Lord Ramsbotham Memorial Lecture
The first annual lecture, in memory of Lord Ramsbotham, held on 29 November 2023
This first of a planned annual lecture series in memory of Lord Ramsbotham, former chief inspector of prisons, was held in the Jubilee Room in the Palace of Westminster.
Introduced and chaired by Mary Glindon MP, the audience heard first from Sir Bob Neill, chair of the House of Commons Justice Committee, who spoke about Lord Ramsbotham’s work on prison reform. Following Sir Bob, Richard Burgon MP, former shadow Justice Secretary, spoke about Lord Ramsbotham’s work on probation reform.
Mary Glindon MP
First of all, I’m really pleased to be able to welcome everyone to the Lord Ramsbotham Memorial Lecture, and we hope it will be the first in a series of annual events on subjects that he engaged on so passionately here in Parliament.
I’m Mary Glindon, the Labour MP for North Tyneside. It was an honour and a privilege for me to serve as co-chair of the Drugs, Alcohol and Justice Group, which David Ramsbotham had himself led for many years. And he was also a member of the Justice Unions Parliamentary Group. Many of you here also knew David – or “Rambo” as he was affectionately known – and we all knew him to be a caring and courteous man.
After a distinguished military career, General Ramsbotham served as Chief Inspector of Prisons before becoming a life Peer in the House of Lords. He was born on 6 November 1934 and died on 13 December 2022, so this event was scheduled for the end of November so it could take place mid-way between those two dates.
A Service of Thanksgiving for his life and work took place in September across the road at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster Abbey, and as his son James wrote in the order of service, he will be remembered in many ways, but especially for his humour, his humility and above all his humanity, and I think everybody here who knew him would agree with that very last description.
Regrettably his sons, James and Richard, are unable to join us this evening, but they both send their best wishes for the event, and I’m sure you will all join me in wishing them all the best too.
I need to add, sadly, that we’ve also lost another Peer and stalwart supporter of the Drugs, Alcohol and Justice Group, and that was Baroness Masham, who died earlier this year, and last month there was a memorial mass for her at Westminster Cathedral.
2023 marks 20 years since the publication of David’s book “Prisongate – the shocking state of Britain’s prisons and the need for visionary change”. To talk about prisons today, it’s a pleasure for me to introduce our first distinguished speaker, Sir Bob Neill, Conservative MP for Bromley and Chislehurst, who is chair of the Justice Committee.
Sir Bob Neill MP
Thank you very much, Mary, and I’m delighted to see everybody here on a pretty frosty evening. And I wanted to thank you, Mary, and the APPG for giving me the opportunity to address this first Lord Ramsbotham Memorial Lecture. I’m delighted that it is going to be one of a series.
I think David was somebody who contributed so much to public life in a raft of ways – as a soldier, as a very impressive Chief Inspector of Prisons, as a Parliamentarian. It was a life of service right from the beginning, pretty much, to the end – and that says a lot about the man, doesn’t it, and your description of him Mary absolutely fits the bill.
And maybe that mixture of serious experience of leadership combined with that humility and humour made him very well fitted to the tough task of being Chief Inspector of Prisons because that’s a role that I think is not recognised perhaps, not often enough, for the significance it has.
There’s a quote in the book – I too have got my copy of Prisongate here – and there’s a quote in there that David uses to head the chapter about when he becomes Chief Inspector in which he quotes Harry Woolf, Lord Woolf, another distinguished cross-bench Peer, and this was at the time when he was Lord Chief Justice.
And Harry’s quote was: “A system without an independent element is not a system that accords with proper standards of justice.”
And that’s important I think for us always to bear in mind. It’s important for ministers to bear in mind, frankly, and it’s important for any official to bear in mind. And it’s particular important when you’re dealing with something like the Prison Service, where you are charged with the safekeeping of people who the state, for legitimate reasons of public policy, has chosen to detain and therefore has a duty of care to. And that independent element and that complete fearlessness in safeguarding your independence is absolutely critical for the Chief Inspector’s role.
