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Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974: Reform

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for bringing this matter to the attention of the House. It is a few years since I worked for the Apex Trust, which tries to get ex-offenders into the job market. I am now vice-president of that organisation. The experience was basically this. When you spoke to the offenders, you generally spoke to a bunch of young men with very low educational attainment and an amazing combination of bluster and servility towards anyone in authority. This group had tremendous difficulty in dealing with the world even-temperedly. They really did not know how to deal with any form of authority other than by cowering or blustering in front of it. They had never passed an exam and, sometimes even in their mid-20s, felt that taking an exam was a sign of weakness. They were probably the worst group for having any idea of what they were capable of. We should remember that exams give marks that show that someone has achieved a certain level; they do not tell you what the full potential of that person will be. This very odd group then has to go through a process under the law of telling someone that they also have convictions. All this means that you have someone who will probably try to avoid such an interview if they can see any other way out, which brings them back into a cycle of re-offending. Anyone who knows anything about this—I know the Minister will excuse me for teaching grandmothers to suck eggs—knows that it is the under-35s who constantly offend. By the time they are 35 or even 40, with a spent conviction and no history of work, they may be tottering towards being unemployable. There must be some cut-off point at which the person can at least say, ““I don’t have to tell you what I have done wrong. Here is what I have done right””. The temptation to go into another diatribe here about the shortcomings of the prison education service is considerable. Then there is the joy of unidentified special needs in prisons—dyslexia is one—but I refer noble Lords to my numerous speeches on the matter, which are already on the record. This group will be difficult to educate and train in prison because of social conditions, because of needs that are unmet if they are undiagnosed, and because of the process by which people are moved around and education is applied. It may be slightly better than a school education, but it is very difficult. There will be problems unless we adopt a more realistic approach than the current approach of bringing forward sentencing. When I worked for the Apex Trust—a good few years ago now—I sat in on a series of interviews and helped in minor ways to tell prisoners how to make this disclosure and, indeed, why they should make it. Most people who come from lower social and economic groups tend not to be very mobile and tend to go back into their groups. What happens if someone gets a job but has not disclosed a conviction, and discovers that someone from up the road knows who they are and says, ““Wait a minute. Didn’t you do X-amount of time?””? We heard a series of stories about people who ended up being blackmailed, having to steal to pay off the blackmailer to keep their job, being discovered, losing their job and going back to prison. That is the type of pressure. Although there should be safeguards in relation to certain groups—it is understandable that an employer would want time to make checks—if someone has had a period of unemployment but has taken some training, which is probably likely when they leave prison, they will probably be more attuned to keeping a job because they have established that they have broken the pattern. A disclosure made after a short periodof time, not a long one, is then probably quite appropriate, or becomes irrelevant. When the Minister replies, will she say what work has been done and how close the Government are to changing this? Under current sentencing practice, whether that is for good or ill, the length of time that is currently applied is utterly ridiculous, as my noble friend has said, because it means that people never get a chance to get themselves established in the workplace in that vital first job that they can hold and thus they have no incentive and no period in which to undertake training. As I said, this is an odd group, but very few of these people will become the compulsive muggers and axe murderers of popular fiction. Certain tabloid press would have that everyone who goes to prison is a threat to every part of one’s person, property and everything else, but most of them commit economic crime. What have the Government done about training the public to understand the level of risk from offenders and what they have done? In doing that, the Government would be taking a step forward. They should also try to explain to ordinary people who interview ex-offenders—let us face it, senior level management will not do most of the filtering of application forms or interviewing—that they can probably do these interviews in relative safety. Many years ago, I spoke to someone who said, ““Aren’t you frightened by being around all these prisoners””. I said, ““Not really””. Neither were the two or three women who were independently making prisoners cups of tea or allowing prisoners to make them cups of tea. The idea that compulsive poisoners were doing a six-month sentence for burglary was interesting. What are the Government doing to get that information into the community? Unless that is done, people are being punished twice and are being given very little incentive to break their patterns of behaviour and even less incentive to undertake training.