looks at the reduced level of re-offending when someone is on a community drug programme, its results are very successful. Now while we continue to measure the effectiveness of probation by this very crude reconviction rate, I don't think we'll improve their performance.

 

(Chairman) Thank you very much for that robust opening statement. I've got to start with an apology for you, there's a statement from the Home Office "surprise, surprise" and I'm being dragged away after I've asked a few questions, Dominic will take over chairing. I hope I'll get back before the end, but in any event, thank you for that. Let's take up that first issue, the issue of so-called re-offending or reconviction rate. It appears to have changed quite dramatically in the last couple of years upwards again, I presume that is a proxy of something going on, what do you think is happening there? It's gone up from 57% to 68% in the last few years.

 

(MN) I think if one looks at that measure and compares reconviction rates against the expected rate of reconviction for the cohort of prisoners or those on community sentences, the rise has been much less significant there. Essentially, reconviction rates, in terms of performance against expectations, have been pretty much flat lined for many years now, but I repeat, I think that it's a misleading measure and not a useful measure to test the (inaudible, Chair speaking over MN).

 

(Chairman) It's rather cheeky of my but I am going to do a PAC Chairman on you and say can you actually write us a note on that point? Because it's actually quite difficult to see.

 

(MN) I will try to, I actually no longer have legions of civil servants (inaudible, Chair talking over MN) but I shall see if I can (Inaudible, Chair talking over MN) and I will be delighted to write on that point.

 

(Chairman) It is very difficult to understand and the presumption that I have been working to to be frank is that the overcrowding effect, in disrupting training, disrupting rehabilitation and so on is manifesting itself in that way, now that's not true, we need to know how we measure that, because we're concerned, I think everybody round this table is concerned about the impact of overcrowding on the effectiveness of prisons as rehabilitation mechanisms, I mean, that's really our big argument, with the government over this, so it's an, I am sorry to impose, I know that I am imposing and it's quite unusual in this context but I'd be very grateful if you could do that.

 

Now can I ask you, before I get dragged away, can I ask you one other question I didn't give you warning of, which is, since you're now heading Barnardo's, one of the great problems we have now is the problem of youth offending. We have, what, 40% of prisoners having been in care at one point or another in their lives, something of that order. Can you give us your insight on that because, the other, and we were talking as it were about the endgames, it might be worth having your insight into what starts this problem, that we're dealing with in youth offending and whether there's interventions we can do here in prison which in your view will work?

 

(MN) I'd be delighted. It's often said that it's impossible to recognise at a young age the children who are likely to end up in prison and to intervene. Actually with children in care we can absolutely recognise that, they are the highest risk and it's not for the want of considerable effort on the part of the local authorities and social workers. It's not for the want of investment we spend about £1.9 billion on children in care in this country, actually, I don't, this is not something which needs to be resolved by additional resources, but we do a pretty shabby job by them and a large number end up in prison, they go to the worst schools, they're excluded at a rate ten times more than other children, they have no champion in their life. And we work in 23 different projects "we" being Barnardo's, with children in care, and it's easy to see why they do so badly.

 

I have to say, I am however hugely encouraged by the recent government green paper, I think Alan Johnson has been courageous in acknowledging the preface to that paper, how poor work in this area has been to date and I think the absolute concentration on the education of children in care might make a dramatic difference and some of the proposals in the green paper, if implemented, in my view, would make a difference at reducing school exclusions, getting children in care to the best schools, not the schools that we don't want our children to go to and overriding entry procedures if you have to do that. And perhaps most of all, simply ensuring that children in care are not moved schools in their GCSE year. We do things to children in care for whom we are the corporate parent that we would not dream of doing to our own children. I think there are some very simple things, not resource-heavy, which could transform their life chances and over five or ten years we will see a reduction in those numbers going to prison.

 

(Chairman) I have always thought the phrase "in care" was the biggest misnomer

 

(MN) Absolutely

 

(Chairman) Children in State custody seems more appropriate. Now will you forgive me, I'll try and get back before the end, if not, can I thank you now for coming today. Excuse me. If you'll take over Dominic...

 

(Dominic Grieve) Thank you Mr Narey very much indeed for coming, I want pursue if I can the point that you were making a while ago about how to divert youngsters or individual groups of youngsters from getting into the Criminal Justice System in the first place. Certainly as a Crown Court judge having to sentence people, certainly very often they may have to sentence people to prison very often the people I had in front of me as either old teenagers or young adults in their late teens or early twenties are precisely the sort of people who have been excluded or have excluded themselves from the education, system are incapable of reading and writing, are racked with drugs in one way or another and inevitably they appear in the courts and they appear in custody on a regular basis. Now what is it that you are doing now which can inform us about what we can be doing as policy-makers and as legislators to reduce, I carefully say reduce rather than to eliminate, to reduce the number of youngsters from getting into the Criminal Justice System in the first place?

 

(MN) First of all to concentrate on that particular "at risk" group which I've just described, those children in care, but secondly to invest in education and early intervention. If you look at the population in a number of Young Offender establishments and one of the things David Ramsbotham very helpfully did when I was Director General was he routinely surveyed young offender populations to see what proportion had been excluded from school. I recall at a place like Stoke Heath and Feltham something like 75% of the boys there had been excluded from school. We have school exclusions at a very high level, schools exclusion which are applied disproportionately to young black boys and we wonder why we have a prison population of 25% of black people.

 

If we had a real investment in education, if we made sure that when people are excluded from school they really did get a proper and adequate education and not just a couple of hours at a pupil referral unit if we made it absolutely, if we put as much emphasis on the educational achievement of those at the bottom of the educational pile as well as those at the top then I think the payoff over a long period of time would be very significant. I think the government have done this very, very commendably for children below school age, I think the introduction of Sure Start and the investment of children's pre-schooling, particularly so because we may not see the benefit of that is the US experience is to be any guide, for ten or twenty years, but we will see a very significant benefit of that but we need to carry on that emphasis into the time when children go to school. As a society we get pretty intolerant of children once they get to school; we see them as troublemakers, we see them as problems to be attacked, we have to invest in their education and if we do that I think we will, over a long period of time, see fewer of them getting into serious trouble.

 

(EG) I asked the following question of the Home Office within the last six or nine months about the percentage of the Prison Service budget which is spent on education and the answer came back that it was three percent. Now I appreciate that a large amount of the Prison Service budget will go on salaries, a large amount will go on maintaining the buildings and so forth but are you satisfied that three percent is an adequate number? Was that the figure obtained during your time and can you advise us about any way we can improve the education service for those in custody both as young offenders and as adults?

