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Crime: Reoffending

My Lords, I, too, pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, not only for this debate but because of all the work she has done on offending and its prevention. Today’s debate provides me with an opportunity to revisit criminal justice territory after my purdah period as a Health Minister. As someone who has worked closely with a former Home Secretary as his policy adviser and set up and chaired the Youth Justice Board for five years, I probably have more sympathy for Home Secretaries than many speakers today. I want to draw on the experience I had at the Youth Justice Board and try to apply some of its approaches more widely. I shall start with where I left the board in 2003. It had multi-agency youth offending teams, strong and growing prevention programmes and restorative justice, which I strongly support and to which the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, drew our attention. It had tough supervised community sentences. I make no bones about saying that we wanted tough community sentences: it was the right thing to do. They were being accepted by the courts as an alternative to custody. In 2003, when I left, we had a falling custodial juvenile population. This had been achieved not by listening to some of the vested interests in the criminal justice system and allowing the Probation Service to monopolise the management of youth offending teams. We were imposing increasingly demanding contracts on the Prison Service; we were seeking a wider range of service providers than the usual suspects; and we were doing something which had been discouraged by the Home Office and the then Lord Chancellor’s Department by working closely with sentencers. We were engaging with them and doing dangerous things such as talking to them and publishing information about their sentencing patterns. This was not the traditional approach which criminal justice had favoured. I was sorry to see my successor at the Youth Justice Board leave his post recently, but I was equally sorry to see that the trajectory on juvenile custodial use had gone in the opposite direction from that which I had left. I cite perhaps immodestly what worked for juveniles, because it has wider lessons for us. I tried unsuccessfully to get people interested in applying the approaches in that system, mutatis mutandis, to women and other adult young offenders. Those approaches could be applied to a much wider group of offenders. However, it would mean radically changing the established processes of working through the probation and the prison services. It would certainly mean fully implementing the recommendations in the report by the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, imposing a real purchaser-provider split, and demanding contracts for those providing custodial and community programmes. We sometimes take a rather rose-tinted view of some of those programmes which have been applied over the years by the Probation Service and the Prison Service. A more rigorous system of contestability would be needed to produce more credible community penalties which would reverse sentencers’ propensity to use custody, as the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, rightly identified. In the short term, we need to focus on credible alternatives to custody for remands, foreign prisoners, women and elderly prisoners. One of the more surprising features of my time in the Home Office was a proposal for geriatric wards in some prisons. This did not seem to be necessarily the right way forward. This model of a mixed economy of service providers has been applied to social care; it is being applied in health and education; and its rapid extension would benefit prison and probation services. To produce a real change in the pattern of offending and reoffending, we may need a new concordat with sentencers, possibly in relation to the 2003 Act, and an even heftier dose of robust commissioning and provider contestability in sentence disposals. As a number of noble Lords have said, we need to increase the involvement of local government and social enterprise, as well as of the private and voluntary sectors, in service provision for offenders. Doing this more at arm’s length from the Home Office, as we did in the Youth Justice Board, would achieve more local ownership of problems and solutions—it might even improve the lifestyles of Home Secretaries. We are moving into a period when growth in public expenditure seems likely to slow down, and public service efficiency has to improve more rapidly. Criminal justice cannot exempt itself from that environment. Doing more of the same is likely to be not only unworkable, but unaffordable.