Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
THURSDAY 13 MARCH 2008
SIR JEREMY
BEECHAM, RUTH
GAUL AND
DR KADHEM
JALLAB
Chairman: Good afternoon and welcome.
This is the inquiry into justice re-investment. When the Committee
was in the United States we were fascinated to discover that Gateshead
was one of the places in which some of the kind of mapping work
we observed there was going on and I am going to ask Mr Michael
to proceed.
Q1 Alun Michael: I would like to
boil it down to two questions because we could make it complicated
or we could try and make it simple. Can you show us and explain
your analysis from the evidence and, very specifically, what you
are doing to act on that analysis. In other words, what changes
as a result of taking the analytic approach that you are doing,
where is it taking us?
Sir Jeremy Beecham: Specifically
on the Gateshead aspect I will defer to my two colleagues. Dr
Jallab is responsible for the analysis and Ruth is responsible
for hopefully devising policies which will be implemented that
flow from the analysis. I have, perhaps, a more general perspective
although, it is fair to say that the project which I chaired in
Gateshead was essentially concerned with studying the problem,
not specifically devising solutions, but perhaps Dr Jallab could
expand on that.
Q2 Alun Michael: I think that is
rather what came out of the paper, so accepting that, where do
we go with it?
Sir Jeremy Beecham: We have lots
of thoughts about that.
Q3 Chairman: Let us start with what
it tells us.
Dr Jallab: The first thing is
to tell you briefly what data we collected and what we had to
go through to find the data. Originally the projects was focusing
on identifying the prisoners who gave their home address as Gateshead
before going into prison or on their way to prison and on leaving
the prisons what kind of address they were giving so we could
look at their home address, how does that relate to other data.
There were a big number of them and I will go through those. The
first thing we found was a great difficulty in identifying the
prisoners, where they were coming from on entering the prison
or what was their home address. The prisons themselves do not
have good records of prisoners. They have records but not ones
that are easily accessible, and when they have addresses there
are lots of prisoners, especially leaving prison who elect to
say they have no fixed address because apparently historically
some years ago if a prisoner said, "I have no fixed address",
they would get extra money for that. It was a kind of cultural
thing that before they entered prison or in the prison they would
tell each other, "Don't tell them you've got a fixed address,
you'll get more money". Apparently that is the story from
some years ago, as I understand it.
Q4 Chairman: The culture lives on!
Dr Jallab: The culture still lives
on. We had great difficulty getting the data from the prisons
themselves or from the Prison Service. We discovered during that
the Prison Service could have a headcount of prisoners on a given
date, ie today they would know how many prisoners are in each
prison, but they could not supply us with historical data from
last year or the year before so we could analyse the flow or trends
of the data, which was astonishing for me as a statistician looking
for a basic database. I am talking here about 2005-06 and up until
early last year, so I am not sure whether this has changed because
we have been told during that time that there is work on some
databases and so on.
Q5 Alun Michael: Forgive me, that
is a useful explanation of why there were the obstacles in your
paper, but given that we have got limited time, what is the analysis
and where does it take you in terms of action?
Dr Jallab: We ended up using probation
data to identify the prisoners and their home addresses. We found
almost a quarter of offenders on probation in 2005 and 2006 lived
in two out of 22 electoral wards, namely Dunston, Teams and Felling,
while half lived in just five wards. In four wards the rate of
offenders on probation was one in 100, while in the rest it was
less than one in 1,000. We looked into comparing where offenders
lived in relation to the index of the Deprivation, which is the
official ranking of wards in England, and we found a substantial
overlap with indices of deprivation. The higher a ward ranks on
the index, the more probation cases are likely to reside there.
We did some kind of Spearman rank correlation co-efficient and
we found the co-efficient plus 0.89 which is very close to one,
one is a perfect correlation, so it was a very high positive correlation.
Q6 Alun Michael: Forgive me, at this
point you are describing the sort of research that I had done
in the Ely area of Cardiff 30 years ago.
Dr Jallab: Absolutely
Alun Micheal: What do you do about it?
Q7 Mrs James: Sorry, before we go
on to what we do about it, on one of your maps here, which is
the one that shows the ranking position of LSOA in England, it
is actually the dots of where people are, because there are dotted
around here people within the more affluent areas, has anybody
done any comparison on the sorts of crimes and what the crimes
are? Are there any indices which demonstrate that?
Dr Jallab: We have. We have got
the crime data and we have done the analysis, but clearly I need
to look into it to tell you the results. We have to expect that
crime happens everywhere but what we looked at was the concentration
of the crimes, the concentration of offenders and that is the
finding. You are absolutely right in saying that after many conclusions
on data analysis we did not find any surprises. What we had expected
we found. If you look at map number six, the Tyne and Wear one,
which is expanding outside Gateshead, it is a very similar picture
to the rest of Tyne and Wear and the other four council areas.
Q8 Mrs James: Are the people who
are living in the green areas doing white collar crimes or violent
crimes? You can meet people in prison who are dentists and doctors
but are the pockets of crime concentrating on certain types of
crime?
