Lord Timpson (Lab)

I thank my noble friend for his question. I have walked past far too many classrooms in prisons where there are rows of computers and desks but no one inside. When prisons are 99.9% full, all that the governor can do is get people clean clothes, three meals a day and a shower. Going to a classroom is the last thing on their list, which is a very sad state of affairs. I am used to incentives. Some noble Lords may have been into the business I used to work in—one of the Timpson shops—and while they may have asked for one key, someone may have tried to sell them two. The reason they do that is not because they are trying to be helpful; it is because they have an incentive. What I know from incentives elsewhere in the prison world is that they can have a very positive impact on prisoners’ behaviour: to engage with their sentence plan, to go to education and to purposeful activity, not to take drugs and to play the game. We are working on this now and I hope to provide more information to the review in due course. It is very powerful; in the new year, I hope to go to Texas with the Lord Chancellor to see for ourselves exactly how we can implement it and just how powerful it can be. That is very important for us to do.