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Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I support not only the other amendments that are grouped with this one, but also a number of subsequent amendments. To explain my support, I will expand on the hint that the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, has just given about the importance of liaison with the prison authorities in any attempt to improve the education of young offenders. The Minister, when we were debating the first amendment, mentioned an understanding that there are current difficulties with the provision of education to young offenders, and that everything was to be gained by them coming into the mainstream and being subject to the same provision that is available outside. Everyone would welcome that; but we delude ourselves if we think that the road will be easy. Countless organisations involved in delivering activities, programmes, teaching, drug treatment, healthcare, resettlement programmes for families and so on, throughout the prison system, are frustrated by the inability of the system to deliver consistent support that enables them to do their work. I hope that it will help the Committee if I spend a moment or two outlining this, based on my experience and on what is currently happening. Unfortunately, the Prison Service is very ill organised to look after any particular type of prisoner, with the exception of high-security prisoners—and that came about only after the escapes from Whitemoor and Parkhurst, which resulted in embarrassment to the Home Secretary. Someone was made responsible for them and accountable for everything that happened around them—the programmes, the selection of staff, the provision of resources. However, nobody is responsible for children, young offenders, women or any other type of prisoner. Unfortunately, what would happen if that were the case—for instance, a new governor of a prison would follow on from where his or her predecessor had left off—does not happen. Every governor is given a list of targets and performance indicators, and a budget. As far as they are concerned, the main priority is to come in on budget and achieve the targets. So you get the ridiculous situation in which a governor coming into an establishment that has a lot of programmes running, which may have been running for some time, can decide that that is not how he or she will do things and is quite entitled to throw the whole lot out of the window and start again—as happened recently in Brixton. That is the worst type of environment in which to introduce something, particularly for young people. Therefore, until and unless people are appointed to be responsible and accountable for what happens to every single young offender and child in the prison system throughout England and Wales, this provision simply will not work. The same applies, unfortunately, with heads of learning and skills. They, too, are subject to direction from a different ministry to that directing the prison governor, and often the prison governor does not respond to what the head of learning and skills says ought to happen. This must be put right. In the process of providing education, two things need to happen. One is that somebody must lay down what is to happen. It is the responsibility of the Ministry of Justice to say what is to happen to young offenders. Somebody else should then decide how to deliver the "what" that has been laid down. At the moment, the learning and skills councils are responsible for arranging contracts with individual establishments for the provision but no one is saying what is to be provided. What is so welcome in the amendments, as I am sure the Minister will realise, is that they contain details of the "whats" that must be included in the direction given to local authorities if they are to provide suitable education to meet the "reasonable needs" of young offenders in detention, to quote proposed new Section 18A. However, the clarity of the "what" must be followed up with consistency; and, again, this is where the Prison Service is too ill organised to be able to respond to the initiative in the Bill. In 1990, there were riots in many prisons around the country—23 to be exact. Afterwards, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, was invited to write a report recommending what should be done to put the prison system on a better basis. He very quickly recognised that the three things most likely to prevent reoffending were a home, a job and a stable relationship, all of which were put at risk by imprisonment. Too many people were separated from the area in which their home, their job and their stable relationship existed. Therefore, he recommended that prisons should be organised into what he called "community clusters". In other words, there should be sufficient prison places in each part of the country to accommodate every type of prisoner from that part of the country, with the exception of high-security prisons, as there were not enough of them. That has never happened; nor has it happened in response to the direction given in the only White Paper on prisons, Custody, Care and Justice, published in 1991, which said that the formation of community clusters was the intention. Why does this matter? It matters because, unless people are held in a community cluster close to home, there will be continual problems with local authorities having responsibility for people from outside their area. That may not appear to matter too much if there are home-and-host agreements but, to me, there is a potential flaw line there because of the time that it takes to pass information from one to the other and to decide what people need. In discussing the amendments