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Rehabilitation of Prisoners

: Let me take the right hon. Gentleman back. I talked about the prison estate, the design council and new prison build. Another thing I picked up going round the prison system, is that when we build new prisons we are not building the warehousing and the workshop units that can go with them. Companies can go to such units to provide training or real work in the prisons. More thought must go into prison design, particularly if we are really to focus on rehabilitation. On basic skills—reading and writing—there is the work of something such as the Shannon Trust, which encourages prisoners to teach prisoners. There is a huge stigma about illiteracy; if people cannot read and write, they do not always want authority figures to teach them how to do so. Work such as that of the Shannon Trust is excellent. It will help with rehabilitation, but it is not the entire key. Operations such as the training operation run by my constituent, Harry Quinton, in various prisons are very helpful. I have seen the work that Amersham and Wycombe college, which is in my constituency and is just down the road from the Minister's constituency of Slough, does in prisons. I have been very impressed by that. Thought must be given to what each individual wants. That brings me to the NOMS situation and the Carter report. Like many people who take an interest in the subject, I was most impressed by the Carter report. The principle behind the report is right. I hate the term ““end-to-end offender management””. It depersonalises things; it is new Labour speak. However, I like the idea that once individuals are in the custody of the state, the state will assess their needs and track them through the system; and that even if individuals manage to break out of the system, when they come back they are captured and the information that the system has on them is reapplied. It is not rocket science. I cannot believe that the Prison Service system cannot get prisoner A from B to C accompanied by his or her file. Having spoken to people in the Prison Service, I know that prisoners can arrive at a prison very late at night without the accompanying documentation. For instance, a woman may arrive at 10 pm and say, ““I have two children; what has happened to them?”” That happens now. We need a system, particularly if the state is acting in loco parentis, that takes an individual's needs into consideration and looks at that person's long-term needs. Assessment is the key. I thought that NOMS was going to give us that, but two years down the line it has not done so. It has given us metamorphosis. It has given us a series of restructured bureaucracies, including regional offender managers. It has not communicated with prison officers or probation officers. The probation service is almost in emotional meltdown. I hope that the Minister will consider the problem. We have a system that holds more than 75,000 individuals in prison, and the staff are demoralised. We have one of the highest levels of sickness among front-line staff, and we have a high turnover of prison governors. The average length of stay for prison governors is about 18 months. Indeed, and with respect, we are now on our seventh Prisons Minister since 1997. Continuity of care in the system seems to be sadly lacking. I am holding back, Mr. O'Hara; I have used much stronger language on other occasions about the fact that the system is falling apart. We also need desperately to consider the position of foreign nationals. We have more than 9,000 of them in our prisons. That was mentioned earlier, and it has been addressed. We need innovative thinking. It will be no surprise to the Minister that we have more than 2,500 nationals from one country. We should have real negotiations with that other country, perhaps about building a facility in that country and letting people serve their sentences there. No foreign national who has served a sentence here should be allowed to languish in prison because the Government have not deported them, even if there is a deportation order; they deserve to be released back into the community. They may have lost the right to be here, but in some cases they cannot be returned to their home country. I perfectly understand that. Restorative justice was mentioned earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd), whose family has taken a distinguished interest in it for many years. I think that restorative justice is rather exciting. It shows people the effect of their crime, which can stop them in their tracks. I would like to go further, and consider something like the North Carolina system. There, before a person is tried, a form of restorative justice is used whereby the criminal and the victim agree to meet and decide on a course of action and restoration. It does not replace the criminal justice system, because if the person who has allegedly committed the crime breaks his or her agreement with the victim, he or she will stand trial in the normal fashion and face the penalties of the law. That sort of innovative system must be considered carefully. The prison system is dangerously full and over-stretched, and there is every indication that the situation has deteriorated since the Committee made its evaluations and the Minister responded. We need a Minister who will take a grip on this area, starting, as the Home Secretary said, with the rationalisation of the prison estate, and take a cold, hard look at the costs in human misery and the financial costs of the way in which we treat prisoners in prison and how we put them back into society. We must be better placed in 2005 to turn people out of prison with the potential to be net contributors to rather than net drainers on our society. The new technology may help the Minister, and I encourage her to visit Salford and the Group 4 Securicor satellite tracking pilot, because satellite tracking combined with the tag is the way forward for keeping people out of prison. It may even be the way forward for controlling truanting children. Truanting is where the conveyor belt to crime starts. If one could use new technology to check that a child goes to school, one could perhaps intervene early enough to prevent the prison population expanding. The Government, sadly, have had eight years. I thought that with their rhetoric before they came to power in 1997, they would at least have taken a healthier or more successful approach. Sadly, ““tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime”” has resulted in an explosion in the prison population, and that has resulted in more individuals reoffending. That is recognised within Government and throughout all parties represented in this Chamber. I hope that there will be some co-ordination. I hope that you will forgive me for saying so, Mr. O'Hara, but it might take a good woman to do the job. There are two good women now in charge of prisons. I know that that makes uncomfortable reading, but I have known the Minister for many years, and I should like to think that she and her colleague in the other place could make a difference. I am very interested to hear what she has to say.