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Education (Student Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2008

rose to move, That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty praying that the regulations, laid before the House on 7 February, be annulled (SI 2008/235). The noble Lord said: My Lords, at first sight, removing the right to maintenance loans and grants for university courses for students who are in prison seems fair enough, but two aspects of these regulations give me great cause for concern. First, although they are only temporary regulations applying just to this academic year, the substance of them is repeated in next year’s regulations, which I think are already before the House. Secondly, the regulations have been put together with a degree of carelessness which is culpable. Prison education is not an easy business. A lot of dedicated people, voluntary organisations, different departments of state, the Prison Service and so on work very hard to use education as a means of rehabilitating prisoners. Prisoners who take university degrees must surely be a sub-group who have a pretty good chance of rehabilitation after they leave prison. It is always hard to get employment after you leave prison, but having a decent degree would make a considerable difference. Therefore, we should treat that group of prisoners with great care. Before we bring forward measures such as these, we should understand their effects. However, these regulations have been brought forward without the Government having a clue as to their effects and without them even knowing how many prisoners will be affected by them. As I said, the regulations apply only to this year. They have been brought forward in great haste to save very little money—and at what cost? When the Government brought them forward, they did not know how many prisoners’ education opportunities would be blighted by them. They did not care, and I find that disgraceful. Although, as I said, taking away from prisoners the right to maintenance seems sensible, what will happen to a prisoner on remand? If a university student is accused of a serious crime and spends time, quite reasonably, in prison on remand, as I read these regulations, he would lose his maintenance grant for the rest of the year. The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, may remember Earl Russell’s student who was accused of rape and, with the noble Earl’s help, was exonerated. Even under the regulations as proposed by the Government, but not yet brought forward, he would have lost his maintenance grant for the term. That might tip a student into considerable financial difficulty without any justification at all. What about a student who goes too far and for some reason is given a six months’ sentence, for example, for driving while uninsured and spends three months in prison in the middle of a university year? He will have contracted his accommodation for the year so he will not pay less rent. What will be his financial situation when he comes out of prison? Where will he find the funds to pay the rent that he still owes? Will he have to give up his university career just because of the regulations? What will happen to longer-term prisoners who pursue a course in prison and when they come out wish to continue that course at university? Where will they look for support? We are told in the replies kindly given by the Minister that such students may be released while the regulations are in force and find themselves without recourse to a maintenance grant to continue the studies that they had pursued in prison. Maintenance grants do not cover only accommodation; they also cover books and other essentials. Where will prisoners turn for that money to pay for the books and other resources which they need to pursue their courses? Prison libraries are notoriously not well endowed when it comes to university-level material. They have to be able to turn somewhere for that. Such matters ought to have been considered in advance, but they were not even looked at in advance. The Government now promise that they will bring forward regulations some time before September to deal with some of these intricacies. However, they have been very sketchy about those regulations and I should like to know from the Minister whether they will be brought forward before we retire for the Summer Recess. These people are important. Letting them down at that point in their education, when they are about to leave prison, risks them becoming a menace to society when they might have been contributors to society. That puts in jeopardy a great deal of work that has been done by other people; and for what? When I first saw the regulations I presumed that some nasty newspaper had stuck a pin into an unsuspecting Minister and that these regulations were just a yelp of surprise and reaction. I could understand that. Newspapers are not nice when they go on the war path and one can excuse the initial reaction. But I should have hoped that the Civil Service would have managed to stop this and would have enabled better counsels and more careful counsels to prevail. Yesterday, when I received the copy of the ministerial statement on this matter, it appeared that that was not the case. A Minister has just stumbled across this anomaly, said, ““Whoopee, I can earn some Brownie points with the Chancellor by saving him £20,000””, and has valued that little bit of personal success over the consequences of this going ahead, without the research having been done and without knowing the effects, which is greatly distressing. At the heart of this, I am afraid, is a contemptible, petty, careless use of ministerial power. I greatly regret that this has been brought before the House. I beg to move. Moved, That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty praying that the regulations, laid before the House on 7 February, be annulled (SI 2008/235).—(Lord Lucas.)