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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 170-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
PRISON EDUCATION: FoLLOW UP
Monday 18 December 2006 RT HON PHIL HOPE MP, RT HON BARONESS SCOTLAND OF ASTHAL QC, MR CHRIS BARNHAM and MS FRANCES FLAXINGTON Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 120
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Monday 18 December 2006 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Mr Douglas Carswell Mr David Chaytor Jeff Ennis Helen Jones Fiona Mactaggart Mr Gordon Marsden Mr Andrew Pelling Stephen Williams Mr Rob Wilson ________________ Joint memorandum submitted by Department for Education and Skills and Home Office
Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Rt Hon Phil Hope, a Member of the House, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Rt Hon Baroness Scotland of Asthal QC, a Member of the House of Lords, Minister of State for the Criminal Justice System and Offender Management, Home Office, Mr Chris Barnham, Head of Offender Learning and Skills Unit, Department for Education and Skills, and Ms Frances Flaxington, Head of the Community Integration Unit in the National Offender Management Service, Home Office, gave evidence. Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon. Can I welcome, from the left, Chris Barnham, Phil Hope, the Minister, Lady Scotland - we are very privileged to have you down from above, as they say - and Frances Flaxington. It is always a pleasure to have a minister from the House of Lords here, particularly Lady Scotland. Thank you for coming. Phil, it is always a pleasure to see you. I think everyone knows that this Committee conducted quite a thorough inquiry into prison education around 15 months ago; we took it seriously. We went to a lot of prisons in the UK and we went to Canada, British Columbia and Helsinki, which gave us a great deal about how different societies look at prisons and what happens to people in prison. We wrote what we thought was a rather good report, which the Government quite liked at the time I remember, the response was quite positive. Shall we get started by saying to the two Ministers, is there anything you would like to say before we get into question mode? Phil Hope: Chairman, we would like to, if you do not mind. I am going to say a few opening words on behalf of both Patricia and myself, if that is okay with you. Q2 Chairman: That is fine. Phil Hope: We too are pleased that you have returned to this subject because we think it is an area of policy and provision which often gets little attention, so the fact that you are paying it attention, and what I am about to say, Chairman, is we are paying it a great deal of attention, is great, so we are very happy to be here today. Whilst I can agree with your remarks that there were significant aspects of your report last time on prison education which we agreed with, there were some areas we felt we were not given any credit for. I think we had made significant progress at that time, and some of the major strands of work already in place that we were working on there do address the great majority of your Committee's concerns and recommendations. Then we had some well publicised future plans. Life has moved on, and I want to draw attention to three significant achievements in a couple of areas we are still concerned about. Of course, the first is we published the Green Paper, "Reducing Re-offending through Skills and Employment" which you will be familiar with, Chairman. I think this was really clear about our Government policy and across government, which is the important point here, to reduce re-offending by improving the education of skills and employment of offenders both in custody and in the community, so right across the board. Those Green Paper proposals talked about training to equip offenders with skills that meets employers' needs; much greater employer engagement in the design and delivery of that learning which was on offer; a new rights and responsibilities package for offenders who are accessing any work-focused provision; and the idea of a new campus model that would integrate together in an area offender learning into mainstream delivery by joining up all the existing range of services. Since the Committee last looked at this we have had OLASS, the Offender Learning and Skills Service, going live across England. These are new arrangements, as you know, for planning and delivery of funding of offender learning. We trialled it in three development regions - the North East, North West, and South West - and I think there has been some very good cross-agency work in implementing the changes which we put in there and, in particular, at a regional level, getting a good relationship between the Regional Offender Management Service and the LSC when commissioning regionally, and at a national level, joint working between NOMS, the LSC and, indeed, Jobcentre Plus, ensuring that education does meet the employers' needs and that offenders are then supported in getting into jobs. Since then, I am sure you have also seen the report by the Adult Learning Inspectorate which I was delighted to read. Q3 Chairman: I thought you might mention that. Phil Hope: I just want to quote: "Perhaps the most heartening successes I can report this year have been achieved in prison learning and skills", and I am very grateful to David Sherlock and his team for that kind of endorsement of the work we have been doing. We are not sitting on our laurels. Even though we have managed to get the number of our prisons that were deemed to be unsatisfactory from 78 per cent in 2002 down to 16 per cent, which means that 84 per cent are now satisfactory and that is good, we are pressing on even further. We published our next document just recently, a few weeks ago, the Next Steps document which, again, I am sure your Committee has seen. That very much picked up on the feedback from the Green Paper. We got 100 written responses at various consultation events. Indeed, at a conference last week 200-plus people turned up. They had one of these interactive machines - I do not know if you have seen these conferences with this type of machine - where people were asked, "Are you broadly in favour of this policy?" "Not in favour at all?" or "Opposed to it?", a remarkable 98 per cent of people there said, "Yes, they endorse very much the direction of travel" and were "enthusiastic" or "very enthusiastic" about getting on with that job. That focuses a whole plan of action for the next few years: the engagement of employers critically through the Corporate Alliance and, indeed, through the Sector Skills Councils as well, further development of that; this campus modelling on the idea of an employability contract for the offender; and an emphasis on skills and jobs within prisons and within probation. We want to have two regional test-plates to develop all of those ideas in one or two regions to take it forward. Of course, the Leitch Report has come out since then as well and the context of the wider needs to fill skills gaps. This is a straightforward economic proposition here, "There is a group of people here who could fill the skills gaps of you, the employer, at various levels and therefore they need to train". There are two areas where I think we have still got more to do, Chairman, you may have more than these but I will mention two to start with. One is around targets and target setting. As you know, performance has been driven by some key performance indicators around basic skills qualifications and starting and achieving qualifications in various probation areas. What we have not had are targets for the learning and skills development of individual offenders. I think there is an issue there that we need to deal with. We have got these high level PSA targets, but what we want to go on to is recording the outcomes for the individual offender to chart their progress from offending into not offending as a result of getting skills and getting a job. I do not think we are there yet and I do not think we have got the right performance and management regime that really does drive the prison governor or the chief probation officer linking up with the OLASS provider or a commissioning body so that we get a complete pull-through of all those targets throughout the whole system. Secondly, although, I am pleased to say, we have secured arrangements to ensure that there is some learner record transfers around the system in terms of achievements and aspirations of what learners want to do, we have not got the comprehensive electronic system which I think is absolutely essential. The reason for that is there are two or three different systems in place at the moment. Essentially, this is a technical problem we have to resolve where you have got the NOMIS system, the Management Information System being developed by the National Offender Management Service, you have got eASSET, which is another electronic database system, and we have got our own offender learning database through the LSC and the LSC's individual learner records. What we are trying to do here is recognise that the different agencies have, for very good reasons, developed their own electronic system of capturing data, but if we want the ambition which we both share, I hope, Chairman, to join all that up, there is a technical problem to overcome here. I am confident that we want to do it but we have got to take the time to get that right because anything which involves technology, if you do not take the time to get it right things can go wrong. I am sorry if that was a long opening statement, I apologise, Chairman, but I wanted to map the picture and this is where we sit at the moment. Q4 Chairman: Thank you, Minister, that was very interesting. In terms of champions, you have mentioned Leitch and you have announced several champions now post-Leitch, have you not, what champions have you announced? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: Digby Jones is going to be the skills envoy for the Leitch agenda. Q5 Chairman: They are envoys now! Phil Hope: "Envoy" is his title. Q6 Chairman: Seepage from czars! Phil Hope: His primary focus is to go out to employers. In terms of the wider Leitch agenda, we know we have got to get a real balance of individuals wanting to learn, of Government funding the areas where we need to fund where there is market failure, Level 2 basic skills and NVQ Level 2, but we need employers to come on board as well. The Leitch Report recommended that employers sign up to a pledge for training their staff, and to really make that pledge a reality. It was an idea which came from what is happening in Wales. We want Sir Digby Jones to go out there and say to employers, "Listen, this is an obligation, let us do this". Of course behind that, as you know, Leitch was recommending that if we have not achieved sufficient progress by 2010 a legal entitlement will be introduced for individuals to train up to a full Level 2 qualification in their place of work. There is a bit of stick and carrot in both those proposals. Q7 Chairman: Have any other envoys been announced yet? Phil Hope: No. In terms of diplomas, this is a different issue, these are the new 14 to 19 diplomas, we are suggesting that we want champions to take the new 14 to 19 diplomas outside so we have asked Mike Tomlinson to talk to the profession, if I can call it that. Mike's report was seminal, the diplomas have flowed from his ideas to promote those diplomas. Q8 Chairman: He is a champion, not an envoy? Phil Hope: Yes, Chairman, that is a right, he is a champion of the diploma to the profession. We have also asked Sir Alan Jones to talk to employers about the critical importance of diplomas for employers so that they are really recognised, because employers have helped to design them to be absolutely the right sort of currency, and the Vice Chancellor of a university - the name has gone out of my head - to talk to higher education. It is one of the not so good universities, I think it is Coventry, but I cannot remember offhand. Q9 Chairman: The Vice Chancellor of Leeds? Phil Hope: I will find out for you and tell you. Q10 Chairman: I am told it is South Bank. Phil Hope: Is it? I am sorry, I lost track of him. I was not preparing myself for a Leitch discussion this afternoon, Chairman. Their job is promoting diplomas as a particular qualification which has huge currency and merit out there among employers. Q11 Chairman: These are dual champions or dual envoys; South Bank and Leeds? Phil Hope: These are three champions who have different roles from Digby. Sir Digby Jones is going up to employers to say, "Train your staff". Q12 Chairman: Who plays the champion for prison education and training? Phil Hope: Sir Digby Jones is quite interesting in that regard. I do not know if you know Digby's enthusiasm. Q13 Chairman: He has not been inside, has he! Phil Hope: I would not know about that, Chairman. Q14 Chairman: Lesser Members of the Upper House have been! Phil Hope: One in four of the adult population has got some kind of criminal record, so I guess that puts this Committee in an interesting position. I do know he is a big champion for training and learning. Q15 Chairman: There is not going to be a specific prison education champion? Phil Hope: No, there is not going to be because we are putting in place a very big structure with clarity about what we want to see from different parts of the system. What we want to do in two regions is put together all the ideas that are there to make those work and see the outcomes in those two regions. Q16 Chairman: Lady Scotland, I must put my cards on the table in that I did not vote - very unusually for me since I am regarded as a party loyalist - for the second reading of the NOMS Bill last Monday. When I was a shadow minister for Home Affairs, as Roy Hattersley's deputy, I used to berate the then government for having 50,000 people in prison; we have now broken 80,000 and, as I understand it, still edging up. What is the truth about what is going on because, on the one hand, we have a wonderful tale from the Minister about how aspirational it is, he has all these wonderful aspirations, all these documents, he is full of aspiration but, on the other hand, our usual suspects who tell us about what is really going on in prisons say that you cannot increase and improve prison education when you have got prisons that are totally full, where people are being directed up and down the country for hundred of miles to just find a bed for the night? The priority in our prisons today is just finding a prisoner a bed. We were told 15 months ago that 30 per cent of the prison population had a chance of some prison education and training, now it has slipped well below that. What is this gap between aspiration, eloquently put by your fellow Minister, and the truth of what is really going on in the prison estate? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: As you know, the truth is the numbers have gone up and that has caused a high degree of churn. What is quite extraordinary is in those circumstances we have still been able to produce an improved outcome for the majority of prisoners. One of the things that warms me more than anything else is that we have been able to get a report from the Inspectorate that puts two words, which are unusual in this context, "dramatic and improvement", together on the same page. Q17 Chairman: But no percentage and no numbers, Lady Scotland? There is no evidence in all the paperwork I have looked at that the figure we were given 18 months ago of 30 per cent has been modified. All the evidence suggests that figure has now been hidden from public scrutiny. Baroness Scotland of Asthal: I do not feel that is right because if you look at the figures which are coming out now in terms of the attainment levels and the standards being obtained by prisoners, they have continued to go up. We have had a situation which has been under acute pressure being managed remarkably well to enable the learning and skills agenda still to be delivered. Is it where we would ideally like to be? No, it cannot be, because we had hoped that the benefit of the 2003 Act would by now have been starting to move. Although we had pressed down heavily saying that those who are dangerous and serious need to be contained, there was the other part of the 2003 agenda which said that those who are not dangerous could be dealt with differently. For example, you will remember one of the issues for us was the way in which sentencing had upscaled, the tariff had upscaled, so although seriousness may not have changed very much, the sentence given by the courts had. There were a number of drivers which caused us to believe that had happened as a result of sentences not being enforced appropriately. If you look at the way in which fines were dealt with, historically fines were used far more extensively than they are now, but then when we looked at enforcement, we had about a third of fines being enforced and that really had to change. One would have thought that the change we have now brought about, where there is over a 90 per cent success rate of enforcement, would have rehabilitated fines to enable courts to use them more effectively; that is not happening. We then look at the community penalties, and we wanted community penalties to be used as an alternative to imprisonment, and we see the upscaling continuing there. Part of the things we have to do now is to redress that balance. We are doing a review to ask some fairly pertinent questions why is it that although we have rehabilitated through enforcement - because you will know for community penalties also that was an issue in terms of enforcement - that has gone up to about 87 per cent? Once we have got fines enforcement up, community penalties enforcement up, why is it that the choice may not still be being made to use those as a way of driving through? Some of the things which Phil and I have been doing by working quite aggressively together in the last 18 months are to try and make a better business case and take a grip of those drivers. The reason that we are, frankly, quite excited about what is happening now with the engagement with employers in the learning and skills agenda is that we do know, as your Committee knows, that if we can get people jobs that will cut deeply into the re-offending figure. Q18 Chairman: Lady Scotland, we saw ample evidence of really good schemes, the Transco scheme, in a number of settings, a number of big businesses working in a very creative way, we would not deny that, but what we are worried about, and you still have not answered us, is we found that even in the best prisons we went to quite a small number of prisoners were getting the chance of getting out of their cell and doing something constructive to change their lives. You still have not answered the question how many, because our informants from prison governors and elsewhere, suggest the numbers have slipped so it will not be as high as 30 per cent, it will have fallen below 30 per cent? Phil Hope: Chairman, the latest figures we have for this year, for the three months of August, September and October, show that the percentage of the total prison population engaged in learning in August was 31.6 per cent, September was 33.2 per cent, and October was 35.5 per cent, so although you are right to suggest there has been pressure on the prison population for all the reasons we have just been discussing, I think the new system of delivery we have put in place through OLASS is managing to achieve much higher participation rates than previously as well as good success rates. Q19 Chairman: The same interpretation could be said if you were measuring quality of less and less numbers that might be impressive, but if people are only getting out of the cell for seven hours rather than 11 hours that covers up something else, does it not, Minister? Phil Hope: Yes, but I am describing what I know to be the importance of engaging prisoners in skills and learning inside the prison system, I have to say outside in the community as well, but just to stick with inside custody for the moment. Although there is huge pressure on the prison regime and prison governors need to ensure that they are providing safe and humane conditions in which people are being kept in custody, nonetheless there is clearly evidence of increased participation in learning by offenders. Indeed, partly what we are trying to do with the consultation and the Next Steps document is to say that experience in prison when you are undertaking work, could that be more about work and training so that learning is not only what goes on in the bit that you call when you go off to do learning, but prison as a whole becomes a place of work and skills development for people to get to understand the nature of a working day, attendance, punctuality, all of those kinds of things, as well as developing particular skills while they are doing other things like laundry, cooking and cleaning inside the prison. Some of those jobs could be made more like a real world job, get skills and attach training to it and there could be employment opportunities in those very areas when those offenders leave prison. Q20 Chairman: Chris Barnham, am I being unfair describing this gap between aspiration and the reality in the prison? What is your evaluation? We have seen you in a number of roles in the Department. Mr Barnham: I think you would not believe us if we came along here and said, "We made a change and everything is perfect"; I do not think we are ever going to be able to say that. It is obvious, is it not, that crowding can be a constraint on what you can achieve, that the sorts of people we are having to deal with are always going to be challenging in terms of what you can achieve and how you can do it. There is objective evidence that the Education Service has been improving over the last few years. The evaluation of the OLASS changes through the LSC has told us that the feedback from that is very positive about those changes. Even some of the written memoranda which you had from people like the Association of Colleges, for example, have said: "Overall that change has been successful". As the Minister has just said, we have always estimated in the past that about 30 per cent of prisoners were getting access to learning. The figures we have just quoted are only very recent ones from the LSC, but what we can say is they are real ones because for the first time we do know what learning individuals are doing because the LSC has systems to give us that information in a way we have never had before. Those are very positive signs. I do not think any of us would pretend that given all the other challenges the Criminal Justice System is facing we are always going to be able to run the perfect Education Service, far from it, but there are very positive signs, I think. Baroness Scotland of Asthal: I think also the important thing is to look at outcomes because we could have people out of their cells for a lot longer doing more creative work and not have these outcomes. The bottom line is what are we doing which makes a difference, which improves the opportunities for offenders and makes it more likely that they will lead a crime-free life? Therefore, I think if you were to ask any of us do we want to do more, the answer is absolutely, yes. Do we want to reduce the number of people who need to be in prison, yes. In terms of looking at those who have got mental illness, the work we are doing in relation to women, the work we are doing in relation to drugs and other offenders?. The answer to all of that is yes, yes, yes. We have to work very much on where we currently are and make sure that the systems we have in place are capable of delivering the highest degree in terms of outcome for improvements. I think these figures on outcomes - and we can give you the Prison Service annual report figures - demonstrate month-on-month improvement. That is why we are pleased that those improvements have been possible in some of the most challenging environments we could possibly consider. It would be far less comfortable if we were coming and saying, "We have gone backwards, and because of this challenging environment, the overcrowding, the churn, these figures are slipping and we are not getting there" but that is not what we are saying, we are not saying it is easy and we are not saying we are ideally where we want to be. Q21 Chairman: Lady Scotland, we are not saying everything is awful, we are saying there are some very good signs that the sort of things we flagged up 15 months ago have been noted, and not just this Committee but the expert evidence which was around at that time and the international experience is making a difference. The trouble is the elephant in the room is prison overcrowding. When we get the Prison Governors Association saying: "It is in our view almost impossible for the Learning and Skills Council in prisons to make a profound difference to the lives of offenders because of overcrowding", it seems to me that something has got to be done about overcrowding to give you guys a chance to meet the aspirations you have and the real changes you have put in hand. Baroness Scotland of Asthal: I would not disagree with you in that regard and that is why some of the things we are doing in the community in terms of making community penalties have greater bite, enabling people to know that they are a serious alternative to prison and why we are working so hard on the Reducing Re-offending Action Plan that we put out in 2004 and the delivery plan in 2005, which is being built on by some of the things that Phil and I and others are doing together on this agenda, are so important. For example, you asked about the champions, you will know that we have created the Corporate Alliance in relation to business. We have now got over 400 employers working with us, for example Cisco. Q22 Chairman: You are not going to name 400, I hope? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: No, I can give you the list though. Q23 Chairman: We will have the list! Baroness Scotland of Asthal: They are going to be driving this forward because really we have to make that business case to the corporate sector, but also the business case and produce empirical data for the courts so they can see that the alternatives we are putting forward are real alternatives with real bite and have a way and a means of punishing people effectively but also delivering on some of the aspirations that probably we and this Committee all share in terms of changing the template with which we have lived for quite a long time. Q24 Jeff Ennis: Minister, in your opening remarks you obviously mentioned many of the aspirational initiatives that have taken place since the service transferred from the Home Office to the DfES. It appears to me, in the remarks you were making, that obliquely you were criticising the state that prison education was in when it was transferred from the Home Office to Education, and that you needed to radically overhaul the existing provision within prison education. Is that the case? Was the Home Office making such a horlicks of prison education, and should it have been transferred years ago given that scenario? Phil Hope: Fortunately, I was not the Minister for Skills back then, Chairman, so I am not able to make a comment, but what I can say is the figures were quite stark in terms of the Inspectorate's assessment: 78 per cent of prison education was unsatisfactory according to the Adult Learning Inspectorate. My predecessors made an important decision then on a different way to commission the plan to fund that provision in future and I think the results have been spectacular. We have seen a step-change in the nature of the quality being provided. Moreover, those doing the providing are being managed by a service which is primarily about education, they are being managed by managers of educational establishments and they are mainstreamed into what education is all about. That is both good for the service - and I think we have seen a change in performance - and also for the learner, the offender, who is part of an integrated system so that we have got more opportunities, as we now move into the next phase, of genuinely seeing them being integrated when they leave custody and go into the community to carry on their learning - this is where we want to go with the test plates - and there can be much greater continuity of provision so they can carry on their training and not be going around that endless loop of assess, provide some training, assess, in a way that was unhelpful as prisoners moved around the system or out of the system. Q25 Jeff Ennis: Prison education which was widely regarded as a "Cinderella service" within the Home Office, that is not going to be the case with the DfES, is it? Phil Hope: Certainly the fact that we have published the Green Paper, we have published the Next Steps document, and the fact that we trebled the budget from around £57 million to £151 million is a real statement. Although you might want to pose it as a Home Office versus DfES position, this is a joint strategy we have here, jointly worked through, because even if we get, and we are getting, the education going on in the prison to be much better than it has been, it is the joining-up of the link between that education, those skills, and the employers through the Corporate Alliance, it is the individual assessment and the planning, it is the full follow-through, the connection between NOMS and the Regional Offender Manager Service and the LSC which is going to make the real difference in terms of getting people into jobs and reducing their re-offending. Q26 Jeff Ennis: I think one of the most striking things that we noticed as a committee when we were going around a lot of the prison establishments was what I perceive to be the mismatch between the education facilities and the wider prison regime and that quite often never the two should meet, as it were. Are we actually reducing that mismatch, do you recognise that that is a problem and is it a problem we getting more of? Phil Hope: I think you have raised a good point. We need to ensure that the education facilities that are provided are the right quality, particularly in terms of skills training in mechanics or painting and decorating, or whatever, that there is actually the quality there that is needed and the quality staff to deliver it, but it comes back to a point I was saying earlier, Chairman: I would like to see, not just learning and skills training going on in the learning and skills part of a prison, the real goal that we should be aiming for is that prison itself becomes a learning and working environment for those offenders. If we know that the importance of work and training, not only for people when they leave prison and get a job and, therefore, reduce their reoffending, but actually running a prison regime can be so much more effective if people feel they are part of a mainstream service, I think that is the next stage we ought to be going to. We have got one or two good examples of where that is happening. I think we ought to spread that good practice around the system. Q27 Jeff Ennis: One of the other things we noticed as well was, in general, the low priority given to education and skills from the senior management teams within prisons. Is that issue now being actively addressed? Phil Hope: Yes. The heads of learning and skills that we have now appointed in those prisons are actually members of the governing body, the management team. Q28 Chairman: Chairman: In every prison? Phil Hope: In every prison that I am aware of, yes, Chairman. There is a head of learning and skills in every prison, and their job sitting on the board is very different from the job they used to do. I want to make that very clear, because we have now got OLASS commissioning and delivering the service. Their job is to really look at what I was just describing, how we can embed and mainstream learning and skills within the prison regime as a whole as well as ensuring the quality of the learning that is going on, the specific activities that are provided. Q29 Jeff Ennis: Lady Scotland, in an earlier answer, touched on the issue of better employer engagement, and that has obviously got to be a key feature. The Chairman mentioned we did see some very good examples of that. Transco at Reading jail, for example, was one of the best examples we saw. I think some of the bigger corporate players realise the benefits to them as well as to the local community of actually engaging in these programmes, but it is getting to the SMEs which I think is going to be one of the most difficult issues to try and address, Lady Scotland. I wonder if you could say a word about that: how we can get the SMEs involved? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: I think one of the most important step-changes we have made is in relation to the element in the reducing reoffending plan. You will know that we now have a Reducing Reoffending Plan for every area with a Reducing Reoffending Board and we have created the Reducing Reoffending Interministerial Group to look at that. The part of the work that we have done specifically with employers is the Corporate Alliance. We now have an opportunity to drive this work really quite creatively in each area through the Corporate Alliance. I spoke earlier about the Reference Group. We have set up the Reference Group with employers. Cisco is going to be hosting, with KPMG chairing, the first meeting in January, so we will be able to brigade the work with employers to be able to better target those opportunities. We have a plethora of companies already working with prisons, but we got have to have a synergy because we have not got a continuous theme going right the way through in all the areas. You have to remember too that education is, as Phil says, very much part of the offender management assessment that we are going to have, so assessing the skills, assessing the employability of an offender will be very important and part of the "Reducing Reoffending through skills and employment: Next Steps", concentrating on some of the companies who are SME who have really benefited from it. I just invite your attention to one of them, Wiltan Ltd, which is a small company employing about 50 people who are specialising in the manufacture of magnetic components. Alison Itani came to the conference that we had and she spoke very powerfully about the contribution that offenders can make to the small and medium sized business, and she was really emphasising the point that we have touched on today about making a business case to small and medium size enterprises - this is actually good business for them - but making it local, and some of the work that we are able to do through the Corporate Alliance we hope will deliver that. Q30 Jeff Ennis: I am just wondering in terms of engagement of local Chambers of Commerce about trying to get them involved in these programmes as well. Can I quote South Yorkshire, for example. Many of the prisons in South Yorkshire are in Doncaster, and obviously Doncaster needs to engage with Rotherham and Barnsley, for example, which do not have institutional facilities. Is that being done as well? Engaging Chambers of Commerce, not just around the prison itself but in the surrounding neighbouring authorities that do not have prisons? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: It is very much part of the Regional Partnership Board, because what we are looking at is not just those who offend who go to prison. We have got to try and make sure that those who are sentenced and remain in the community have an equal opportunity but also we are talking about through the gate - it is before they go to prison to try and prevent them ever getting there - then, if they go to prison, to be able to help them through that experience to get a job when they come out and then to manage them in the community. The role of the Corporate Alliance is trying to go more broadly and giving a community response, but it is also saying to the regional offender managers that they have got to get a clear idea of what the regional needs assessment is for business. It is tiny in the stuff that Sandy Leitch talked about, the stuff that we are doing with learning and skills, and saying that this has to be an holistic assessment of the region so we can sell it in a way that makes better sense. Q31 Mr Marsden: I wonder if I could just take Phil Hope back, briefly, to some of your questioning in relation to Leitch. Minister, the issue, as we know from the Leitch Report, is about getting the importance of skills generally onto the public agenda and particularly onto the media agenda; so the importance of getting skills in a prison environment must be even more daunting in some ways. How important do you view the task of raising the priority of offender learning to public, press and employers, given that this Committee found, when it looked at experience from elsewhere, that winning public consensus was critical in boosting programmes for the rehabilitation of offenders? Phil Hope: There are two or three points in there. The first is in terms of the wider public agenda, and I think what Leitch is saying is that we do have an important job to do in terms of raising awareness. I would hope that the Committee might think that we are actually going a long way down that road already in terms of the importance of skills, the skills gap and what we are doing about it. Just this weekend we did a small kind of attempt to raise the stakes a little bit. I took part in a karaoke. If you want to do karaoke, Chairman, and you want to sing "I will survive" - not that that is relevant, of course to you in this context--- Q32 Chairman: Where were you doing this? Phil Hope: I was not doing this personally. ---you will need Level II literacy to do it. There are lots of different schemes like that where a skills for life strategy is done to try to get people to realise that we can reach out to the five million adults in this country who do not have the reading age of an eleven year old and let them know that there is free training available, and so on. When it comes to raising awareness of the importance of skills for offenders, the critical thing here is that we are doing this because not only are they workforce ready, as it were, to go into those small as well as large companies to meet a skills gap, but also it helps reduce reoffending. It makes economic sense. Instead of reoffending costing £67,000 for somebody to reoffend and go through the system, £35,000 a year to keep them in jail, through giving them skills, through giving them jobs, we actually give real offenders, whether in Doncaster, or Barnsley, or wherever, it does not matter, real jobs with real employers and make that connection whilst they are in prison with real firms, and then I think we stand a much greater chance of being much more successful at achieving that core job of reducing reoffending, reducing crime. So we are cutting back crime and reducing the cost of crime, saving money, and we are giving those individuals the prospect of a crime-free life in the future. Q33 Mr Marsden: That is great rhetoric. What is the beef going to be by way of a public information campaign given that we have a number of national newspapers, shall we say, that might view this with less joy and enthusiasm than you and I might? Phil Hope: The broader public awareness campaign for raising skills generally is going to be rolled out next year through the LSC and its big skills campaign and the other things that the Chairman was mentioning earlier about skills envoys and champions and through the Corporate Alliance that Baroness Scotland has mentioned. In terms of the stakeholder group, as it were, for marketing, or selling, or talking about skills in prisons our first priority group here is the criminal justice system itself, the Probation Service, prison governors, the LSC, the providers, who are going to be a part of these local campuses in the campus model to get everyone to understand and appreciate the value and importance of doing this. In terms of the public, would the public (classic tabloid) have a go at us about it, actually I think there is across party consensus about this. If we can demonstrate, and we can demonstrate, that reducing reoffending saves money and reduces crime, that is a win all round. Whatever your political persuasion, I believe we can convince people that this is money well spent. Mr Pelling: It does not stop the Daily Mail. Q34 Mr Marsden: My colleague anticipates me. It might be across party consensus but not necessarily across media consensus. Can I move to you, Lady Scotland, and talk a little bit about the funding issues. I think I am right in saying, Phil you said the budget had gone up from 57 million to 151 million, but what I am not clear about is whether that budget is envisaged as doing the sorts of things that you are doing at the moment but, if you like, more effectively, or whether that budget is envisaged in doing some of the very (and I am enthusiastic for them) ambitious things that you talk about particularly in the Next Steps paper. What is the situation in that respect? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: In terms of DfES money or ours? Q35 Mr Marsden: Both. You are giving us an impression that you are joined at the hip on these issues, so presumably you have had some discussion on joint budgets. Phil Hope: We have had discussions on how we use the individual budgets that we currently have. You will know that there is a debate to come in relation to new PSAs and the way in which we will spend that money, but the reform is likely to lead to significant reallocation in the short-term, holding prisons and refocusing on assessing need and developing learning plans, and where prisons have the bulk of sentences they will be served concentrating on learning delivery, an aspiration many people, including, I think, David Sherlock, the inspector, all share. Reallocation relies on ROMS playing a full commissioning role to supervise the knock-on reallocations of other regime activities, systems capacity to adapt to these big changes, ROMS picking up a commissioning role. The current high prison population limits the capacity to adapt some of that and there is a counterproductive force, but we have got an opportunity now, with offender management being rolled out and the ROMS taking on this role, to work really closely with the commissioners for the Learning and Skills Council to make sure that we have a joined-up approach and so we are allocating things in a way that makes better sense. Q36 Mr Marsden: That is fine, but, as I think the Chairman touched on earlier, there is an issue not just in terms of how well you are doing with prison education, the cohort you are currently reaching, but how well you will be able to do if you maintain the standards that ALI talk about when you attempt to reach a much broader cohort. I am interested, therefore, in knowing what priority you are giving to this in terms of your comprehensive spending review bid and whether that is one that is being orchestrated jointly or separately with DfES? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: We are giving it a high priority because you will know that it fits right into the seven pathways and the work that we are seeking to roll out through offender management. It is really talking about what are the needs-based assessment of the individuals that we have and then how do we better deliver that. All the work that Phil Hope and I have spoken about today is part of that joint agenda to address the change that we need to make in that delivery plan. Phil Hope: One point on that. For example, the point here is about mainstreaming, but as well as spending that specific resource in prison, whether it is DfES or Home Office resource, if you think of something like Train to Gain, if we have got offenders coming out of prison going into working for a small, medium size enterprise, Train to Gain is ideally suited to providing resource for that SME to skill up their workforce. We need to look, I think, quite creatively at whether or not we can ensure that we can put packages together in these two test-bed regions where, if we have identified an offender, we have identified a skills gap, we have got an employer who is going to take them on - there is a package there, through Train to Gain, that can provide extra resource. So it is not Home Office money, it is not the special offender learning money, it is mainstream money that every employer has access to to ensure first skills and employment for every person that needs it. That is what I mean by mainstreaming, and I think we can start to see those kinds of benefits coming through the system next year. That is the aspiration, Chairman. Baroness Scotland of Asthal: I think it is also important to remember why we set up the Interministerial Group on Reducing Reoffending in July. It is because we understood, firstly, that this has to be a joint agenda in terms of delivery. There are things which we will not be able to change unless our partners across government change with us. The whole import of the Interministerial Group is to look at where the blockages may be, how we could work more creatively together to get a better understanding across the piece as to how these different agendas interlink, whether it is health, education, accommodation, employment, some of the stuff that DCMS are doing in terms of art and sport in terms of diversion. So, although we are talking quite rightly in this Committee room in relation to education, it sits alongside what all the other things that we are doing will do, because it will contribute to it, and one of the things we have learned is that we need a multi-faceted change in order to get the change that we want and aspire to achieve. Q37 Mr Marsden: I understand that entirely. I wonder if I could return to you, Phil, and ask you a final question on the back of that. I understand that holistic version, again I am very much in favour of it, but the fact of the matter at the end of the day is, even an holistic approach of the sort that you have described which makes the links and is going to inevitably raise expectations, will involve potential extra expenditure. Is DfES, as the lead department in this area, going to be going along to the Treasury and saying, "It was great that you trammelled our budget from 57 to 151, but given all these ambitious things that we need to do, we now need a bit more"? Phil Hope: It is interesting. Q38 Mr Marsden: It is very interesting! Phil Hope: I am not absolutely convinced by the argument that this problem needs solving by yet more cash. There is actually quite a lot of money going on in the system at the moment, and not just the money I was describing. I think, if we can put together what we have learnt about how to assess an individual's learning needs, if we get past the point where they are being bounced around the system being assessed every time but no other training happening, if the training that goes on in those prisons is improved because we have actually got heads of learning and skills in there making sure that we have got good quality and we have got the new commissioning, if we create the campus model where we connect up Jobcentre Plus with employers and with those offenders to go into a real job on the way out, if we do all of that, that does not require extra resources; it is those people currently in post doing their job differently. I was asked this at the conference: what was the one thing I thought would really make the next change happen? Everyone was expecting me to say: "If we had the money." I actually think it is about attitude. It is a mindset and agreement among all the players. Q39 Mr Marsden: Let us be absolutely clear about this. You and Baroness Scotland, presumably, who I know is a prodigious persuader of people in terms of all sorts of things, not least in terms of the Treasury, are saying that at the moment you do not envisage the very ambitious plans that you are setting out in Next Steps and in various other things you do will require a significant increase in the prison education budget? Phil Hope: I am saying that in the two test-beds next year where we will have £500,000 allocated between those two test-beds inviting leaders to come forward with proposals about how they can change what they are doing now in the way that we would like them to be doing in the future, using proven methodology, whether it is assessment and delivering or linking with employers, or creating a seamless pathway through the offender learner's journey, all of that, I believe, can be done within the existing resources that are out there. That is not to say that I might not want to bid for more resource under the CSR, one always wants to have more to be able to do those things with, but I am suggesting to you, Chairman, that this is a solution that does not require, as it were, a big cash solution. I think if we can mainstream what is being delivered so that mainstream FE is delivering to those offenders, mainstream Train to Gain is delivering to those offenders, there are the mechanisms there by which we can respond to this and deliver this without necessarily requiring another trimming of the budget or anything of that kind. Q40 Chairman: It is very nice to hear that you do not need more money, Minister, but one of the problems is that if you have got a Home Secretary in a department that you do not work in, a Home Secretary banging the desk of the Treasury saying, "I want more money to build more and more prisons", everything that you aspire to do, whether you have more cash or not, is going to be washed away, is it not? What we keep hearing is if you keep filling prisons and then building more prisons, you will not be able to meet the challenges that you have set yourself. That is the truth, is it not? When is somebody going to talk to the Home Secretary and say: there is no solution to criminal justice problems in this country by just building prisons. Is not that the truth? Phil Hope: I am convinced that employment and skills is one critical strand among the seven pathways and that, if we are going to reduce reoffending and reduce the costs of reoffending, reduce the numbers going to prison, we have got to get that right, and that is why we are putting so much into this. Q41 Chairman: That is the education view. We have got a Home Secretary who wants to keep building prisons. Presumably we will overtake the United States in the percentage of people we have got in prison if we really reach some serious targets. Is that where we are going, Lady Scotland? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: No, Chairman, that is not where we are going. We are really clear that we do need more prison spaces at the moment. We are also clear (and I think the Home Secretary has said it on a number of occasions) that there are those in prison who should not ideally be there. So if you look at some of the work that we are doing really quite creatively, I believe, for instance in relation to women, we have the situation where many of the women in our prisons at the moment are multiple abusers in terms of alcohol, drugs. They are low-level offenders, prolific offenders quite often, but not dangerous. If you look at the breakdown of their background, many of them were previously victims of domestic violence and/or sexual assault. For instance, I went to Holloway two or three months ago and I was told by the Governor there that 83 per cent of the women that he then had in his custody were previously victims of sexual assault or domestic violence. The work that we are doing in order to address victimisation of women in that sense will have, and should have, a dramatic impact on the numbers who end up going into prison because, if we reduce the number of victims who do not have their needs addressed, it may be that we will be better able to reduce the number who take to drink, drugs and other forms of substance abuse in order to provide some sort of panacea for that ill, which would then mean that we would have fewer main carers being in prison which should affect our numbers going into custody in the youth justice state. So that is clear. The work we are doing with mental health is very important, being able to divert those who are mentally ill out of the criminal justice system earlier and treat them more effectively. The work that we are doing on substance misuse generally to get a better grip, and some of that work has been quite powerful, all of that should enable us to better manage, and there has to be a clear view of those who should be in prison because of the danger that they pose to the community and the seriousness of their offending and those who we can look at more creatively. There is an issue at the moment, because, of course, a number of people in our community believe that the reason we are advocating non-custodial sentences is not because they are right and appropriate and the most effective and efficient way of dealing with offending and to reduce it, but simply because we have not got space in our prisons, which is not the case. I think we have to have more prison places at the moment to deal with the position we currently find ourselves in. That is why we are looking to build the 8,000. But there is, coming back to the comments I made right at the beginning, a real challenge for us, because the 2003 Act was not supposed to be just about increasing the opportunity to send those who are serious and dangerous to prison, although it does; it was supposed to be about giving the courts more flexibility, a wider menu to intervene, to intervene earlier and divert people out of the prison system. It is that which has not quite got into sync in the way we wanted it. We are getting better at managing dangerous people - we are able to keep them in custody for longer, we are able to risk assess them more accurately and do the needs-based assessment - but we have not shifted the agenda in relation to those who need to not be in prison, and, therefore, the escalation that has happened in sentencing is something that we have to look at very aggressively. How do we get the confidence level in our sentencers to feel that they can use the non-custodial sentences and feel sure that is an appropriate way of dealing with it? It is about doing some of the things we are now doing, increasing the availability of empirical data to sentencers so they know: "What do I need to do with this person? What works." And we have got a lot of work to do on what works, but it is not, as you so elegantly characterise it, Chairman, a Home Secretary who simply wants to build more prisons. We do not want to build more prisons for prison's sake. Q42 Chairman: It is my job to stimulate your answers. Baroness Scotland of Asthal: And you are doing so successfully. Q43 Fiona Mactaggart: We have been talking about churning the number of people in jail. Can you tell me what percentage of prisoners who have moved between jails in the last year did so while they were doing an educational course? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: I have not got that figure, but I do know that is why we are looking at the modules. One of the problems we have had historically is that people start a course, they get to a stage where they are doing well and they move to another prison which may not have that course, which may not be able to continue it, and that is why when we are doing our work we are looking very much at the modules so you can have a modular approach which will be more easily transferred. Phil has spoken about the opportunities there are for us to therefore maintain continuity in that regard. Having more teachers who are virtual, if you like, who can move from place to place, will be very important to us. We try to avoid moving prisoners unnecessarily wherever we can, that is always difficult, and the churn means that they have had to be moved and the population pressures do not make that easier. What we have tried to do is to look at the position that we have and think about what the solutions may be. Therefore the campus model and the modular approach which we are evolving are more likely to be able to assist us in making sure that we limit the potential disruption that there is. Q44 Fiona Mactaggart: Would I be right in saying that with the present pressure on places it is much more likely than previously that a prisoner will be transferred during a course? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: I do not think that I can say that. We have tried for those who have a course and who have a longer sentence, of course, not to move them, so the churn is happening in relation to those who may start a course on a relatively short sentence, but I think it is absolutely right to say it is a problem, and that is why we are developing the campus model, that is why we are developing the modular approach, which will mean it is more portable, not just from prison to prison but in terms of how do we make sure that people continue those when they are in the community. We have got a situation where some, of course, are committing offences whilst in the community. They may have been on a course. We know that continuing education can be a stabilising influence in making sure that we limit the likelihood that they will reoffend, so maintaining a course in the community and in prison and then back out into the community, particularly if they are not going to do a long sentence, is going to be much more important, and we need to get that through-put, none of which is easy. Q45 Fiona Mactaggart: What steps do you take to make sure that education in prison does not just go to those who are relatively easy to educate? One of the things that I have noticed in visiting prisoners is that in education courses you see, unfortunately, more of the rather biddable sex-offenders than you do of the rather wilder, drug-addicted youngsters who have very few qualifications. What are you doing to shift that round? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: Really that comes back to the importance of offender management, which we are now starting to introduce. Offender management, as you know, is really there to do two things: firstly, to do a proper and accurate risk assessment so we know what are the risks that this particular offender poses; the second is an accurate needs-based assessment, so that we have a better grip on the package of things we need to do with, for and sometimes to offenders to make sure that they maximise the opportunities to reduce the level of reoffending. That gives us a much better purchase on how we introduce change than we had before. It comes back to the seven pathways, because even if we were to get the education and skills element sorted in an appropriate way, we would still have difficulties with some offenders in relation to accommodation, in relation to substance misuse and the other pathways that we are going to have to deal with at the same time. We need also to understand that there are some offenders to whom interventions actually will be something which will make things worse not better. So we have got to differentiate between those who simply may need to be punished but who do not have the crimogenic factors which means intervention is necessary and those who may have multiple complex needs for whom the crimogenic factors that we have are not being adequately addressed, and we need to better address them. So the whole issue has to be looked at more in the round, and we do think that the end-to-end offender management model which will enable us to do that risk assessment and that needs-based assessment and be able to differentiate between those whom we have to work creatively and quite energetically with and those who we can simply punish becomes clearer. Q46 Fiona Mactaggart: Minister, you are doing a thing which I think the members of this Committee felt when we looked at the publications like the Next Steps and so on. We have a picture of powerful aspirations but not very much transparency about what is happening for people in the system now. For example, in the Director General's Report we do not get the hours of purposeful activity that used to be reported on. It is not clear what is actually happening on the ground enough for people. Do you have any plans to make that clearer in future reports? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: We do in relation to the fact that now offender management is actually being rolled out. In the past we were waiting for it, and some people thought it was a bit like waiting for Godot - when will it come. It is now actually taking place on the ground, and the good thing about it is that the probation officers and the prison officers and those who are doing this are starting to give us a very positive feedback, the practitioners on the ground as well as offenders. They say, "It makes a difference. I know more now what is expected of me, what is going to happen, how it is going to follow through", and I agree with you that what is really important is not just the aspiration but it is the outcome. If we have these aspirations and we are not changing the outcome, then we will not be delivering what we aspire to deliver. Some of these outcomes are quite hard-edged. We want to see how many people do get gainful employment, retain that employment and, as a result, the level of offending is reduced. How many more people are we going to get into accommodation which is stable and secure? These are hard outcomes. Q47 Chairman: But we do not see much evidence of them in your printed material, Lady Scotland. Baroness Scotland of Asthal: We hope that in the next year or two, as offender management starts to roll out, we will be able to produce that empirical data which will start to enable us to make a better assessment as to whether this is working or not. Q48 Fiona Mactaggart: We look forward to seeing that, because I think it is essential to make sure that these things are occurring. One of the things which you said, Minister, in response to an earlier question was that the experience of women in prison is very often one of having themselves been victims. I am wondering what that means in terms of different provision for women in prison. We have talked very much about preparation for work and employment. Very often the preparation that women need is preparation for life with their families which they have been separated from for some time. I will never forget the young woman in Bronsfield Prison who had come off stage, having performed in Chicago, who grabbed me by the lapel and said, "I am a robber right. This has done more for me than any of that stuff you give me", and I think it was a very powerful way of describing the contribution which things like creative arts can give in prison. We have not had anything of that in reading what you have said, and I am wondering whether either of you would like to tell us something about that? Phil Hope: I think you have put your finger on a very important point, because the skills agenda that I have been describing does not reflect fully the curriculum we might expect to go on inside prisons. I have visited prisons, and I remember meeting one young woman who was doing a painting and decorating course and I said, "Are you hoping to get a job afterwards using some of these skills"? "Yes", she said, "but really I am just looking forward to going back and decorating my daughter's nursery when I get out." This was for her the first time she had been taught how to do something. She was actually going to get a qualification in it, but, even though I was wondering whether she was going to get a job and stay straight, the thing that mattered to her most was that she could go back to her child and give her child something that she could not give her child before. So, quite clearly, for different individuals there are very different motivations and we need to tap into that. The curriculum, therefore, needs to be not just skills for life, although if you cannot read, write or count, then you are going to struggle in life and it is vital that you have those skills. Yes, it might be that there is a vocational direction and we want to get employers coming along and saying, "These are the skills we need. I would like to have that person trained up to work in my factory in this way", but also there are the broader interpersonal skills and the wider social skills. Indeed, thinking about some men who were doing parenting courses in Wandsworth that I went to see, some of the good work techniques and some of the learning they were doing there was having a much profounder effect about thinking who they were, where their life was and what they were planning to do with themselves outside of necessarily getting a job. I think it is right that the curriculum does embrace that much wider idea of personal development, and creative use of the arts is one particular aspect of that. I think we could do a lot more. A lot of prisons have got gyms where people go and do fitness. We could think a lot more about how all of this could add up to a package, a curriculum for personal development, as well as the vocational skills. Fiona Mactaggart: That is all very good, Minister, and when we went to prisons we got loads of anecdotal stuff about good stuff, but the hard stuff of how many hours out of the cell a prisoner has, the hard edge, is one area in which you do need quantitative measures, and we found it frustrating when we did not get them. I am happy with all the anecdotal stuff as long as it is also is combined with how many hours out, what percentage. Q49 Helen Jones: It is this that we really need to find out, Minister. You gave us the figures for the percentage of prisoners participating in educational activity, but the question is really: what is the average number of hours per week that they are participating? Phil Hope: Yes, we should try and give you that data - I understand the importance of that - but much more important is the individual's development and the idea of the individual learning plan, and the LSC will be collecting information about individuals - the learning they are doing in prison, the learning they are doing out of prison when they are on release and the outcomes for them, both in terms of qualifications or skills achieved but also jobs they have got, how long they hold down that job and the impact that holding down that job has on their reoffending. Q50 Helen Jones: With respect, you cannot reach a good outcome unless you are allowed out of your cell to participate in courses, and it is quite possible for you to give us the figures about the percentage being involved, but it might be, and we do not know because we certainly do not have the figures, you could have more people being involved but for fewer hours. Do you have any figures to give the Committee on that? Phil Hope: My dilemma is, whilst I understand that point (and you are not unreasonably asking for the figure to see whether that has changed) that if we only count learning that goes on inside the prison as that which prisoners do when released from their cell to go and do some learning, we are missing out on a really important part. Q51 Chairman: What are we missing out? Phil Hope: We are missing out on the fact that while they are doing the laundry, while they are doing