Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
PHIL HOPE
MP, RT HON
BARONESS SCOTLAND
OF ASTHAL
QC, MR CHRIS
BARNHAM AND
MRS FRANCES
FLAXINGTON
18 DECEMBER 2006
Q80 Chairman: Leeds, you see, short
answers from a Yorkshire woman. You think when you drill down
away from the people represented, why have these people not written
to our Committee saying how good it is?
Mrs Flaxington: They are too busy
getting on with their work.
Chairman: I see. I am really enjoying
this. Frances, I am going to direct all future questions to you,
but we are moving on.
Q81 Mr Chaytor: Briefly, before we
leave this section, in the new document, the reducing re-offending
document, Next Steps, there is frequent reference to the
campus model, but as far as I can see nowhere in the document
does it describe the campus model. Could you describe your understanding
of the campus model, Minister?
Phil Hope: In a sense, if you
can imagine either a geographical area or virtually, what we want
to do is understand that an offender sits within a campus in which
they will arrive into the system, their learning needs will be
assessed and then an individual learning plan will be developed
for them as part of joining the campus, as it were, this geographical
area, or indeed a virtual campus, and there will be provision
made to meet those individual needs. It could be work training,
it could be the kind of thing that we were talking about with
the wider curriculum, it could be work experience and many other
things. An employability contract critically might be drawn up
which the offender signs saying that in return for turning up
and doing these courses and so on there will be privileges and
responses to that individual while they are in custody. Impacting
on all of that process for that individual offender inside the
campus there are the campus providers, there are the employers
who provide employment opportunities who maybe come into the prison
and set up mechanical equipment to deliver the mechanical engineering
or whatever it is that we are going to be training the prisoner
on there will be the learning providers who will be there delivering
the teaching and the learning and there will be support from mentors
or others from the alliances that we have been talking about,
the civic alliance and so on, who provide support, the macros
and so, on that work with offenders in that way. There is a complete
continuity of the passage of the offender, what happens to them
and all of those providers, including the prison governors and
the head of learning and skills services in that prison working
together to ensure there is a complete picture joining up. Indeed,
when the offender leaves and goes out into the community, they
are linked to a provider there, an FE college or whatever it might
be, and they are linked through the Jobcentre which might be another
part of the campus, another organisation committed to the same
route that we are talking about here in that campus making sure
that they are connected to an employer to give them the opportunity
to get an interview to get a job. That is what I mean by the campus,
it is the collection of agencies and organisations working collaboratively
together in that cycle that I have just described of arrival,
assessment, meeting the need and providing various ways of responding
to the individuals.
Q82 Mr Chaytor: Is that not what
is supposed to happen now?
Phil Hope: Clearly, we would like
more to happen and by calling it "the campus model",
by describing it in that way in a region where we get the Regional
Offender Managers working with the regional Learning and Skills
Council looking at the prisons in a particular region, what facilities
they have got, what training they are providing, we can get the
complete picture and I have to say regional Jobcentre Plus are
working together, we get a commitment to that collaboration that
has not been there in the past.
Q83 Mr Chaytor: The key new feature
is the degree of regional collaboration rather than the individual
aspects of the process because the whole question of initial assessment,
allocation to training programmes is all there now, is it not?
Are we clear?
Phil Hope: Unfortunately, all
of those features are not there now—
Q84 Mr Chaytor: Or should be there
now.
Phil Hope: —in that connected
way that I would like to see happen. Bits of that model, bits
of those things that I was describing there, are happening in
bits of the system. What we want to do is to take two regions
and put the whole thing together in a comprehensive way so that
there are all those good features, you described them as anecdotes,
evidence of good practice. I can go up to Liverpool, go to a prison
there and there is a prison officer who has been charged with
the job of going out and talking to employers and linking up individual
offenders with individual employers to get them jobs. That is
not happening in every prison.
Q85 Chairman: We picked up on one
on the Isle of Wight.
Phil Hope: It is not happening
everywhere. We want to make it happen in one region collectively
and then really see, when the system is singing in that way, just
how far we can get in terms of improving skills and employment
opportunities.
Q86 Mr Chaytor: The campus model
describes a level of collaboration between all of the existing
agencies that is not operating now and it describes a level of
regional co-operation and delivery that is not there now.
Phil Hope: Moreover, it describes
for an individual offender, through the employability contract,
a personal experience which is not there at the moment and which
could be literally a contract that if we are offering this to
an offender, to go through those processes and get those results,
that then there is something in return or indeed there is a withdrawal
of those privileges and so on so that there is a counsellor for
the individual offender. It is not only collaboration at that
organisational level regionally and at the level of the prison,
actually those agencies working together, but for the individual
offender they can see what is going on for themselves and what
they get and what they lose if they do not co-operate.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: Of
course, we now have service level agreements which we did not
before which the Regional Offender Manager is able to enter into
with various suppliers. We have the Local Area Agreements which
we are able to take better advantage of with the other departments
taking a purchase on it locally. We have now got a number of partnership
tools to deliver this which we did not have before and that hopefully
will make it easier.
