Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I strongly support what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has said and I think the House should listen to him. Few people have as much experience of the Prison Service as he has. This is the only occasion on Report when we have the opportunity to debate this extraordinary proposal to transfer the education of young offenders from the Prison Service and Home Office, and now the Ministry of Justice, to local authorities. It has not been possible to know how this is going operate in practice from the actual words in the legislation, even from the Explanatory Notes. I was, therefore, grateful to the Minister for publishing last Friday LA Guidance—Learning for Young People in Youth Custody in England, which runs to 44 pages. It is extraordinary on a Bill of this importance that only at almost the last stage—Report in the House of Lords—this information has been made available. What did the Commons do when it discussed these matters, or was this part not discussed in the Commons at all because of the guillotine? This is the first time the House has any idea how this extraordinary policy is going to be implemented. I downloaded the 44 pages on Saturday evening on my House of Lords printer. It took 20 minutes. Then I settled down to read it, denying myself the chance of watching "Strictly Come Dancing" and "The X Factor"—it was a happy release. I now understand what the Government are trying to do, but this is an incomplete document. On 12 different pages it says things such as, ""need to add further detail"," or, ""add detail on requirement about literacy and numeracy assessments"." Annexe 1 takes the biscuit, stating that, ""this section will explain the roles and responsibilities to the different organisations and partners involved"." The page is a complete and utter blank. Those of you who have read The Hunting of the Snark will know that a snark’s map is a perfect and absolute blank. This is a snark’s map. How are we going to understand how this works? I then found an extraordinary statement on Page 3: ""add link—a drat is due to be issued for consultation in November"." A drat? I wondered what a drat was. I turned to the glossary. Did "drat" mean "a definite rational and actual training"? Was it just an expletive? It was, of course, a spelling mistake. Even on page 3 they cannot get the spelling right. None of the officials or Ministers noticed it. They published it. This is absolutely typical of how this Bill has been handled throughout its progress in this House. Hardly a week has passed without two long letters from Ministers explaining how the Bill will operate. I do not blame the Ministers. They are the poor custodians of a very poor policy, and they have been given the job of trying to explain it to everybody. But this really is not the way that legislation should be addressed. At the heart, what is this Bill going to do? It is going to deal first with 7,000 young offenders who are admitted into custody each year. At any one time about 2,600 are actually in custody in 15 young offender institutions, four secure training centres or nine secure children’s homes, and there are two more in Wales. How long do they stay there? Some only stay for a week or a few days. The average is three to four months. Some stay much longer, up to two years. So how will this Bill operate? At the moment, these young offenders are provided with education and training by the Prison Service. This Bill gives to the local authorities where the offenders have lived, not where the institution is, a duty to promote the fulfilment of the young person’s learning potential while they are in custody and on their release. How will this work? Let us suppose a young offender from Essex is sent to the young offender institution in Wigan. As one of the largest in the country, Hindley takes more than 400 young offenders. As soon as that young offender from Essex—let us call him Mr Bloggs—arrives in Hindley, it has to write to Essex and say, "Do you know about Mr Bloggs?". Essex might find that Mr Bloggs left school at the age of 11 and that it has had no track or record of him since, and the lad may not remember the name of the school that he went to. We are dealing with these sorts of people. Wigan then has to find out how intelligent Mr Bloggs is by doing a literacy and numeracy assessment within two or three days. Then it has to try and find out what he would like to study and send that information back to Essex. Essex then has to devise an individual learning programme for this person in Wigan. That is going to involve huge bureaucracy. Can an individual learning programme for a young offender be identified and written without anybody going from Essex to Wigan to talk to that young offender? Who is going to bear the cost of that? It will be the Essex local education authority. And Essex being what it is will not have just one Mr Bloggs. It will probably have 20, 30 or 40 at any one time, not only in Wigan but in several other young offender institutions. So you are throwing a huge responsibility on local education authorities. What are the difficulties in discharging that? There might be early leavers, as I have said, who played truant and bunked off at 11, 12 or 13. These young offenders might be itinerant. It might be difficult to track down where they have been educated. They might say that they last lived in Essex but were, in fact, only in Essex for two or three months and then they went down to Devon or to Birmingham or Leeds. When you assess what that young person needs, suppose he decides in Wigan that he would like practical training in plumbing and Wigan does not do plumbing. Suppose he wants training in some other function that the young offender institution cannot provide. If Essex says, "He wants to be trained in plumbing", what are you going to do? Bring in plumbers to Wigan with all their equipment to do this? This is so utterly typically unrealistic. Suppose that young person is transferred to another young offender institution, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, knows, can be quite common. All this has to be gone through again. You have this extraordinary dichotomy between the host local authority where the young offender institution is and the place where the offender is deemed to live. It is the host authority that has to provide the education. It has to commission the tutors or provide the teaching classes or workshops. But in order to do that, it has to speak to the Youth Justice Board, which has to approve the resources to be provided. Who will pay for those, the YJB or the host authority? Why should the host authority incur capital costs when they do not particularly want to do it? Where is the money going to come from?