 

(MN) I don't know if that is the figure, although the amount of money which is spent in the Prison Service on staffing and on the very structure of prisons and so forth and moving prisoners about, is very considerable. What I do know is that investment in education in prisons particularly but also in the community, has increased very significantly in real terms since 1996. The amount of education available, particularly basic skills education in prison has increased very significantly and the number of prisoners getting their first ever qualifications in prison has risen dramatically. But I think the bounty from that would have been much more significant had not the prison population grown almost [indistinct] with increased expenditure. During the time I was first Director General and then responsible for both the prisons and probation, which was from 1998 until 2005, although I enjoyed very, very significant investment in rehabilitation - was able to employ many, many more prison officers, probation officers, many more teachers, the rise in the numbers we were dealing with in prison, at no time failed to overtake that increase in investment so it's numbers which are the crippling factor here.

 

(EG) You were Director General of the Prison service, you then became the Chief Executive of the National Offender Management Service, as I understand. Could you just explain to me what your remit was as the Director General and how that fitted in the overall landscape of the supervision of defendants and the reduction, if at all possible, of offending throughout the country?

 

(MN) I was a very fortunate Director General, my predecessors had much more difficult jobs than I did, I was, although it was a difficult job when I was there, I was very fortunate in that I enjoyed significant investment. I took the job from a Home Secretary who agreed expressly that part of the deal would be that I would get investment, particularly in health and education and I could drive forward what I called the "decency agenda" simply to try to get prisoners treated with a little more dignity when they're incarcerated. And I believed, and I remember telling the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, as a consequence of that, I believed I could effect a reduction in re-offending. We made some modest reductions in re-offending up to 2003, but very modest indeed, and again, I think it could have been more significant had it not been because of the very steep rise in the population.

 

(EG) There's a concern that I've come across that the creation of the National Offender Management Service has simply drawn away personnel and expertise into a bureaucracy here in the centre, but which has not produced a divided in terms of effective management of the Probation or the Prison Service or effective reduction in the numbers of people that the Criminal Justice System has to deal with. Is that a false concern?

 

(MN) I think it is a false concern and I don't want to contradict Lord Ramsbotham when he's not in the room, but I think his figures about the rise in bureaucracy at NOMS are wrong, unless there's been something quite astonishing happen since I left. I was quite clear that when I left NOMS in October 2005, there were fewer people employed in prison, probation and NOMS headquarters than there had been two years previously, significantly fewer. But people had moved from prison and probation headquarters into NOMS centres and very importantly, and I think this is a very important development which I think has, like so many things, now evaporated. I also for the first time at NOMS, I was the primary advisor to the Home Secretary on Criminal Policy and that was very important because when you're running prisons or when you're running probation, what you're subject to all the time in the Home Office there's been a particular concern about a particular policy which some bright spark in Home Office suggested to the Home Secretary, such as the thing to do is improve sentence length by 20% without any discussion about whether that can operationally be delivered. And bringing criminal policy and sentencing policy under my umbrella as Chief Executive of NOMS starts to bring that together. And my priority as Chief Executive of NOMS in the time I did it, was I actually tried to address the sentencing issue and work with the Judiciary and particularly the Sentencing Guidelines Council to try to achieve some balance between the numbers being sent to prison and the capacity of prisons.

 

(EG) Finally if I may, under this Bill, as I put to Lord Ramsbotham, there is a top down direction from the Home Secretary through the head of NOMS, through the Regional Offender Managers, down to the Probation Trusts for the commissioning of supervisory services. Whilst I can understand there's clearly a need for some form of leadership and direction, as for any large organisation, are you sure that the structure insofar as it's definable and divinable from this Bill, are we looking from the right end of the telescope or should we be placing far greater emphasis on local supervision and local provision and local commissioning?

 

(MN) I think the top down approach is necessary, not that for all matters but it is necessary to effect changes which are necessary, it used to be before, when we have 54 independent probation services, there was a very healthy relationship with the voluntary sector in particular, indeed although those individual services were lightly managed, there was a requirement on them to spend at least five percent, and I think just before the creation of the National Probation Service, it rose to seven percent, to spend five percent of their budget on voluntary organisations, when the National Probation Service was formed that sum of money immediately reduced, I think is now smaller than three percent. So I think there is a need, I felt when I was there, there was a need to give some national top down direction to stop people working in Probation Services to think that they are the only ones who know best. In my experience, and I do not just say this because Lady Stern is there, but the most innovative, the most effective community penalties I've seen have been some of those from the voluntary sector. In the seventies and eighties on the Biker Wall in Newcastle, I saw projects run by Nacro which I could demonstrate were effective in reducing re-offending. They have all disappeared, nearly everything is delivered in-house, and Barnardo's are unlikely to be involved in this because we, our concentration is on children. But I think that if we gave a greater role to organisations like Nacro, to Crime Concern, we would foster innovation and we would foster effectiveness. And the National Probation Service regrettably has been very slow to take that on and indeed has brought rather too much work back in-house.

 

(MH) Yes, thank you. In your opening comments you made reference to private sector involvement and the fact that you've made some positive references I think, to that aspect, the Home Secretary of course has said that the Bill specifically is not about privatisation but I'd be interested if you could tell a little bit more about the positive experiences from your own perspective, of private sector involvement in prisons because I don't think the public at large perhaps understand that private sector involvement has been quite as successful as perhaps you would wish us to understand it to be, could you expand a bit on that?

 

(MN) When I became Director General in 1998, I remember telling the Chief Executive of United Kingdom Detention Services that I would considerate a success of my tenure as DG if I drove him out of business. But as I try to put an emphasis on decency and the simple things of treating prisoners and their visitors with a bit of dignity, I couldn't fail to notice as I visited private prisons, what visitors and prisoners told me consistently was that they got a great deal of [indistinct] in the Northwest. Prisoners spoke to me very convincingly about the contrast in the way that they were treated in [indistinct] Prison which is near Birkenhead and the way that they were treated in Liverpool Prison, and I realised that the private sector were doing some things really rather well. But I think, I have always been opposed to simply giving work to the private sector, and I am opposed to privatisation, that's what privatisation is. I think the key was to introduce competition in the running of prisons, and actually although sometimes people think that I'm an arch-privateer, I've brought more prisons back into the public sector than I've put into the private sector when I was Director General, I've brought two prisons which had been run successfully by Group4 and [indistinct] back into the public sector because when we put them up to competition, and when we let the public sector compete for prisons, what we've got with the public sector, with the cooperation of a previously very difficult Trade Union the POA, what we got were innovative, exciting and cost-effective proposals for the whole treatment of prisoners. And if I'm to be very blunt, I believe the presence of the private sector helped me to break the POA and the POA needed breaking.

