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Cutting Crime (Justice Reinvestment)

We went through a period when sentencers were almost discouraged from going to see what was happening. In my time on the bench, which was quite a long time ago, I used to spend time, particularly with respect to youth justice, going to see where we were sending people. That included community as well as custodial disposals. It was invaluable. Under the previous Government, we moved back to encouraging sentencers to engage in an understanding of the places where people were to go. However, it is clear from work done by charities that more could be done, and that not enough is known, particularly by judges, who have a disproportionate influence, through the training programme, on the decisions of magistrates. They set the tone. A lot needs to be done in that area. Incidentally, the issue of purpose arose elsewhere. The Committee also undertook an inquiry into the role of the prison officer, which overlapped with the later stages of the justice reinvestment work, and I want to draw attention to one of our conclusions:"““The aim of imprisonment should be to reduce re-offending, while treating prisoners with humanity and keeping them appropriately secure.””" That clarity of purpose should be reflected in the aims and objectives of the prison service, and in the way in which its activities are measured. If lots of other things are used as measures they get in the way of that overall objective. It is important for us to mainstream the objective of reducing crime and reoffending. In the report on justice reinvestment we said:"““We are concerned that there has been low take-up of crime-related indicators in local areas and we believe that local strategic partnerships should better reflect the priority given to crime as a matter of public concern both nationally and locally.””" That is something that local MPs and councillors have, in my experience, always considered important, because it is important to their constituents. Therefore it is not impossible, if the information and data are adequate, to achieve coherence. There is a need for coherence across several Departments—we refer in the report to the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and others—to ensure the most appropriate allocation of resources to reduce crime. The report states:"““A considerable amount of management information about offenders is held locally by prisons, probation areas and other providers which, if captured centrally, would provide a wealth of material to support the case for cross-departmental reform.””" The idea that reform should be cross-departmental is important, because most of the resources that affect offending, for good or ill—the resources that, if applied in the right way, lead to a reduction in reoffending, or, if not properly applied, lead to a likely increase—lie outside the criminal justice system. That, too, is highlighted in the report. One of the things that worries me most at present is the decision made in rather too much of a rush by the incoming Government to cut the support for, and the pledge to, unemployed young people. I do not say that just to be oppositional. I came into national politics because I worked with unemployed young people and saw their hopelessness. It was what led me to decide we needed to change things nationally. That is going back to the 1980s. I believe that the end of the pledge was foolish and short-sighted, but, more to the point, in relation to the criminal justice system, it may turn out to be a very expensive step. It was meant to save money, but I believe it will prove expensive. The drivers of offending and reoffending, or the things that can reduce them, are education or the lack of qualifications, basic skills and employment-related skills; drug rehabilitation or its inadequacy; mental health—we know that mental health problems are the trigger for the activities of many people who end up in prison; and housing. Those are the four drivers of the apocalypse of reoffending, so to speak. There is a need somehow to connect those four areas of provision and efforts to reduce reoffending. If I were to include a fifth element it would be relationships. We underestimate the extent to which relationships or their lack, or failure, drive offending and reoffending. There is a connection between those things and the other four drivers. I suggest that, for instance—and this came out in the report on prisons—trying to turn prisons into learning establishments where prison officers and prisoners share the sense of the importance of learning opportunities would make an enormous difference. I heard on the ““Today”” programme a couple of weeks ago a reference to a protest in America, where local people objected to the fact that prisoners were being given greater educational opportunities than prison officers. The result was that educational provision for the prisoners was reduced. The obvious thing would have been to increase the educational opportunity for prison officers and turn that into a shared preoccupation. I have certainly come across prison officers with a passion for education and a wish for learning, who care about what they are doing. I suggest that that approach would make a great difference. My other particular concern at present is last week's announcement of the ending of the Youth Justice Board. The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed said that he hoped its work would continue elsewhere. He acknowledged that the work of the youth offending teams, bringing the different professions together in tackling youth offending, has been quite successful. My worry is about the fact that the expertise on youth offending and what can work in tackling it does not lie in Departments. It is not the sort of thing that civil servants do well. They are good on policy development, and so on, but from ministerial experience, I would say they do not have the professional expertise that the Youth Justice Board provided in support of the youth offending teams. We need that expertise somehow to be reinstituted, or the Minister may find that the effectiveness of work with young offenders starts to move backwards. Justice reinvestment is not about massively increasing the resources that we put into the criminal justice system. Indeed, it is potentially about reducing them by using the available resources in a much more targeted and effective way. It is therefore an approach that should be attractive to the Government, just as it provoked a positive response from the previous Government. Does that mean that we have a boring consensus across party lines? No, I think that we had a very exciting convergence of views in the Select Committee, driven by the evidence rather than by the media. That is in the public interest, for three reasons: first, it is in the interest of good administration and governance; secondly, it makes the best use of available resources and stops demand for them getting out of hand—and we have seen how great the risk is, under successive Governments, of the demand for prison resources in particular getting out of hand; and thirdly, it delivers on the victim-centred agenda of reducing the likelihood that people will become victims a second or third time. The Justice Committee's report is the product of remarkable consensus among Members of Parliament in the four main parties. The members of the Committee put in a considerable amount of time. That was true not only of the Chairman but also, on the Conservative side, the new Chairman of the Treasury Committee—there should be an ally there—the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie), and on the Labour Benches myself and my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead). When we came to the writing of the report we expected we would be up against it. We expected a degree of cross-party controversy. However, perhaps it says something about the quality of the evidence and about the considerable investment of time in the inquiry over two years, as the Chairman of the Committee said, that we found ourselves in passionate agreement at the end. I revert to comments by Professor Jonathan Shepherd, cited in paragraph 309 of the report, who"““advocated offender management schools and institutes in research intensive universities, similar to the police school model, and argued that such institutions can be cost-neutral.””" In analysing crime—what causes crime and what can drive it down—methodology is absolutely crucial. That is central, as well as a proper understanding of the actual experience of crime at a local level. The way forward is to put correct methodology at the centre, then trusting people to apply it locally, understanding the needs of their community and communicating those needs and the methods with which they are approaching them. That is precisely the approach to transparency and accountability that the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) asked me to underline. The justice reinvestment report offers an agenda that it would be wise for Government and Opposition to support in the coming months and years.