Examination of Witnesses (Questions 413
- 419)
TUESDAY 11 NOVEMBER 2008
DENISE EDGHILL
AND PAUL
RICKARD
Q413 Chairman: Welcome to Ms Edghill
from Southampton City Council and Mr Rickard from Tower Hamlets
Council. Unfortunately, Detective Superintendent Rose from West
Yorkshire is not well and cannot join us this afternoon. We have
asked you each, rather than plying you with questions, to tell
us briefly, in just a few minutes, some of the things we need
to know from your own experience which we would be really interested
to hear.
Denise Edghill: Yes, I suppose
for about the last five years or so we have been very engaged
in working with offenders to enable them to progress to a level
of skills and employment, but when you take a holistic approach
across, what they call, the "seven reduced re-offending pathways",
so looking at accommodation, substance misuse and other issues,
but with the ultimate aim of getting people into work because
all the research shows that having a job is the single biggest
factor in reducing offending. All of the projects have been funded
through European sources, relating back to the previous point,
and we have a very, very small amount of European funding now
and I was not aware of any Engage funding, so that is something
we need to consider.
Q414 Chairman: So you have a small
amount of European funding now?
Denise Edghill: A very small amount.
We have looked into other sources which I can tell you more about,
but over the last four years or so we have worked with about 1,500
offenders, 60% have progressed to learning and work, but something
we were very, very keen to do, which I think is fairly unique,
is look at police data for re-offending because quite often it
is quite anecdotal around whether somebody re-offended or not,
and often it will be around skills they have acquired, but not
the longitudinal study. A year ago we shared the details of 600
offenders at that point that we had worked with, and that was
not being selective, that was all the offenders we worked with
at that point, so it was their names and addresses and the dates
that we started working with them. Hampshire Constabulary sent
us back `anonymised' data on all of those offenders which showed
that, in the year before we worked with them, they collectively
committed around 1,800 crimes and, in the year after, that reduced
to 600. Now, there are all sorts of ways you can analyse that
in terms of the cost of re-offending and what impact we have made.
Not all of them would have re-offended, something like 70% would
have done, because, on the whole, the offenders we work with have
been the prolific offenders and those serving sentences of less
than 12 months who do not get any support from Probation when
they are released from custody because our local prison, Winchester
Prison, tends to work with those types of offenders, so, if we
say that 70% would have re-offended, we extrapolate. We did produce
a case study for the Treasury and we do feel that we can evidence
that we have saved £25 million with those 600 offenders,
and that is not at all looking at things like state benefits which
have been saved if they are in employment, it is not the cost
of taking their children into care if they go into prison, the
cost of the crime or all sorts of other factors which we have
not included, but it is just the prison place and the criminal
justice costs. Our approach, I think we have found, being a local
authority, is unique because we can bring together the planning
and commissioning side of things, so, whilst we focus on employment
and training, we can also look at the housing, the substance misuse,
the other support issues, and integrate things. Something else
we have done which is very innovative is that we have used our
planning processes to influence Section 106 planning provision
so that, when we have new developments coming into the city, we
can work with developers and end users to actually ensure that
they are committed to providing opportunities for local people,
not exclusively offenders, but offenders being amongst them. For
example, we have just had—
Q415 Chairman: You put a 106 agreement
on an employer to say that—
Denise Edghill: That they must
comply or they are in breach of contract. For example, we have
just had an Ikea being built in Southampton, so we work with Ikea
on opportunities for local people, including offenders. Construction
has been a big opportunity and, without stereotyping too much,
most offenders are young men and construction has been an opportunity
for offenders, so we have had a lot of success in getting people
into construction jobs through working with developers and working
with end users. There is lots more I could talk about, but really
the headline for us is that we have got the police data which,
I think, a lot of other employment and training providers have
not been able to access, and it does actually show that we have
made a significant difference. The frustration is that we have
not got any, with the last figures we are talking about, ESF,
European Social Fund, opportunities to pilot different approaches
and we feel we have piloted it several times, but the mainstream
opportunity does not seem to come, so that is one of the frustrations.