(speaker, not introduced) Is there any particularly reason why the private sector has brought that kind of attitude to bear and that approach to bear in the prisons that it runs which contrasts favourably in your opinion to those still run by the public sector? Is there particular reasons why those prisons still in the public sector should not be able to develop along similar lines?

 

(MN) There isn't at all.

 

(MH) And if there isn't, why haven't they in your opinion?

 

(MN) There isn't at all. I don't believe that there's anything the private sector can do that the public sector can't do as well. What I believe fosters better performance is competition and when, through a series of competitions, what happened to the quality of bids it wasn't just that the public sector caught up. At one time the public sector caught up and overtook the private sector. The private sector had to get their act together a little bit and we got even better quality bids. I recall when we put out a Group4 prison in Humberside for competition; we got a much better bid from Group4 for the running of the prison which they previously ran, not because there was another private sector bidder, but because they knew there was going to be a very good public sector bid. In everything that we do in life, we exploit competition, we all have in real terms fantastic deals on the mobile phones we carry because we can shop around, And I have become convinced that being able to go to more than one supplier for the running of prisons, has significantly increased quality through a very, very difficult period and I think that can be applied in community penalties as well.

 

(NH) what is holding back, my question is generally, what is holding back those prisons that are still in the public sector from adopting the kind of best practice that you're implying private sector prisons are now extensively utilising?

 

(MN) Ok, well I think there utter competition, there hasn't been a holding back, I think that the number of prisons which I felt were hugely inadequate when I left the Home Office in 2005, and I have to say were many fewer than those when I arrived in 1998. When I arrived in 1998 and this is no criticism on my predecessor Sir Richard Tilt who had very, very little in terms of resources to tackle this, but I thought there were a large number of public sector prisons, Wandsworth, Wormwood Scrubs, Brixton, Dartmoor, Liverpool, which were deeply, deeply inadequate and their very treatment of individuals bordering on the unacceptable. I think competition, even if it [indistinct] with that particular prison, I think competition has driven improvements in all of those prisons.

 

(DG) Thank you, Lord Dholakia

 

(LD) Thank you can I say during your watch as a Director General of the Prison Service, you were able to bring some very important changes, policy changes within the prison service, and I want to personally thank you for some of the best [indistinct] policy any Criminal Justice agencies had at that particular time and I also want to thank you in terms of the extent to which you were able to admit things when they went wrong in prisons. What I am not very clear about at this moment with this height and number of attempts by the government in the last five or six years, we still don't have the clarity about the probation and NOMS. Let me make my position clear; I have nothing against [indistinct] support, the idea of a National Offenders Management Services, provided there is a holistic approach, and provided it is very clear about the issues there. Let me just take you back to 2001, on the Probation Service, the government was defeated five times in one single afternoon, about the whole question of senior probation and chief probation officers, yet the government didn't learn their lesson, they went ahead. To this day, we still haven't got any review of what happened since then and why it is necessary to change that particular approach that you adopted a few years ago. You then had a situation of a number of times when you come out with different suggestions as to how NOMS should actually operate, and you went ahead as far as promising a bill and it was never introduced. And finally, we now come about, suggesting a National Offenders Management Service, it generally lacks the support of the Probation Organisation. I am not against Probation Officers being sacked and not finding jobs, I've got nothing [indistinct] with that, because changes are very difficult, but I still believe there is no clarity about what the government is up to. Let me make my position very clear, I am very keen, I said as a magistrate, I wanted my reports and everything that came before me, came as local solutions by local people who were working in the local area who knew themselves more, than people who tried to control situation centrally.

 

(MN) Well as I explained earlier on it's only right for me to talk about what happened up until October 2005 but I understand why there is some confusion because there have been some changes along the way. I think the original concept was about trying to separate the [indistinct] offenders which would be done - which actually was a great boost to the probation service, a great gift to the probation service because of the first time as Chief Executive of NOMS I was saying that the people who are going to primarily determine what happens to somebody not just in the community but in custody are going to be the whole probation office, and we need to separate offender management from the delivery of disposals like community punishment. Originally that was going to be through the abolition of probation boards and then we tried to find a way following a period of consultation of retaining the probation boards and essentially taking the Probation Boards' Association on board with us and as I left in 2005 that was the situation. Things have now moved on a little more and there are now probation trusts. But I would still defend the essential philosophy about what is trying to be happen, that is to try to find a mechanism by which other providers can play a role in the supervision of offenders in the community and I think that will bring real difference - coupled with offender management that will bring a real difference, so long as capacity can be controlled, and I stress unless we can do something about matching capacity and - demand and supply, none of this will make very much difference at all, we simply have to do that, and my greatest regret about this bill is that it no longer has the provisions, meticulously negotiated with me in the middle between David Blunkett and Lord Wolfe about giving a role to the Sentencing Guidelines Council in seeing how we will use the 80,000 prison places we have available. In any other area of public service we have to ration healthcare, we have to ration education, we have to ration prison places and we have to determine, if we have 80,000 prison places, first of all whether that's not, whether that's enough and if it isn't we have to build, if it is enough we have to decide who needs those places, and I would argue that actually we have some people in prison now who perhaps don't stay there as long as they should but we have many people in prison who don't need to be there. The best people to make a judgement of that and the way of depoliticising this whole issue is to give those choices to the Sentencing Guidelines Council and let the senior judiciary advise the crown and magistrates' courts, and I think that without that I worry about any of this being successful.

 

(DG) Thank you. There are a number of people who want to ask questions and also who obviously want to get on to Dr David Green, so if you ask questions be brief, I go to James Brokenshire and then Baroness Stern.

 

(JB) Sorry to come back on to the issue of contestability, I noted your comments that you were a contestability convert as you described it. One aspect of this that perhaps isn't clear is and I'd be interested in your thoughts is how the structure that's proposed will actually create the much-vaunted end-to-end management that has been talked about and as I understand is intended to be part of this because whilst you can put in this commissioner to commission services, there needs to be something to try and link it all together in terms of the national service and I'd be interested in your thoughts as to how the current proposals actually achieve that or whether they don't.

