Lord Farmer (Con)

My Lords, I thank all who will contribute this afternoon. It is an impressive list, and I am looking forward to hearing some valuable contributions to what is, at the present time, a very important subject. I thank you for making time after a busy week. I particularly welcome the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, who is making his maiden speech here. I am looking forward to hearing his wisdom, of which he has much in this regard. I received a very supportive email from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester, who is prisons Bishop. She is at the College of Bishops this week and is unable to attend, but she wants us to know that she would have been here if she could have been. This is a highly relevant debate to the public. The current state of our Prison and Probation Service constantly plays out on front pages of newspapers and online media sites. One of my pleas today is for politicians to resist the media drama, particularly of a single case, and keep rehabilitation at the forefront. The fact is that punishment is deprivation of liberty, not grim conditions. On today’s news, we heard that temporary prefabricated cells, sized for one, are now being fitted with bunk beds. Ten years ago, or more, former Chief Inspector of Prisons Nick Hardwick described such circumstances to the Commons Justice Committee, saying that many prisoners are now effectively living in toilets. Headlines about prison spaces running out should not be ignored. In August 2026, the total prison population was 86,843, which is 97.6% of the usable capacity. As around 96% are men, it is unrealistic to treat the women’s estate as a readily available solution to male overcapacity. The Government’s female offender strategy admits that some have committed crimes of such gravity that custody is the only sentencing option. Of course, women should be in prison if they have committed serious offences. The range of contributors to current major capacity pressures includes the increase in convictions for sexual offences. Many are historic, but their devastating effects on victims do not expire. There has also been sentencing inflation of 45% over the past 15 years. A response in no small part to penal populism has also clogged up our prisons and today’s need for early release of prisoners is a predictable consequence. It is ironic that a “lock them up and throw away the key” mentality necessitated the proposed earlier release of heinous criminals at the top of the new Prime Minister’s in-tray of wicked policy issues. Early releases started under the previous Conservative Government, with their end of custody supervised licence emergency response, which allowed eligible prisoners to be released up to 18 and then 70 days before their automatic release date. But eligibility excluded many serious offences. During the 2010s, the Government found money for new prison places, which will only become available under this Government, and this Government will get the credit—whatever. Short-termism does not work in penal policy. Even when a prison has opened under a highly experienced governor, it takes time to fill up gradually. We are building a community, not stocking a warehouse. The current scheme of early release cannot be characterised as a continuation of end of custody supervised licence. Moving the standard release point from 50% to 40% and now 33% represents such a significant change in the proportion of the custodial sentence spent in prison that sentencing is becoming increasingly meaningless. This is very worrying for public confidence in the courts and judiciary when they are under exceptional strain. We need sentences that are understandable and reflect the seriousness of the crime but also recognise the possibility and need for rehabilitation. Given the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, I hope he will comment on this, and I will say no more. One of my main points today is that the issue of prison capacity took the previous Government’s attention away from rehabilitation, and that trend has continued. The terms of reference for the Rudd review barely mention it. While it is a theme in the call for evidence, it does not look like a priority. Neither document mentions the importance of good relationships, despite them being essential to rehabilitation and to many other Rudd review priorities, such as safety, decency and strategy for future prison build. Yet I find HMPPS staff are very committed in this area. Their transforming prisons directorate is creatively building the importance of relationships into future prisons, but it is hard for them to build this culture without the oxygen of ministerial and political support. The 2016 White Paper, Prison Safety and Reform—in which my first review for the Government was announced—was also focused on Rudd review emergency issues, such as safety, security, new-build prisons and staffing pressures. However, it treated rehabilitation—prisoner reform—as equally important and called for “a huge cultural and structural change within our prisons—a transformation away from offender warehouses to disciplined and purposeful centres of reform where all prisoners get a second chance at leading a good life”. The MoJ’s own data showed the powerful positive rehabilitation effects of contact with families and significant ties. They exceed those of, say, education and employment, and provide the motivation for the latter—hence my reviews said that relationships should be the golden thread running through all the processes of prison and probation. Narrowly seeing this as only good family visits misses the fact that everything is mediated through relationships—relationships between governors and their officers, officers and the prisoners, prisoners and other prisoners, the prison and the community that surrounds it, and the prison estate and the society that it is part of—however difficult it might to define and cost them. The culture of prisons and probation needs to change so that a relational approach becomes business as usual, working with the grain of what it is to be human rather than against it. That is how professionals in the Youth Custody Service strive to operate. Yet when young people make the transition to the adult estate, too often they still fall over a cliff edge into a relational desert. It is 10 years since the