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Rehabilitation of Prisoners

: As we say throughout our report, a number of good policy and strategy papers have been produced by the Government: by the policy unit at No. 10; by the Home Office; and by the Prison Service. If they were put together as a policy framework on paper, they would add up to a pretty good picture of what ought to be done. The difficulty is that many of them have not been fully or energetically implemented. I remember going to one young offenders institution. There was a clear awareness among the young people we talked to about what type of skills would enable them to make an honest living when they went out. They could see the difference between those courses that enabled the boxes to be ticked and the NVQs gained, and the sorts of skills that would enable them to get work, given that they had a criminal record. There is too little tailoring of the courses and training available to what would genuinely make prisoners employable. More fundamentally, very few prisons offer the discipline of what the report calls a nine-to-five working day. We were impressed by what we saw at Coldingley in Surrey and by what we saw in prisons in Sweden and in Germany, which had what in the jargon is usually called ““an industrial style of prison work””. Such examples are very much the exception in our prison system and although there is a prisons industry strategy, which is supposedly being implemented, we found no real sense of energy, urgency or drive to put that type of widespread change in the prison regime into place. We suggested that there could be new innovations; an agency could be set up to develop public-private partnerships for prison industries. That was given a half-hearted welcome in the Government's response; I hope that the Minister will be able to say more about the likelihood of its happening. The first core message is that unless we have a way of changing the fundamental regime in most of our prisons so that they offer a real work-like experience, it will be difficult to equip people with the disciplines and skills to find work outside. I say in passing that we recommended that the economic potential of higher employment among people who are released from prison should be investigated. That was rejected by the Government, which is a shame. We said at the time of writing our report that it was slightly odd to be producing large numbers of unemployable people out of our prisons to be unemployed at the same time as attracting significant numbers of economic migrants from eastern European accession states or from around the world. We might win more resources for prisons if the full economic potential of making greater use of our prison population was fully taken into account. There have been missed opportunities. I am told by people in business that 18 months ago one could make a good business case to an employer for employing ex-offenders because there was a labour shortage. Not enough was done at that time, and today people tend to say, ““Well, there's a pretty large pool of people from the eastern European accession states, with skills, who can come here quite cheaply.”” The business case is now moving against the Government. However, even at this late stage, it would make sense for the Government to make a full economic assessment of the advantages to the British economy of ensuring higher employment rates among ex-offenders.