Justice Committee
Oral evidence: Rehabilitation and resettlement: ending the cycle of reoffending, HC 194
Tuesday 16 June 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 16 June 2026.
Members present: Andy Slaughter (Chair); Pam Cox; Sir Ashley Fox; Warinder Juss; Tessa Munt; Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst; Vikki Slade; Tony Vaughan.
Questions 619 - 684
Witnesses
I: Lord Timpson OBE DL, Minister for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Offending, Ministry of Justice; Matt Grey, Executive Director (Rehabilitation and Change), HM Prison and Probation Service; and Jim Barton, Executive Director (Rehabilitation and Change), HM Prison and Probation Service.
Witnesses: Lord Timpson, Matt Grey and Jim Barton.
Chair: Good afternoon. Welcome to this session of the Justice Committee. It is the final evidence session, and therefore a ministerial session, of our major inquiry into rehabilitation and resettlement. I will ask our principal guest, Lord Timpson, the Minister of State for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending, to introduce himself and his colleagues in a moment. First, we will make our declarations of interest.
Sir Ashley Fox: I am Ashley Fox, the Member of Parliament for Bridgwater. I am a former solicitor and my interests are on the register.
Chair: I am Andy Slaughter. I am the MP for Hammersmith and Chiswick. I am the Chair of the Committee. I am a non-practising barrister, a member of the Unite and GMB trade unions, and a patron of two justice-related charities: Hammersmith & Fulham Law Centre and the Upper Room for ex-offenders.
Tessa Munt: Hello. I am Tessa Munt, and I am the Member of Parliament for Wells and Mendip Hills, which is in Somerset. Everything is on the register, but I just point out that I am a director of WhistleblowersUK, which is a not-for-profit organisation.
Vikki Slade: I am Vikki Slade, the MP for Mid Dorset and North Poole. My interests are as per the register, but there is nothing relevant to this Committee.
Pam Cox: Good afternoon. I am Pam Cox, the MP for Colchester. I am the chair of the APPG on penal affairs, and everything else is on the register.
Warinder Juss: Hello, good afternoon. I am Warinder Juss, the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton West. I am a member of the GMB trade union central executive council. I am a solicitor, but not practising at the moment, and I am a member of various APPGs.
Tony Vaughan: Hello. I am Tony Vaughan, the MP for Folkestone and Hythe. I am a barrister with a practising certificate and an associate tenant at Doughty Street Chambers. I draw attention to my entry in the register of interests.
Q619 Chair: Welcome, again. I will give you an opportunity to introduce yourself and perhaps your colleagues from the MOJ as well, Lord Timpson. You have been in post almost two years, now. You had a mighty task ahead of you. Could you briefly—which will be difficult—summarise how well you think it is going, where you think progress has been made and where it has been sluggish?
Lord Timpson: First, thank you very much for inviting me today. I am pleased to introduce my colleagues Matt Grey and Jim Barton. We have worked closely together for the last two years. It is very much a team effort at the MOJ, generally.
You are right that the last two years have been pretty busy. A lot has happened, but a lot of good things have happened. I would put the first three months of doing the job down as a traumatic experience in my life and probably in that of lots of colleagues, because the crisis that we inherited in the justice system was so profound that it was difficult to do anything bar look at capacity. There was no other show in town. I am really proud of where we have got to, but I also see the potential of what more we can do.
I came into this job to try to sort out the problems in our Prison and Probation Service, and I feel that we are well on the way. One main reason for that is the Sentencing Act. Without the Sentencing Act, it would not be possible to do all the really important work on rehabilitation and reducing reoffending, because you have to manage the capacity. As I am sure you are all aware, a number of things in the Sentencing Act are really important: the presumption against short sentences; following the evidence; and a focus on probation. For far too long there has been only one show in town—prisons. If you do not fix probation, you will never fix prisons. In my view, the heavy lifting of the justice system is done in probation.
I think the work around diversion, and what we are trying to do to divert people away from custody and the criminal justice system, is important, especially for women in setting up the Women’s Justice Board. I personally believe that most women should not be in prison; I believe most women are victims. When you hear that two thirds of women in prison have brain damage as a result of being beaten up, it is not the right place for them to be. We have made good inroads on the female estate and women in the sector, and also things like intensive supervision courts—how you divert people away.
Again, that has been all wrapped up with the Sentencing Act, but I have been really focused on performance. I come from a business perspective and experience, so I am on performance all the time. HMIP inspections are my main barometer to judge how we are performing. In the last 60 HMIP prison reports, 75% of prisons have an improved score since the previous inspection. In my business experience, that is a serious turnaround. Credit should go to all the amazing staff working in our prisons, and all the support teams, because it is fantastic. On top of that, a lot of the work that we have been doing around leadership, stability and culture is starting to bear fruit. Prisons are calmer places. Most weeks I visit prisons, and you can feel that the leaders have more space to get things done.
There is also a focus on standards—I have never known a great organisation to have poor standards, so there is a big focus on standards—and investment. There is £40 million going into security and another £35 million going into grilles. There is an awful lot of work on fire safety upgrades, and so on.
