Obfuscation Masterclass 3

Q46 Chris Evans: Before I begin, I would like to declare an interest. My sister, Cara Chapman, works for Working Links in Cardiff. Sir Richard, I want to pick up on something you said earlier. You said measures like successfully placing offenders in housing is a proxy for better measures. Can you tell me, then, why of the 23 men who were interviewed on the day they were released from Cardiff prison, only 13 had a definite place to stay? 

Sir Richard Heaton: I cannot tell you specifically. In an ideal situation, the number would be much, much higher than that. Housing is a responsibility of both the Welsh Government and local authorities. The CRCs can do their part as well. We are trying to make a better join-up between the CRCs and National Probation Service and the statutory and non-statutory housing providers, but from the numbers you have suggested, it is not working as well as it should be in Wales. 

Q47 Chris Evans: Am I right in saying that your target is for 90% of released prisoners to have some sort of accommodation? In that, Sir Richard, do you include tents? 

Sir Richard Heaton: Sorry?

Chair: Tents. 

Michael Spurr: No is the answer. Settled accommodation is what we would generally look at; tents would not be settled accommodation. And I don’t think it is quite as high as 90%. 

Q48 Chris Evans: Mr Spurr, moving up the country from Wales to Humberside, Lincolnshire and North Yorkshire, we have evidence from a probation officer who said, “We do have people who leave custody and have nowhere to live. Staff are still informally giving people tents.” What is your view on that? 

Michael Spurr: I am sure that is accurate. It is a huge, huge issue for us—releasing people who do not have accommodation. As I think the NAO Report brings out, that is why reducing reoffending involves a whole range of parties and is not just about what we do in prisons or in probation. As Sir Richard says, we do not have the mechanisms to provide the accommodation. We need to work with others to provide the accommodation and do more to support offenders getting accommodation. 

Where colleagues have done things that—somebody is saying they are going out and doing that, and I do know they have given, on occasion, tents. That is not what you want to do, but that was the humanitarian act of saying, “Actually, this person has nowhere to go.” I am not condemning that, because they are trying to help. Of course it is not what we want, but the sad reality is that people do leave prison, sometimes, without accommodation to go to. That is a reality. We want to reduce that. It has been difficult; accommodation has been difficult across the country, in England and in Wales, over recent years. Most probation colleagues would say it is one of the hardest things that they have to deal with—working with local authorities and others to find appropriate accommodation for offenders leaving custody. 

Q49 Chris Evans: Mr Spurr, I find that statement absolutely amazing. You have just used the word “humanitarian” about giving somebody a tent. Would you expect them to pitch this tent? Are you actually encouraging rough sleeping—yes or no? 

Michael Spurr: I am not encouraging anyone—I accepted that if somebody said that they had done that, it had happened. It is not our policy to give people tents when they leave prison. Our policy is to attempt to help people to have accommodation to go to on release. If they leave the prison and do not have accommodation, we still have to release people, and we give them a discharge grant. I agree with you it is not an acceptable position for people to go out and not have accommodation. I have been working as hard as I can, for as long as I can remember, to try to improve the opportunities for people leaving custody or in the community. I am simply talking about the reality. It is not true to say that everybody leaving prison goes into accommodation. We work with others to try to reduce the number who go out of prison and not into accommodation. Our aim is to have everyone in settled accommodation, not in bed and breakfast—

Q50 Chair: Can I ask you this, then? You have been 35 years a civil servant and nine years in this role. Where do you rank the current housing situation? We all represent constituencies where there are housing problems or different challenges. Is it worse now than it has ever been, or has it always been this bad? Has anything changed? 

Michael Spurr: I think it has got worse in recent years. I think most probation colleagues—as I go round, talking to people in probation and CRCs, finding accommodation is undoubtedly one of the hardest things that people— 

Q51 Chair: Has the Ministry of Justice given any thought to buying more hostels? I have been dealing recently with a constituent who is in a hostel, for instance. 

Michael Spurr: Yes, we have certainly given thought to a whole range of things. For example, we have been expanding the number of approved premises places. We are looking to expand the number of approved premises places specifically because we need to do more of that. But we are not a housing provider, and that is the reality. 

Chair: Absolutely. That is what the NHS always say to us when they have housing problems too. 

Q52 Caroline Flint: I just want to share with you a statistic from Doncaster, because obviously I represent a constituency there. There were 216 releases from Doncaster prisons to Doncaster between April and August 2018, 51 of which were to no fixed abode. The releases from Doncaster prisons represent 70% to 80% of the total number released to Doncaster from all prisons nationally, so it is very much a Doncaster prisons to Doncaster issue. This came up during a discussion with our ALMO, St Leger, about the shortage of available housing and the pressures in the private rented sector. Do you feel the figures that I have just presented are high? Some 51 people released in those few months did not have anywhere to go. 

Michael Spurr: Yes. I do think they are high—I think they are too high; 51 people not having somewhere to go is a risk. We want people to go into accommodation. We know that that helps reduce the risk of somebody reoffending immediately they go out of custody. Accommodation is critical for that. It is a really, really important priority for us, but it is tough. 

