Queen’s Speech — House of Lords, 2015-06-04
Topic: Law and Crime
Veronica Linklater (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, my contribution to this debate on the Queen’s Speech comes under the broad heading of "welfare reform", and would more properly have been given during yesterday’s debate, making as it does the essential interconnection and correlation between social and economic disadvantage on the one hand, and offending behaviour on the other. So I am particularly grateful for this opportunity to speak, albeit somewhat out of context Last week, the Prison Reform Trust published the latest edition of its highly successful, informative and much-used Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile. According to the briefing, England and Wales currently have the highest imprisonment rate in western Europe, at 149 per 100,000 of the population. Over the past two decades, the prison population has nearly doubled, at enormous expense to the taxpayer, and it currently stands at more than 84,000. Reconviction rates are sky high: nearly half of all people released from prison are reconvicted within one year of their release The current realities of the lives of ex-prisoners include the following. Some 15% of newly convicted prisoners reported being homeless before custody, and 9% were sleeping rough. More than half the people released from prison were claiming out-of-work benefits one month afterwards, and two-fifths were still claiming benefits two years after release. In 2013-14, only a quarter of prisoners entered employment on release from prison, and 26% of women and 16% of men said they had received treatment for a mental health problem in the year before custody These figures suggest that social policy is not tangential to success in criminal justice policy, but absolutely central to it. The Justice Committee has highlighted the importance of joining up welfare and criminal justice policy to tackle offending and reoffending. Commenting on the launch of its recent report on prisons, planning and policies, the then chair of the committee, Sir Alan Beith, said: "The Committee has repeatedly emphasised the dangers of allowing the prison population to escalate and consume huge resources which could be better spent on preventing crime, for example, by dealing with drug and alcohol addiction and further expanding programmes, like the Troubled Families programme. The public look to the criminal justice system to demonstrate that crime is taken seriously, but that means tackling and preventing crime effectively, not merely locking up more and more offenders at massive cost to the taxpayer" A number of the previous Government’s policies and initiatives recognised the social and economic dividends that can be gained from a closer co-ordination of welfare, health and criminal justice policies. I am pleased to see that some of these are being taken forward and developed in the proposals contained in the Queen’s Speech Alternatives to custody represent the most positive policy in the management of offenders, as well as the one most likely to succeed. Taking offenders out of the community by putting them in prison may work as punishment in the short term, but the evidence is that it is not nearly as likely seriously to reduce offending behaviour The troubled families initiative rightly recognises crime and anti-social behaviour as important indicators of disadvantage. The National Audit Office has acknowledged the potential of such programmes both to deliver savings—an outcome always welcomed by Governments—and to represent a more co-ordinated approach to tackling social problems. I welcome the commitment in the Queen’s Speech to, "expand the Troubled Families Programme", and I hope that this will include efforts to ensure closer co-operation between welfare and criminal justice There have been welcome changes in the justice system in the treatment of people with mental health needs and learning disabilities. More than half of England and Wales is now covered by liaison and diversion services in police stations and courts, and a full national scheme is planned to be put in place in 2017, subject to the Treasury’s approval There are important footholds for greater co-ordination between social and criminal justice agencies in the reduction in recent years in the numbers of children and young adults in custody. Over the past three years, the number of children in prison has reduced by 60%, while levels of youth crime have also fallen. This success is in great measure due to the work of the Youth Justice Board, which I wholeheartedly applaud and which oversees the multidisciplinary youth offending teams based in local authorities. YOTs bring together social workers, police, probation, health and welfare agencies to help keep children out of trouble and to divert them wherever possible out of the justice system into appropriate treatment and support. This intervention alone enormously improves the chances of young people, reducing their offending and keeping them out of prison The Transition to Adulthood Alliance has commissioned substantive evidence to show the benefits of extending the multidisciplinary approach to young adults. While people aged 18 to 24 accounted for one in 10 of the UK population in 2010, they account for a third of those sentenced to prison each year, a third of the probation service caseload and a third of the total economic and social costs of crime. Those in this age group are particularly impressionable and subject to influence by peers, but they can also benefit from intensive community and multidisciplinary approaches to divert them out of crime A group that is disproportionately represented among children and young people in prison is children who have experienced local authority care. Looked-after children make up 33% of boys and 61% of girls in custody, despite fewer than 1% of all children in England being in care. The noble Lord, Lord Laming, is currently conducting an independent review supported by the Prison Reform Trust into improving outcomes for this particularly vulnerable group in the justice system. It is a real issue: these young people, whose lives have been characterised by disadvantage, badly need more attention paid to their welfare in the widest sense I am really grateful for the opportunity to speak on these issues today—out of context—because they crucially concern the management of offenders and the relationship between offenders and communities. There is an assumption that these issues belong exclusively within legal and home affairs, but bringing them to this context, unlikely though that is, may not be an entire waste of time. The silo mentality between government departments must be broken down if we are to have communities which can, instead, enjoy cross-departmental strategies to reduce offending and reoffending.