That is my side of things.
Q416 Chairman: Thank you very much.
Mr Rickard?
Paul Rickard: The London Borough
of Tower Hamlets is a beacon authority this year for reducing
re-offending and that accolade was gained, I think, largely because
of the authority's approach to including all categories of offenders
in its programme and to filling the gaps which are missed by the
other statutory services, so the programme concentrates very heavily
on non-statutory offenders, the offenders that Denise has mentioned
who have sentences of less than a 12-month period. The reason
we arrived at the conclusion that this was the right group of
people to work with is we were approached by the then Office of
the Regional Offender Managers to take part in a pilot study or
a pilot resettlement programme in Holloway Prison. When we looked
at the data that they presented to us, we found a great resonance
with the data on social exclusion and the number of non-statutory
offenders who were coming back into the borough unsupported to
want to extend that work and to expand it to other prisons, and
we duly did that. Something like 45% of the Tower Hamlets people
in prison in London are on remand and receive no services and,
of those sentences, 65% of those are sentenced to periods of less
than 12 months and would, under normal circumstances, return to
the borough without services, so we felt that it was incumbent
upon the local authority, knowing what we do about social exclusion
partly from the data that was presented to us, partly from the
published data in the Social Exclusion Report and so on, to take
that issue seriously and to start thinking about providing those
services. Tower Hamlets is one of the poorest boroughs in Britain,
it has a very, very high rate of worklessness, something like
around 35% at the moment, and a quarter of all the families in
the borough live on less than £15,000 a year and there are
very poor levels of skills amongst the work force and so on, so
it is very important for us, this work. We see it as a core part
of our social responsibility to deal with this group of people,
and we have done so by building a resettlement programme which
actually actively goes into the prisons, and we started with Pentonville,
Brixton and Holloway as our core prisons, and we go in to find
the people who will be coming out. That may seem like a simple
thing to do, but it is actually much more complex than really
it ought to be because we have to trawl around in the prison with
a caseworker looking for people because prisons do not, as a routine,
keep the information about where people are returning to. That
is starting to change, but the performance in relation to that
in various prisons is certainly very patchy and variable from
time to time, so, for example, we may get 30 referrals from a
prison in one month and one in another and it is difficult to
believe, in a large establishment, that that would be reflecting
the number of people who are coming back into the borough, so
that is a constant struggle. What we have identified by doing
this project, and we have been running a programme off and on
now for a year because we were in and out of various prisons with
security issues and the like, but we have been running a programme
for about a year and we have identified extremely high levels
of need amongst the people who are coming into contact with the
programme, much higher than we would have expected even from the
Social Exclusion Report, which did look at need across all offenders,
and particularly high amongst women. What I think was most noticeable
about the women was that something like 80% of the women were
also victims of crime, either domestic violence or some form of
sexual abuse, and that, I think, was a spur to doing further work
in terms of building capacity in the community, which we really
see as the other arm of this programme because we are not in a
position resource-wise to have a whole series of services specifically
for ex-offenders. Where we can, we do, and we run an NVQ scheme
for ex-offenders, which is NVQ3, by the way, not NVQ2, and we
have no problem filling that, so we have high expectations for
the people we come into contact with, but, in the main, we are
looking at mainstream services, we are looking at mainstream health
services and so on, to provide for need, mainstream drug services
and mainstream benefit services. We do attempt to facilitate employment,
and I think, to some extent, we need to focus on employment, it
is a very important factor, it is one of a number of important
factors, it is not the only one, so accommodation is certainly
a key factor and access to families has been identified time and
again as being a key factor in reducing re-offending. We have
just started a children and families project with an organisation
in the Thames Valley who have been doing this work for some time,
so we are using the benefit of experience elsewhere. Our programme
is provided through the third sector, so I programme-managed the
programme, but I am the local authority employee and everything
else is provided through the third sector and that gives us the
opportunity to bring in specific expertise. I think it goes down
better with ex-offenders themselves, that the programme is not
