Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, if the noble Lord was the head of a department of state he would not be advising me to accept the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, with such alacrity. However, I take the point. At the beginning of my remarks I made the point that we are now in close discussions with the Department for Work and Pensions in what we hope will be a genuine exercise in joined-up government. I remember one of the first experiences I had when I took over this office—and I should say that I am not the prisons Minister; my honourable friend Crispin Blunt is the Minister, and he has addressed these problems with great energy and commitment, but because of my responsibilities in this House I take an interest in this area. At any rate, I was reading in what was the strangest of all places, the Daily Telegraph, an article about a young man being released from prison with £46 in his pocket, but with a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. The article went through the 48 hours after his release, by which time he was using that money to buy drugs and was back with the gang he had been associated with and which had sent him to prison in the first place. So we are not unaware of the problem. I have said before that there is a revolving door of crime which sometimes our treatment of prisoners only exacerbates. What we are doing, in what I hope is a non-ideological way—I know about the fierce debates on the welfare Bill, but the noble Baroness was kind enough to comment that there are aspects of the reforms that are genuinely useful—is to see if we can stitch those reforms into our prisons. That will go a long way towards addressing the problems raised by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. As I have already indicated, I do listen to what he says and I will take back his ideas to see where they can mesh in with what we are trying to do with the DWP and the various initiatives that NOMS has taken.