to this legislation, particularly in relation to those over the age of 16 and in the context of things such as apprenticeships, we have been very keen to involve local employers in deciding what should be provided. However, local employers providing potential for apprentices and so on in Northumberland, for example, are not going to be very interested in prisoners who have been moved from London purely because there happen to be empty spaces in Castington, which is the young offender institution there. Since 1991, many people have been saying to the Prison Service, "For heaven’s sake, get your house in order. Get the prisons into regional or community clusters and then local ownership can come into play. All the employers, the education, the drug treatment and all the other things that are needed can be provided locally and there will be some hope of people making the transition from custody to the community and getting the community involved in the follow-on". It is no good saying, "Well of course, if you start a level 3 course, you must follow it on". That has to happen and you have to enable it to happen. What I am really saying to the Minister is that, while of course people welcome what might happen, one must be aware that it is not going to happen unless another ministry gets its act in order to enable it to happen. This is not the first time that this sort of thing has been proposed. In 1998, when it was suggested that the Department for Education and Employment should take over responsibility for prisons, I remember having a long discussion with the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, on exactly the same subject. What has happened? Absolutely nothing. In the same year, I remember a question being asked of the then Prisons Minister, Mr Boateng, about how much money was being made available for young offenders in prisons. Those sums varied from £483 in one prison to £2,500 in another because of the way the money was allocated. The same applies now to the time made available for education. A young offender in Werrington, for example, up in Shropshire, gets nearly 17 hours of education a week. If they are in Feltham, in London, they get 7.5 hours. Given that sort of inconsistency, you have real problems. I make no apologies for saying this at this point when we shall discuss detention because I seriously believe that the problems must be faced up to. This week I presented to the Minister the report of the second stage of an initiative in which I and others have been involved for the past two and a half years. We suggest that a new type of young offender institution might be built. It is called an academy at the moment because that seems to be the in word. We suggest that account should be taken of the fact that these young people need a responsible adult, and particularly a continuing relationship with that responsible adult. If you are to prevent crime, it is essential to make certain that people are kept in the same area. Bubbling up from local authorities in the East End of London, social services, education, healthcare, housing, the Foyer movement, which provides accommodation for the homeless, and the police has come a suggestion for a site which contains a foyer for the homeless, a small custody centre for young offenders who have not committed very serious crimes—otherwise they might disrupt the place—and provision for all the education, training, work experience and other activities which they need as they are growing up. Local employers could offer those people employment opportunities in the local area. It is interesting to note that, when planning this initiative, the one thing we could not find out was the cost to the Prison Service of running a young offender establishment. The relevant authority was very cagey about providing those figures. Eventually, we asked the Justice Secretary to get the figures released. He said that he would but they have still not been produced. The figures that we are discussing are very alarming. I shall explain why I think this is important in the context of this Bill in a moment. They disclose that whereas the Prison Service would like to say that the cost in relation to young offender institutions ranges between £35,000 and £55,000 a year, in fact, it is £107,000, because a lot of the costs are hidden. Why does this matter? It matters because of local authorities, which are being asked to take on the custody of children as well as education and a whole lot of other things to do with children’s matters. They are very happy to do so because they feel that local ownership provides a better service. However, as the academy project report points out, a very serious obstruction, ""is caused by doubt about the quantum of the funds to be transferred to local authorities and whether this would be sufficient to buy places in the secure estate"." If the relevant body thinks that it is going to be able to provide what the Prison Service says it is providing now, with the money that the Prison Service says that it costs, there is going to be serious embarrassment because it will not be able to do so. Therefore, I again suggest to the Minister that until and unless the whole funding of this matter is properly established and sorted out, it is extremely unwise to make a move which might end in disaster, bearing in mind that we are so heavily involved in looking after the nation’s tomorrow. I hope that I am not being overdramatic but it is essential that, before launching something of which I am sure many noble Lords instinctively approve because it suggests that something better can be achieved, we get our house in order to enable this to happen rather than risk throwing everything away for all the wrong reasons.