Rehabilitation and Sentencing

With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement. On 12 May, we said in our programme for government that we would conduct a full assessment of rehabilitation and sentencing policy to pave the way for radical reforms to the criminal justice system. I have laid before Parliament today the Green Paper entitled ““Breaking the Cycle: Effective Punishment, Rehabilitation and Sentencing of Offenders.”” This sets out our initial conclusions from this work, on which we will be consulting widely over the next 12 weeks. Despite record spending we are not delivering what really matters. Society has a right to expect the criminal justice system to protect them. Prison will always be the right place for serious and dangerous offenders. Criminals should be properly punished. Prisons should be places of hard work and industry, and community sentences must be credible and robust. Criminals must also be reformed so that when they finish their sentence they do not simply return to their life of crime, creating more misery for victims. The present criminal justice system falls short of what is required. Around half of offenders released from prison reoffend within a year. Reoffending rates for young offenders sentenced to custodial or community sentences are even worse. It is not acceptable that three quarters of offenders sentenced to youth custody reoffend within a year. If we do not stop offending by young people, the young offenders of today will become the prolific career criminals of tomorrow. Solving these problems requires a radically different approach. Of course, criminals must face robust and demanding punishments. This means making them work hard both in prison and in the community. More prisoners will face the tough discipline of regular working hours. This has been lacking in most prison regimes for too long. Community sentences will be more credible, with more demanding work and greater use of tough curfew requirements. There will be greater reparation to victims through increased use of restorative justice and by implementing the Prisoners' Earnings Act 1996. We will bring forward other changes to make sure that more offenders directly compensate the victims of crime. But we will take a new approach to the reform of offenders. I regard prison first and foremost as a place of punishment where people lose their liberty as reparation for what they have done, but on top of that, prison cannot continue to be simply an expensive way of giving communities a break. We must give higher priority to ensuring that more prisoners go straight on release. Offenders will face a tough and co-ordinated response from the police, probation and other services. It will mean that they must either address the problems that fuel their criminal activity or be caught and punished again. It will mean taking action to get offenders off drugs. It will mean reducing the abuse of alcohol. It will mean improving the treatment available to those suffering mental illness. It will mean getting more of them off benefits and into honest employment so that they can pay their own way. We will bring forward a revolutionary shift in the way that rehabilitation is financed and delivered. We will begin by commissioning a range of providers to administer at least six new projects over the next two years. They will be paid for the results that they achieve. I intend to apply the principles of that approach across the whole system by the end of the Parliament. We will also test this payment by results approach with young offenders, and devolve more responsibility for preventing and tackling youth offending to local communities. We will introduce more competition across offender management services to drive up standards and deliver value for money for the taxpayer. We will increase discretion for public sector providers and front-line professionals. The sentencing framework must provide courts with a range of options to punish and rehabilitate criminals and keep the public safe. The sentencing framework has developed in an ad hoc fashion recently, with over 20 Acts of Parliament changing sentencing in the past 10 years. This has left it overly complex, difficult to interpret and administer, and hard for the public to understand. We need to make better use of prison and community sentences to punish offenders and improve public safety, while ensuring that sentencing supports our aims of improved rehabilitation and increased reparation to victims and society. We will therefore simplify the sentencing framework in order to make it more comprehensible to the public and to enhance judicial independence. We will reform community orders to give providers more discretion, and we will encourage greater use of financial penalties and improve their collection. We will bring forward reforms to the indeterminate sentence of imprisonment for public protection. This sentence has been much more widely used than was ever intended by Parliament since its introduction in the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Indeed the last Government had already tried to change it once since its introduction. We will reserve IPP sentences for the most serious offenders and focus indefinite punishment on those who most clearly pose a very serious risk of future harm. Of course, prisoners who in future do not receive an IPP sentence will instead receive long determinate sentences. This will enable us to restore clarity in sentencing, plan rehabilitation and target punishment more effectively to protect the public. Let me assure the House that public safety remains our first priority. We will continue to ensure that serious and dangerous offenders are managed effectively and their risk is reduced through appropriate use of prison and then through the multi-agency public protection arrangements. Let me also assure the House that we will also ensure effective responses to knife crime. Knife crime is wholly unacceptable. It causes misery for victims and is often connected to the kind of gang violence that can wreck whole communities. The Government's position is clear. Any adult who commits a crime using a knife can expect to be sent to prison, and serious offenders can expect a long sentence. For juveniles, imprisonment is always available and will also be appropriate for serious offenders. The Green Paper is an important change of direction in penal policy, which will put more emphasis on reducing reoffending without reducing the punishment of offenders. By reforming criminals and turning them away from a life of crime we will break the cycle. This should mean fewer crimes, fewer victims and safer communities. The Government will make a further statement to the House when they publish their response to the consultation. I commend the statement to the House.