 

(MN) I think the current proposals can achieve that, it depends how far you take contracting out. If I was still Chief Executive I would be pausing long and hard before I took the role of the offender managers and considered whether or not it should be contracted out. I think, as members of the community have commented, there are some real potential conflicts of interest in having, for example, somebody from who before making recommendations to the court in a pre-sentence report when their organisation might benefit. They're not insuperable but they are difficult. I would concentrate very much on introducing competition actually into the delivery of the sentences and I would start with community punishment. Community punishment has a great potential to make a much bigger contribution to the supervision of offenders, its research base is pretty sound, the proportion of offenders who get community punishment has drifted alarmingly away to become much less popular. I think if we got local, locally based voluntary groups, for example, to deliver community punishment, I think public confidence and the courts' confidence would increase and we would get more effectiveness, but the management, the coherence of the management of the offender would not be affected because you would still have one offender manager; the heart of this is one offender manager for each offender, managing them wherever they are and deciding where they need to go within resources.

 

(JB) Sorry, if I may, just on the back of that, do you agree therefore with the analysis that we talked about Lord Ramsbotham, in certain cases though, that you have this cascading effect, you have intervention after intervention after intervention and therefore by the time you get to prison, in some ways you can't do the rehabilitation as effectively as you can, you could do otherwise, just because of the fact that you've got somebody who is so indoctrinated within the criminal justice system, how do you overcome that risk?

 

(MN) I don't agree with that, I would welcome the opportunity here to say something about sentencing drift before I leave. Actually what has happened over the last ten years is that the usual, if one might use the term, 'career' of somebody who went to prison, started with being cautioned, then they might be fined, then they might get community punishment, then they might get another community disposal and finally end in prison. Now people are catapulted into prison, leapfrogging all those other disposals, and my conclusion is that actually quite a few people go to prison now who would, in terms of reducing their re-offending, would benefit from the community penalties which they now miss. One of the reasons for the prison population increasing so markedly during a time when crime has been falling, has been the fact that the courts have become much more likely to use custody and much more likely to impose longer custodial sentences for offending which has not changed, and I can give statistics to demonstrate that.

 

(DG) I want to bring in Lady Stern but I'm interested to hear that, because it's at variance, isn't it, with the response from the judges' council to, who were asked only 48 hours ago about whether too many people were being sent to prison and their response appeared to be that they didn't think... that it was very difficult to get sent to prison, do you have any light that you can shed on that difference of perspective?

 

(MN) I only read the newspaper reports of the, what the Council of Circuit Judges said. What I can say is that as a member of the Sentencing Guidelines Council before my resignation is that the view of the Sentencing Guidelines Council and the then Lord Chief Justice Wolfe was that one could do things to manage within the constraints of the prison population an he frequently expressed his concern about the number of non-dangerous offenders that went to prison, can I just give one example with shoplifting, which I am not suggesting is not a serious offence, but it's not a dangerous offence. First of all the numbers sentenced for shoplifting between 1995 and 2005 have doubled from 18,000 to 37,000, so that's a lot of people who wouldn't previously be in the courts at all being convicted for shoplifting, so one might expect, if we're pulling in some lower level offence, for the custody rate to fall. In fact during that precise period the proportion sent to custody has tripled - it's gone from 8% to 21%, meanwhile the use of fines for shoplifters has dropped for 40% of all shoplifters to 21%, and that's just one example of why we have a rising prison population. This is an old statistic and I haven't been able to check it with old colleagues in the Home Office but I believe this is right. In 2003, there were 29 shoplifters in prison at any one time. Sorry, in 1993. By 2003 that number was 1500. Now I can't really believe that that's a sensible use of a very scarce resource in putting so many offenders of that nature into prison.

 

(DG) Baroness Stern

 

(BS) Thank you. Very briefly, just to say, Martin, how lucky the disadvantaged children are that you're now their champion and I think great things will come for your new role. However, my question is perhaps just a little more questioning than that. I want to ask you, as the designer of the idea of a national offender management service, what you think of what I want to put to you now. We're starting from an offender. A national offender management service is about an offender. An offender is a little person who hopes he will not be an offender for ever but is passing through a phase called 'offender', a little person who lives in a place somewhere, who has a family somewhere, who will get a job in a little place hopefully and who will get services in a little place, whose whole life will related to being resettled in a little place, and will stop being 'offender' and will stop having anything to do with anything national.

 

Now, in that, if that is the right view of the world, that this is the starting point for this whole reconfiguration of the service, how can a national offender management service be anything other than a hugely expensive, very bureaucratic, self-aggrandising set of processes, as we understand from Helen Edwards' interview yesterday, often done on video cameras because there is not enough money for the probation officers to go and see their prisoner, as the prisoner moves from the north to the south to the Isle of Wight and so on. How can it possibly not be a total waste of money to do this as a great national service, rather than - most other countries in Western Europe do it, as something about the local situation and the local person?

 

(MN) Well first of all because it's being run by a remarkable person, who was your deputy for many years and who you know very well, and I think NOMS is safe with Helen Edwards as Chief Executive, but I agree with much of what you've said there, Lady Stern, it is wrong to look at people just as offenders. Nearly everybody in the criminal justice system, nearly everybody who we're seeing caught on a regular basis at the moment, nearly all of them will stop offending, they will nearly all stop in or around their late 20s. You just need to go into any prison and see how young the prison population is. Offending is something that people grow out of. What helps them to grow out of it is a fairly simple thing; there are no cures here, it's not about offending behaviour courses, it's not, I regret to say, about speech therapy, there are no simple cures. It's about getting people an education so they can become employable, it's about finding them somewhere to live, and it's about a family relationship. It's a very old-fashioned notion but actually one of the most significant things that stops a young man offending is getting into a stable relationship and getting married. If you can do things to bring those three things forward, if you can bring the efforts of prison and probation together to make a better job of making people employable, to make a better job of getting people somewhere to live, particularly when they leave custody, I have always believed that you can bring forward the point at which people will desist from offending, and actually I don't consider myself the designer of NOMS, there were some, as Lord Carter would acknowledge, he and I had some pretty robust exchanges in the design of this, but I was tempted to leave the job I love, which is running the prison service, to move into a more central role because I believed then and I believe now that bringing the work of prison and probation together, to give more consistent management and support of offenders is the way to make some increases. But I want to be quite clear: we are talking about modest increases. The suggestions that prison and probation can halve re-offending are simply nonsense. It is impossible. All the research suggests that the best you can hope for are marginal increases in re-offending in the nature of five or ten percent, but in cost/benefit terms they are well worth having.

 

(DG) On to Nick Hurd and Baroness Anelay, and then I think we'll have to bring this session to a close.

