---

Rehabilitation of Prisoners

: I thank the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) for the gracious remarks at the end of her speech. I have really enjoyed the debate, because it has reminded me that when I first took on this responsibility, I was somewhat of an oddity. When I spoke to anyone about what we did in relation to prisons, I asked, ““What impact did it have on reoffending?”” Sometimes, if not always, people were surprised by that total focus. An aspect of Government, which was highlighted by what my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) said about the size of the change programme, is that one can forget such drive and the point at which one started. I should like to say thanks to all hon. Members who have contributed to this debate, because my pointy stick, which is concerned with how much difference can be made to reoffending, has been sharpened by today's events. The clear vision set out by the Home Secretary in his speech to the Prison Reform Trust on 19 September has helped. He said that we must see radical improvements in the delivery of sentences, focusing on how best to tackle the individual's offending behaviour. One problem with this mass system, which was obvious from what the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone) said, is that it sometimes misses out the impact on the individual. We must focus on that. We must have clear goals for a sentence, and ensure that there is a plan for a particular offender's sentence which reduces the likelihood of their reoffending. That is not an easy challenge. As hon. Members have said, offenders are drawn disproportionately from the most socially excluded members of society. They have often experienced long-term disengagement from services, and they have histories of poor relationships with those who might help them. By tackling some of the educational, housing and health inequalities from which they suffer, we aim to help them to re-establish themselves and to contribute to society. We cannot deal simply with those disadvantages. I welcome the way in which the debate has focused on employment out of all the issues highlighted in the Select Committee report, which was pretty wide ranging. It is right that our debate did so. How have we done so far? Hon. Members referred to our targets. The 2004 Home Office strategic plan set out our target to reduce reoffending by 10 per cent. by 2010. We believe that we can meet that target. Adjusting for the changes in the population, 3.2 per cent. fewer prisoners who were discharged in 2001 were reconvicted within two years of release, compared with the position in 2000. The hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham referred to the datedness of the figures, an issue that was raised in the Committee's report. At the moment, we use a very brutal measure of reoffending—the two-year reconviction rate—to measure our success against PSA targets. We need to get better at this. The research report on frequency and severity has been received and the recommended methods are being applied to larger data sets so that we can decide whether there are different ways of measuring reoffending, as the Committee recommended. We will have to use the standard reconviction rate. That is our PSA target. We are not trying to duck those targets. We have not missed anything that we have changed. We must examine such issues as the severity and frequency of offending and the length of time before reoffending and see whether we can do better. We have had to invest as well as set the target for reducing reoffending. Spending on our prisons has increased by more than 25 per cent. in real terms since 1997. We now spend £300 million a year on rehabilitation regimes in prisons, and our spending on probation has also increased by 39 per cent. We recognise that extra resources are not enough, so we have made three radical changes in our approach to working with offenders. First, we have changed the structure of sentences. For the first time, reform and rehabilitation is a statutory purpose of sentencing, to which the courts must have regard when handing down a sentence. Community sentences will be better targeted on rehabilitation as well as on punishment, so a young person can be required to take education classes or attend a drug course as part of a community sentence. All prison sentences will be followed by a much longer period of supervision in the community. Hon. Members referred to work in prison and in the community not being joined up. The change will allow rehabilitation work begun in prison to be carried on in the community, creating the throughput that the Select Committee report implied was necessary. As I said, my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen focused on the job part of the job-home-family equation in reducing reoffending. He was anxious that there was a gap between reality and the report, and that what prisoners did all day did not always match the report of what they had done. That is one of the reasons why we have done one of the things about which my right hon. Friend is also a bit suspicious: we have focused a lot of the work on what has to be done in prisons, because we know that that is sustainable. We have sought to make sure that if someone's positive activity is working in the prison kitchen, they will get a qualification to accompany that. If they do cleaning, which a lot of the positive activities involve, the prisoner can get some of the NVQ cleaning qualifications. I recognise that such qualifications are not as high level or likely to lead to substantial incomes as some of the industry schemes. Nevertheless, we know that we can sustain them and that they can provide people with employability. One of the points that the Select Committee made was that a specialist agency should be created outside prison industries to co-ordinate investment and marketing for prison industries. We share the concern that we should draw on the expertise of the business world for that, and we have been restructuring prison industries to help us seek more commercial partners for support. A new sales and contracts scheme has been developed and is working with the private sector to develop the case for involving commercial partners. That seems to take very long, but we have to do it well. In the south-west, a pilot is developing a regional strategy for prison industries that will respond better to the needs of business and offenders there. The Isle of Sheppey project has considered the issue in the context of market testing and trying that within a cluster of prisons. Hon. Members referred to the importance of locality; we are getting clever about that. Commercial partners are being engaged to update the workshops at HMP Wymott; the Committee and hon. Members mentioned such workshop investment. My right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen talked about the employment opportunities that terminal 5 creates. In the south-east, the regional offender manager is leading work on engagement with construction industries. We are making progress, although perhaps not as much as everybody in this Chamber wants. However, the picture is better than is suggested by what I have heard from hon. Members. We have heard a lot about Germany, which does some of these things well. However, every day, more than 1,500 prisoners do real work outside prisons for more than 500 different employers. We want to improve that figure, but let us not forget what we have already been able to do. Many longer-term prisoners will be given such an opportunity before they are released.