run by a statutory agency, they tend to find it easier to relate
to people from the third sector, and we have also requested of
our third-sector partners that they bring in additional funding
with them as part of their contractual obligations, and they have
been, in most cases, successful in doing that. There have been
many issues around funding and it would be remiss of me not to
mention them. We are constantly having to find, and I certainly
agree with Mike Stewart's suggestion, that the money should be
put in a pot and given to local authorities, but unfortunately
we are at the opposite end of the spectrum to that where we receive
no earmarked funding for this project whatsoever, and the only
reason we have managed to sustain the project over a second year,
and we do not know about the third and fourth years yet, but we
are certainly bidding for that, it is because we have persistently
made the case with the elected members and we have made the case
with many organisations in the borough that this is important
work and we have formed partnerships around that, but we have
to cobble together the money every year for doing this. Not only
is that time-consuming, but it is not particularly welcome that
there is absolutely no central government money for that. Other
problems that we have faced, I have mentioned the problem around
the prisons and really there is a resource issue with prisons
about whether people, even where prisons participate in centrally
organised pilots, there is still an issue about resources being
put to identifying people coming back into boroughs, that has
been a major issue. There are problems about fluctuating resources
generally and access to mainstream services. We have made great
strides, I think, with developing partners in the PCT, in benefit
services and so on who have come on board and who have been persuaded
by our arguments, but initially we found that there were very
serious access issues, particularly around health, for example,
and very little awareness of the needs of ex-offenders and the
extent of those needs and their complexity and how that would
impact on their ability to access mainstream services, so that
has been a major piece of work for us and it has borne some fruit
in terms of the partnerships that we have been able to develop.
One thing I perhaps ought to mention at the end is that the current
situation with end of custody licence, or ECL, as it is commonly
known, is particularly unhelpful for us in our focus on non-statutory
offenders because 80% of the people released on end of custody
licence are non-statutory offenders and unfortunately two of our
most important prisons, Pentonville and Holloway, seem to have
a much higher percentage of people released. This is to do with
the churn in the system, the fact that people must be released
in order to make way for people coming in. That means that many
resettlement efforts that we have made come to nought because
we cannot access those people and we might turn up at the prison
to meet them at the gates and they have already gone because they
have been released.
Q417 Chairman: You cannot access
them for what reason?
Paul Rickard: Because they have
been released 18 days early, so sometimes we hear about a person,
but some, when we get to them, they have already been released.
For people on very short sentences, that is quite common.
Q418 Chairman: Does that mean that,
whereas previously you were notified of their release date, when
an early release comes in, you are not re-notified that they are
coming out early?
Paul Rickard: No, we would not
be re-notified. The system of ECL seems to be very chaotic and
very ad hoc. It seems to be organised on a day to day basis, so
that is very unhelpful indeed in terms of actually providing a
service to people.
Q419 Alun Michael: That last point
that you have made is a very telling one and it fits also with
something that you referred to earlier about the inconsistency
of referrals from prison. In both of those cases, is there a real
reason, in other words, is somebody putting obstructions, I do
not know, for data protection reasons or something like that,
or is it simply incompetence or a systems failure?
Paul Rickard: I think it is many
different factors. Certainly data protection does have an influence
and different prisons take a different view on who should be referred
to the programme or not. One thing that does have a large influence
is the experience of the caseworker. We find that, when the caseworker
has been in position for some time, they build up a network of
contacts within the authority whereby we are able to hear about
referrals to, or people being released in, the borough from a
number of different sources, and we can match those up and make
up quite a decent caseload for the month. If it is the case, as
at the moment, that we have some reasonably inexperienced people
and we are reliant upon one or two resettlement individuals, it
does not work so well, so I think what that indicates is that
the systems inside the prisons are not very robust. Together they
have the data, the various elements, the housing element, perhaps
the resettlement team and so on, and together they certainly have
access to the data, but whether we see it or not is—
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