Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 59)
TUESDAY 13 MAY 2008
RT HON
JACK STRAW
MP
Q40 Alun Michael: How do you see
that as changing the work of the Department, particularly in relation
to the cost and effectiveness of the criminal justice system?
Mr Straw: The change from five
to four was to reflect changes in the organisation of the Department,
and that was part of the prosaic explanation for that. The purpose
of the Department remains the same essentially, although I think
it is now better organised into the four operational directorates
general. That is what that was about.
Q41 Alun Michael: So you would not
see it as being relevant to the questions that we were asking
in relation to this particular—
Mr Straw: Not particularly, no.
With luck, the greater clarity we have got between operational
delivery of services in the new NOMS and better co-ordination
between probation on the one hand and the criminal justice directorate
general on the other should help to generate a better dynamic,
but marginally it should make a difference.
Q42 Alun Michael: Thank you. That
is helpful and a lot clearer. One of the issues that has come
up is the mixed picture regarding the availability of community
orders and related requirements. Obviously that is a big issue,
because options cannot work if they are not available, and that
potentially makes the likelihood of a prison disposal greater.
What is your assessment of the availability of the different community
requirements?
Mr Straw: There was great concern
at the turn of the year about the resourcing of the Probation
Service, particularly after the Probation Service had looked at
the consequences of the CSR for the financial year that began
last month and forward, and that then led to suggestions that
courts, whilst they would wish to use tough community penalties,
might find that the Probation Service lacked the resources to
implement them, and it was for that reason that additional resources
were found—£40 million—to ensure that the Probation
Service and the courts were not placed in that position. I have
not got area by area details about differences. I could ask officials
or the inspectorate whether they have and, if they do, I could
give it to this Committee, Chairman.
Q43 Alun Michael: I think, in that
event, I will not pursue that point any more, but it will be interesting
to have that information.
Mr Straw: There are variations.
Q44 Alun Michael: Do you have a specific
view on how that £40 million will be spent?
Mr Straw: What we sought to do,
and it is part of the process going on with the Probation Service,
is to ensure that it is spent on the higher end of community orders,
because the idea is that it should lead to courts having confidence
that there is a tough community order which they can impose as
an alternative to prison. So it is a higher rate.
Q45 Alun Michael: One of the concerns
that we had expressed was there is a recent report from the Centre
for Crime and Justice Studies which suggested, "There is
a vacuum in the knowledge about how much needs to be spent to
meet increases in work load caused by the rising number of community
orders." Is that a fair assessment?
Mr Straw: I would not say it is
a vacuum, but the information is inadequate. One of my continuing
interests over decades has been how otherwise similar parts of
the public service—say primary schools in inner city areas—have
significant variations in cost and also significant variations
in the quality of their output, and it is a great challenge in
terms of public service. It applies in business as well, but it
is a particular challenge. Anecdotally, if you look at the Probation
Service you will find that one service will say it is very over
loaded, but if you look at the cost per case it may be spending
more money than another which is not making any complaint about
this and the other one may be rather more successful as well,
and the explanation will be an internal cultural explanation about
how the staff operate together, what kind of internal processes
they have. This also applies in prisons, where we know that otherwise
similar prisons have quite significant differences in their costs.
I am talking about within the public sector; leave aside the disparity
between the public and the private sector prisons, or within courts.
You and I will remember that when we looked at the time it took
get a persistent young offender into court some areas with quite
high work loads said, "Yes, we are going to halve it",
and with others it was like trying to get blood out of a stone.
It was really, really hard.
Q46 Alun Michael: That suggests that
looking at justice reinvestment might well repay reinvestment
within specific services?
Mr Straw: Of course, and getting
people to think imaginatively. I know that those delivering services
always think it is an excuse by policy-makers at the centre when
they say, "Try and think about how you can use your resources
better", and it can be an excuse, but it can also be sensible
advice. Of course, there comes a moment when you have got to put
more money in as well, but I say to each part of the public services
for which I am responsible, the more you show me you are both
efficient and effective and doing better, the stronger my case
when it comes to getting money out of the Treasury.
Q47 Alun Michael: I wonder if I could
ask about one other thing. Reinvestment within the criminal justice
system as a whole is something we are looking at, but then some
of the issues go across a variety of department and services.
You will be aware, for instance, of the violence reduction work
that took place in Cardiff which actually started off from an
accident and emergency surgery wanting to spend less time on the
victims of violence in order to be able to cope with the victims
of motor accidents and other things. That led to changes which
led to savings for the criminal justice system, including the
Prison Service, but also a reduction of costs within the Health
Service. Is there any work looking at better spending of money
across different services?
Mr Straw: To a degree, and Professor
Jonathan Shepherd's work, to which you refer, has been very, very
important and, interestingly, in the latest survey he has done
on A & E admissions for violence the reduction in violent
crime which is shown in the BCS is also reflected in his work,
which suggests that the BCS data is robust. The answer to your
question, within the criminal justice system, for example, in
respect of efficiencies which have been introduced within London
within the criminal justice system, there has been a transfer
of spending between different parts of the system. I am desperately
trying to remember between which parts, but Deputy Assistant Commissioner
Tim Godwin has been in the lead on this and there has had to be
co-operation about these transfers. I will give a note to the
Committee, because I do not want to get it wrong. What has happened
there is that, by the CPS, the police and the Court Service working
co-operatively and sharing the benefits that they have received,
each part of those services have benefited more than they would
have done if they had said, "This money is mine", because
it incentivises it.
