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Rehabilitation of Prisoners

I am pleased to initiate this debate on the Select Committee's report on the rehabilitation of prisoners. I should say at the outset that the Committee's interest in the topic was stimulated by the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe), who was a formidable prisons Minister in her time. She encouraged the Select Committee to take an interest in the topic but, for personal reasons, she had to leave the Committee shortly after the inquiry started. I hope that she feels that we have looked into the issues that she raised. The report is lengthy and covers a large number of issues, so it might be helpful if I set out the main theme that I want to refer to in my opening comments. It is pleasing to see so many hon. Members here on a Thursday afternoon when there is a one-line Whip. It shows that the subject is of interest—[Interruption.] Some of my hon. Friends did not realise that there was a one-line Whip. I hope that they do not leave too soon. The central issue in the report is that we know from many sources, including the social exclusion unit, that a released prisoner's ability to get a job, to have a home to go to and to maintain family ties is critical to the likelihood that they will not reoffend. Everyone accepts that the rate of reoffending by released prisoners is far too high. In simple terms, that means that far too much crime is committed in our communities by people who have already served a custodial sentence. We need to improve our ability to reduce reoffending. Our report acknowledges the importance of the strands that I mentioned of work, housing and family ties—it also looks at other issues such as drug treatment—and we make recommendations on all three. I would like to acknowledge at the beginning—I will not deal with them in detail—the submissions that we have received for today's debate from Citizens Advice, Action for Prisoners' Families and the Local Government Association; they reinforce the importance of those issues. There is important work to be done in all those areas, but the central theme of our report is how well or how badly the prison system prepares prisoners to get a job on their release. I shall concentrate most of my comments on that theme. Housing and family ties are extremely important and changes must be made; drug treatment needs to be improved; but it was on how well our prisons do in preparing people to work that we felt that the gap was largest between what is happening in our prisons today and what needs to be happening in the prison system in future. I know that the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) shares my personal commitment to these issues. We both spoke recently at the launch of an Exodus project by South East England Development Agency which was aimed at prisoner rehabilitation. We both have an interest in the matter, but the gap between what the Committee found when going round prisons and taking evidence and the picture described in the Government's response to our report is uncomfortably wide. If this debate has one effect today, I hope that it will be to encourage her to look again at what is happening in our prisons and the way in which they are or are not preparing people for work. The Government's response does not reflect the very difficult reality that we found. I want to make a few other background comments. Overcrowding was an issue that came up a lot during our inquiry and we describe some of the difficulties that arise from prison overcrowding. We acknowledge that the Government have put a new sentencing framework in place and we hope that if public confidence can be built up in that framework it will reduce the number of people who go to prison unnecessarily We highlight our belief that a lot more should be done to reduce the number of people who go to prison on remand and do not ultimately serve a custodial sentence. We also highlight the large number of women going to prison for minor crimes. All those issues have an effect on prison overcrowding. As far as we could see, on any reasonable projections prison overcrowding is with us for the foreseeable future. It is difficult to foresee in the next 10 years either the number of people sentenced falling rapidly or the number of prison places increasing quickly so that we will not be living with overcrowded prisons. A culture seems to have grown up in the Prison Service that we shall be able to deal with issues such as work when the prisons are less overcrowded. The Select Committee says that that view must be challenged. We must find ways in which to improve the ability of the prison system to help prisoners find work, even though for the foreseeable future prisons will be overcrowded.