Q87 Chairman: Why give it the name
"campus"? It does not make any sense.
Phil Hope: We wanted to get to
the idea of what happens in mainstream education. If you take
the idea of a university campus where a student might turn up
and be looked after by somebody, go through an assessment, go
on a course, have things meeting their needs and they might link
up to the milk round an employer will give them a job. I know
that is a long way away from what I am talking about here but
the idea of a campus, a place in which all these different agencies
impinging upon the individual as they go along their journey,
seems to make sense to us and it puts it into an educational framework
and therefore does make the point about skills.
Chairman: When we took evidence on this
in our inquiry I kept urging—there are about the same number
of prisons as universities, that may change but there is roughly—twining
between universities and prisons. There are two or three very
healthy relationships. Jeff Ennis wants a Yorkshire question.
Q88 Jeff Ennis: Most prisons operate
an allowance system for different duties that the prisoners operate,
I know it is a very meagre sort of allowance, but in many respects
quite often prisoners are penalised if they are doing education
courses rather than producing goods, for want of a better expression.
Are we tackling that issue head-on so that prisoners do get rewarded
in allowance terms for undertaking certain skills qualifications
or whatever?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: We
are trying to do that through the service level agreements because
you are right, there is a disincentive for some offenders who
take low-level, low-skill employment jobs in prison because that
will give them more money than education. We are seeking to address
that by taking away disincentives.
Q89 Jeff Ennis: It appears to me
if a prisoner is undertaking a course that will give him an opportunity
to go into employment, that ought to be the highest level of allowance
that we ought to be operating rather than them doing a menial
task, for example, producing mail bags or whatever people do in
prison these days.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: That
is exactly what we are looking at through the employability contract
and the arrangement that we are trying to build up. The creation
of tool kits for various areas; for instance, Humberside has a
tool kit which does the analysis of skills gaps for employers
and tries to match that so that we get a throughput into prisons
to make sure that we are incentivising people to try and develop
the skills that are most likely to get them a job at the end of
the day.
Q90 Chairman: Minister, we have had
a 78% change in the providers in this kind of education and training.
If you did that in any other part of FE, there would be a revolution,
would there not? You could not do it. Is it a good thing? Some
of the literature almost boasts 78% change. That means a lot of
people who were delivering quite high quality prison education
and training over the years have gone from the system and you
have started again and you are warning that it might happen again
in 2009. It is not good, is it? You would not do this in FE colleges,
would you?
Phil Hope: Interestingly, we are
bearing down on the quality generally. Outside of what goes on
with offender learning, you will know that through the FE Bill,
we are making sure that we answer the demand-led system of funding
that is increasingly coming through, trying to go into the FE
system. We have a mechanism for making FE colleges far more responsive
to the needs of employers and we have by passing responsibility
to the LSC for dealing with colleges that fail a far harder way
of making sure that we do not have failure in the system. Our
aim is to eliminate failure from the system generally in FE and
raise the quality of employer responsiveness and indeed through
training again increase the funding that goes to FE if they win
those contracts for delivering that funding. I see no reason why
a desire to eliminate failure in the system should not apply to
offenders and their learning and although that is a lot of change,
we can see from the evidence before us, that change has been of
benefit in terms of raising the quality of offender learning in
the system.
Q91 Stephen Williams: My question
is about NOMS. While we have been sat here I have been skim reading
this Next Steps report. My skim reading skills probably
are not as good as Baroness Scotland's, but I was looking for
references to NOMS because that is what I am meant to be asking
about and I cannot find that many. On page 10 in figure two, for
the record, where we have got this colourful diagram, next year
we are going to be conceptualising and in 2008 we are going to
be proving and evaluating and then in 2009 we are going to be
rolling out. We have got several things being rolled out, one
of them is a commissioning model for NOMS in the spring of 2009
and another is a commissioning model for the Learning and Skills
Council in July 2009. What is going to be the relationship between
the Learning and Skills Council and NOMS and who is going to be
the primary driver in what I assume was the campus that David
was asking about earlier?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: The
answer can be found seamlessly on paragraph 17, page 12 and because
I am trying to respond to the Chairman's dictation not to talk—
Chairman: Do not take too much attention
of the Chairman. We like your answers by and large.
Q92 Stephen Williams: I was coming
to that because that refers to a mapping exercise.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: The
real challenge for us is to get the local Regional Offender Manager
to do a needs-based assessment, they have got to do a skills gap
assessment and then they have got to commission things that will
deliver. They are going to be doing that with the Learning and
Skills Council commissioning process at the same time so there
is going to be a real joined-up approach between the work that
DfES is doing and the work that we will be doing through the Regional
Offender Manager so that synergy is going to be there.
