Rehabilitation of Offenders (Amendment) Bill [HL]

My Lords, the Government congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, on getting his Bill debated today. We are grateful to him for introducing it in the way that he has and giving the House the opportunity for this short debate on Second Reading. I can only repeat what my noble friend Lady Kennedy said: the noble Lord has the huge respect of the whole House for his work in this field. This debate gives us the opportunity to remind ourselves of the fundamental changes that there have been in the criminal justice system in the past 35 years. I will say a word about rehabilitation and then move to the background to the Bill itself. Rehabilitation is very much at the heart of our approach. Of course, turning offenders away from crime is not only good for them: more importantly, it benefits the wider community as a whole. As far as those in prison are concerned, we have worked hard to ensure that prison is a more decent, humane and constructive place than even 10 years ago, and a place where rehabilitation programmes can thrive. No one underestimates the need for ever to build on our work to tackle reoffending, but reoffending has fallen in recent years, I understand, for both adults and young people. We believe that part of that is as a result of the approach that we have taken. The noble Lord knows better than I do about the increase in prison drug treatment, which has increased tenfold since 1996-97, and the extra spending on offender learning too. For those who have not been sent to prison, we have focused on making sure that particularly vulnerable non-dangerous offenders are diverted away from prison when it is the right thing to do. I remind the House that the number of women in prison fell by 3 per cent last year. After what had been a rapid rise, the number of offenders under 18 went down by 8 per cent over that same period.