Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400
- 412)
TUESDAY 11 NOVEMBER 2008
IAN PORÉE,
JON GAMBLE
AND MIKE
STEWART
Q400 Alun Michael: It always has
been, even prior to the 1998 Act when it was made explicit, if
I may just point that out. But it does not seem to get to the
attitudes of those who are actually managing data.
Mike Stewart: If I may also, on
the access to mainstream funding options. It is not necessarily
and is often not the case that offenders require, if you like,
mainstream learning or are not able to respond positively to things
like NVQ Level 2, or whatever. The sorts of issues we are talking
about, and I think the evidence suggests that offenders with complex
needs respond best to specific, very focused targeted stuff a
lot of which is not funded through the mainstream and tends therefore
to be supplemented by ESF funds and local regeneration funds and
so forth and so on, and it is that where the majority of the people
I think we are talking about tend to end up rather than into mainstream
learning.
Q401 Alun Michael: But the flexibility
that Mr Porée was talking about earlier should overcome
that problem.
Ian Porée: It certainly
should.
Q402 Alun Michael: Just to make sure
that was a yes!
Ian Porée: That was a yes.
Q403 Dr Palmer: To what extent do
you feel that employers in both the private and public sector
and outside the prison service are doing enough to help to engage
offenders? We have heard about the very low proportion that walk
straight into a job. Is that because most employers just are not
interested?
Ian Porée: I have described
the situation we are better placed now than we have been for a
very long time and there are a number of very good reasons for
that and one of them simply is the availability of relevant skills
within the market has meant that employers have had to look a
little further, some of which look to other parts of Europe and
clearly some of them are looking much more intentionally now within
the prison system. So the level of employer engagement is steadily
rising all the time and the barriers to people being concerned
about employing ex-offenders are certainly coming down all the
time. I would include in that some services which we deliver across
government itself. The Ministry of Justice is expanding the level
of services that it takes from within prison industries as part
of an example to other employers, particularly private employers,
that actually we can make better use of some of those services.
I mentioned the example earlier about working within a prison
kitchen and the Holiday Inn started a year or so ago with being
very nervous about could they in the corporate brand manage the
risks of having ex-offenders within their kitchens. They have
spent a lot of time within our system; they are hugely impressed
about the quality of services, the quality of training that you
get, and I guess if you have worked in a kitchen for a long time
you are a very effective industrial chef essentially. So they
are starting now to take people straight out on release, obviously
well identified in advance and understanding the individual. Clearly
we do the risk assessment because of course we understand the
individual's risk before they are even released. So as an employer
what you get is someone very well risk-assessed; you have a very
good understanding of their skill set and therefore it is a very
valuable employee that you get. A number of those employers are
now starting to invest in the prison workshops themselves and
so essentially they would provide, either themselves or through
learning and skills training funds as employers, the training
staff within the workshop. Some of them invest some capital in
terms of some of the equipment to train effectively. So again
we have examples of both direct employer engagement where they
would guarantee jobs for individuals within the system. And we
have examples like Cisco, who have invested heavily on raising
skills in their industry so that is information and communication
and technology skills delivered in workshops in prisons. They
have expanded rapidly and continue to grow. That is more about
a net investment in skills in their market and so they have qualified
technicians coming out of our system because they have made the
investments in their training packages, their equipment and essentially
it is ever increasing. So my view is that it is a significant
improvement.
Q404 Dr Palmer: How do these partnerships
in practice arise? If I am running a garage near a prison, can
I expect to get a call from the prison governor suggesting a partnership,
or should I make the approach, or is there some regional co-ordination?
Is it random?
Ian Porée: It is certainly
not random. It is probably all of the above. We have some national
co-ordination working with big national employers who indicate
an interest. There are a number of regional partnerships and,
within the new regional directors of offender management, they
will have capability for employer engagement, looking for big
regional partnerships. In particular, the training prisons would
have people who would go out and do work with local employers
to find relevant partnerships for employment opportunities. The
reality of course is that the stability of the small local partnerships
exposes the prison to a kind of sustainability of those jobs at
risk that some of the bigger partnerships do not necessarily have,
but they are all manageable and all properly assessed in terms
of how that works, and there are local employer bodies who actually
do proactively engage with us, so it is not just us reaching out,
but there are certainly employer bodies who do reach out.
Mike Stewart: You asked whether
employers were doing enough and, as Ian said and again in my experience,
prison governors in particular and prison staff in particular
are usually very good at engaging with employers on the whole,
but I do not think, if you like, that we, on this side of the
divide between the employer and the customer, have done enough
to understand and assess how best to get to the employer. Why
should the employer do anymore? What are we asking them to do?
