Offender Management Bill

I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, that the Prime Minister has not dropped the phrase, "““Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime””." The Government remain committed to addressing the causes of crime. Indeed, I remind the Committee that, although some of the erstwhile responsibilities of the Home Office have transferred to the Ministry of Justice, others have not. The crime strategy remains with the Home Office, as do crime prevention and crime reduction. I now have the proud title of Minister of State for Crime Reduction. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, that my attention will not stray from the causes. Let me reassure the Committee about a few things. Noble Lords will have heard me mention the reducing reoffending alliances, the reducing reoffending plan and the reduction that we have seen in the level of reoffending. It is important to consider the cross-government approach to that reduction. In November 2005, I published the National Reducing Re-offending Delivery Plan, which sets out the cross-government commitment to improving outcomes for offenders across seven pathway areas. The first pathway area is accommodation. Getting offenders into accommodation is the foundationof successful rehabilitation, resettlement and risk management, and it underpins many of the other pathways. There is the skills and employment pathway area, because lack of employment is one of the factors associated with reoffending. There is the finance, benefit and debt pathway area, which is about ensuring that offenders have sufficient lawfully obtained money, because financial security is the key to their rehabilitation. There is the health pathway area, because people within the criminal justice system often experience significant problems gaining access to adequate health and social care services and often have unaddressed needs that prevent them from taking advantage of facilities that are available to them. There is the drugs and alcohol pathway area, because, as Members of the Committee who have participated in our debates know, those issues impinge on offenders’ ability to recover and lead a law-abiding life, and the criminal justice system is uniquely placed to tackle their drug use and break the cycle of reoffending. There is also the children and families pathway area. Children and families are an issue that I know the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, feels passionately about, and I share his passion. They play a significant role in supporting an offender to make and sustain changes that reduce reoffending. Finally, there is the attitudes, thinking and behaviour pathway area. There is an international evidence base on the effectiveness of cognitive skills programmes for offenders. All those pathway areas go to the causes of crime. If we are to reduce reoffending, we have to address those issues aggressively. Part of the purpose of the Bill is to get all those who could help in that endeavour to do so. There is an opportunity to conjoin these two agendas. When reducing reoffending was in the Home Office, it was part of crime reduction and crime prevention. Just because part of that function has moved to another department does not mean that those issues should no longer be conjoined. We are looking to see how we can brigade things across government even more. The work of the inter-ministerial group remains of critical importance. I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. We have not explicitly said ““crime prevention”” and ““crime reduction””, but we still have the 15 per cent target for crime reduction, and we are committed to fulfilling it. Part of the reason why we have 44 action areas is that we have identified those areas that are likely to contribute most to our reducing crime agenda. We are working with them on the causes in their area. Local area agreements, local strategic partnerships, crime and disorder reduction partnerships and all the other issues that we have talked about are all going towards crime reduction and crime prevention. That is what the work with youth offending teams, schools, safer school partnerships and all the other matters is about. We touched on those issues when we had the long—two hours—debate at the beginning of the Committee. Many of these issues were taken up in that debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, for tabling his amendment. I know that it adds, "““the reduction of the causes of re-offending””," to the probation aims but, as I mentioned on a number of occasions during our debate last week, the wording of the probation aims is derived from the precedents already enshrined in legislation in the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000, which currently governs the Probation Service, and in the Criminal JusticeAct 2003, which sets out the purposes of sentencing. Both the aims and purposes of sentencing already refer to the reduction of reoffending—an aim that can hardly be achieved without considering the causes of reoffending. Although I am sympathetic to the motivation behind the amendment, I must tell the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, that it is unnecessary. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. We have already done work on that basis which, we can demonstrate, has properly identified those causes as issues that we must address effectively. In the light of those points, I hope that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment, confident that what he said powerfully about crime reduction, crime prevention and the causes of crime has been heard and is totally understood. Indeed, it is already embedded in our plans to reduce the level of crime in our country.