Speaking at the Social Market Foundation Rehabilitation Revolution conference, Crispin Blunt (the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Prisons and Youth Justice within the Ministry of Justice) said proposals for reform set out in the Green Paper would help create a “rehabilitation revolution”.
Blunt stressed plans to introduce payment by results and outcome-based commissioning would be of “profound benefit” to those receiving the services and those delivering them.
“I expect that England and Wales delivering through payment by results over the next five years will become a global market leader,” suggested the minister.
The minister also urged attendees to contribute to the Green Paper consultation, which closes on 4 March.
“With your collective experience, I’m sure you will have a great deal to add to the debate,” he said. “Success in developing and implementing these reforms is very much dependent on the knowledge and expertise of professionals like yourselves.”
The Social Market Foundation is one of the UK’s leading Think Tanks, existing to develop innovative ideas across a broad range of economic and social policy.
Rehabilitation revolution: the speech in full
“As you will be aware, the Ministry of Justice has now published its Green Paper entitled Breaking the Cycle: Effective Punishment, Rehabilitation and Sentencing of Offenders. The consultation period is underway.”
“Today, I want to speak to you about our proposals for improving rehabilitation, in particular covering payment by results and outcome-based commissioning. This is a new way of delivering public services: one that I believe will be of profound benefit to those receiving the services and those delivering them.”
“I expect that England and Wales delivering through payment by results over the next five years will become, as the privatisation programme of the 1980s became, a global market leader.”
“Before I set out our proposals for the ‘rehabilitation revolution’, I would like to be clear about the starting point for our reforms. The primary obligations of the Criminal Justice System are to protect the public and to punish offenders. Society has an entirely proper wish to express its disapproval of what offenders have done, and to be safe from crime.”
“The changes we advocate will not affect either of these principles. Indeed, we believe that they will ultimately enhance public safety by lowering reoffending levels.”
“Let’s be clear about what we are not doing. Just because we estimate our reforms will work and we will have 3,000 fewer prisoners by 2015 does not mean we are releasing 3,000 prisoners early.”
“Punishment alone is not enough. We also need to make sure that we rehabilitate offenders. The truth is that, under almost any system, most offenders will eventually return to the community. If we haven’t addressed their propensity to commit crime, we are not keeping the public safe. It’s only through cutting reoffending that we can reduce crime over the long-term.”
“Ultimately, we need to reform the criminal justice system in order to break the destructive cycle of crime and better protect the public. This is exactly what the Breaking the Cycle proposals set out to do, and improving rehabilitation is vital to achieving our aims.”
The system inherited by the coalition
“Let’s first look at the current system we’ve inherited. There are areas which have seen improvements – the number of escapes and absconds has been reducing, for one. The co-operation on the management of offenders in the community, MAPPA, is another example of progress.”
“However, I believe two significant failures overshadow those achievements. One was in managing capacity appropriately – the last administration was forced, due to poor planning, to let out 10,000 prisoners before they had finished serving their sentences. This was a manifest failure of their obligation to provide sufficient places for those whom the courts sentence, and it is one which we will not repeat.”
“Perhaps the greater failure of the previous Government in this area was in reoffending. It’s unacceptable that half of all adult offenders are reconvicted within one year of release from prison. This rate is even higher (61%) for offenders released after sentences of less than twelve months.”
“This is not just about adults – young offenders also need to be managed effectively. Failing to get this right results in the young offenders of today too often becoming the repeat offenders of tomorrow. At present, three quarters of young people released from custody reoffend. We must do better. It’s an indictment of our system that around half of all crime is committed by people who have offended before.”
“For too many people, too much of the time the criminal justice system has let them down, and criminals have not faced consequences for their actions. The police, courts, prisons and probation services are all links in the chain of justice, many of which have broken. Each part of the criminal justice system needs urgent reform and, at a time of tighter resources and budget cuts, reforming the component parts of our criminal justice system becomes even more important if we are to deliver more for less.”