cooking, while they are doing cleaning, while they are doing other things in the working day of the prisons, those could be opportunities for learning, for skills, for gaining qualifications. Q52 Helen Jones: They could be, but are they? Phil Hope: This is changing the culture of the prison and probation system that we are describing here. I am not saying that is going to be easy, Chairman, but you can see what I am trying to say, as well as that which we call learning, and people are released to do it. Q53 Helen Jones: Minister, I understand that, but we have not got to that stage yet. That is an aspiration that you have and one which we may well share, but what we are trying to find out, particularly in view of the overcrowding in our prisons, is how many hours on average people are out learning now. Are you telling us that those figures are not available? Phil Hope: I do not have those figures available to me at this moment, Chairman. If we have got them we will certainly give them to the Committee. Q54 Fiona Mactaggart: I raised the Director General's Report, which used to have the hours spent in purposeful activity, which included precisely the things which you are referring to. Those hours are no longer published and I do not understand why. As I understand it, to get a successful education, training and employment outcome all that is required to tick that box is an interview arranged with the job centre when a prisoner leaves jail. If those two things are the case, it seems to me that we are going backwards, not forward. Phil Hope: I am still going to argue quite closely, Chairman, that what we call "purposeful activity" in some prisons may not be as purposeful and as valuable in terms of that individual's skill. Q55 Chairman: Phil, let us be honest. You know what we are after. We are happy to have a figure for how often is that prisoner out of the cell doing gym, laundry, all that sort of stuff, and then, Helen's point, how many hours out of the cell doing proper training? We are happy to take your point that both matter, but we are quite interested to know if overall it is only seven hours a day or a tiny number a week. Phil Hope: The OLASS contracts for the learning and skills that are provided in prisons are mixed with the number of hours, so we can get this information to you. I cannot read it out to you here and now, Chairman, but we certainly can get you that information. Q56 Helen Jones: Just to follow up on that, Minister, yes, you can, but the contract for the number of hours to be delivered is a different thing from the number of hours that prisoners are actually participating, because you can have a contract but you may well have, for example, a prison so overcrowded that there are not the staff to supervise those classes, so the two are not the same. We are trying to get to what is actually happening on the ground as opposed to what is contracted for. I am still not clear whether those figures are actually available. I know you may not have them with you now, but are they actually available? Phil Hope: My information is, yes, they are, and we will get them to you. Helen Jones: That would be very helpful. Can I move on to the next point. We have heard very often about this idea of a seamless education system so that when someone is studying, learning in prison, they move on to further skills training when they come out of prison. Why is it that the NOMS Bill does not have anything in it about education at all? Q57 Chairman: Perhaps Frances Flaxington could tell us about that, because she is a very widely experienced member of the team. Ms Flaxington: I think we have got this across government reducing reoffending delivery plan and the pathways are about supporting offender management. I believe that the Bill deals with the introduction of offender management, but we are confident that all the reforms that we have been putting in place across government partnerships will integrate education, training and employment both through the gate and as part of our whole NOMS approach with offenders on community orders. I think we feel it is the supporting factors that will make offender management work; therefore we did not feel that it was necessary for the Bill. Q58 Helen Jones: What you are saying to us is that in the future no-one should come out of prison without a proper plan being in place, not only for their supervision, but for their education or training. Is that correct? Ms Flaxington: I think what we are saying for offender management is that it is an assessment, both of public protection, the likelihood of reoffending, but, importantly, an individual approach to all the needs that an offender has to help them turn away from crime, and accommodation, employment and education being at the absolute core of it. We see this agenda being critical to support offender management. Q59 Helen Jones: But is this not also going to be affected by the churning? We heard quite a lot this afternoon, quite rightly, about making links with local employers and about people then being able to finish their sentence, come out and maybe go to work for an employer; but if people are continually being moved around prisons, if they are not in a local prison, not where they are going to settle afterwards, that whole thing just goes by the board, does it not? Ms Flaxington: I think there is a really important message, which is about a very targeted approach here that this individual assessment is going to identify a critical few who are at high risk of harm, those prolific and other priority offenders who are going to commit the most offences, so that we are actually identifying which of the offenders we really need to focus on, and it is a very individualised plan. Some offenders are quite willing to go and find their own jobs; they already have the skills. We want to identify what different package is needed with each offender, and education training is an integral part of all that. Q60 Helen Jones: I understand that, but it is not much use making the link with the local employer if that offender is then moved round the prison system, not because of any reassessment of the risk they pose, but simply because of the sheer numbers we are dealing with, and then they go to a different part of the country and that link is broken. That does not help prevent people reoffending in future, does it? Ms Flaxington: The concept behind offender management is that that offender manager will actually track the offender wherever they are, that we actually have a continuity of information, of assessment, passing it through the system, whether the offender is in prison or in the community. Q61 Helen Jones: I understand that, but that is not my point. You can track them, but if you have broken the link with the employer, you have broken the very link that might prevent them reoffending in the future, have you not? What is the point of someone going through skills training, making links with a local employer and then being moved round away from that? It is great tracking them, we know what is happening to them, but you are still not increasing their chances of getting a job when they come out, are you? Ms Flaxington: I think by having this regional offender management system, by having these regional partnership boards, by having this assessment of skills gaps across the country, by having this network of employers across the country, we will be able to match people wherever they are in the country because we are going to have a much better picture of what is actually happening. Q62 Helen Jones: You will not, because the skills needs in different parts of the country are very different. If you start a programme for someone which is matched to the needs of a local employer, you might very well find that in another part of the country the skills they have gained are not necessarily in short supply, there is not an opening for them. Baroness Scotland of Asthal: Can I say that the impression that we have got from a number of employers is that there are what are called "soft skills", but they are actually quite hard skills, which we need in terms of punctuality, working with others, being able to have literacy and numeracy skills and pick them up. Lots of employers say, "We can give the specialist training, but we actually need those core skills to be developed better with the staff with whom we work." So that is issue number one. So there are certain core skills which you can give to offenders which will enable them to be more employable than they would otherwise be, but the most important thing, I think, that we need to grapple with is the idea that the moment the person comes into the criminal justice system that needs-based assessment and that risk-assessment has to be made at that point, because offender management is not simply about what happens to them when they go in prison, there is an issue about whether they should go to prison at all. If you look at the 2003 criteria for sentencing, it is not just about punishment, it is about the sort of intervention or sentence which will reduce the likelihood of reoffending and rehabilitate the offender as well. So it is punishment and those other issues. What we want the offender manager to do is to make that risk and needs-based assessment when the decision is made before the court about disposal and for us to be able to retain those who are not dangerous and who are not serious in the community so some of these issues will be more easily and more effectively dealt with because they will remain in situ. We then, because we are going to have an offender manager who will stay with the offender through the process, have an expectation (and I am not talking about aspiration but an expectation) that each offender when sentenced will have an offending plan. So the court will be told, "The reasons that we say that you should not go to prison are as follows. Whilst in prison we would expect the following to be undertaken with this person", so that they have a sentencing plan and the sentencing plan would be worked on more concretely in prison so that when they come out they have got a discharge plan and you have that continuity from the beginning to the end. That is end-to-end offender management. Q63 Chairman: Wonderful in theory, Lady Scotland. Can we move on? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: It is delivering it in practice which is very difficult. In relation to the issues that Fiona raised in relation to women, I absolutely agree with her that there is a model in terms of the work we are doing for women, the reducing reoffending programme, which was just over the nine million that we are trying to deliver through the Women into Work Programme, which deals specifically with the different models, and in relation to arts and the strategy Fiona is absolutely right about that too. If you look at the Civic Alliance, the Civic Alliance is about looking not just at accommodation but also arts, sport and the other activities which we can use creatively to access learning. Chairman: We are coming to alliances in a minute. We want to move on. Andrew. Q64 Mr Pelling: I am sorry to look backwards for a moment, but the experience with the OLASS when it came to the new contracting arrangements with the pilot areas, how were those pilots assessed and how did they feed into the rolling out of the programme nationally? How was this able to ensure that where we have had this roll-out there was what was actually a short period of time? Phil Hope: As we delivered the pilot in the three regions we wanted to assess as they were going along; so we were learning the lessons from how the pilots were going so that we could apply the lessons learnt to the roll out. We did not wait until those three regions had finished, researched it, found out what the truth was and then commissioned the roll-out for most of the six regions, we did the learning along the way so that we could then roll it out in that year as we wanted to. We are still carrying on doing those assessments and, as you can see from the report, from the early inspection, clearly it has made a huge difference, but there are still questions to be answered about the exact difference of the different models, the models in the south-west in particular compared to others, and the extent to which you commission prison education alongside, or differently from, education for offenders in the community, and the regional strategy that the south-west has adopted is different from others. I am not going to speak for too long, because I will get told off again, but it is that learning that we are taking on now as we go through, and, of course, in 2009 all the regions will be recommissioned again on a three-yearly cycle and we are hoping that the two regional test-beds that we are putting in place in 2007/2008 will start further learning so that each of the OLASS contracts we have got can develop this campus model having learnt the lesson. So this is work in progress. Q65 Mr Pelling: I know the Government these days is about constant revolution, but you made reference to the change that is taking place. The Association of Colleges have expressed concerns about the resources that are required to rebid in a different style. How concerned should we be about this speed of change, and do you recognise that there is some instability that is created for colleges and, indeed, for the motivation of staff who are currently delivering these programmes? Phil Hope: To be honest, I realise the speed of change was fast, but I