Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I am sorry to be hogging the Floor. This amendment refers to an amendment that I have already tabled to the Welfare Reform Bill, and to something that has been worrying me ever since 1996 when I first came across it. It refers to the fact that when prisoners are released from prison they are given a release grant of £46, on which they are expected to live until their benefit payments, which they have had to apply for on release from prison, come through. That can take up to three weeks, and I defy anyone to live for three weeks on £46. Some prisoners qualify for double payment if they are of no fixed abode, but this became a Catch-22 situation when tagging was introduced because, in order to qualify to be tagged, you had to produce an address—and if you produced an address, you got only £46. During the passage of the Welfare Reform Bill, I suggested that it should be made the responsibility of the Department for Work and Pensions, using the jobcentre staff who are present in every prison, to process benefit claims during a sentence so that when prisoners leave, if they are entitled to benefits, they receive not a release grant but the first payment of the benefit so that the following week they get the next one and so on, so that financial planning can begin on the certainty of the benefit payment. It should not be too difficult because when they come into prison a very large number of prisoners are already on one form of benefit or another, which has to be suspended during the sentence, so it is not a question of starting again but merely of resuming something already there. All the information necessary—the national insurance number and so on—is already held, so it should not be too difficult. I have never understood why first the Home Office and then the Ministry of Justice did not insist on that happening because they must be desperately worried at the very large number of people who reoffend very quickly on release, literally in order to survive because they cannot live on £46. In many ways, this system is merely setting people up to offend and reoffend, which is therefore avoidable. During the passage of the Welfare Reform Bill, I talked with the Minister and with officials in the Department for Work and Pensions, who told me that they had gone as far as they could. They have set up a scheme for employment benefits to be processed in prisons, starting this year, so they are covered, but all the others—those for the disabled, the elderly, children and so on—are not covered, so there is still a gap. There is also a problem because, under the new system that the Welfare Reform Bill will introduce, payment is in arrears—in other words, a prisoner has to come out and be out for a period of up to a week in order to qualify for a payment in arrears—so there is still a gap. This gap has got to be filled. I believe that this is something that the Ministry of Justice should take on and ask for help with from the Department for Work and Pensions, which it is willing to give. Again there is the danger of being prescriptive but, having been worried about this for so long, and being quite certain that the Minister will be the first to want to stop a totally avoidable cause of reoffending, I suggest that when somebody is received in prison a standard set of questions should be asked to establish the national insurance number and the benefits. Then everyone should be interviewed by the jobcentre staff so that everyone knows what has to be done, and plans should be made for release a long time before the release process starts, rather than leaving it until the last moment, as now. As much as probing whether the Ministry of Justice will take on this issue, the amendment suggests that the Department for Work and Pensions is waiting to co-operate in any way it can to eliminate an avoidable source of reoffending, thereby indirectly helping with the various matters that the Government hope to bring about in their Green Paper and a reduction in the size of the prison population. I beg to move.