Examination of Witnesses (Questions 453
- 459)
TUESDAY 18 NOVEMBER 2008
AMELIA COOKSON,
FRANCES CROOK
AND CLIVE
MARTIN
Q453 Chairman: Amelia Cookson, Clive
Martin and Frances Crook, thank you very much for joining us.
I anticipate that there may be some divisions in the House in
the course of the time you are before us. We may suddenly disappear,
for which I apologise in advance. If you simply sit tight we shall
be back at the appropriate stage. You have just heard the questioning
of Paul Tidball and David Scott about mechanisms by which decisions
could be made at local community level. Do mechanisms really exist
at local level which can enable significant diversions of resources
into things which might have the effect of preventing crimes and
reducing reoffending and thereby the prison population?
Frances Crook: I think there are
mechanisms. The trouble is that they are preventing resources
getting to the front line. You asked earlier about reorganisation
and restructuring of the system. One of the problems is that we
have had a constant reorganisation of the deckchairs on the Titanic
but meanwhile we have hit the iceberg. What has happened is that
frontline services are suffering. I know of probation officers
who have to deal with a case load of 80. When you are dealing
with very needy people, which is what probation does now, it is
impossible to deliver that service properly. Whilst there is much
better sharing of information amongst different agencies in some
ways that sucks into it resources that are not reaching frontline
services.
Clive Martin: I would say they
do not exist. The criminal justice boards could play a part in
that but their structure is very different in each part of the
country and as yet how they assimilate budgets and distribute
resources is very unclear to me. Fighting against that is also
the way in which procurement works in both the Prison and Probation
Services. Procurement is becoming more and more centralised and
national or regional contracts at least are the driving force
behind the way in which structures are developed. Those two things
militate against it. I also believe that in that cocktail there
are resources that could be used to deliver services to offenders,
for example drug treatment programmes which are, if you like,
community resources that exist outside the criminal justice agency.
Somehow whatever mechanism needs to exist if there is to be a
more local agenda must draw in other agencies besides just the
criminal justice agencies. Certainly, criminal justice boards
might be a step in the right direction but I do not think they
are yet. There is a lot of talk about local area agreements being
the mechanism by which that can be delivered, but for the bulk
of the voluntary sector how one accesses local area agreements,
influence them and subsequently gets hands on some money to deliver
services associated with them is very vague.
Q454 Chairman: Amelia Cookson, you
look at it from the point of view of local government?
Amelia Cookson: Absolutely. It
is helpful to mention local area agreements because I think the
mechanisms are possibly not in place at present but that could
be done quite easily. We came into this debate rather late mainly
because we have been focusing on areas which work with local government
on a more regular basis such as health and the police. We found
it quite fascinating that we came to much the same position that
the Commission on English Prisons Today did. The principle of
justice reinvestment, the directionality of partnerships and how
they have been evolving has brought us to a place where we are
on the cusp of a fundamental shift to move resources into local
area agreements that could suddenly start to make dramatic decisions
about moving resources in a much more open-ended way than we have
seen before. We have developed a commissioning framework that
builds on the strength of what we have today and believe that
it could deliver that and work particularly well on the justice
reinvestment model.
Alun Michael: That is the LGIU?
Q455 Chairman: Yes. Whose resources
were you talking about?
Amelia Cookson: In terms of the
criminal justice system I think the principle of diverting the
cost of imprisonment into that part held by the local authority
is specifically what we are talking about. It is a decentralisation
mechanism so that that centralised part moves into the province
of the local partnership.
Q456 Chairman: Does that assume that
a decision has been made centrally to spend less on prisons and
to give money to some of them who think they are in a position
to take over the job rather than something much more radical which
would be, if you like, a local decision to spend more on things
other than prisons?
Amelia Cookson: I think local
authorities would be cautious about being handed the problem of
increasing prison spaces and a devolution of that issue without
the opportunity significantly to invest in alternatives. What
we are talking about is some pump-priming investment in other
alternatives because all preventative activity has a lead-in time.
That is particularly an issue we have seen play out in health
and older people. There needs to be some initial investment in
preventative activity. We would want to look well outside the
bounds of criminal justice to include a very diverse range of
investment. But with any reduction in prison places that investment
could then be ploughed back into the community and would be kept
by the community for further investment.
Q457 Chairman: Has the Sustainable
Communities Act provided any useful mechanism to you in this area?
Amelia Cookson: I believe that
that Act has interesting potential but it is untested. We have
been doing some work to look at the Sustainable Communities Act,
but it is nascent and unclear how it will work. It is a very interesting
piece of legislation but an unclear one.
Q458 Chairman: "Interesting"
is what people say to ministers in Yes Minister.
Amelia Cookson: In that vein,
yes. It has a huge amount of potential. The calibre of the information,
how it will be used and what it will produce is a matter yet untested
and we will have to see. It does have that potential, but what
we are looking for is not just moving information about funding,
though that might be the first step, but moving funding itself.
Q459 Alun Michael: I am interested
in the bit about the responsibility of different agencies or parts
of local authorities which provide for the wider needs of offenders,
possibly in the field of housing, drug rehabilitation, education
and lots of different areas. Do some of those agencies shrug off
any sense of responsibility for making a contribution effectively
to reducing offending and reoffending?
Clive Martin: Certainly, from
our experience in the voluntary sector there is a battle of hearts
and minds with some local authorities, though not all, still to
be won in terms of owning offenders. I think that the notion of
imprisonment in particular is one of sending people away and disowning
them. There is a battle to win back hearts and minds. For us the
direction of travel in terms of trying to encourage local authorities
to own more of this is entirely sensible. For example, it is obvious
to most people that young people who are excluded from school
at the responsibility of the local authority are much more likely
to end up in custody. There are direct connections between some
of the agencies that the local authorities run and manage and
the impact on crime.
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