Q53 Caroline Flint: The problem, going back to the Chair’s point, about housing, is that you could have the CRCs and what-have-you in the Doncaster area trying to work with landlords in our low-rent, low-value private rented sector, trying to take a piece of that action. We have already got problems in Doncaster. We are meeting our agreed requirements on the resettling of asylum seekers and refugees, and we are being asked to do more on that front. We have a whole lot of people who live in Doncaster who aren't offending, and there is no social housing, and they are trying to compete with all those other groups in the private rental sector. You say the Ministry of Justice is not a housing provider, but is there not a case for building more homes and accommodation, so that you are not robbing Peter to pay Paul when it comes to trying to get a home in an ever-shrinking private rented sector? 

Sir Richard Heaton: Just two points: I am absolutely sure there is a compelling case for building more homes but, as Mr Spurr says, we are just not funded to do that. Our job is to work with partners in the Government, and that is what we can do uniquely. I am pleased that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government is working with us on a rough sleeping strategy. It may sound like small amounts of money, but we are not a well-funded Department—we are investing £6.5 million in a joint scheme to support individuals released from three prisons. That is not Doncaster, but Leeds, Pentonville and Bristol. This is exactly where we want to put our energy. Speak to any probation officer in the country. They work incredibly hard, and they will tear their hair out, because housing, employment and access to benefits are the three real drivers of recidivism. We desperately want it to be better. We are not a housing provider, but we have got some leverage with the MHCLG. 

Q54 Chris Evans: Can we go to the Report, please, Sir Richard, and look at paragraph 2.3 on page 28? Could you talk us through that paragraph about the lack of piloting for the system? 

Sir Richard Heaton: Lack of piloting of TR? 

Chris Evans: Yes. It begins: “The Ministry did not pilot how transformed probation services would be delivered in practice.” Could you explain the reasons for that statement? 

Sir Richard Heaton: I will do my best to reconstruct the reasons that existed at the time. It is partly, as Mr Spurr said, that there was a desire to get on with it and to keep the momentum going and to deliver before the 2015 election. The model did not lend itself to piloting, once the sentencing framework had been set in statute, because it is quite difficult to pilot different sentencing regimes unless you have statutory cover to do so. 

Nevertheless, the decision not to test out in shadow form the CRC and National Probation Service relationship or to test out how the courts were to use the framework of intervention measures so that we could better predict what sort of orders they were to give the CRCs—our inability to do those two things meant that we launched the programme on a national basis, with a full roll-out, and had to pick up the consequences as we went along. Looking back on it, in terms of project success, it was not a good thing to have done. It would have been better had we been able to test some aspects of this out in real running form before the thing went live nationally. 

Q55 Chris Evans: I understand, Sir Richard, your being under political pressure with the 2015 general election coming up. Considering you are dealing with public safety, did you not think to apply the brakes and step back and say, “This is not going to work”? 

Sir Richard Heaton: I am sure there was a lot of consideration in the Government. I was in the Cabinet Office at the time, but not involved in this project. I am sure that there was a lot of consideration in Government, both in the MOJ and at the centre, about the scale and pace of the programme. 

In defence of everyone who worked on the programme, all the checks, balances and assurances available to a major Government project all gave the programme the green light. It went through Treasury clearance and major projects review group clearance at the centre and all the rest of it. I am sure that there were anguished decisions about whether we were going too quickly, whether we should slow down or whether we should pilot or test bits of it. I was not privy to those discussions. However, the decision was taken to go ahead. 

Q56 Chris Evans: But why did you take the specific decision to cut probation in half and then introduce new interfaces, which brought friction where there wasn’t any before? Surely that should have been picked up at least by the major projects group, and perhaps by the Treasury? 

Sir Richard Heaton: I am absolutely sure—Michael can speak to what was going on at the programme board—that that risk was recognised at the time. I think that the interface between the NPS and CRCs has probably gone better than we feared. However, that was not part of the original design. It was simply that there was a desire to outsource probation, and then there was a recognition that the public would not accept some serious cases being dealt with by the private sector and so those would have to remain in-house. Lo and behold, you then have a two-tier probation service; you have engineered a split.

It was a consequence of a design that was then aimed off for the serious cases, which gave you the two-tier model. I do not think—I was not around for this bit—that anyone set out to design a two-tier probation service. It was a consequence. 

Q57 Chris Evans: Mr Spurr, you have more experience of this than anyone in this room. What are your thoughts? Did you think at any point at the beginning that this would cause friction in a unified service? 

Michael Spurr: Fragmenting the system was clearly going to cause some friction. The question was whether that was necessary and whether it could be managed. The reason why we went down this route was because a decision was taken to retain sexual and violent offenders—high-risk offenders—under the management of public sector probation officers. There were alternative options. It could have been that there was an outsourcing, for example, of a whole trust to the private sector, with some retained in the public sector. There were different options. 

However, the main policy drive was to drive reductions in reoffending through a payment-by-results model. The reoffending rates of higher-risk offenders are relatively low, but obviously the consequence of a higherrisk offender reoffending is very great. The reoffending rates of shorter sentenced offenders in prison and community-sentenced individuals are higher, and the potential to reduce reoffending rates and reoffences with them is much greater. 