“The need to improve the current system is made even more difficult by the economic mess we inherited and that we have to work our way out of. As you know, we are currently facing an unprecedented fiscal situation. My Department, the Ministry of Justice, will be cutting its spending by nearly a quarter over four years. The previous Government’s reckless spending left the coalition with no choice but to make cuts now in order to restore sanity to the nation’s finances in the future.”
“If we live within our means we will save the next generation from inheriting new debts. There’s no doubt that tough decisions need to be made. Real innovation is required.”
The Green Paper proposals
“It’s in this context that we’re setting out a series of radical but realistic reforms. These are set out in full in the Green Paper, but I want to highlight some of them.”
“First, I should make it clear that serious offenders who commit serious crimes are going to go to prison for a long time. That will not, and should not, change. While offenders are in prison, however, we must ensure that they are engaged in hard work, and are subject to a tough and productive regime. Too often, prisoners live a life of enforced idleness. We should ask more of them, not less.”
“Our ambition is for prisons to become places of hard work and industry, minimising unproductive time spent inside. Offenders will work hard and be subjected to the discipline of regular working hours.”
“However, such changes will not be limited to prison. We also plan to introduce more demanding work in the community, too. For Community Payback, our aim is to achieve greater intensity and immediacy so that it’s more demanding for the offender and delivered as soon as possible after the sentence is handed down.”
“Rigorous enforcement is also important to ensure that sentencers have confidence in community sentences, and we will make sure that offenders’ compliance with their sentence is monitored and managed properly.”
“Increasing reparation to victims also forms a central part of our proposals. There is simply not enough emphasis placed on the importance of offenders paying back to society, and especially to victims, for the harm they have caused. Whether this is through the earnings of prisoners going towards services to help victims, or more visible and productive Community Payback schemes, reparation will form a more central part of our approach.”
“Reparation includes restorative justice. We want to see more emphasis on restorative justice at every stage of the process. This could include pre-sentence conferences with offenders where this is appropriate. This is about making victims front and centre of our consideration.”
“We also plan to make compensation orders the first point of departure for sentences so that offenders will normally have to make direct financial amends to their victims. As today’s Public Accounts Committee makes clear, this is an area where we must improve the performance of the criminal justice system.”
“Of course a central tenet of the Green Paper is our plans to improve opportunities for rehabilitation. We must get this right. The current system all too often fails to turn offenders away from a life of crime. That failure produces more victims of tomorrow, and it’s through that prism our proposals should be seen.”
Payment by results: the financial incentives
“At the heart of this approach is to make sure the financial incentives are right through payment-by-results. In the past, services have tended to be commissioned with insufficient use of the private and voluntary sector markets.”
“We will unlock the expertise of organisations, especially in the voluntary sector, which know how to work with offenders to get them back on the straight and narrow, whether through rigorous interventions to get them off drugs, mentoring or preparing them for the world of work and responsibility.”
“The same approach which underpins our welfare reform plans – payment by results – will be used to cut re-offending, with organisations paid using savings made in the criminal justice system from the resulting lower levels of crime.”
“There has also been far too much prescription from the centre with providers not being held to account for their outcomes. It could be characterised as a ‘command and control’ approach to running public services.”
“The results of this are predictable: large sums spent, constrained professionals, insufficient return, a lot of time spent on processes and little time spent on outcomes.”
“Payment by results by contrast does exactly the opposite. The commissioner specifies a goal and increasingly pays for what gets delivered against this benchmark. As we will allow providers discretion in how they manage individual offenders – that’s up to them – they are free to innovate, but they know they will be held to account for their performance against the outcomes that they achieve.”
“That being the case, they have strong incentives to do what works. It’s a much more decentralised and flexible approach. Ultimately, it’s a potentially market-based one as different kinds of organisation start offering services – be it public, independent or third sector.”
Helping to drive up standards
“We’re excited about payment by results because we believe that it represents an excellent way of helping to drive up standards, reduce reoffending and improve value for money for the taxpayer.”