 

(NH) Thank you. I share your view on the merits of competition but given the reform fatigue that appears to exist out there and given the sensitivities about how we release offenders into the community, do you agree the incremental reform at this stage needs to be evidence-based, and if so, can you point us to any hard data, either from the proportion of services outsourced at the moment or from international markets, that actually show a causal link between competition and reduced re-offending which is the criteria of success that the Home Secretary has set for this Bill?

 

(MN)Yes, at risk of repeating, I would point to experience with prisons, where I think competition...

 

(NH) Prisons aren't probation services...

 

(MN) Well, nevertheless we have in the positive sense an example of where competition has made an increase in the quality of service, right across the sector, both public and private, and I think prisons stand, private sector prisons and their effect on the wider public sector prison world has been very, very significant. NAPO, when I was running NOMS, NAPO used to frequently say to me, "Where is the evidence that contestability will make an impact?" And I used to say, "Well, actually we will find out". If we had competitions for the running of, for example, community punishment in Hampshire, we'll find out, we'll find out whether the voluntary sector can do a more cost-effective job, or indeed whether the private sector can. Competition will find that out. But the fact is that we will give commissioners a choice. And I have to say that although NAPO are a, perhaps a more sophisticated trades union than the POA, in some respects they are just as restrictive in their activities. And I could take members of this committee to look at community punishment, as delivered now, in some areas of the probation service, not all, and I think you would be pretty shocked at the proportion of staff to offenders, a very unhealthy proportion, in some probation areas the unions have managed to win agreements that of community punishment for example, which are low-level offenders, there can only be six offenders with one member of staff. Now I think if we said to Crime Concern, for example, "Do you think you could do a better job?" I'm sure that they would say that they could. Competition will find that out. And I stress competition because in many, if we had competition for community punishment for example I'm sure that in many parts of the country, the public sector would win. But they'd win by offering us a better product and better value for money and potentially greater effectiveness than we get at the moment.

 

(DG) Baroness Anelay

 

(BA) Can I just ask you a little more about the role of the voluntary sector.Why is it you're so convinced that it's a bottom-down approach, which can only deliver a larger contribution via the voluntary sector, and do you think that there is any danger that the smaller charities, unlike Barnardo's, the smaller charities may be at a disadvantage. If not, why not, and if so, are there ways in which Barnardo's can work with smaller charities to ensure they're not at a disadvantage?

 

(MN) I don't think it needs to be a top-down approach, I think the top-down approach with probation, as I mentioned earlier, is a consequence of probation having essentially retreated from partnership with the voluntary sector which is regrettable. Frankly had that not happened I doubt we'd be sitting here today. With the introduction of the voluntary sector, the third sector, in the delivery of community penalties then this probably wouldn't be happening. But it has and it's been severely reduced. And this is a way of enforcing change. If you're asking if small charities might suffer, yes they might, it depends on the contracting regime. I'm not able to speak on what's happening at the moment but I was determined when I was running NOMS to make sure that whereas for [indistinct] we might have very large contracts that we made sure that wherever possible we could have quite small contracts which would be open to local organisations to deliver and the reason I did that was that I saw, for example, in Brighton, the drug treatment orders or the drug rehabilitation requirements in the community order [indistinct] alcohol are delivered by a very small voluntary sector organisation functioning only in Brighton and nowhere else, and I was determined to make sure that those organisations would not miss out. But there's a wider implication behind your question relevant to my current job which I'd like to say something about. I do think it is up to organisations like mine to help smaller organisations out, to be their partner and to work with them. I am currently developing such arrangements with three very, very small charities in this area, and I'm determined that we will do more. We do have an infrastructure and we should share some of that infrastructure with very small organisations to help them get through, for example, the tendering processes, and I'm determined Barnardo's will do that much more.

 

(BA) Thank you

 

(DG) Martin Narey, thank you very much for giving us your time this morning, it's been extremely useful, and I'm left with a slight sense certainly speaking from my point of view having taken over the chair that there were about five or six other matters I wanted to ask you arising from what you said but I shall restrain myself. Thank you very much, and well worthwhile. Thank you.

 

(John Bercow) Hear, hear

 

(DG) The next witness is Dr David Green. Dr Green, welcome. Thank you for your patience in sitting through the two other sessions. Dr Green is, founded Civitas, the institute for the study of civil society, has been at the Institute for Economic Affairs since 1984, and director of the IEA Health & Welfare Unit since 1986, previously a Labour councillor in Newcastle, as well as a research fellow in Australia. Dr Green, before we ask questions, especially as you've had the opportunity of sitting through the two previous witnesses, was there anything you wanted to say at the start, to set the scene as to your views about the Offender Management Bill?

 

(DDG) Not really, I'd rather just answer questions if that's alright with you.

 

(DG) Who would like to go first?

 

(EG) Can I repeat Dominic's thanks to you and also thank you for sitting through, no doubt frustrated as others were speaking and you were listening, but I wanted to get your perspective on the way in which policymakers and particularly legislators approach the issue of offending and what ought to be done about how to divert people away from offending and what we ought to do in order to supervise offenders once they are within the criminal justice system to ensure they don't come back, and whether we are doing the right things with regards to the supervision of offenders post-custody, so that the two forms of supervision, that's to say community punishment supervision and post-custody supervision of those who have been in custody and whether from start to finish, this expression 'end-to-end-management', we as policymakers and legislators are really doing, in your view, the right thing, are we looking at the right bits of elements to make sure we are coming up with the right things to protect the public?

 

(DDG) Well there are some criminalisation things and there are some socialisation things that you have to think about. You've got to get the basics right in criminal justice first of all, and that is, so I think you've got to have, in this country we should have more police, the police should change the methods in which they function, they should move, they're already saying they're moving towards neighbourhood policing, they need to do that. We need more prison places, so that we're not overcrowded, and when people are in prison, something constructive should be done with them. Now there's countless efforts - people have been talking this morning about vocational education, basic education and getting people off drugs. Those are the, everybody knows the right things to do, and there are numerous well-intentioned efforts to do precisely those things already happening, but they're not being done very effectively, and you only have to look at the Home Affairs Committee's own report recently to see that. So, I think you've got to get those simple things right first and the, at present they're not being got right, on anything like the right scale. Then there's some socialisation questions that are saying "Why do people commit crimes in the first place?" and we've already heard talk about the risk factor so one of the big risk factors is being in care, broken homes is another risk factor, having parents who themselves are criminals, having parents who are drug addicts, or alcoholics; they're also big risk factors, and you have to attend to those problems as well, and unless we do attend to what you might call primary socialisation alongside the criminal justice measures, you'll still get this steady flow of youngsters coming into crime.

