Contribution
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, on securing this debate and I am grateful for how he opened it. I thought he was going to be a little more critical and, in turn, I have written a counter speech. I want to speak primarily about rehabilitation, which he mainly focused on. As he said, one of the big influencing factors has been 30 years of sentence inflation, with more and more, and longer and longer, sentences being handed out. I too look forward to the maiden speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, with great interest in what he may say on this.
There have been 30 years of underinvestment, by all Governments, in the courts, prisons, the probation services and of course rehabilitation, which has been the Cinderella right at the end of the line. However, services have been particularly hollowed out since 2010, when George Osborne’s austerity programme was introduced. Then there was the calamitous, I believe, social experiment of the part-privatisation of the probation service by the Conservative Government, as well as a failure to build new prison places—we are still waiting for new ones to come on stream, as has just been mentioned.
In 2024, Labour inherited a demoralised and understaffed workforce, with prisons almost full to capacity. We were almost at a point where, without radical action, the country faced the prospect that courts would not be able to send criminals to jail, because there were no places to incarcerate them. I am glad to say that we have not shied away from that challenge. I congratulate all those who have been involved in trying to right the wrongs, especially the now departed Prisons Minister, my noble friend Lord Timpson; he did outstanding work, which was recognised across the whole Chamber. He did it with enthusiasm and endeavoured—this particularly appealed to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and me—to re-energise the work on rehabilitation of prisoners, especially those with addiction problems relating to drugs, alcohol or the recent growth in problem gambling, on which the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, has done such valiant work. I am sure that we will hear more on that from him today.
My noble friend Lord Timpson also recruited Professor Dame Carol Black. She was brought in, with her particular expertise, to assist with these long-standing addiction problems and with rehabilitation. The rehabilitation of offenders whose crimes are driven by drug or alcohol addiction is a crucial part of any strategy to reduce reoffending. Currently, services are still not fit for purpose. For example, half of all people on probation have a drug or alcohol problem, and over half of those arriving in prison are assessed as needing drug or alcohol treatment. Intensive drug or alcohol rehabilitation programmes in prisons were delivered to 11,000 people in 2012. We do not keep the figures now on what is being done, but the guess is that is in the order of as low as 2,000 a year—that is a terrible fall-away.
The Sentencing Act envisages increased early release, or community sentences instead of short periods of imprisonment, for offenders addicted to drugs or alcohol, but there are no plans to ensure that these people get adequate treatment. If their addictions are not treated, we will see high rates of reoffending and licence breaches. Dame Carol will be giving an update on progress in her report entitled From Hope to Delivery: Drug and Alcohol Treatment Under a New Government. She will be doing this in Committee Room 5 on Wednesday, 14 October. I hope that many of us present today, and others, will be there to hear about the work she has been done to try to address, in particular, addiction issues linked to rehabilitation so that we can then, in turn, look forward to a more detailed programme of action on rehabilitation and recovery. I would be grateful if the Minister could give us an indication of how the Government are likely to respond to the report that will be coming from Dame Carol.
I am also involved in some rehabilitation work being trialled shortly in a Kent addiction recovery centre that welcomes prisoners in its numbers. We are endeavouring to develop an AI companion linked to the 12-step recovery programme—I assure noble Lords that it will be entirely safe—so that prisoners there will be given a companion 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, if they are in need of someone to give them advice that has been based on the 12-step programme. We have managed to interest Stanford University in the USA in this, and we are hoping that King’s in London will also be associated, to validate a doctoral research project that is being set up alongside it.
We also have enthusiastic support from the charity Forward Trust, which I am sure the Minister will know does valuable work in recovery and rehabilitation within, and for those leaving, prisons. We see this project as having considerable potential in assisting with rehabilitation. I wonder therefore whether the Minister can give an indication of whether, if we get this off the ground, there may be a possibility to trial it in prison. It has great prospects of meeting some of the many deficiencies we currently have from not having the numbers around to help people with rehabilitation.