“I should be clear that we are developing this vision carefully and in stages. We already have plans to pilot at least six new rehabilitation programmes delivered on a payment by results basis starting this summer. Under such schemes, providers will be paid to reduce reoffending, funded in the long run by the savings that this approach is expected to generate.”
“We also have one scheme up and running with the Big Lottery we have commissioned the Social Impact Bond in Peterborough. Under the pilot, social investors work intensively with 3,000 short-sentence prisoners over six years. This work will be carried out both inside Peterborough Prison and after release to help former prisoners resettle into the community.”
“What makes the Social Impact Bond exciting is that it levers in private, using some philanthropic capital. If we can make a success of this model it will be a win-win. It will deliver a social return to the communities to which the offenders return through lower reoffending and therefore reduced crime. It will also reduce overall costs to society.”
“Of course we are aware of the technical and organisational challenges in developing payment by results. We need to find the best way to measure reductions in reoffending levels. It is essential that providers are only paid for results directly attributable to their work. Hence, in Peterborough we will rigorously analyse their performance using independently assessed control groups and reoffending of other similar offenders, being careful to ensure that we can identify the effects of the interventions on the offenders with which they work.”
“There are also risks around perverse incentives that we have sought to manage through the contract design. Under the Peterborough Social Impact Bond, the providers get rewarded from reductions in the number of reconvictions from all offenders released from the prison with under 12-month sentences, rather than just those they are successful with. The aim of this is to ensure that the St Giles Trust – the main charity delivering on the ground – work with those who cause greatest damage to their communities rather than just those who it is deemed easier to rehabilitate.”
The Social Impact Bond
“The Social Impact Bond was the first of its kind to the world. We know expect to commission a range of different models to test different approaches to payment by results – of which the Social Impact Bond is just one example.
If we can demonstrate that we can make payment by results work we will roll it out much more widely. That’s why we are partnering with other Government departments to support the development of pilots to pay providers by results.”
“For example, we’re working closely with the Department of Health to examine how payment by results could be used in getting offenders to recover from their drug dependency. The Department for Work and Pensions is also launching a new approach to improving employment outcomes based on payment by results, and we’re keen to explore whether we can include reduced reoffending as an outcome in these contracts.”
“Since we have set out our propositions, there has been a great deal of interest in work we’re doing and we’re grateful people have been putting forward their ideas. We’ve already received proposals from a number of sources (including probation trusts). I’m pleased to see that providers are responding to the new environment.”
“I don’t think that anyone can argue that against the principle of payment by results. The challenge is to design something in practice that works. Due to the complexity of this new approach and the potential benefits of being able to share learning from them, we are centrally commissioning these pilots.”
“Alongside this central approach, we will deliver new freedoms and flexibilities for public sector providers across the system. Two of the pilots are deliberately designed to test the effectiveness of a local commissioning approach in delivering more effective outcomes and reducing cost. This will give us the basis upon which we will determine the long term model of the commissioning system.”
“We are all aware that there is no ‘silver bullet’ for reducing offending. However, I firmly believe that the current levels of crime can and must be reduced. We can do this by making punishments more effective and rehabilitating criminals so they do not reoffend. We will reduce demand for prison places, and make our communities safer.”
“That – a safer, more responsible society – is our overriding objective.”
Facts speak for themselves
“The facts speak for themselves. To reiterate the dismal outcomes: almost half of adult offenders released from custody are reconvicted within a year. Three quarters of young people released from custody also reoffend. This is set against a backdrop of record spending and a high prison population.”
“All this suggests that new and innovative approaches are needed. Increasing professional discretion, devolving power away from Whitehall, increasing transparency and accountability, paying by results, introducing competition into the provision of services and encouraging local community engagement are just a few of our proposals.”
“It’s time for a new direction to be taken. With the right policies and approaches we can better protect the public and ensure there are fewer future victims.”
