Welfare Reform Bill

Thank you very much. I am glad that the noble Baroness raised that point. It reinforces something that many of us have been saying for a long time: the prison system of this country is not organised to help itself. The trouble is that prisoners are scattered all over the country by an incoherent national population management structure, as opposed to—as recommended by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, after the Strangeways riots in 1990—prisons being grouped into what he called community clusters or regional clusters so that nobody ever left their region. Therefore, all the resources of the region could be applied to the rehabilitation of their own offenders. It will be very difficult for the Ministry of Justice to resolve the questions that noble Lords have asked under the present distributed system. If prisons were regionalised and the prison authorities properly hooked into all the authorities in the region, it would be much easier to liaise with the regional authorities responsible for finding out that sort of detail. That should of course be part of the whole rehabilitation process anyway. The questions that the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, posed are absolutely ones that should be referred to the Ministry of Justice. We should ask, ““How will you ensure that these are answered, because they must be?””.