 

However, they're not mutually exclusive alternatives, a lot of people talk about them as if they are, but what the police do and what the criminal justice system does, can help or undermine the efforts of good parents, so if you live on a council estate, let's say, and there's a lot of youngsters who are on the borderline between crime and leading a law-abiding life and you're the parent who's telling your kid not to commit the burglaries and not to do the robberies, and the reply comes back "Oh well, the kid next door just got an informal warning after he broke into Mrs. So-and-so's house", that can make a big difference, so the criminal justice system has to send the right messages about what's right and what's wrong and what society will do something about in order to reinforce the efforts of parents and others to do the primary socialisation properly. And they're not separate things, and you often hear people talking as if they are.

 

But then the specific point about the seamless attention to the offender once they're in the system, I think that is the right approach, I think the government is trying to do the right thing because, for, it's been talking about, there was a big rehabilitation movement in the 1920s, a chap called Patterson was a great champion in those days, you know we were talking about this for seventy, eighty, ninety years and it's still a fact that when offenders leave prison, there's been a named officer and there's been a link with a probation officer and there's nearly always some voluntary association involved, well-intentioned voluntary organisation that helps them when they leave, all that is happening in some sense, but when you go and talk to the people who are doing these, making all these contacts, you'll find that they lose touch with them in two or three weeks, and they'll say "Oh well, they were at this address, and then they moved, and nobody knows where they went" And nobody knows where they went, so it isn't being done very systematically at the moment. And it needs to be, and this regime was intended to make a proper job of having attention paid to reforming people while they're in prison and if possible establishing good relations with them, the same people establishing good relations with them while they're inside, and supervising them, and showing that combination of supervision and kindness and help acting as a mentor, if you like, which makes a difference, particularly with younger people. So it's the right approach, it's trying to do the right thing, whether it's done in the right way or not, which both Martin Narey and lord Ramsbotham were implying it wasn't, I have my doubts because for example, you're not going to be a mentor if you're having a video conference with someone who's in Newcastle and you're in London, it's got to be a personal relationship, it's got to be a face-to-face personal relationship and there's got to be a lot of home visiting. So it's the right thing to do but I'm not entirely sure that it's being done in the right spirit, it's being done in a rather bureaucratic spirit as far as I can see.

 

(EG) Look, I think this bill is about the sixtieth criminal justice bill this government has passed since 1997, that's a broader figure. Are you suggesting to me that getting the basics right is something that's done outside legislation and it requires boring, administrative, getting on with the job, making sure that people talk to people and that people do a job rather than policymakers converting their good ideas, or less good ideas, into another bill.

 

(DDG) If you try to keep, I mean everybody tries to keep up with this debate and familiarise themselves with the literature and notes and it's very hard to, if you were asked to point to a couple of bright ideas that seem to work very much it's very hard to say "Oh well, this worked and that worked, in rehabilitating offenders" but some things do work. If we're talking about people admitted to prison then, depending on which survey you look at, something like two-thirds of them manage to get hold of drugs, sometimes it's a lower figure, depends on the survey, sometimes it can be two-thirds, I've seen higher figures, that get hold of drugs in prison, and including heroin and cocaine, serious drugs, not just cannabis. The prison authorities could stop that. Some prisons in other parts of the world stop that, they have a system, they have a regime now of random drug tests, actually Lord Ramsbotham made a rather amusing anecdote in his book where he says he went into one prisoner's cell and said "Ah, you've got," I think it was eight, "certificates on the wall for passing the random drug test," and she said "Yes, if you come back tomorrow, I'll have nine" - I don't know if you remember that - and he said "How do you know?" and he said "Well, they always pick me for the random drug test because they know I don't do drugs". So random drug tests aren't really it, but mandatory drug tests on admission - they do them on arrest now - but mandatory drug tests on admission, which I think are not always done, would help, and then you start with a regime, and we have to forget about the sheer folly of compensating people because they are made to go 'cold turkey', under the Human Rights Act, they should be made to go 'cold turkey' and that's one thing you could do. And the second thing you could do, which again is an administrative thing, it doesn't require any change in the law, it is - and everybody has been talking about this for years, people have been talking about it today - that is get the education right and there's two aspects of education, there's the basic skills and there's the vocational skills so that when they leave prison they have something useful that they can, if they're so inclined to be law-abiding, they can get a proper job, and there's a lot of this already happening , every year they have the prison service publishes a report which says how many qualifications have been obtained, how many GCSEs and all the rest of it, so there's a lot of this happening, a lot of extremely well-intentioned people in the prison service and outside, who take this same view and are trying to do their bit, but a lot of people still go through prison who don't get any help, they don't get, they didn't have any basic numeracy and literacy skills when they went in, and they still don't when they come out, and they didn't have a vocational skill when they went in, and they still don't when they came out. So the, you know, the answers are known, but they don't get the simple things right, and that is, it's pure administration.

 

(DG) Could I just pick up that point? Is it also, does it go beyond that? I mean, I was conscious when I was doing prisons spokesman for my party, visiting centres of excellence often run by the voluntary sector, and I can think of one particular one in Devon which was post-release, and received a great deal of praise, and then the government said that they liked the model but intended to run it out through the Home Office, take it in-house rather than through the voluntary sector, there's an organisation called C-FAR in Devon, and they never did it, eventually the funding for C-FAR withered on the vine, and as far as I'm aware it's now closed, and my experience was that a whole series of projects and initiatives which get started, appear to have some substance and then get abandoned, is that something that you've picked up from...?

 

