Lord Foster of Bath (LD)

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, and I join him in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, not only on the tremendous work that he has done in this particular area but for securing the debate and his excellent opening speech. I also look forward to the maiden speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson. Just over a year ago, the Justice and Home Affairs Select Committee, which I chair, published Better Prisons, Less Crime. We quoted witnesses who described the prison service operating in, or on the verge of, crisis. We acknowledged the failures of successive Governments, but our purpose was not to catalogue failure: it was to identify practical ways forward. Echoing what the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, said, our starting point was simple: we ought to understand the role of prisons. We said that punishment for the prisoner is the loss of liberty and the role of prisons is to protect the public by reducing reoffending. We said that required purposeful activity, education and training, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke said, treatment for mental health, drug, alcohol and gambling problems, and preparation for life after release. It also requires relationships, as again the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, said, particularly family relationships. They are really important, yet distance from home, restrictive visiting arrangements and limited digital access can make contact unnecessarily difficult. Family contact cannot and must not be treated as an optional extra. Our report found that purposeful activity was woefully inadequate overall, with prisoners spending up to 23 hours a day in cramped cells with little help for them to lead constructive crime-free lives when they leave. The consequences are predictable: boredom, frustration, self-harm and violence. With a cost to the taxpayer of approximately £54,000 per prisoner per year, we get very little benefit from that expenditure. It is not merely a failure of prison management; it is a failure of public policy. Of course, overcrowding is a major cause, but it is not the whole explanation. We identified longer sentences, which have already been mentioned, excessive use of custody, bureaucracy restricting governors’ autonomy, inadequate recruitment and training of staff, poor assessment of prisoner needs, a backlog of repairs and, frankly, complacency within the MoJ and HMPPS. For each of those problems, the committee made recommendations to release capacity for work on reducing reoffending and public protection. Yet, little more than a year later, the picture remains deeply troubling. Charlie Taylor, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, in a newspaper article only this weekend described the system as awash with drugs, with organised criminals operating with impunity, serious violence going unpunished and prisons struggling to control, let alone rehabilitate, those in their care. A prison system which cannot maintain order cannot properly rehabilitate prisoners. One which fails to rehabilitate stores up more crime for the future. The impact of all this on staff is equally serious. In the last 12 months to July, prison officer numbers fell by the equivalent of seven officers per prison and sickness absence rose to 12.4 days per officer per year, compared with a national average of 4.4 days for all other workers. We cannot expect officers to deliver rehabilitation in an unsafe, understaffed and demoralising environment. Overcrowding will not disappear quickly. Recalls are adding substantially to the pressure. Ten years ago, one person was recalled for every three or four released. In the first quarter of this year, for the first time ever since records were kept, more people were recalled to prison than released. Recalled prisoners now account for approximately one-seventh of the prison population, at a cost according to Nacro of £750 million a year. These figures raise all sorts of questions about whether the system is operating intelligently or just recycling people through custody at enormous cost. I urge the Minister to revisit the committee’s recommendations with much greater urgency than there has been so far. I have just a few quick suggestions in the time that remains. We must reduce the number of people sent to prison unnecessarily. We know that well-run, probation-led community sentences cost less and can produce lower reoffending. I welcome the replacement of short prison sentences with community sentences, but I believe we can go much further, which means doing other things. The noble Lord, Lord Brooke, referred to the issue of gambling disorder. It is a ridiculous situation that the courts can currently make changes to the sentence they give to people with drug and alcohol problems by linking treatment orders to a non-custodial sentence, but there are no similar treatment orders in relation to gambling disorder. I urge the Minister to look at that issue. I hope we will also look at the way in which we are funding and developing our Probation Service. We will hear all sorts of fine words from the Minister about the Government’s £700 million, but I point to the simple fact that, since the day our report was released to July of this year, the total increase in the number of probation staff has been 11. The Government are now using an ad agency to try to find additional people, at a cost of £150 million. I hope the Minister will tell us whether that is true and whether he believes it is good value for money—and, in particular, whether that is coming out of the £700 million, which would be a very expensive way of filling staffing gaps. We also know that the huge pressure on probation officers is one of the key causes of the recall of prisoners, because it is so much easier if there is a licence infringement to send people back to prison rather than taking up more time to deal with them. I hope the Government will also look at our recommendation about the importance of prison education. They accepted our recommendation and said that prison education was vitally important, yet since our report was produced the budget for education in prisons has been reduced by at least 25%, which has meant that some 300 people who deliver that service have now lost their jobs. We can do other things, too, by looking at the way we help prisoners when they leave prison. I urge the Minister as a final point to look at the work being done at HMP Doncaster, where Nacro is bringing together all sorts of different agencies to help prisoners from the day they walk out of prison. There is a lot that needs to be done. Only today, the unions have written to the Prime Minister about the piecemeal approach to dealing with the multiple problems in the justice system. They urge a more joined-up approach. I hope the Minister will look at that letter; it gives a lot of good advice as to how we could move forward, with the Government working more effectively together on these issues.