Dr Jallab: I could not answer
that without looking into the crime data analysis.
Ruth Gaul: This leads us on to
where we are now in relation to this piece of research because
especially with the information you have got in front of you,
I think we have moved on from there and some of the processes
we have in place could address some of those questions you are
raising there.
Q9 Mrs James: Thank you.
Ruth Gaul: I have come into this
at a later date so this all happened before I came on board. The
one thing from Gateshead Council's point of view is that this
piece of research was seen as a catalyst to our involvement within
the sort of offender and prisoner issues that are taking place.
What we have seen is a two-pronged approach, so we have policy
development within the council, but then we also have operations
and service delivery at a neighbourhood level. If you look at
the bigger context of policy direction, where we are going to,
you can compare this to the Crime and Disorder Act where it is
stated that it is not just the responsibility of the police to
tackle crime. What we have seen in Gateshead is that this piece
of research has emphasised the fact that support and tackling
and preventing offending is not just the responsibility of the
Probation Service and that is where we have tended to move to
in relation to this piece of research. The one policy driver that
we have had in relation to this has been our Local Area Agreement.
Gateshead Council was a pilot for Local Area Agreement, so we
are now entering our second Local Area Agreement. We have seen
offending and tackling and supporting offenders as a priority
within that Local Area Agreement to the eventuality that we have
set what we call an "improvement target" and a "stretched
target", one of only 35 for our partnership for the CSP in
Gateshead because we see it so much as a priority. From a policy
direction, that whole emphasis on a partnership approach to offend
and to prisoners is identified within our newest Local Area Agreement.
Q10 Alun Michael: How has this analysis
then changed the way you target activity?
Ruth Gaul: As I said, what we
have done now, and where we have moved on to from this piece of
research and the analytical data, is within Gateshead we have
produced our own strategic assessment and, at the same time, the
health authority have produced their own joint needs assessment.
Both of them have identified for the first time ever the needs
of prisoners and offenders as a priority, so both authorities
have looked at a multitude of analytical data. What is really
interesting is the fact that for the first time ever the health
authority, in their joint needs assessment, has identified prisoners
leaving prison and coming into the community as having a massive
impact on health and the health agenda.
Q11 Alun Michael: Fine, but what
are you doing differently?
Ruth Gaul: That is getting into
service delivery and there are quite a few initiatives ongoing
in relation to it. From the Community Safety Partnership's point
of view, the first thing we have done is invested resources and
we have recruited what we call a prolific offenders' manager who
has now taken on a much broader role of strategically reducing
offending in Gateshead. We have just confirmed that funding is
in now for another three years through the Local Area Agreement
to achieve our improvement target. There is a thread there that
takes it around. We have invested also in community payback which
links into our problem solving approach in Gateshead, which also
links into our neighbourhood policing approach in Gateshead, so
we have neighbourhood policing which is linked into problem solving
which is linked into our neighbourhood management process. We
identify problems in partnership and then what we do with probation
and also youth offending is we then get offenders to go back into
the community to then solve the sort of environmental crime issues
which nine times out of 10 they may have created. Again, financially
we have invested in that as well.
Q12 Alun Michael: In that targeting
are you working with the prison authorities before release, for
instance?
Ruth Gaul: No. What I was saying
before we came in here, as you will be aware, is the development
of policy is quite long and it takes a lead-in process. We do
have gaps and one of the main gaps which we still have is our
inability to talk to and collect information from the Prison Services
about offenders. We are more robust now in relation to analysis
and information which we receive and it has moved on from when
this piece of research started, but what we are still lacking
is the communication and information sharing between the Prison
Service and the local authority.
Sir Jeremy Beecham: This is where
there is an intersection between your two topics for today because
the role of the Prison Service and NOMS generally is going to
be critically important and it is essential that there is a partnership
at local and not just regional level between those two services.
Q13 Chairman: Does that not apply
to the Court Service as well?
Sir Jeremy Beecham: It certainly
does. In terms of the release, I do not know what the particular
local situation is, but notifications have risen from something
like only 3% in 2005 to 19%, roughly split, equally I think, between
the Prison Service and the Probation Service, so the trend is
upward but there is a huge gap still of basic information.
Q14 Chairman: That is notification
of releases to the local authority?
Sir Jeremy Beecham: Yes. There
is a particularly good example in the sense of community payback,
though not quite on the lines which Ruth was mentioning in Gateshead,
which is the refurbishment of Saltwell Park that was done under
a re-investment prison project by prisoners, both acquiring skill
and then deploying it in refurbishing an old Victorian park, and
a similar project in Middlesbrough which was done in conjunction
with the Prison Service and partly funded by, dare I say it, the
Northern Rock Foundation. The future of that project is a little
under question at the moment but, nonetheless, it was a very good
example of payback in that sense. Of course, there is a range
of local authority schemes up and down the country where councils
have worked, for example, in promoting literacy and skills, which
generally makes between a 30% to 50% impact on re-offending, to
maintaining housing links, that is about a 20% effect on re-offending
if people can go out to housing and so on. The other area that
is very important, which Ruth mentioned, is the link with health
in two ways. First of all within prisons, there are huge problems
about health. The Government has rightly given responsibility
to the NHS and local authorities are feeling their way very slowly
and we need to go faster in developing the scrutiny process that
we have to apply to the prison medical service and perhaps more
generally the medical service, that is for offenders. Equally,
when you look at the composition of the prison population, a huge
proportion of prisoners, 95% of young offenders with one mental
health disorder, 80% with two and 70% and 80% for adult offenders
with mental health problems, it suggests much earlier intervention
might lead to more prevention and not just the prevention of re-offending.