The best people at working with that tend to be experienced people
who have been doing it a long time, but they move on and then
somebody else comes in or the HR person at the local garage disappears
and somebody else comes in. It needs constant renewal and so forth,
like any good recruitment agency would do. I think we are still
under-performing in relation to getting employers on board, and
I do not think there is actually a problem getting employers on
board if the approach is right and the service offered is good
enough.
Q405 Dr Palmer: Would you recommend
throwing some money at them, basically saying, "If you take
one of our trainees, we'll pay a quarter of his salary for the
first six months", that kind of thing?
Mike Stewart: Well, I am an employer
and, if you offered me that money, I would certainly give it a
run, but it would only last as long the money lasted, and I think
that is where these kinds of things have been tried, that they
have an initial impact. To be honest, if it is a way in, but as
a kind of mainstream, "This is what we do", I do not
think there is a long-term value in it personally.
Jon Gamble: I do think there is
that opportunity within the brief and the configuration of the
advancement service in terms of partnership with DWP and Jobcentre
Plus, and certainly with flexibilities within Train to Gain where
brokers can actually broker those relationships between employers
and offenders and ex-offenders through access to training money,
making sure, as Ian says, that all the other checks are in place,
that there is a training budget available for those individuals
working with employers. Our experience certainly in the East Midlands
recently was where we trialled that sort of approach, through
European money, not through mainstream public funding here, and
we did in fact manage to engage a group of employers, again national
employers, in terms of Trackworks and Streetworks, and Ian has
already mentioned the hospitality and catering. At the end of
that was an event where employers were invited to actually share
the findings and over 200 employers turned up to that one-day
event, so there clearly are opportunities there, and I think that
the message that we would have is that as much of the mainstream
initiative in policy change and reform that we can drive into
the Offender Learning and Skills Service has actually got to be
of positive benefit and the Adult Advancement and Careers Service,
which is a referral service working in partnership with Jobcentre
Plus, actually can make some inroads there as well.
Q406 Dr Palmer: Finally on this specialist
question, we had a letter from, I think it was, the Howard League,
saying that they had operated one scheme within a prison to actually
set up a business which would operate on normal business guidelines
and would pay tax and so on, and this foundered on the rule that
prisoners, if they got any money at all, would be paid cash in
hand, and it was not really designed to be integrated in the standard
system of employment, tax, National Insurance and so on and they
have had to fold the scheme as a result. Do you feel that there
might be scope for looking again at the regulations there?
Ian Porée: The status of
a prisoner as a regular taxpayer is a complicated issue which,
I think, was only one of the elements of that scheme. The fundamental
viability of the business model, I think, was more the issue about
actually whether there was a viable, sustainable business, but,
yes, the question of can offenders earn money at minimum wage
and pay tax within the system, I think, is quite a complicated
area.
Q407 Chairman: It is done in other
countries. A number of other countries do it, not generally, but
specifically where there are schemes like the one Dr Palmer describes.
Ian Porée: The US Federal
Government has essentially created a separate employer legal entity
which draws in contracts against which the prisons then match
essentially workers to deliver those contracts and those services,
and it helps regulate interfering with local market wages and
competitive elements in a local market so that you cannot undercut
other local businesses out of essentially using prison labour.
Essentially, you do then also need to cater for all the other
issues related to the fact that the State is essentially paying
for board and lodging and the element of reparation and punishment
associated with the prison sentence. Certainly other countries
have found models which actually allow you to mainstream essentially
industries within prisons to a much larger scale.
Chairman: With the prisoners paying tax
and paying for their board and lodging as well.
Q408 Mr Heath: And reparation.
Ian Porée: And, in some
cases, then investing in reparation. The complicated element is
whether you can link one victim with one offender in reparation.
I think that, if you disconnect the victim and the offender and
you have a payment into local schemes or a trust of some sort
for reparation, you can then deal with the reparation element
of the sentence as well as the kind of regular earnings.
Chairman: There are difficulties for
every solution.
Q409 Mr Heath: Can I just pick up
on something that Mr Stewart said and, I think, Mr Gamble mentioned
in passing as well, and that is the use of explicit funds, like
the European Social Fund, like the fund from DCLG for deprived
communities. Have they made a real difference in this area and
have they been properly exploited? What sort of added value have
they added to the sort of work you are doing?