I’m glad to say that’s worked well over the years but David in particular epitomised that because sometimes you have to be the bearer of unwelcome tidings to those in authority. That’s the only way you shine a light upon the system – a system which too many I think in this country, too many ordinary members of the public know very little about.
One of the frustrations I’ve had as chair of the Select Committee is that, with the justice system, everybody nods along to it but they think nothing of it until they happen to have some direct connection themselves. And people will easily say, oh yes we must imprison more and must punish more, but they never go anywhere near the work that has to be done. And there’s an issue I think for all of us in terms of public education around that, both the justice system as a whole and prisons in particular.
As you said Mary, it’s the twentieth anniversary of Prisongate, and it’s a powerful book. If you haven’t read it, any of you, do. It’s really well worth it. And I’m going to start with a quote, a quote which I think sets the scene for much of what I’m going to talk about this evening. And the quote goes like this – it’s a little long but it will probably ring a bell with some of you.
“Prisoners remain locked in their cells for long periods of time without purposeful activity that would support a successful reintegration back into society at the end of their sentences. I have consistently raised concerns with governors, the Prison Service and ministers that prisoners have not had sufficient opportunities to become involved with education, training or work, and have spent their time languishing in their cells and are more likely to offend when they come out. Prisons have a duty to protect the public and act as a punishment for those who have offended, but they also have an obligation to make sure that prisoners in their care are given the help to move away from crime into more productive lives.”
Now, it could be a quote from David, but it’s not. It’s actually not from Prisongate, it’s not from David’s time. That’s the foreword to the 2022/23 annual report from the current Chief Inspector, Charlie Taylor.
Isn’t that an indictment? And if I read from Prisongate, he would say exactly the same, and nothing has changed. That’s a challenge for us all. It’s all the more important that we continue David’s work, it seems to me.
Only yesterday, we had a report from the current Chief Inspector on Woodhill Prison in Berkshire. An inspection in August found the highest rates in the country of use of force by staff and also serious assaults against staff – going two ways, if you like.
More than seven in 10 of the men living in that prison said that they felt unsafe at some point in their stay. Severe staff shortages meant that men were locked in their cells for more than 21 hours a day. 65% of the men in prison said they had mental health problems. Over 800 incidents of self-harm.
So, those things that David was finding as Chief Inspector in his time are still with us. And more than ever, I think, the recommendations that he suggested in Prisongate need to be acted upon, they need to be revisited.
One of the key conclusions, some of you who have read it will recall, suggested that this country lacks a penal strategy. He finds, in the book, and admires individuals working within prisons who are committed to the cause of protecting the public by helping prisoners to live as law-abiding citizens.
And that’s the important point that David makes. Public protection isn’t just about incarceration. Reform and rehabilitation is a part of public protection, too, because if you prevent reoffending you’re protecting the public as well. I think that’s an insight that we need to remember, all of us.
But despite those hardworking and dedicated people who are still there in the Prison Service, collectively prisons were – and they still are – failing to protect the public because of that high rate of reoffending that we have.
Now, our select committee, the Justice Select Committee, very recently published a report, Public Opinion and Understanding of Sentencing, because we wanted to drive down into what are the drivers behind the sort of approach that politicians feel constrained to take towards penal policy.
And that showed there is a problem with the lack of a coherent approach to sentencing. Sentencing is done in a very ad hoc, very piecemeal way in this country in recent years. And in particular there’s insufficient analysis of the potential effects on the prison population of what has been a ratchet in terms of increasing sentences.
Now, the truth is there’s unlikely to be any political opposition of any significant kind to an increase and push upwards in sentencing. And that’s partly because it is an easy win, but in fact we also have to be blunt and say it reflects a view in public opinion.
Public opinion is not always well-informed but we have to accept what it is to start with before we can then try to change it, and certainly the survey that we did – we did quite a bit of research, opinion-polling and so on – suggested that there is a public view that, for the most serious crimes, sentences should be severe.
But when you look down a bit more, it actually then becomes more nuanced when you look at the other priorities that the public have – doing justice for the victim and preventing reoffending. So I think it’s not a question that we need tougher sentencing, we need smarter sentencing.