Q15 Alun Michael: One point, the
key for the co-ordination of this is the Local Crime Disorder
Reduction Partnership, is it?
Sir Jeremy Beecham: It varies
from place to place. In fact, I do not know quite what the situation
is in Gateshead.
Ruth Gaul: Luckily in Gateshead
we have the CDRP, i.e. Safer Gateshead, which has a very strong
working relationship and partnership arrangements with our local
criminal delivery group. That is essential because that is tying
in crime and criminal justice together. I think in some areas
perhaps it is not as strong, but that is a strength and, again,
that is something which has emulated out of this piece of research.
Q16 Mrs James: In prisons it is quite
common now to have a team called the "CARAT team" and
it does not make any sense to me at all that you are not linked
into that team.
Ruth Gaul: We are, perhaps I should
say that, there is still a gap, but we are linked in to carrot
through our drug intervention programme.
Q17 Mrs James: Just through the drug
intervention programme?
Ruth Gaul: We are also linked
in through our prolific offenders as well.
Q18 Mrs James: Because the CARAT
is much wider than that now because the aim of most prisons is
to get a prisoner linked in to all of these support agencies before
they leave prison, i.e. that they have got housing sorted out,
that they have got a doctor, a dentist, et cetera, because those
are the challenges.
Ruth Gaul: Perhaps you have hit
the nail on the head. From our point of view we see a gap and
I think the gap is the co-ordination of all the support services
we have linking in to the offender when that offender leaves prison.
We have drug intervention, we have prolific offenders and now
what we will hopefully have is a more co-ordinated approach to
it. We pull together housing issues, the housing company, we are
pulling together employment, the Jobcentre so that we have a more
strategic and co-ordinated approach and I think that is the gap.
Sir Jeremy Beecham: The gap is
made wider than it should be by virtue of the high proportion
of people on short sentences for whom there is not the time to
deal with this and, secondly, sometimes by location. When I was
reviewing local public services in Wales, thanks to an instruction
from a minister not un-adjacent to a member of this Committee,
I did discover to my horror that there were not any real facilities
for women prisoners or young prisoners in Wales, so you have a
huge geographical gap which makes the connection that one wants
to see more difficult.
Q19 Julie Morgan: Sir Jeremy, by
what you have said you have obviously made the case for local
authorities to be right in there in tackling re-offending, what
do you think strategically can be done to make local authorities
more effective in this area, and are there barriers to the set-up
of local authorities now which make it more difficult for you
to be in there?
Sir Jeremy Beecham: It is probably
a little more difficult in two tier areas because you have got
housing, apart from other services which might be relevant, education,
adult education and so on, but that is not insurmountable. In
addition to Local Area Agreements, which include the authority
with appropriate agencies, which might be NOMS or the LSC, for
example, if you are looking at skills, we might have to look to
a multi-area agreement. Again, going back to some of this morning's
discussion around the sub-national review and sub-regions, because
some of the organisations like LSCs are essentially sub-regional,
you could see the potential for putting together agreements across
local authority boundaries around the kind of support services
you would need, particularly to re-integrate offenders back into
the community. Also, we need to be imaginative in local government.
Employment is key and it seems to me that local authorities should
be looking at the potential for employing ex-offenders as part
of this programme, as well as being sensible about housing allocation
and the rest of the services which they will need, that is on
the re-offending side. Much of what we do in any event ought to
be directed to the causes of crime. It is not a coincidence that
these maps show so clearly a correlation between the lowest decile
of disadvantage and crime, so we need to be tackling some of the
underlying issues, particularly in the realm of health. Looking
at the profile of the prison population, it is so overwhelmingly
the case that in dealing with people, they are 13 times, I think
it is, more likely to have left school without a GCSE and many
times more likely to be a single parent of either sex at any early
age and all the rest of it. These are deep-seated social problems
which have to be tackled as part of an overall approach here.
Chairman: What about the place of the
courts in this? We have looked at one or two of the American schemes
and, indeed, also, North Liverpool—of course in some cases
here you are dealing with people who are not given a custodial
sentence initially but might very well get one if they carry on
the way they are—where all the services that you describe,
all of them joined up services, are brought effectively into the
court room or at least into the corridor outside, so you do not
leave the building, having been seen by the judge or the magistrate
without having immediate access to one or other of these services.
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