Mrs Flaxington: It is entirely
deliberate that there is not a lot about NOMS because this is
very much a message about our alliances which are meeting reducing
re-offending needs, with all of us across government, all of our
partners regionally and local communities helping us deliver it.
Q93 Stephen Williams: Page 12, as
Baroness Scotland just referred to, referred to the mapping exercise
and page 16, just to prove I did read it, refers to a database
of offender management skills. Is that how they are going to collaborate?
NOMS is going to map the skills needs of offenders and then the
Learning and Skills Council is going to meet those needs?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: There
is an amount of mapping, it is not just the risk assessment and
the needs-based assessment for offenders, and I say offenders
and victims because the link between these two is quite direct,
but it is also doing a mapping exercise in terms of employers
because part of the work that we are doing through the board is
mapping the needs-based assessment for local employers in that
area so that we make sure that we understand them and are able
to fulfil those needs with the offender package that we have.
Mr Barnham: An important thing
to bear in mind is the basis of the OLASS service which is regional
commissioning of learning and skills by the Learning and Skills
Council in partnership with Regional Offender Managers who have
the commissioning powers over prisons and probation. They do not
yet have all those powers but the model should work in the future
with the Regional Offender Managers able to influence the prison
regime to provide an environment which is conducive to learning
and skills which the Learning and Skills Council in partnership
with them is commissioning to meet the needs of that offender
population.
Q94 Stephen Williams: I can see how
this regionalisation fits in with a neat Whitehall map of Government
offices for various regions and so on but my experience of visiting
Bristol Prison in my constituency, there may be prisoners there
from various parts of the country, certainly when it was a category
A prison there definitely were. We know that prisoners because
of the churn we have discussed already move about. How can we
be sure that the skills needs of a region, say the South West,
can be matched up with a prisoner who happens to be in Bristol
Prison at the moment but when he is released may want to go back
home to South London, the North East or wherever. How is that
going to work?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: Part
of that is part of our resettlement agenda because we have got
the reducing re-offending delivery plan, but also you will know
we are seeking to have resettlement wings in a number of the prisons
to which we will return prisoners before they are resettled home,
so it is part of the resettlement agenda, it is part of the reducing
re-offending agenda, but it is part of offender management because
the whole plan is supposed to be that once you have an offender
manager, they are supposed to plan your sentence, the beginning,
the middle and the end, and that plan is supposed to follow you
right the way through. It is something that prison governors and
others are seeing the benefit. Because I think the Chairman particularly
wanted a comment from the coalface, Bill Shaw, who is Castington's
governor, said in response to would he do it this way, "Yes,
if I was going to design this, this is how I would have done it".
The frontline like it, we just have the challenge of delivering
it.
Chairman: That is a very good sound bite,
Lady Scotland.
Q95 Stephen Williams: I would like
to come back to the report, Chairman. On page 22, it says, "By
April 2007 you will have a new target for the Probation Service
around employability over a four week period" and you are
announcing well in advance you are going to have a target. Do
you know yet what that target is going to be for the Probation
Service?
Baroness Scotland of Asthal: We
do not, but we are going to have a shadow target because one of
the things that you will know we have not got from the National
Offender Management model depends not just on one statutory sector
delivering but the CJS, together with the corporate community,
working together in partnership so we do want to expand the number
of people who work in partnership with us, and until we do that
we have a shadow position which can then be consolidated if and
when the bill is delivered with, I hope, the Chairman's full and
energetic support.
Q96 Chairman: Frances wanted to come
in.
Mrs Flaxington: We already have
the shadow target and that is part of preparing the Probation
Service to have this greater focus on employment and we do have
lots of examples around the country; we want to get that consistent
which is why this target will really help us move that forward.
Q97 Stephen Williams: Something slightly
off subject that no-one has mentioned so far but it is in the
report so it is relevant. Paragraph 4.4 refers to child poverty
and the role of rehabilitating offenders to make sure that they
can go out and work and therefore tackle child poverty. We know
from the statistics in this report, and we have read elsewhere,
about the poor educational standards of offenders. Does the Department—this
will be a question for Phil Hope—monitor the educational
attainment of the children of offenders?
Phil Hope: We monitor the educational
attainment of every child through how they are doing at school.
Whether we collect data about them separately because they are
the children of offenders, I think the answer to that is no but
I am speaking without really being sure of my ground there.
Stephen Williams: Would you expect a
school to know?
Q98 Chairman: I think Frances has
the answer.
Mrs Flaxington: I am really pleased
that the Committee have raised this issue because one of our other
reducing re-offending pathways is better support for the children
and families of offenders, not least because of the inter-generational
cycles of abuse and, yet again, we are developing a cross-government
framework of support on this. We see it as critical to access
mainstream services for children and families of offenders and
that is why you will see a reference in the Local Government White
Paper to the children and families of offenders.
Q99 Chairman: I think it will feed
into Every Child Matters.
Mrs Flaxington: It is a safeguarding
agenda, it is critically important to us as well as reducing re-offending.
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