realise too that the level of change that was needed to get the improvement was dramatic. Without driving the agenda for it as hard as we did, we would not have achieved the kind of change we have done in such a short time. I know change is difficult, but through using that formative evaluation method, as opposed to the summative evaluation, we were able to learn the lessons as we progressed, and certainly, whilst we know change is always difficult for staff as they go through, the fact that the new providers and the new approach to doing this has achieved such a step-change in its performance does imply that it was the right thing to do, to drive hard. Q66 Mr Pelling: You are changing again. Why is it necessary to change again for 2009? Phil Hope: We are inviting two regions to bid to be test-bed regions for these new ideas. The campus ideas are rooted in the OLASS model; they are another step forward. So we are hoping the two regions who have been through the process already will say, "Yes, we want to carry on and change". I would not call it a permanent revolution, I would call it building on good practice and doing so in a systemic way. Q67 Chairman: It is all in the past though, is it not? The last time you did five regions, you hardly assessed them before you spread it to the rest of them. Phil Hope: I think, as I said, the assessment was going on as the pilots were rolling out, but I think that the change that has happened has been successful. I think there have been concerns about the impact on particular individual institutions. I think they have been managed quite carefully. At the beginning there was a key issue about communication. I think when you are managing a process of change communication is absolutely critical, and I think the Green Paper and now the Next Steps document makes it very clear what we are trying to achieve in communicating to staff in all parts of the system why we are doing what we are doing. Q68 Mr Pelling: In which way is this evolution rather than revolution? Would it not have been better have had two rounds of OLASS before moving on again? Phil Hope: As I say, I think it is evolution in the sense that we have taken the learning from three pilots and applied that to all nine regions. Those nine regions will be in place for three years delivering the new contracts that they have agreed, but, rather than just resting on those laurels, as it were, we have invited two of those regions to try out the next stage building on the OLASS model into the campus model so that by 2009, when we recommission them, we rebid, we will have new things to put into that bidding process to build on the success that the campus model will have shown us in the two test-bed regions. Mr Barnham: Could I add to that? There are always difficult judgments to make in these change processes about the balance between speed and going steadily. Your Committee itself did criticise the Government for their lack of urgency on this front when they identified a lot of issues that needed to be dealt with in prison education, so the OLASS change was intended to be fast, and I do not think we make any apologies for that. It was evaluated as we went; there was action researched by independent people as we went along. There is a report that has been published one year on of the development regions which shows that the process overall has been a positive one. I think the thing to say about the campus model is that we have not said that the OLASS model is going to be thrown out and something completely different put in its place. People have said the contracting approach may be a bit too narrow. That is what we have got at the moment and it is having a positive impact, but maybe we can do better. So people have said, "Maybe you can do something slightly different, more connected with the mainstream." We may not need another bidding and procurement round in the same way in 2009 to replace those contracts. On the other hand, we may decide that we do have to. So the test-bed regions are to try things out to see if you can pull together the strands of the Green Paper strategy, to build on what OLASS has already given us, to do something a bit more effective and a bit more impactful. If that does not seem better than the OLASS process, then we would have to think very carefully about throwing that out and doing something different. Q69 Mr Pelling: It would be even more expensive for the colleges, would it not, if you went through that process? Mr Barnham: No, if we have another OLASS bidding round it will cost them possibly what it cost them this time round, although possibly less because they will be used to the process. If we develop the campus model sufficiently that we do not need a bidding process, that we can build this into the mainstream planning and funding that the Learning and Skills Council does with its providers, then that would probably be less expensive for them. Q70 Mr Pelling: I have three more micro-questions, which I will try to deal with quickly. Quite often prisoners ask to be moved in the context of the educational provision that they might have been provided. Is there any way in which these new providers have been drawn into that, bearing in mind that some of them are quite new to the process, and how have they coped with that? Phil Hope: I am not aware that there has been any difficulty on prisoners requesting to be moved. The important thing is if an individual offender is having difficulty with their learning, to find out what that difficulty is, is it inappropriate assessment that has happened, is it that the nature of the provision is not to the quality that the prisoner was expecting? Q71 Mr Pelling: Sometimes it can used as an excuse to secure a move rather than real educational need. How is that being coped with? Phil Hope: We have not had any evidence that is causing difficulties within the system that I am aware of, but I am certainly happy to look at that and make sure that it is not happening. Q72 Mr Pelling: ESOL provision, that is made, is it, under this provision of OLASS? English as a second language. Phil Hope: It is something that we can be delivering inside prisons, yes. Q73 Mr Pelling: Is there much under this scheme --- Phil Hope: Yes, there is. Q74 Mr Pelling: --- bearing in mind you are cutting it elsewhere. Phil Hope: We are not cutting it elsewhere but there is provision for prisoners who need English as they are speaking another language in prisons. Q75 Mr Pelling: There was quite a change in the providers, I understand 78 per cent was the change to the providers through the OLASS change. Do you think that has worked well? What regulations are in place to ensure that these providers are performing bearing in mind, at least initially, there was a lack of experience. Phil Hope: I think moving over to the LSC with the new contracting system, the fact that those new contracts are now in place and are delivering a change as we can see from the inspector's report, is clearly having a positive effect. There is a monitoring regime through the contract by the LSC of the providers to ensure that the quality continues to improve and at the end of the three year period a summative judgment can be made but in the meantime there are clear performance criteria that we expect the providers to be meeting. The LSC will be monitoring those and if they are not being met then they will be accountable through the contract of the LSC for not doing so. Q76 Chairman: Has my colleague Andrew Pelling really used the wrong kind of culture in terms of permanent revolution? Is it more Japanese shakubuku, breaking and subduing, that you are into? How do you explain all the nice things you have said about aspirations and so on, if you did a 360° evaluation of the people who deliver this stuff, what sort of response would you get? Frances, you have got a lot of experience in this and you mostly do very short answers. Ms Flaxington: It is because I am passing all the notes. Q77 Chairman: The information that we are getting from prison governors is that they do not like it, they are unhappy and they are miserable. If what you say is true everyone should be dancing in the streets, but the prison governors do not like what is going on, certainly the Probation Service do not like what is going on. Who does like it? Frances, why are they not dancing in the streets? You know this area so well. Ms Flaxington: First of all, I have to say this is wholesale culture change to introduce offender management --- Q78 Chairman: I told you shakubuku, breaking it in two and then rebuilding a good society. Ms Flaxington: I would also point to the roll-out of offender management which was based on a pathfinder in the North West and if you talk to the people on the ground doing the work, they are very, very positive. You talk to the offenders and they say, "For the first time I know what the plan is in plain speaking language and I know how all these people are trying to work together to help me". There are platitudes about the difference. Q79 Chairman: I think you are from Yorkshire, are you? Ms Flaxington: Leeds. 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? Ms 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 reoffending 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 job centre 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 to 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 per cent 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 per cent 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 ten 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. They have got 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. Ms Flaxington: It is entirely deliberate that it is not a lot about NOMS because this is very much a message about our alliances which is reducing reoffending needs, all of us across government, all of our partners regionally and local communities to help 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 reoffending 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 reoffending 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 CS, 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. Ms 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 that 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. Ms Flaxington: I am really pleased that the Committee have raised this issue because one of our other reduciong reoffending 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. Ms Flaxington: It is a safeguarding agenda, it is critically important to us as well as the reducing reoffending. Q100 Stephen Williams: One final question, it follows from what Fiona raised earlier and the Minister mentioned it as well, about soft skills of prisons, not just direct employability skills. In my limited experience of two visits to Bristol Prison and meeting some prisoners, they have very low personal articulation and inter-personal skills. Is any of that built into the prison education targets? Phil Hope: It is an essential part. What is important about individual learning is that we continue to talk about personalising the learning which the individual will receive and each individual will be different and, therefore, as well as generic skills training of one kind or another we need to find out what it is for individuals. That is why different courses are put on and why different offenders choose which courses to attend that appeal to their particular interests and perhaps their particular needs. You are right, Patricia was saying this earlier, we call these soft skills, I think they can be the hardest skills for someone to acquire because they have had a legacy of learning the complete reverse of those skills. The whole of their lives has been spent communicating badly, behaving badly, treating others badly and treating themselves badly, to turn that around, those are not soft skills, those are extremely difficult things to do and require some extraordinarily talented people that I see inside the prison system working very well to take offenders to a point where they have not been to before about looking at themselves and developing a change about their self-esteem and self confidence, that moves them forward. Q101 Stephen Williams: Going back to my previous question, would that include parenting skills and anger management? Phil Hope: Yes, both of those would be available and increasingly parenting skills - you mentioned child poverty - many of the offenders, particularly dads, go back into prison and as a result of some of the parenting skills for the first time finding out about some very basic things like reading to your child, for example, that they did not think about before. I know that sounds remarkable, but it is the case, Chairman. Chairman: We are on a nine minute countdown to the Chairman's Christmas party, to which our witnesses are cordially invited. We only have nine minutes, but David wants to ask some questions. Q102 Mr Chaytor: I cannot wait but I want to finish the question. During the Committee's visits to various prisons as part of this inquiry, one of the strongest messages we received was about the inadequacy of individual learning plans. Is it the case that the individual learning plans remain paper-based throughout the system and that they vary from prison to prison? Phil Hope: Yes, they are currently still paper-based and what I said at the beginning, one of the things that we have not yet achieved, and I see it as a core part of dealing with this issue of churn, for example, and certainly dealing with the issue of linking