Alun Michael: I do not want to take up
time; so a note would be very helpful.
Q48 Chairman: Let me give you another
example that cuts across the boundaries. If the system were different,
you might have a local authority deciding that it was cost-effective
to invest quite heavily in children excluded from school.
Mr Straw: Yes.
Q49 Chairman: In order to prevent,
if they had to pay for it, paying for prison places for those
people who became offenders later on. At the moment these two
decisions are taken in very different places.
Mr Straw: They are taken completely
differently. Although I think that would be difficult to achieve,
if there were elements of police budgets which were devolved to
a district level, then you would be able to get local authorities
looking at that more in the round. Of course, local authorities,
since the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships were established,
initially, I believe, the Crime and Disorder Act, are now realising
that they can work to reduce crime effectively and to benefit
the whole of their community, and the police realise too that
often they can reduce crime and make for a safer society by actions
through the local authorities, so there is a much higher degree
of spending.
Q50 Chairman: Rather than having
to digest this, you might like to write to us afterwards on whatever
you have just been provided with.
Mr Straw: I have been given a
note, but I actually cannot read it very well, so I will put that
away.
Chairman: Can I move on to Dr Whitehead.
Q51 Dr Whitehead: Could I return
to the question of the role that you might say that the proposed
titan prisons may well play in terms of the distribution of justice
and sentencing? We had the Carter Report, which did not really
cost out what the proposals would represent, and yet the Government
announced plans to build the titans pretty soon after the Carter
Report came out and, indeed, announced £1.2 billion funding.
But at the same time you were unable to provide even an indicative
estimate of the total capital and running costs that would be
required to develop the three prisons. Is that something that
the Department is working on, or is that still in the air?
Mr Straw: I am sorry, Dr Whitehead,
but there is a table on page 20 of Carter which gives unit costs
of short-term build options and compares the capital cost to replace
various things from house blocks, rapid build residential units
through to new prisons, both in terms of capital costs and cost
per place, and Carter did that work. If I may say so, the case
for the larger prisons is to do with cost and availability. The
evidence, and Lord Carter produced it, was that a larger individual
unit would be more cost-effective, for very obvious reasons, like
shared perimeter security, shared central services, catering,
healthcare, and so on, and back office as well, but you could
have that single perimeter and still have a series of prisons
within prisons, which is what we are planning. Just as in the
clusters in Sheppey or in large prisons, for example, like Wandsworth,
you have got actually distinct prisons. In Wandsworth you have
got a sex offenders wing, which is a very distinct prison in many
ways from the rest of the operation of Wandsworth which is principally
serving a role as a local prison for that part of London. The
other factor that needs to be borne in mind is that in practice,
I think, obtaining three sets of planning permissions for three
buildings on three sites, even if they are large buildings, will
be a lot easier than, say, obtaining planning permission for 15
much smaller prisons. There is no perfect way of doing this, but
my view was to agree with Lord Carter that this was the least
worst option. Can I say, Chairman, I am due to publish a consultation
paper on the type of prisons and their operation at the beginning
of June. It is in the final drafting stage.
Q52 Dr Whitehead: That to some extent
anticipates a question I was going to raise with you. Could I
put it to you that what Carter says in terms of the costings,
to the extent that he has done them, is to look at cost per place
for new prisons generally and cost per place for short-term build
options, but that the question of scoping out what the consequences
would be of titan prisons and how they might work, including the
way that they might make changes in terms of the overall cost
per place of prisons within prisons, was not done. Is there a
scoping exercise under way for that?
Mr Straw: Not all of the background
work of Carter was included in this. In any case, this was his
independent report and, as everybody knows, I know him very well
and I work closely with him. Nonetheless, it was his report, not
mine, and so I have not seen all the papers by any means that
led to this report, but his judgment, based on a pretty thorough
analysis, was that the titans, the two and a half thousand or
so place prisons, were the most cost-effective way of delivering
this, and he had, as far as I know, reasonable evidence for saying
that. We have certainly got lots of evidence to show that, other
things being equal, unit costs in the larger prisons are lower
than those in the small prisons. I am well aware of Anne Owers'
concerns that smaller prisons may be rather more pleasant places,
but they are more expensive.
Q53 Chairman: They are not just more
pleasant, they are places in which you might be able to run better
regimes.
Mr Straw: I was not being pejorative.
All right, you can run better regimes, but it is about the overhead
costs, which are significantly high, because you still need security,
you still need a back office, and so on, and you can get economies
of scale. The challenge, Chairman, for the titans is to achieve
those economies of scale as it is the public is paying for these
facilities and, at the same time, ensure that what the Chief Inspector
of Prisons and everybody else wants—which is that there
are relatively smaller units within that big prison for separate
regimes and there is not contamination, as it were between one
another—is maintained, and I think you can achieve that.
