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Crime: Reoffending

My Lords, I join others in paying tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, for sponsoring this debate and for the tour d’horizon that she gave in her opening remarks. As I am batting rather late in the batting order of this team, it leaves me with not a great deal to say. I shall focus on what I consider are the five main non-custodial avenues open to the courts: monetary fine, which has not yet been mentioned; tagging, which I do not think has yet been mentioned; anti-social behaviour orders; community orders; and probation orders. I gloss over volunteer mentoring and restorative justice, not because they are unimportant and not because, as the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, said, those issues and others do not hold out promise for the future, but simply because time is against it in a debate of this length. All those five avenues fail in one way or another not because the concept is wrong and not because the aims are outmoded or irrelevant but because in each and every one of them the approaches are no longer accorded sufficient priority—not enough effort, money, staff, emphasis or co-ordination. Tagging is a case in point. The concept has not changed in a decade or so—the decade that we have used it—and neither has the technology. It can operate only within the offender’s own home, close to a telephone system. Typically, the offender is required to be at home, virtually imprisoned, for about 12 hours of the evening and night, and can roam free during the day without any check on where he goes being possible. The result is virtual imprisonment at home for long periods and non-supervision for the rest of the time, with all the opportunities that offers for reoffending. At just over £2,000 a time, for some offenders tagging is cost-effective and successful, but mostly it is a crude tool. Technology has moved on. I declare an interest as chairman of a company—one of many companies—that manufactures equipment that could be used in this field. Technology can now track individuals anywhere, pinpointing their whereabouts to as short a distance as three metres, and can be linked to an individual computer programme tailored to the offender that will cover the full 24 hours anywhere, giving both the rigour of tight supervision and flexibility. It would be a huge improvement on what we have today at virtually the same cost. Magistrates have largely given up imposing fines as a realistic penalty because they expect that the fine will be unpaid and eventually written off. This was not always the case. Courts administrators no longer see this as part of their core business and cynical non-payment is all too often the result. But firm determination can rectify that position. Merseyside is as an example of this. Non-payment of fines was the norm in Liverpool. It was a bad joke. Only 12 per cent of warrants for non-payment of fines were executed, the other 87 per cent went unexecuted and therefore unpaid. In 2002, the warrant enforcement function in Merseyside was outsourced to a large private security company and within three years 71 per cent of the warrants for non-payment were being executed and the fines paid. That percentage grew rapidly; it was a success story. For reasons that are not altogether clear, the Department for Constitutional Affairs decided to take the warrant enforcement function back in-house. I understand that the percentage of executed warrants in Merseyside has begun toslide remorselessly back towards the pitiful level that was seen originally. The message is simple; proper outsourcing to competent, commercial concerns can bring debt recovery under proper control and once again offer the fine as a realistic option. What of ASBOs, community orders, probation orders and the like? They are all different, but they all have one essential set of ingredients. They all require a proper degree of supervision and management, and appropriate staff trained to an appropriate level and in appropriate numbers. All those orders have been largely devalued in recent years, to a point where they are often seen by the offender as a minor irritation. On some community programmes, recidivism runs as high as 90 per cent. The reoffending rate for males on probation, for other than the most serious offences, is around 60 per cent. All too often, the ASBO or the community order is seen as a badge of honour. The fast reducing impact of the Probation Service in implementation across the range is alarming. The diversion of its resources into management functions is pitiful. In 2000, approximately 70 civil servants made policy for the Probation Service. In three years, by 2003, that number had risen to 500 or so in the probation directorate. Now the figures are blurred, with the creation of the National Offender Management Service, which has seen a staggering increase of 1,600 new posts created for probation and prison matters, on top of the staff who were already in post. All the time, the service at the sharp end diminishes. The average offender on probation receives only an hour a week at most face to face with his probation officer. Yet, when resources were adequate and locally directed, the Probation Service in this country was an exemplar for the rest of the world to follow, and we were proud of it, and reoffending was minimal. A challenging vicious circle has developed, in which the collapse of the fine as a penalty has raised the sentencing threshold so that offenders who would have been fined are now sentenced to supervision or community orders, and those who a decade ago would have received a community sentence now serve custodial sentences. It is no surprise, therefore, that prisons are full to capacity, and we have to find a way back. There is nothing wrong with the range of options in the courts at present; nothing that proper resourcing and close, local attention to communities—I echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham—cannot solve. Without it, and with a continued growth in bureaucracy and in criminal justice legislation, we can expect to see a further degradation of our already damaged system and further challenges to our high reoffending rates.