(DDG) I don't know if that's a pattern, I know of the case you mentioned. I think the thing to get right is this: that I think particularly with young offenders, if you've got the people aged roughly between ten and let's say twenty for the sake of argument, who can, and there must be some hope that they can change, and we have to think of it, I think, and the people who dislike prison make this point all the time, and I always argue, well, they should be out in prison and something constructive done with them while they're there but I share this with them, it is, you should see it as a matter of primary socialisation, that's is to say that these are the people that have never been socialised, if you like, they haven't really got a conscience, they don't really think it's particularly wrong to steal or attack other people or hurt other people, or if they do steal they'll say "Oh well, they're insured" or something like that, they'll rationalise it or they won't have any feelings about it, whereas most people, if you see somebody's bag, I don't know, is that somebody's - I can't make out what that is, it's probably a tape recorder, it might be somebody's phone it's like, "When nobody's looking, I'll have that" Well none of us would do that, because our conscience stops us, other people don't have a conscience, they could have a conscience and you, when their parents haven't done that job and when the care system hasn't done that job and being in care often means you get to the age of 10,12,13,14 you may have had no adult ever showing you any serious affection for more than a few months at a time, because there's a big staff turnover, quite apart from your own parents. That's what you've got to change and you've got to change it by having a mentor, and people talk about risk factors, so those are the risk factors, being in care and coming from a broken family and having criminal parents. But there are also protective factors, and one of the protective factors is having a resilient personality, which is quite apart from what else happens to you, but the other, one of the others is having a mentor, and adult to whom you can turn, who, if your parents have let you down and the care system has let you down, it could be the local vicar, it could be the sports coach, it could be the, you know, the youth leader, a teacher, it could be any adult, it could be an organised mentor, for that matter, there are these schemes that organise people from business to go and spend some time each week with a youth who is at risk of crime. So, I think that's where we've got to look, you've got to think of it as resocialisation or doing the primary socialisation in the first place, but I think you've got to do it when they're in custody often, because sometimes children get to the age of 14, 15, 16, they're doing hardly anything but commit serious crimes, the public's got to be protected. Quite often the best thing you can do for them is to take them away for a year or to, from their disorderly circumstances and put them with some people who genuinely care about them and want to act as their parent substitutes. So they finish that year or so guided by a conscience which is the only, ultimately the only way to reduce crime.

 

(EG) But if we, I take your point, but the problem I find with visiting prisoners which I do at my current job is that we take into prisons people who are socially inadequate in all sorts of ways and one, two, three years later we push them out the other end in exactly the same condition. Now, let's accept your idea for mentors is a good one, it socialises youngsters. But they come to the end of their two-year period in this place, be it a young offender institution or in care or wherever it may be, essentially what we do is we push them out the back of the aeroplane without a parachute and they are left to fend for themselves. Unless they are sufficiently strong and resilient personalities themselves, they are likely to need the sort of mentoring on a continuous basis, and are you suggesting we should have some sort of state system or charitable system which continues to mentor ex-offenders or ex-inmates for some considerable time so that the letting-down down process, to independence, is more gradual than it appears to be at the moment?

 

(DDG) Yeah, that would be the way to go, and I think that's some of the thinking that was behind the establishment of NOMS, to have this - people sometimes say - seamless process of supervisions, I'm really, and it's not preposterous, it isn't done very well anywhere but it could be done and I think it's the only way that you can do it. I mean, the hardest group are people on drugs, and there are a lot of schemes in America, there's the In-prison Therapeutic Communities which then release from prison to a halfway house, and then into supervised accommodation. So they supervise people for about three years. It takes, and even after that you only get about thirty percent of them off the drugs but that compares with about six percent of people where we didn't have that treatment so it does take a long time...

 

(EG) But would you build that into the sentence?

 

(DDG) Umm, umm, I probably would, yeah, I have, because at the moment if we have release at the halfway stage it is built in to the sentence because they're supervised until the end of the sentence by the probation service. I'm not sure if I agree with releasing at the half way point but... [laughter]

 

(DG) Could be controversial...

 

(DDG) I think, I think it would be sensible, yeah, to have. It depends who it is, I mean some people, the basic principle here is this is a free country. Here are the standards of right and wrong that we all live up to, if you break the rules, this consequence follows. And so we're relying on people to, so to speak, learn their lesson, to serve their time, pay their debt to society and then start afresh. We hope they'll come back into society as law-abiding citizens. So you don't necessarily want people supervised if that works. It does work, quite often. But when it doesn't work then you do need the supervision by someone who is a - I think mentor is the best word, that is to say they are providing a combination of love and supervision.

 

(DG) Do you want to...?

 

(Nick Hurd)Yes, yes. Obviously, Dr Green, you talked at length about the need for dealing with offenders, the seamless end-to-end management, those sorts of things. It's a question of how to deliver that in practice and I wonder if I could move you on to the debate about contestability, you obviously heard some of the comments that have been made this morning, I'm interested in what your views are on the structure that is being suggested and whether it can actually deliver a lot of the things that you've rightly identified as being needing to be provided.

 

(DDG) Well whether the structure can do it I don't know, but it's the right thing to try to do for this reason: it's not obvious who, in any walk of life, it doesn't matter whether it's selling a business or providing a service like this, it's not obvious in advance who's going to come up with the bright ideas, who's going to be the best at providing a given service or producing a certain particular good. So we've learnt over the years it's best to let many people try their hand in a competitive system to see who ultimately succeeds, and that insight is valuable, so I know Martin Narey spoke of competition, and if that's what he meant by competition then we're saying exactly the same thing. The trouble with this contestability process is it doesn't say "right, everybody have a go at doing a good job of mentoring troubled young people". It says "put your bids up to the Home Office and we'll decide whether it's a good idea or not and we'll decide which ones get the contracts." So, the innovation comes at a preliminary stage and is filtered out by the Home Office, or the National Offender Management Service. And I'm not at all sure whether anything terribly innovative will be left standing after it has been filtered in that way, but the - sorry, I seem to be losing my voice - but the basic insight is the right one, that you have to let many people try their hand, and as we know from the voluntary organisations that work with the prisons and help with prisoners on release, so there are a fantastic number of voluntary organisations with terribly well-motivated people trying to do the right thing and to give them more of a chance was the original inspiration for this, as I say I'm not convinced that the structure that's been set up will actually accomplish that.

 

(EG) Would you therefore agree with, I think, some of the criticisms made and I notice that Martin Narey sought to address this in terms of suggestions of how this could be overcome but do you agree with the approach that this may lead to smaller community organisations finding it more difficult actually to do a lot of the good work that you've suggested just by virtue of this difficulty in being able to get into what may be a regionally-commissioned contract through ROMS, the Home Office and down through probation trusts.

 

(DDG) It could easily work that way, I just don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me if it worked that way, and it's actually better if the prison governor is supposed to be responsible for setting up some release arrangements and the voluntary organisations can go along to the prison governor and say, "look, let's have a crack at taking..."

 

(EG)Identification of the service you want to compete for. The Home Office is going to do anything to say, we want to see in Bristol, a competition for the provision of post-release supervision, or post-release housing or post-release drug rehabilitation, bidders come forward, rather than something or other more vague.

 

(DDG) Yeah, since we're talking about people who are in prison and under the supervision of the prison governor, I would say give the prison governor the responsibility to accept all sorts of experimental support arrangements on release, and to see who is, turns out to be good at it, and learn from them.

 

(DG) Up to a point, isn't, that's what seems to have happened, but it's all been on a, I mentioned C-FAR earlier, a fragmented basis with the [indistinct] unit at Reading prison, which made sure that all the young offenders that went there for the last six months ended up with a job and housing, sent them out for training - they all did pipe-laying - it was immensely successful with a very low re-offending rate, admittedly that was probably slightly selective because people had been...