And for some – for the murderer, for the dangerous sexual offender, for the drug baron, for the seriously violent – that will be long terms of imprisonment. But there will be very many people for whom imprisonment is not the answer – people who come into prison for different reasons, and we don’t have the nuance I think in either public debate or in the opportunities that we give to them in prison.
So, if we’re going to have a debate about sentencing and, if politicians, my colleagues from across all sides, are going to talk about tougher sentences, I said in my introduction to that report, we need to level with the public.
We need to be honest that, if we just carry on locking more and more people up without doing anything that changes their lives, it is a very expensive – I say to my friends on the right, a very un-Conservative – way of doing things, funnily enough, because it costs shedloads of public money.
Are you prepared, members of the public, to put your hand into your pocket for more tax-pounds to go into what is largely dead money? Because an adult prison place is about £47,000 a year. If they thought of it in those terms, every time you could avoid someone going to prison, that’s £47,000 that you could either save in tax or you could spend upon the priorities that the public do have – upon schools, upon hospitals, upon the social care system.
So I think we need to make that case to the public around a sort of enlightened self-interest. It’s actually in your – members of the public – interest to reduce the prison population because you free up funds for better causes, and actually you improve lives and you get fewer people reoffending as well. And I think David would’ve seen that and would’ve wanted that to carry on.
For the dangerous, I think David would’ve been the first to have said, yes they have to be imprisoned. And David met some really dangerous people in the course of his career as a soldier, let’s be blunt, so he would know.
But equally, when you’ve got those whose lives are messed up – who have been perhaps weak in some way, who have been misled, who have been failed themselves by the care system, by breakdowns in family, by the education system, by the failure to pick up drug abuse, debt, all manner of other pressures, when they’ve been failed by society – imprisonment, I would suggest to you, is not the constructive answer in very many of those cases.
And so I’m pleased to see that there have been some changes. I think I have to say that the arrival of Alex Chalk at the Ministry of Justice, regardless of one’s party politics, is a thoroughly good thing because he’s somebody who’s open-minded and, interestingly, had – not the same as David, but in a different way – real-life experience of the system, because Alex was a serious prosecutor and defender of heavy crime during his time.
So he’s actually seen the system and what causes the people coming into the system. I think some of the changes that he’s making in the legislation that we’ve got coming to us next week is really important and really valuable.
For example, introducing the presumption of a custodial sentences of less than 12 months should be suspended, I think that’s a really important step forward, something that my committee recommended some time back. Alex’s predecessor of course put it straight in the wastepaper basket, if I can put it that way. I’m delighted that wiser heads, that more enlightened heads are now in charge.
It’s happened in Scotland. It’s been delivered up there and the roof didn’t fall in in Scotland. And there’s no reason why it can’t happen here now.
So I’m really pleased with that shift in policy – there will always be the exceptional case but the presumption is the right way to start because all of us who have been involved in the system know that actually you can do virtually nothing by way of rehabilitative work in those short sentences.
And at the same time, if people have community ties, they will be broken up. If they have jobs, they will be lost. If they have accommodation, it may well be lost.
Their families can actually be split up as well. Kids can go into care, particularly in the case of a woman, who usually is, but not always, the principal carer and so on. So the downsides of short sentences massively outweigh the upsides.
Equally, we’ve then got to find robust alternatives that both sentencers – magistrates and judges – are confident in, that they will actually have an impact upon the individual, but also that the public is going to be confident in. Because in the same way that we talk about policing by consent, to a degree we have to – looking at it from a position of somebody who sat as a recorder once – you have to judge by consent as well, to a degree.
I think that’s possible. I think changes in the technology have certainly helped. But it does mean – and I know Richard is going to talk about this later – a lot of investment in the Probation Service, for example, to make sure that the community sentences are properly monitored and there’s proper feedback in the real way there should be.
Anybody been to Red Hook? Have you heard of it? It’s in New York. It’s the Red Hook Community Court in Brooklyn. It’s a pretty deprived part of Brooklyn and for years it was run by an inspirational judge called Judge Calabrese, who’s just retired.
