Welfare Reform Bill

I wish to raise a matter in connection with the government amendments which I have mentioned before to the Committee: that is, the payment of benefits to those who are in prison. Under the current system, people receive a leaving grant when they leave prison of £46, which can be doubled if they have no fixed abode. Then, having come out of prison, they have to start the process of applying for benefits, which can sometimes take up to three weeks. You try to live on £46 for three weeks. When I was Chief Inspector of Prisons—indeed I have mentioned it subsequently—it seemed much more sensible that the benefits arrangements should be prepared before people left prison so that they did not get a leaving grant but received, in effect, the first benefit. This would be paid not necessarily from the jobcentres to which they would subsequently go but by the prison acting in loco jobcentre, if you like, because frequently they are held somewhere away from the area where they live. If that happened, you would save a tremendous amount of subsequent problems because the next week they would go and collect the next benefit. This would also introduce people to the whole jobcentre system. It is crucial that they have help in preparing the documentation, rather than suddenly being sent to what is frequently a foreign environment for them. I therefore read these amendments with considerable optimism because it seemed to me that, in preparing Clause 20 and the amendments to it, the department had come up with a possible solution. I wondered whether in the preparation of the Bill the department had had consultations with the Ministry of Justice to see whether this was a practical way out of a problem which faces every governor of every prison, quite apart from the probation officers and others who have to pick up the avoidable wreckage caused very often by people coming out with no visible means of support.