Mike Stewart: I think certainly
Ian's guys have probably exploited it. I certainly think the Prison
Service, after years of not being able to actually engage with
the European side of things for structural reasons, have engaged
in a big way, and I was working with colleagues within the Prison
Service on a programme called PS Plus which has run in various
forms over six years and which has drawn in £221 million
over that six years and dealt with 80,000 offenders. Ian will
talk more about that.
Q410 Mr Heath: Sorry, I do not want
to pre-empt what Ian has to say about that, but I am interested,
in terms of the European Social Fund, does that mean you have
got to put the prisoners in the right places to do that? I will
leave you to think about that one.
Mike Stewart: In that case, I
do not think they had. ESF has actually underpinned an awful lot
of offender employment work ever since it came in, frankly, for
precisely, I think, the reasons that I was talking about, that
the mainstream funding will not deal with the complexity of the
issues that most of the offenders we are talking about present,
whereas ESF funding always did. That has, over time, been ratcheted
tighter and tighter and tighter, I think for understandable reasons,
that people are requiring more and more justification for the
funding than they did in the early days, but certainly it has
been a big underpinning of a lot of offender employment work for
many years now.
Jon Gamble: I think that is true
and it certainly has enabled the testing and trialling of a number
of different approaches that you would not have had the opportunity
to do with a mainstream OLASS fund, and there is a further £16.4
million available up until 2010 through the Learning and Skills
Council's ESF matched fund just for offenders as opposed to a
number of other ESF funds that offenders, certainly in the community,
could have access to. I would also say that it was an ambition
of the Offender Learning and Skills Service, in moving to the
LSC, for the LSC to encourage its providers and use its systems
to actually enrich the offender learning experience. For example,
£11 million has been invested in the IT learning centres
across every prison in England to support IT skill development
and also to support learning for literacy, language and numeracy
through interaction with programmes. UFI Learn Direct also invest
upwards of £1 million a year in learning centres in prisons,
and we have also managed to achieve just under £6 million
of capital funding last year to actually improve the learning
environment, not for capital build because that is the prison
estate, but actually to make improvements in the learning environment
in custody. The whole impetus here is to draw in related funding
where it is appropriate because we need to make a distinction,
I think, between the Offender Learning and Skills Service which
goes much wider than a discrete Offender Learning and Skills Service
budget which is, as I have said, this year in the region of £160
million.
Ian Porée: I would just
mention that we have made very good use of European Social Fund
various pots of money. The PS Plus service reached 80,000 people
and there were 2.4 million hours of work delivered, 71,000 positive
outcomes, and there were over 4,000 jobs. It was very good use
of that available money at the time, but I still do agree with
Jon, that the biggest value we have received out of making use
of that money is to develop essentially our best practice models
about how do you take somebody from a kind of very excluded state
with no history of employment and no relevant skills to move them
forward positively to be much better-placed to be able to receive,
so in many ways that it has been an investment in developing best
practice is probably the best learning that we have got out of
all of that resource, and we will continue to make bids for any
of the other available resources.
Q411 Mr Heath: There is a danger
of our drowning in acronyms when it comes to this! I do not know
if anyone has any sort of breakdown of the sort of total take
from these sorts of sources, but it would be quite helpful, I
think, and, whether the NOMS would have that available or the
LSC, I am not sure.
Jon Gamble: What the LSC can say
is that there was £30 million of EQUAL Engage funding available
to it and, as I have said, there is now £16.4 million of
ESF funding available to 2010. The EQUAL Engage is now over and
that was a matched funding amount, by the way.
Q412 Mr Heath: This is in danger
of being a very open question, but one of the things that we have
noted all the way through this inquiry is the fact that we still
have departmental silos where the benefit from investment in one
area is repaid in a saving in another department and it is very
difficult to marry all those elements together, so my question
to you really is that, if you had control of all of the departmental
budgets which were relevant to this subject, are there changes
in distribution that you would make in order to achieve the better
outcome for what you are trying to achieve?
Mike Stewart: I would put it all
in one big bag and give it to the local authority and say, "Sort
it out".
Ian Porée: I would agree
a set of very clear common outcome measures so that we are all
delivering the same outcome, and that is already drawing the resources
from the different departments to focus on the same individual
because in many cases that is all we are trying to achieve.
Jon Gamble: That would be my suggestion
too, that often different agencies have different targets and,
while we are running on the twin track with different targets,
we may be missing the point in terms of getting offenders into
employment and helping to reduce re-offending.
Chairman: Well, apologies to two of my
colleagues who had further questions they wanted to raise, but
I will have to draw this part of our proceedings to a close so
that we can bring in Mr Rickard and Ms Edghill.
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