I’ve been there twice actually to have a look at what they do. And the system permitted him, I suppose, to have far more judicial control over the sentencing, in the form of supervision of it.
But he rolled up everything. He was able to deal with issues of crime. He was able to deal with issues of debt, and drugs issues. They had all the relevant agencies on-site in the courthouse so you could stand them down: “You’re going to go and see the drugs guys, you’re then going to go and see the people from the employment office. You’re going to get yourself interviews. You’re going to be back in a month’s time.”
And they were prepared to commit the judicial resource of those people coming back regularly. And as they progressed, then the amount of times the judge would need to see them decreased.
And equally, he wasn’t afraid to put the sword of Damocles and say: “Look, if you succeed in this, I suspend in effect a further sentence for a year if you clean yourself up by then, then I won’t impose any further penalty on you.” They were able to do that – they sealed the indictment, as they call it. “If you do, then you’re going to get 12 months in Rikers Island.”
It may sound tough but it actually worked. But it worked because they invested the time in it. And that was the key thing – they were prepared to invest judge time and agencies’ time to have those effects. It’s a shame that we’ve never been able to, perhaps, do some of that here.
Those are the things that can be done. The presumption can work. We have to do more to find the alternatives to imprisonment to make sure that that gets the public buy-in that we need.
We can do more, I think, with curfews. Again, the technology enables us to do that more. I don’t think we do enough with ROTL, for example, Release On Temporary Licence. We need to look at that.
I’m glad to see, too, changes that are being proposed by Alex Chalk around the approach to parole. There were some, I think, draconian things that were being proposed at one time, which have now been rowed back on. We need to support people in being released when we can properly help them.
And of course, very importantly, the changes to sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection. It doesn’t go as far as I would like. That was described as a “stain on the justice system”, a sentence which David Blunkett, who invented it – full credit to him came along and said, we got this one wrong. We are at least getting rid of the life licence, which was so unfair and actually set people up to fail.
So there are movements in the right direction, which I’m sure David would’ve welcomed, but there’s still an awful lot to go, it seems to me.
David correctly identified in Prisongate that the achievement of reform required politicians to explain exactly what they mean when they come up with those pledges about being tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. That might say, in my language, to level with the public about that. But I think he saw the point there.
But actually, being tough on the causes of crime is as important. It does have to be a balance. That’s a pretty decent slogan for us to be taking forward.
I was at a roundtable only on Tuesday morning with the Bishop of Gloucester, who is the Bishop who looks after the prisons now. And she was sort of using her convening power to get a really interesting group of people around the table asking what practical things can we come up with.
And one thing that I suggested, and perhaps you might want to think about taking forward, is we do not have any statutory definition of the purposes of prison. We do have a statutory definition of the purposes of sentencing, but not of prison – of the most significant part of the sentencing process.
It wouldn’t take much to do that. It might be something we could perhaps look at amendments to the Sentencing Bill when it comes along, because what that would do, and what the professionals in that room were saying, well that will concentrate the minds.
And you could include in that the obligations for decency, for safety, for rehabilitation as well. If you had a statutory purpose then, of course, ministers have to seek to achieve it or they’ll find themselves in breach of the Ministerial Code. That I think is perhaps something that we might all like to take forward as a practical thing that we could charge forward with.
So, a lot to do. There were a number of things that David wanted, and suggested in Prisongate, that did come to pass. The creation of the Ministry of Justice itself is actually one of his proposals in Prisongate. So, that’s good news.
I think strengthening the ability of the Chief Inspector to follow up – which one of his subsequent successors, Peter Clarke, was able to persuade with support from our committee – was important too, because otherwise the Prison Service were marking their own homework. And that, to my mind, offended against that independent element because the element has got to be independent but also effective as well.
So I think those are things that David achieved – as well as actually, because of his ability to communicate, he raised the public awareness to some degree. All of those were important things.
