Let's take these prison reforms to their logical conclusion

Prison staff will have been delighted to see the Prime Minister choose prison reform as the centrepiece of the Queen’s Speech last week. They will have known that their daily efforts to maintain public safety and to rehabilitate prisoners are valued at the heart of government. They may also feel that changes to only six prisons, affecting 5,000 prisoners out of total of nearly 90,000, should be just the beginning of a wider programme of change.

Both prisons and probation have seen many reforms over the last 15 years, most recently the high profile reforms to probation which exposed part of probation services to competition. True rehabilitation requires that a number of agencies work together to help offenders find a job, abstain from drink and drugs and find the motivation to change their pattern of behaviour. Past reforms have sought to create a seamless service rather than one in which the management of offenders is a set of disconnected episodes. They have also sought to devolve decision-making, which was the principle behind the Queen’s Speech announcements. In the vast majority of non-digital crimes, offending takes place locally and the best responses to offending behaviour are designed, organised and delivered locally.

These reforms have not however achieved an end-to-end, localised service. For all the efforts of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), prisons and probation remain divided, and the current programme of reform is not doing enough to bridge that divide. Probation itself is divided between a centrally-managed national service for the highest risk offenders and regional services for those of lower risk. The justice system as a whole still has a national centre of gravity. Central government currently imposes 88 “Prison Service Orders” on prisons and introduced 124 “Prison Service Instructions” between 2013 and 2015. Pay negotiations are handled nationally. In this light it is not surprising that reoffending rates have barely shifted for more than a decade. The proportion of offenders in custody committing another offence within a year has stayed constant at 45-50 per cent since 2003 (and is currently 46 per cent on the latest figures).

The Government has recognised the compelling case for further change. Six “Reform Prisons” will have a greater degree of operational and financial autonomy. Greater Manchester will take more local ownership of both prisons and probation, as part of the wholesale shift to devolution in that city. Nonetheless this programme does not go far enough, fast enough. The Queen’s Speech reforms need to be taken to their logical conclusion.

To achieve a full devolution, the better approach is to devolve both prisons and probation to Police and Crime Commissioners. PCCs would commission those services along with policing and their increasing responsibilities in the justice system, including victim support. As budget holders, they would have incentives to invest in new rehabilitation services such as mental health diversion for offenders. The apparatus of national control can then be reduced so that NOMS in effect disappears, remaining only to provide strategic advice to Ministers.

To achieve a seamless service, prisons and probation services should be brought together into Local Rehabilitation Trusts, each with a single chief executive. The National Probation Service should be abolished and its responsibilities handed to the new local operators. The various inspectorates and monitoring organisations should also be rationalised.

Some have argued that the key problem facing the justice system is a lack of resources. Certainly the lack of spare capacity in the prison system is hindering rehabilitation, as the authorities focus simply on fitting the prison population into the available places with barely any leeway at all. There remain however costs that can be taken out of the justice system, including the rising overhead of NOMS. Most importantly the lack of progress on rehabilitation is due to structural problems which have existed in times of rising resources as well as the current period. A lack of integration and local ownership are the true problems to be fixed.

These proposals could be tested as part of the current Manchester reforms. They could then be fully introduced before the end of the Parliament. They would deliver the progress on rehabilitation which the Prime Minister rightly seeks.