‘I know what causes crime’, Michael Howard once told us as Home Secretary. His answer: criminals. What was he trying to tell us? Was he deftly highlighting reoffending rates in Britain? Was he bemoaning the inability of the prison system to rehabilitate prisoners? Was he urging more policies to direct people away from crime? Perhaps not. But the truth – and the tragedy – is that reoffending blights people’s lives when it shouldn’t do. Members of the public suffer from crimes that should have been prevented. And offenders find themselves unable to break out of patterns of destructive behaviour. As minister for skills, I am determined to help break that cycle.
The best estimates show that, each year, reoffending by ex-prisoners costs the taxpayer around £11bn. More difficult to quantify are the human costs of reoffending – the loss of personal possessions, the physical hurt, or the damage to people’s self-confidence and dignity that crime can cause. But what is very clear is that we can do better. Prisoners must serve their sentences, but they must also be ready – equipped with the right skills and the capabilities – to start afresh.
A mere glance at the figures for the prison population tells its own story. Almost half of all male sentenced prisoners were excluded from school. Over half have of all prisoners have no qualifications at all – a figure that rises to 71 per cent for female prisoners. Over two-thirds were unemployed when they committed the crime that brought them to prison. None of this excuses reoffending, but it does help illustrate how we can help prevent it.
Over the last 10 years there have been some important steps taken to equip offenders with the skills and opportunities to help them start again. Formal inspection of learning in prisons was first introduced in 2002-3. But even this served to highlight the scale of the challenge: just over 20 per cent of providers passed their inspections. A green paper followed in 2005, which helped raise the profile of the issue and introduced some important changes. The number of learning and skills hours delivered in prison has now almost doubled since 1997, whilst 70 per cent of providers of offender learning passed their Ofsted inspection last year. More offenders now take part in learning and more are picking up basic skills awards.
The time has come to build on this platform with some radically different ways of preparing offenders for the outside world. Central to this must be a more integrated approach, which draws together learning providers, probation services, and – vitally – employers themselves.
Already there are signs of what can be achieved when we do this. In Southampton, where the city council has taken the lead on services for offenders in the community, reoffending has been halved in a year for a cohort of 600 offenders. In London, many prisoners are now benefiting from intensive training before leaving prison to go straight into employment with the Bovis lend lease. And in Doncaster, a tailored training initiative has led to over 500 offenders finding jobs at Trackwork, a local rail maintenance firm.
What these are examples tell me is that where political willpower, corporate citizenship and willing learners come together, we can make a real difference to society. The adult prison population was still rising in September 2007. We need to reverse this trend through a concerted drive to help tackle some of the underlying causes of crime: the absence of the skills opportunities for people to change their lives and make a contribution to society. Offender learning is but one part of the story of reducing reoffending, but unless we make the changes we need to, we know what the ending will be.