Q54 Dr Whitehead: Certainly my understanding
of the Carter Report is, yes, he did put some very general points
in the report about building options and also costs of present
places, and also he made what may appear to be a commonsense idea
that maybe putting a big prison together might save money over
those prison costs, but that is as far as it goes, and to date
no further material has surfaced which looks at the capital costs
and the running costs of the proposed titan prisons. Yet, for
example, in the NOMS value for money agreement, the efficiency
savings they have suggested, will be subject to change once the
implications of Lord Carter's recommendations on prisons have
been fully scoped out. So one is contingent on the other, is it
not, and yet we do not have any view of what that might be?
Mr Straw: I think the best way
of resolving this is for me to write to you with what evidence
there is, but Lord Carter comes forward with a set of proposals,
they seem to stack up, and we would not have got the money from
the Treasury unless the Treasury were convinced they stacked up.
Q55 Dr Whitehead: Would you perhaps
put in that note whether it is envisaged that the £1.2 billion
that has already been announced is in any way to be repaid out
of department spends, or is that £1.2 billion which goes
into whatever happens? Let us say, for example, that it turns
out to be unbelievably economical to do this.
Mr Straw: Normally when the Treasury
releases its cash against spend it is unlikely to be unbelievably
economical.
Q56 Chairman: I am glad you recognise
that.
Mr Straw: When we suddenly find
we have saved a couple of hundred million quid, I doubt it. Would
we be able to say the Treasury, "We have saved that money
and we are keeping it"? I will get some more advice about
it, but I set out quite a lot of the detail about the spend in
my letter to you. My official has pointed out, and I underline
the point, that the £1.2 billion is new money. You have not
got to find it from efficiencies. It is genuinely new money.
Q57 Dr Whitehead: Can I move to the
question, which I think to some extent follows from that, of a
structured sentencing framework. The consultation document which
has been issued by the working group on the structured sentencing
framework talks about the timetable by which this should be done,
an extremely tight timetable subject to some criticism. Is there
any suggestion that the haste for examining the idea for a structured
sentencing framework maybe has something to do with trying to
reconcile the question of predictions of prison population, probation
resources that are required and the issue of judicial discretion?
The suggestion that maybe if you have a structured sentencing
framework which, therefore, one might argue, rather circumscribes
judicial discretion, shall we say, then you could rather more
accurately predict prison populations and, indeed, what resources
might be available for probation outside that prison population
and that then might tie-in with your titan prison programme; does
that all tie in with a plan to get the numbers organised, or is
the haste simply because it is a good idea in its own right?
Mr Straw: First of all, I would
not describe it as haste. Lord Carter was appointed 11 months
ago. He worked very hard at the central part of what he was doing,
with advice from the senior judiciary and others, to look at the
idea of a structured sentencing framework, and other colleagues
visited the United States to look at examples of that up to the
date when he published his report, or I published his report,
on 5 December last year. Since then we have had the working party
under Lord Justice Gage, which has now published this consultation
paper. I do not think it is haste. Yes, we do want to get on with
the work to make some judgments about it, but it has been very
thorough. I do not think anybody has said it is hasty. We need
the additional prison places. If we can square the circle between
greater predictability of sentencing in general whilst maintaining
proper individual judicial discretion in particular cases, which
we have got to do, then I think it will produce benefits. There
is no perfect way of predicting prison population. In the United
States they have found that even if they have a mandatory grid,
which is what the Federal system had, which we are not proposing
and is not best practice in the States, the prison population
may still rise for other reasons. You can predict what will happen
in an instant case, but what you cannot necessarily predict is
the overall aggregate demand. Although you can have some sort
of regulator, it could only make a marginal difference to sentence
length. You cannot suddenly say a sentence for X offence has been
cut from 10 years to one year, because there may not be sufficient
prison places and it would be absolutely absurd, and the system
would not work in that way in any event. Should you have a system
which is more transparent and which takes account of the reality,
which is true for all governments and the judiciaries in all parts
of the world, that built into the system is an acceptance that
the resources are restrained? Yes, I think it may make sense.
Q58 Dr Whitehead: The working group
consultation has not actually dealt with resources. Is there an
intention to raise this as a national debate?
Mr Straw: It is part of the debate,
and what the working group are looking at is seeing how you get
a structured sentencing framework. Lord Justice Gage and his colleagues
quite properly said that some of the decisions are decisions for
here and not for them. That is true.
Q59 Dr Whitehead: Do you think that
if we combine the steps that you are taking to expand prison capacity
and the structured sentencing framework with the resource implications
that both of those may have, you would consider that those measures
are likely to be enough in the future to prevent prison overcrowding
crises?
Mr Straw: I hope so, but everybody
who has done the job I do now, in this respect for four years
between 1997 and 2001, expresses the hope that it would be very
nice to be in a situation where one does not have to worry about
the pressures on prison places week by week. Whether we can get
there depends. There are some people who would say that the demand
for prison places is a function of supply. I do not share that
view, but it is interesting that although the absolute pressure
on the system has varied and is measured by whether you have to
use police cells, as accommodation has been provided so the places
are filled up.
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