Plenty more for us to do, it seems to me, but I think there’s a quote that David uses in the book. It’s a note that David’s wife, Sue, who meant so much to him, gave him shortly before he retired as Chief Inspector. And what Sue wrote, and David quotes with approval in his book, is this:
“If prison worked, there would be work or education for every prisoner. If prison worked, we would be shutting prisons, not opening more. If prison worked, judges would not be seeing in the dock the same people, time over again. If prison worked, we would not be imprisoning more people than any other European country other than Turkey. If prison worked, less children would be in care, less mothers would be in prison. If prison worked, we would be saving billions of pounds with less prisons, less secure children’s homes and fewer court cases.”
All perfectly true, wasn’t it? Sue was right and David was right to listen to her. We would do well to listen to her too. And that final quote at the beginning, the subtitle of the book that Mary read out: “The state of our prisons and the need for visionary change.”
Well that’s the thing, in his memory, we could all do – take some of these practical proposals that we’ve been talking about and push forward still with the visionary change. That actually you need not simply to treat prisons as a means of warehousing, you actually can use them as a means of turning people’s lives around.
And if you do that consistently and try to avoid the political football that all too often it becomes – if you can do that, then you can actually make a force for good rather than, at the moment and very often, an embarrassment.
Richard Burgon MP
Well, thank you so much. And it’s wonderful to hear Bob’s speech – I think a really fitting start to what we hope will be a series of memorial lectures paying tribute to Lord Ramsbotham’s contribution, but also of course thinking about how can we best honour his contribution, and that’s by changing things now.
And I was very pleased to hear from Bob about the idea of putting down an amendment to state the purpose of the Prison Service, a statutory purpose, and that’s something that I’m sure we can work together on a cross-party basis because many Members, regardless of party, have a keen interest in this.
And it really was an honour to be asked to address you here today on the subject of Lord Ramsbotham’s work with probation, just as it was, as Mary’s mentioned, an honour to work with David directly in 2018 and in 2019 on probation reform. I’m especially pleased to be able to pay tribute to David today as I was unable to attend the Lord Ramsbotham Remembrance Service in September due to constituency commitments, sadly.
I first met David when I was Shadow Justice Secretary and I commissioned David’s report “People Are Not Things” on the best ways to bring probation back into public ownership. That was something we were planning to do with the formation of a Labour Government.
But before I get into that ground-breaking document that David put together, let me first lay out the context in which it was produced. Because it’s worth emphasising that, before privatisation, our Probation Service had been seen as world-class – winning awards and studied by countries across the globe as an example of best practice.
Then in 2013, the Government announced its Transforming Rehabilitation programme, which would see new private companies take over supervision of everyone deemed “low risk” or “medium risk” while the state would continue to look after “high risk” former offenders.
But as the Napo trade union said at the time – and it’s quoted in Lord Ramsbotham’s report that he prepared for me – this was like splitting the responsibility for fire-fighting, with the Fire Service being responsible for major fires and private companies for the rest. Now the trouble is, of course, that a small fire can turn into a major one quite quickly if it’s not handled properly. The artificial split between two very different – in some ways competing – public and private systems was a recipe for disaster.
And those probation reforms had a devastating impact on the quality of supervision, not to mention on staff morale, as well as being an eye-watering waste of public money and Government time.
Scathing reports from the Public Accounts Committee in 2016 and 2019, as well as from the National Audit Office and the Chief Inspector, which are generously quoted in People Are Not Things, sounded the alarm, at least in Parliament.
Because on the ground, the problems really had been very obvious from the start, with unions and other organisations doing everything they could – from strike action to judicial reviews – to make the Government see sense and reverse course. And whether in the public sector or private sector, probation officers were finding the job they loved was becoming quite simply impossible, with huge staff lay-offs and a new toxic tick-box culture.
The working environment changed completely, with the public-private split and huge cost-cutting having a corrosive impact on morale and also on performance. I’ve even heard about one workplace, a single office shared by both the public sector and the local private company, where staff from both sides were told in no uncertain terms not to use the other’s water-cooler!
And if you can’t share a water-cooler, just imagine trying to share information about clients or ensuring a smooth handover when supervision moves from one to the other because an ex-offender’s risk factor has gone up or down.