Government commissioned my first review and accepted all its recommendations, but its emphasis on relational culture is frequently cut across by policy decisions. In response to understandable public outrage over non-attendance at sentence hearings, prison rules have been changed so that, as a general sanction, governors can remove all social visits for up to 27 days and restrict social visits to one visit in every 28 days for up to 84 days. Prisoners’ children can still visit, but that sanction rules out a very large range of other potentially prosocial visitors. When relationships wither, as they can quickly do when you are in jail, this might remove a key reforming influence on a troublemaker. One of the most extrovert prisons I visited, HMP Norwich—with its tourist café run by prisoners in open conditions—holds a surgery for family members every week so that the deputy governor can hear their concerns. The deputy governor told me about the mother fighting her teenage son’s corner after he had given her a sob story about how badly he had been treated, and how she turned that mother into an ally by saying, “He’s doing himself no favours. You need to help us help him get through this as well as possible”. I am also concerned about fathers in prison who might lose parental responsibility when the Courts and Tribunals Bill abolishes the rebuttable presumption in the Children Act 1989 that children’s best interests are typically served by both parents’ involvement. Being in prison does not automatically make someone a bad or damaging father or mother, but removing the presumption will make it easier to argue that they are not needed. Can the Minister confirm whether any guidance will be issued to mitigate that possible unintended consequence for these parents and their children—who are at a profound legal disadvantage—if the Bill becomes law? Such examples suggest that the culture is still punitive rather than rehabilitative. The problem with culture is its apparent intangibility for policy purposes, but its effects are anything but intangible. Where there is a culture of each government department or public service working separately and territorially, people fall through the cracks between operational silos. That still happens, despite the duty to refer when people released from prison are at risk of becoming homeless. Some local housing authorities work very well with prisons and probation and secure accommodation for prisoners, despite similar pressures on their housing stock as less integrated local councils. According to Nacro, last year in the north-west, 12% of people leaving prison were released into homelessness, compared with more than 20% of people released in south-central. If agencies in every region collaborated as well as they do in the north-west, there would be 3,700 fewer people released to homelessness every year, potentially preventing 1,500 reoffences. The proven reoffending rate of those released homeless—76%—was more than twice that of those released from custody into settled accommodation, at 36.4%. Some 4,500 inmates will be released early in 10 tranches between 1 October and 1 June next year, in addition to the 4,500 regular releases that take place each month. Prisons and probation are on the front line of the Prime Minister’s pledge to end rough sleeping. Almost one in six are released homeless, and the most recent snapshot found that half of all rough sleepers had been in prison at some point and that 15% of them had been released within the last year. This Government’s national plan to end homelessness calls out the deficiencies of the duty to refer and promises to legislate for a duty to collaborate as soon as parliamentary time allows. I tabled amendments to the Social Housing Bill to seize that legislative opportunity, but unfortunately to no avail. I was even told by the responding Minister that the duty to refer was working fine, so my amendments, which would have brought the Government’s own proposed reforms into statute, were not needed. It was rather an Alice through the looking-glass moment. Can the Minister report any new progress on bringing the duty to collaborate into law? What is being done to ensure that prisoners have good relationships and that someone is there when they are released, not just accommodation? One of the most effective ways to prevent homelessness after release is to maintain existing family and other relationships, or enable prisoners to build supportive connections both inside and outside prison. Effective peer mentoring schemes are creating valuable communities of support that start in prison but go beyond the gate for prisoners who have no contact with their families and cannot hope to have. Sex offenders, for example, lumped together as a universally heinous, also need to be given a second chance. Programmes such as these should become business as usual. When well supervised, they can be powerfully therapeutic. Trusted relationships can bring home to a prisoner the criminogenic influences they have to shrug off if they are to change. They create a sense of agency and dispel despair. Peer support can be game-changing for the 25% of male and female prisoners who are care experienced. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act requires prisons and probation to share corporate parenting responsibilities as part of a new, highly relational approach to care leavers. Peer support is key to fulfilling this. Can the Minister provide an overview of the spread of peer mentoring in prisons and support in English and Welsh prisons? Are there are any plans to integrate them into the Probation Service? The 19th-century social reformer Elizabeth Fry branded our violent and squalid prisons the “nurseries of crime”. She said: “The better the actual state of our prisons is known and understood, the more clearly will all men see the necessity of these arrangements by which they may be rendered schools of industry and virtue”. I will finish on one neglected relationship that I have already mentioned: between the prison and probation system and wider society. Most prisoners will be released back into that wider society, which needs to know and understand what it takes to reform someone who has transgressed, how to prioritise rehabilitation and how to prioritise good relationships while still being appropriately tough on crime. I beg to move.