 

(DDG) Yeah

 

(DG) ...picked to go there, but that was run, as far as I'm aware, by the governor, and it was an initiative taken but it was, there seemed to be the absence of any, this is the point I came to earlier, and I'll ask you about this - is there a problem about politicians and government departments are there to empower people to do something, is there a problem that the Home Office, and NOMS for that matter, doesn't seem to be very good at providing the empowerment to individuals such as governors to do any of these particular tasks?

 

(DDG) Ah, why hasn't there been more of it already, is it because they're too busy, it's not made clear that it's welcome, I don't know. All I'm saying is it's not clear to me that to set up a formalised contracting process is the way ahead, it's - what you want to do is to make the people on the spot feel that they are encouraged and will be supported if they come up with all sorts of bright ideas, experiments...

 

(JB) I'm just going to follow up your particular question that you just asked, is it going to be a big problem that we have that politicians rather than talking down, are talking up about crime, about toughness and if you look at the very simple example of the parole system in this country, a very successful system, within which 95 percent of people who are on parole do exactly what I would have expected of them, do not re-offend, but about five percent will re-offend from time to time, but the entire policy seems to be based on those five percent as to how they should be dealt with, rather than looking at the success of it. And I think one of the things that it fails to do is to recognise there are some very, very good practices and effective practices that are not [indistinct] voluntary organisations. How do you highlight that rather than simply talking about toughness on crime?

 

(DDG) Ah, how do you highlight it? Well, you've just got to say it. I mean, I can't really - it seems rather obvious, I don't mean to be trite, but it is just a matter of willpower, I think, some things just a matter of willpower. If that seems to be true, well, the government's got the power to do anything it wants, why doesn't it do that?

 

(DG) I know in about five minutes' time everything will turn into pumpkins as we come up to the...

 

(BS) I want to just have a quick one.

 

(DG) ...questions. I think we've got time to do five minutes more.

 

(BS) Well this is a, you've said some extremely interesting things and I was very heartened to hear it. Am I right that in your view the whole basis of this Offender Management Bill with this command structure, with everything from the Home Secretary down, and then the competing for contracts, and the whole plan is ill-advised, and that your view would be that to get the system to deliver, you actually have to liberate the people at the bottom and give them little budgets and more, much more freedom to buy, to hire, to invite, to look for and to make their bit of it blossom with everything that civil society can deliver. Is that...

 

(DDG) Well that's a better way of putting it than I put it myself. But, it's a well-intentioned thing, this offender management...

 

(BS) [indistinct] a very nice person

 

(DDG) ...a long process of help and supervision and as well as control and punishment, which is the right thing to do, but I think they've set up a structure which will actually not, well, I have my doubts about whether it will deliver what they hope.

 

(BS) And are you saying that the way I described it...

 

(DDG) Yes, I...

 

(BS) ...should be, is that what you think would deliver, I mean you're right about socialisation ...

 

(DDG) Yeah.

 

(BS) ...and how people have to be reintegrated ...

 

(DDG) Yeah.

 

(BS)...and have to have someone they relate to, all that is absolutely right from all the research there is. Do you see that that's the way to get that?

 

(DDG) I would like to localise rather than centralise, if that's the issue, for sure, yeah.

 

(BS) Thank you.

 

(EG)Can I ask you, we talked about mentoring and things that we do to the offenders and prisoners, I want to try and improve the delivery of the service from the people in the prisons and people in the probationary services [indistinct], not the probation services and also through prison officers and I had a half thought of an idea about incentivising prison governors and incentivising prison officers and incentivising probation officers in their delivering probation services. Do you think it is practically possible to build into prison governors' salary structures, to build into prison officers' wages and conditions and salaries and similarly to build into the probation service and so on, financial incentives so that if for example a prison governor can produce from his prison a greater number of people who can read and write and can go down to the job centre and actually look at the job card, that he should be rewarded, it may put him in competition with another prison governor down the road, but that there should be some form of financial or other wages and conditions incentivisation to encourage the improvement of the product, to use the hideous expression, we put junk into the prisoners and we take junk out of the prisoners - is there some way we can incentivise those who run the prisons to turn the junk into a useful social human being?

 

(DDG) Incentive systems - it's hard to devise incentive systems that don't have perverse effects. You know you've got this big problem with all government targets that you've got the underlying difficulty is that the people at the bottom that are doing the job and have the knowledge about what's required, know things that the people at the top don't, and then the people at the bottom may have different actually intentions from the people at the top and so there's a constant struggle for the people at the top to devise targets and measures that get the outcome that they want, so those famous ones in the health service and so on. Nobody waits more than four hours in emergency, turns out that they were keeping people in ambulances until the four hour clock started ticking outside, so it was worse for them and then they had, were putting people into corridors at, you know, five minutes before the four hours was up, calling them wards when they weren't really wards, they were just a corridor next to the accident and emergency. So it looked as if you were getting a result and you weren't, and it's the same problem with this. So, I haven't thought about this enough, all I've done is tried to be familiar with the literature about what works and what doesn't work and can therefore suggest directions of travel but if you then ask me to say "How do you make that happen?" I don't really know. I'm sure there's some - within a centralised structure you can make it clear what's, to people who are on the ground, what's expected of them, any good organisation ought to be able to do that and that isn't consistently done, whether you do it through an incentive system or a kind of target-meeting culture, I'm not so sure, but you of course do it by making it clear what's expected.

 

(JB) It's the target-meeting culture which produces the skews where everything then starts to be adapted to meet the targets so one's somehow got to provide the incentive without, without it being simply a series of targets.

 

(DDG) That's right, yeah. What gets - some people say what gets measured gets done, but it doesn't always lead to the thing you thought being done actually being done.

 

(DDG) Yeah, well, there's, is it called Goodhart's law, that is to say if you turn a measure into a target you make it meaningless, that is to say if you can measure something and then you make that a performance target that somebody else has to meet, then they make the numbers come out right, but it's ceases to actually measure anything very much. I think that's a perennial problem, but it's not hopeless, there's ways of making expectations clear, you could decentralise, not necessarily bureaucratise, I suppose that's what I'm saying.

 

(DG) Well, I'm conscious that we probably ought to bring this session to a close, thank you very much Dr Green, thank you for giving us your time, thank you for waiting patiently to give your evidence, and thank you for your help. It's a very challenging note on which to end, how we succeed in providing incentives without setting targets. Thank you all very much for attending.

 

January 2007