Things were bad and lots of people were raising the alarm. But it was the Justice Committee’s inquiry into Transforming Rehabilitation, which reported in June 2018, that I believe finally forced the Government to act. And I pay tribute to Sir Bob and his Committee for that excellent piece of work – as hard-hitting a Select Committee report as I have ever read.
The report had the desired effect, I believe, because the following month the Government announced, as if by magic, a consultation into the future of probation.
But as well as the Justice Committee, I think Lord Ramsbotham had forced the Government’s hand. The Government announced its consultation on 27 July, just weeks after I’d announced that David was going to oversee our review into probation. Of course it wasn’t the only factor that forced their hand but I can’t imagine the Government fancied leaving it to Lord Ramsbotham to lead the national debate on the necessary changes to probation. So they had to do something and they had to do something quickly.
On Labour’s own review, I’d been clear from the outset that probation needed to be brought back into public ownership because every bit of data showed this was a no-brainer and that, the longer the Government dragged its feet, the worse the situation would become.
As I wanted probation to be a big priority for my justice work, I asked around the sector – who should chair our review? I asked academics, other experts, the trade unions, Shadow Cabinet colleagues like John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn, who had been on the Justice Committee. I asked justice reform NGOs and many more.
No matter who I asked, a person or an organisation, they all came back instantly with the same response: “Rambo! Get Rambo involved!”
Now I’ll be honest, at first I wasn’t convinced. Not because Lord Ramsbotham wasn’t one of the most respected people in the justice sector, not because he wasn’t roundly regarded as a wonderful person as well as a brilliant man, but because he was already very busy in the House of Lords. I though it seemed like he might have had enough on and it would be unfair to ask him to do this work for us when we couldn’t provide much in the way of staffing support, etcetera, for such a big project.
But oh my goodness, how wrong could I have been? I went ahead and asked him, and Lord Ramsbotham agreed immediately. And during that first meeting, he instantly, with his sharp mind and with his clear way of thinking, laid out exactly how he would do it – who he would consult, how he would consult them and when. And I remember, in my office, saying to my advisor straight after that meeting – wow! Wow! We knew then that we’d made the best choice.
And then, with the energy that would leave someone half his age tired, he immediately set to work, sending out seven specific questions to a range of experts, the answers to which informed the bulk of his report.
His plan originally was to wait until the Government’s response to its own consultation before submitting his report because, as he put it, of the need to base it on any changes that the Government might make to the delivery of probation services. But the Government dragged its feet on its consultation so, by May 2019, David felt it was right to publish and update the interim report he’d sent me a few months earlier, because he felt that it “may help those interested not only in the future of probation but in responding to the response”.
And then, of course, less than a fortnight after we published People Are Not Things, the Government did finally announce its consultation response – the renationalisation and reunification of probation. A great victory for common sense and justice, we all agreed.
But there was a problem – several problems – with the way the Government planned to undo the damage caused by the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms. And I just wish that Justice Secretary David Gauke, who was as good a Justice Secretary as there had been for a number of years, would have paid more attention to David Ramsbotham’s analysis and his recommendations. Because I do think probation – and indeed public safety – would be in a much better place today if he had.
So let me turn now to the document itself, People Are Not Things. People Are Not Things – just the name tells you exactly where Lord Ramsbotham was coming from. It was a favourite phrase of his.
Because that should be our starting point when it comes to criminal justice. Everyone, even those convicted of crimes, must be treated with humanity. And the understanding that, to quote Churchill – as David does on the first page of his report, “there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man”.
Introducing the profit motive into probation – or indeed the running of prisons, I believe – risks turning people into things. And I would urge everyone to read Lord Ramsbotham’s report, People Are Not Things, because I believe it is still a blueprint for the way out of this mess. I believe it is just as relevant today as when he wrote it, over four and a half years ago. It serves as a message, a warning, from the past to the future.
The bulk of the report, in typical David style, is made up of quotes from experts, from the ones he wrote to, to Parliament’s Select Committees and the watchdogs, He lets other people’s words do the talking. And the message is: yes, probation can and must be renationalised, but it must be done correctly or it will cause more problems. And that, I’m afraid, is the position I think we’re in today.