up what goes on in prison with what goes on outside of prison, is creating an electronic database that offenders will have, an electronic learning plan and electronic storage of what their achievements are and so on. Therefore, when they move from prison to prison we have not got to worry about are they clutching the bit of paper or the folder with the record inside. Although we have now got a system where that works, I think it is inadequate and it is something that we need to do. Our difficulty is that data collected on the NOMIS system is not the same or is not compatible with data that the LSC are using, so this is the technical thing. It is soluble but it is going to take us a bit longer than I thought it would take to get there. Q103 Mr Chaytor: When would you expect the whole system of individual learner plans to be in electronic format? Phil Hope: I would hope that we can overcome these systems over the next year. I know you will hold me to this so I might as well say it. I want it to be successfully completed within the next year. I think through the regional test beds we might be able to take it forward. It is a technical problem that we have got to resolve here. There are questions about confidentiality of data records and so on, I think these are all doable, it is just going to take a bit more time for us to work together to solve it. Mr Barnham: Could I add to that? The Learning and Skills Council will procure in 2007 an offender learning database. Q104 Mr Chaytor: What? Mr Barnham: They will specify and procure an offender learning database which will basically hold all offenders' records electronically accessible from various places so there will not have to be a physical transfer, you will be able to access them wherever you go. Q105 Chairman: You said you were going to introduce that a year ago. Mr Barnham: It has been introduced in some of the development regions and in the South West, for example. Q106 Chairman: They are having terrible trouble with it. Mr Barnham: Certainly there have been teething troubles, but in the South West, the system that they have got there, the LSC told me only this week that they have saved themselves at least 1,000 reassessments that they would have had to make of people being assessed again who had previously been assessed somewhere else, so there is some progress being made but the longer term solution must be an offender management information system which covers all offender needs, that is a very long-term solution for the education needs. In the meantime, the Learning and Skills Council, because it needs this, will procure something to cover all the nine English regions starting from 2007. I cannot make commitments on the exact timetable of getting that embedded everywhere, but they will go out to procurement. Q107 Mr Chaytor: The procurement of the database will be in 2007? Mr Barnham: Yes. Q108 Mr Chaytor: The process of inputting all the information of all offenders could take years and years after that, could it? Mr Barnham: I would not put it like that. There are systems already in place and, as I said, the South West has a system already which is operated, it is a commercial system that the company Tribal, which is responsible for information, advice and guidance in the South West, has developed itself and is using. That is also available to the other two development regions although they have been slower to adopt that. What we need is a system that applies everywhere. We have got different systems in operation at the moment and the LSC is requiring emailing of individual learner records and learner plans but they are going to put all of this on a firmer footing to cover everything that they are responsible for. Q109 Mr Chaytor: Does the same situation apply to the sentencing plans? The sentencing plans are supposed to relate closely to the individual learner plans, but are the sentencing plans still paper-based or are they in electronic format? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: Electronic. Ms Flaxington: In the longer term we are going to see it integrated into C-NOMIS, our offender management database, and that is going to be really important to make sure that this agenda is part and parcel of electronic records on offender management. Q110 Chairman: Now someone is passing you pieces of paper. Ms Flaxington: He reminds me that we already have Oasis. I will let my Minister answer. Baroness Scotland of Asthal: No, I like it when Frances answers, it gives me a break. Continue. Q111 Chairman: You could end up in some obscure office in Leeds! Ms Flaxington: The Oasis system is already online, which is this offender assessment that we talked about which has really helped in terms of rolling out offender management. It is the focus, this assessment of the needs. I am starting to ramble so I am going to stop. Baroness Scotland of Asthal: It has also so far been one of the best models that we have in terms of accurately assessing both risk and need and rolling it out is one of the issues which is challenging but actually quite successful. Q112 Mr Chaytor: Could I pursue this point. The sentence plan is a paper-based system, but we have in the three development regions the Oasis system which is due to be rolled out. Ms Flaxington: You have got Oasis across the country which is an electronic assessment situation. What you get with the learning and skills, this database which we are developing in the three regions now, is about the qualifications that the offender is gaining and doing individual qualifications and what we are trying to do for the longer term is integrate it all into one package. Q113 Mr Chaytor: How does this fit in with the employability contract because, again, the Next Steps document makes no reference to individual learning plans but describes quite carefully what will be in the employability contract. Are we going to have two things or is it all going to be merged together? Ms Flaxington: I think this is part of our challenge for the future, we want our offender manager to have education, training and employment as central to their assessment and planning and this contract is simply a badge for us to promote the agenda with offender managers as part of its roll-out. Q114 Mr Chaytor: Will the employability contract be a sheet of paper or will it be an electronic record and how will it relate to the individual learning plan and the sentence plan? It sounds chaotic to me, but I want you to explain why it is not chaos. Ms Flaxington: I think what we are going to do is use the test bed regions as a way of saying, "Okay, there is your roll-out of offender management, how do we get a higher profile for education, training and employment as part of it?" Really, whether it is a piece of paper, it is about how we get the offender manager working with the offender in the community in terms of what you need to do to get yourself into work. Q115 Mr Chaytor: If you still have the staff who are delivering the service at the frontline confused about the status and the transferability of the individual learning plan, not knowing whether the employment contract is a physical document or an overarching concept, how is it going to work? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: I hope I can help. The whole role of the offender manager is to be the co-ordinator. What the offender manager will have to do is a risk assessment of that individual to basically assess dangerousness and otherwise and then do a needs-based assessment. That needs-based assessment could involve employment, education, accommodation, difficulties with children, debt, a whole series of things, including the seven pathways, of which education and employability will be one. In relation to education and employability, they will work really closely with the LSC to identify the offender's needs and part of that sentencing plan may include the employment pathway, but there will be other pathways. It is going to be important for accommodation, so, if you like, the offender manager is going to be the conductor of an orchestra which is going to have many parts but they are there to synthesise and make sense of it so you do not get a cacophony of discordant notes but you get a bit of harmony. Q116 Mr Chaytor: When the new system beds in, will there be a single electronic document that will contain all this assessment and set out the essence of the employability contract and the individual learning plan? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: There should be as part of C-NOMIS because Oasis was the assessment tool, but C-NOMIS will provide the means to which that will be collated. Q117 Mr Chaytor: When will C-NOMIS be up and running? Baroness Scotland of Asthal: It is alive already in one prison in Albany and it has been rolled out progressively throughout the next year or two. I think we were hoping that by 2008 C-NOMIS would be rolled out throughout the system. Q118 Mr Chaytor: If C-NOMIS is going to be rolled out by 2008, how does this relate to the procurement of the database that Phil Hope referred to? Ms Flaxington: Can we think in the short, medium and longer term. In the three test regions we have already got some database on learning, in the medium term we will have this offender learning database while C-NOMIS starts to kick in, getting the education bit into C-NOMIS is going to take longer, that is why we have got these interim arrangements. Mr Barnham: It is easy to get confused. I want to try and clarify this. For anybody who is engaged in education, the Learning and Skills Council already requires there to be an individual learner record and a learning plan. The transfer of those things and the availability throughout the system for providers has not been good enough in the past and we ought to improve that, we ought to do that with an electronic system so that somebody goes from one place to another and it is clear how far they have gone. That is connected with, or ideally should be, and analogous to the overall offender sentence plan which ought to set out everything that somebody needs and all the interventions that are going on. The employability contract is a fairly specific idea that we floated in the Green Paper last year which is where an individual is identified as having a particular employability need which, if addressed, could make a significant impact on the chances of not offending anymore, so it may only be a minority of offenders, and where they are willing to sign up to an intensive programme to address that need with rewards attached to it, with a job opportunity at the end of it perhaps, where they are willing to make that step to sign up to what may be a demanding programme, the idea was to have a contract to motivate them and it may be a piece of paper if that is what people appreciate, it sets out what it is they are going to do and what they will get in return for it. That is not to say that they will not have the learner records elsewhere in the system which anybody else would, but the contract idea is a New Deal concept, "We will give you this help you must have responsibilities to meet that and we will address that in a plan which we are going to set out to make clear what you do". Q119 Mr Chaytor: Chairman, I am really anxious to get to your Christmas party but if I could ask one more thing about the contract. I have accepted that the contract will be for a minority of appropriate prisoners but presumably some of them will ultimately reoffend, it will not be a 100 per cent foolproof system and they may well turn up in prisons in other parts of the country. Surely, if the contract is going to be a paper-based system we are back to square one because we have still got the inadequacies of transfer of records between prisons. Mr Barnham: I do not think so because their sentence plan will be on the system, their learner record will be on the system, the things they have undertaken, the programmes they have done, the achievements they have made will all be recorded there. The fact that they may once have had an agreement about their behaviour is there. Q120 Mr Chaytor: The fact that they have reneged on a contract they previously signed will not be on the system. Mr Barnham: I think it will be, it will be part of the sentence plan. Baroness Scotland of Asthal: The thing is the person who will continue with them is going to be the offender manager. The whole point of having one offender manager is that they do not get lost, you do not have to relearn. That offender manager will remain responsible for them wherever they may be and is supposed to be the glue which gives you your continuity so you do not get lost. What offenders have told us again and again is that in the past they did not know what the expectations were, "What am I supposed to do? What does success look like? What does failure look like? What is the clear message that I have to take?" What we hope is that offender management gives them that clarity, "This is your bit, this is our bit, this is what will happen if you succeed, this is what will happen if you fail", so consequences very clearly gripped. Chairman: This has been a really good session. We have learned a lot, we have asked some, I hope, hard questions. There is a bit of me that wants to say, with great respect to Phil, that there is a triumph of hope over experience, but we hope that we can mull this over and come up with a report based on this evidence session. Thank you very much and can I wish you all a very happy and enjoyable holiday and Christmas. |