The combination of wanting to retain much more direct oversight of the highest-risk offenders and a desire to deal with the biggest cohort of those who create most harm through reoffending, in volume terms—the shorter sentenced offenders—led to the decision to separate it into the NPS and different CRCs. There was a rationale for it at the time, but it was driven by those issues. It is perfectly legitimate to say that there would have been alternative models, and of course you are entirely right to say that separation causes a degree of friction. That is not ideal, but it was done for the reasons I have set out. 

Q58 Chris Evans: But it is not just friction. The Report says that the CRCs are detached from the court process, that sentencers to do not have confidence in the CRCs and that the NPS does not have knowledge of or confidence in CRC services. This is a serious crisis. You have two institutions that do not trust each other. 

Michael Spurr: I think the Report accurately reflects several things. I think it is true that sentencers have become less confident about community sentences, partly because they don’t have CRC colleagues in court—advice is given by the NPS—and therefore do not deal directly with CRCs in the way they once dealt with the unified probation service. In the new generation of contracts, one of the first things we set out was that there would be a single probation head in every English region and in Wales who would be responsible for both parts, so a single voice would be speaking to sentencers. That is really important. I think that that is accurate. 

We have been working to build sentencer confidence. I have had regular meetings with a senior presiding judge, we have worked with the judiciary to look at what we can do with that and we have provided better information on what CRCs do, both at a national and local sentencer forum levels. Those are important. That work has been going on. It is true to say, however, that that has been an issue and it comes out in the NAO Report. 

Q59 Chris Evans: That lack of confidence has led to judges going for short sentences over community sentences. I am right in saying that, am I not? There is a move towards that. Sir Richard Heaton: I am not sure what the evidence is on that. If that were the case, we would have seen an uptick in the short sentence prison population, which I do not think we have. I do not want to underplay the judicial confidence piece, but I think I am right in saying that we have not seen that consequence. It has not come through in custodial sentences, but it is anecdotally picked up by all sorts of sources, including the NAO, that that confidence is not there and needs to be. 

Q60 Chris Evans: We know from the evidence that the prison population is at breaking point, and that is due to more people being sentenced to prison. Do you know how much it costs per place for a prisoner every year? 

Michael Spurr: Per place for a prisoner? Depending on which way you look at it, about £36,000 a person. 

Q61 Chris Evans: I have got the cost per place as £40,843. 

Michael Spurr: It depends what you are looking at. Chair: Where did you get that from? Can you cite the source? 

Q62 Chris Evans: This is from the MOJ’s latest data, the costs per place and costs per prisoner information release on 25 October 2018. It was £40,843 per place for 2017-18. To send someone to Eton next year is £40,668. You have to say that that is a huge cost to the taxpayer, because you have not reformed community sentences. If we had community sentences, the Government could be confident about reducing short sentences down to a maximum of six months and therefore reducing that figure. Am I right? 

Michael Spurr: I absolutely agree about increasing sentencer confidence in community sentences. I absolutely think that prison should be used only where it is absolutely necessary. All the evidence indicates that if someone can be managed in the community, the outcomes are generally better. It is for sentencers to determine what is right, but I agree with all that. It is absolutely the case that prison places cost a lot of money, and on that basis, they should be used only where appropriate. That is for sentencers to determine. You are right that one of the reasons for making the changes we are making in the future reforms is to make sure that we can give back greater confidence to sentencers in community provision. 

Q63 Chris Evans: So it still costs more to send someone to prison than to Eton, at the end of the day, according to figures from the MOJ. 

Michael Spurr: I do not know how much it costs to send to Eton. It costs what it costs to send to prison. We have the set of figures. The rate varies depending on what type of prison you send people to. It is about £36,000 on average. 

Q64 Chris Evans: Sir Richard, you said that when the system was designed, you were not sure what the long-term changes to sentencing practices would be. Why was that? They were disastrous, particularly for the CRCs. Were you talking to the MOJ at the time? 

Sir Richard Heaton: Was the MOJ talking to who? 

Q65 Chris Evans: Talking to the probation service. In particular, why did you not foresee the long-term changes to sentencing practices? 

Sir Richard Heaton: I am not sure, sitting here. I suspect it was partly the case mix coming to court—in other words, the types of offenders that the police were charging. You may find this surprising, but it is surprisingly and frustratingly difficult to get a forecast of the sorts of case load that are coming into the courts. We saw an increase in serious cases coming to the courts and a decrease in less serious cases coming to the courts. That was partly it. 

We failed to anticipate accurately how the courts would make use of the various sentencing outcomes at their disposal. They preferred quicker, cheaper interventions that brought less revenue into the CRCs than we had modelled, I think. To this day, I am not quite sure that we have put our finger on why that happened. 

In an ideal world, either we would have forecast that better, or we would have created a model that was more flexible to variations in the case load coming to the CRCs. We were caught in the unfortunate position of not getting the forecast right and having a model that turned out to be inflexible and not having tested it. You have put your finger on a very difficult issue for us.

To be continued...