This is the key recommendation – the first one, recommendation A, in Lord Ramsbotham’s report: “There is no reason why probation should not be returned to public ownership, but that return will require a great deal of preliminary work, which must not be rushed, but the role and purpose of probation must be defined.”
And David looks at role and purpose in the report. “Advise, assist, befriend,” he writes, but then he adds that this was “overthrown by Jack Straw when he added the word ‘punishment’ to its role”. Yes, this was a cross-party problem long in the making, and that means that it needs cross-party solutions.
“Probation staff should encourage offenders to find opportunities and take advantage of them, to find direction and purpose in their lives and, above all, some hope for the future” – he quotes David Faulkner, rightly describing him as formerly a distinguished civil servant in the Home Office.
So, let’s look at some of David’s other recommendations. Recommendation E, that “HMPPS should be abolished, and the Probation Service regarded as separate from, and different to, the Prison Service, under its own Director General.”
Now, abolishing HMPPS might seem like quite a radical step, but in truth it makes perfect sense. Because the truth is, we don’t actually have a Probation Service, just like we don’t have a Prison Service. We have a Prison and Probation Service – HMPPS – and we all know that Probation is a junior partner in this arrangement.
But prisons and probation are not the same. Yes, they’re both about the management of offenders, but obviously one is about managing them whilst incarcerated, the other about managing them whilst in the community.
Prison and probation have different cultures, different values, and they need completely different operational structures. David was right that we need a standalone service in probation – but, worryingly, we’re now moving in the opposite direction. In fact, the Government’s new One HMPPS plan abolishes the role of interim director-general of probation completely, when instead I think we really should be strengthening it.
One HMPPS brings prisons and probation even closer together – the clue is in the title here – when instead we should be giving them more operational space. And that’s especially true now after the traumatic Transforming Rehabilitation experiment.
And of course, we do welcome the Government’s reforms to early release and the presumption against short sentences that it recently announced. These are good changes, even if perhaps they’ve been made for the wrong reasons – or at least purely for practical rather than moral reasons.
But all of that will put new pressures on probation and, if they’re going to work, they’ll need a Probation Service that’s at the top of its game. And that’s something that, unfortunately, we just don’t have at the moment. So it’s more important than ever that we do everything we can to strengthen our Probation Service, starting with having a proper Probation Service in the first place, not further subsuming it into prisons.
Then there’s Recommendation F from Lord Ramsbotham: “The provision of probation services should be regarded as a local rather than a national responsibility.” That is vitally important and something the trade unions have been flagging up for years.
Pre-privatisation, probation services were delivered by 35 self-governing Probation Trusts, which as the Justice Committee explained, entered into a complex array of local partnerships with local criminal justice agencies to commission, co-commission and broker access to a range of other services. Now, the key word here I would argue is “local” – local trusts to deliver local services with local partners. And that’s been lost, first with Transforming Rehabilitation and then again with reunification.
We went from 35 local trusts to 21 private companies and one National Probation Service – to now, quite simply, just one National Probation Service entirely under Civil Service control. That’s the total opposite to the report’s recommendation for probation to be a local rather than national responsibility. And I believe we need to get back to a locally based, standalone service, as recommended by Lord Ramsbotham, if probation is to stand any chance of coping with the challenges ahead.
So to end with, I’d like all of us here tonight to see if we can get an amendment to one of the new justice bills facing us to bring probation back into a locally based, standalone service. And I hope that such an amendment, like others, will have cross-party support, because I think that all of us here, of all political stripes, will recognise that this is the right way forward.
So far, from the conversations I’ve had with the clerks, it looks difficult in the Commons, but maybe it will be possible, like so many things, in the House of Lords – a place where anything is possible! So let’s find a way to do it!
And I also think it would be, as Bob has said, part of a fitting legacy for David in this place, one more opportunity for us all to benefit from his wisdom, his experience and, to quote the subtitle of his book, his extraordinary vision.
Read Lord Ramsbotham’s 2019 report on probation reform: People are not things.