I will focus on probation. Most Thursdays I normally do prisons, but recently I have been doing roadshows, speaking to probation staff up and down the country and presenting the vision and the plan to them. We have been recruiting 1,300 extra staff—PQiPs—every year and are on track for that. Justice Transcribe, which we may come on to, is transformational for probation staff. We are doing 11,000 transcriptions a day. It saves an hour a day for every probation officer, which equates to 450 staff. We are doing a lot of digital tech stuff that really makes a difference. By April next year, supply in probation should equal demand.
There is a lot going on, and maybe we will come on to housing, another area that I have been really focused on. I am interested in performance, stability and focus, and delivering on my ambitions when I set out to do this job. I feel that we have made really good progress, but there is a lot more I want to do.
Q620 Chair: Thank you. I have some questions on what you said. You mentioned the Sentencing Act as a landmark piece of legislation. Is that affecting capacity? Is capacity changing in the way you expected? Is it going fast enough? Is there continuous improvement there, and are there unintended consequences of the Sentencing Act? For example, I have been told by the police and the CPS that, because of the presumption against short sentences, when they arrest prolific offenders they go immediately on to bail because they are not eligible for custodial sentences. That is not very reassuring to communities where they are committing those prolific offences.
Lord Timpson: We do not know some of the things yet because we are still in the transition process of implementing different stages of the Act. A number of parts of the Act were switched on in April. The next big point is September. As to how that impacts capacity, today there were 2,901 spare places in the male estate, which is a completely different game from the one we were in six months ago. Capacity is where we thought it would be, if not slightly better, but these numbers can fluctuate a lot, very quickly. Capacity is where we want it to be, but within the estate we still have a lot of pressure in remand prisons as well.
On unintended consequences, I just think it is the pressure on the system. Different parts of the system feel that pressure at different points. We are doing a huge amount of work at the moment on offender management units in prisons; then we will move to a lot of pressure on electronic monitoring; and, in September, there will be a lot of pressure on housing. For me, the unintended consequences are pressure, but I think we planned really well to manage that, and we are very open with the teams about where we are putting resources at the right time.
Q621 Chair: You have given a fairly upbeat view of progress and pointed out what you say is significant progress. I was looking at the Independent Monitoring Boards’ annual report. That is, shall we say, a slightly more gloomy, or some would say pragmatic, account from people who spend a lot of time in prisons. I know that you spend a lot of time in prisons as well. Anyone reading that report would not come out feeling that things were going well; they would feel that they were still pretty grim. How do you square those differences?
Lord Timpson: Going back to the HMIP scores, for me that is like the end-of-season Football League table. How many goals have you scored, compared with other people? The positive direction is, I think, really significant. IMB reports consistently say there is lack of investment, they need more staff and training, better drug support and a more joined-up approach with the third sector. They rightly point out that those areas need improvement, and in all of them we have a plan to improve. I have the investment and the strategy to do it, but this will take a long time to fix.
We have been going two years. I think we have stopped the decline. It levelled out and now it is improving, but I have to get all these other parts of the jigsaw to work—especially a number of the things pointed out by the IMB. At every prison I go to, I meet the IMB team, and it is a pretty consistent message, but when I go through what we are doing on housing, and on drug and alcohol work, I think they agree that the plans we have are right. It is just going to take time for some of them to be seen through. In my experience, it takes five years to turn around something like what we are dealing with. After two years, we are probably in as good a place as we can be.
Q622 Pam Cox: This is a question on HMP Doncaster and the operator competition. Are you able to give us any information about the potential cross-government issue that led to the competition being cancelled, and can you give us an update?
Lord Timpson: There is no update to give. I know we wrote to the Committee, but there is no further update to give. When there is an update, we will write.
Q623 Pam Cox: Could you elaborate a little more on that?
Lord Timpson: There is a procurement process in place and we need to let it run through. I am not in a position to be able to say any more.
Q624 Pam Cox: The letter stated there had been an investigation into procurement. Do you know when that will conclude?
Lord Timpson: We have written to the Committee, and when I know any more I will write. I do not know anything else.
Q625 Pam Cox: Thank you. When is the next competition for prison contracts due?
Jim Barton: We have competitions running all the time. We have a pipeline of competitions that runs all the way through to the 2030s, so we have procurement processes that are live at the moment.
Q626 Pam Cox: If that previous issue has not been resolved, how can those other processes continue smoothly?
Jim Barton: As the Minister referred to, we have an investigation under way. If anything comes out of it that is material to other competitions, we will take the steps we need to.
Q627 Pam Cox: Thinking about procurement in the round, the Government have made changes to procurement more generally. I know that that is something that your team is keen to get right. As I recall, the MOJ was running 1,000 or more contracts two years ago. Is that still the case?
Lord Timpson: If I can just give my view on contracts, I think we need to do a lot better at helping our staff to manage the contracts we have. We expect our governors and the senior staff in a prison to manage many different contracts and many different relationships with third-sector partners. Often, we do not pay those but they do an amazing job contributing to the work of the prison. I think, as I did for many years before I did this job, that we need to train our staff on how to get the best out of the contracts. Do you have more to add?
Jim Barton: A thousand is about the right order of magnitude. Obviously, there is a huge disparity in the scale of those contracts, from things like prisoner escorts, which is at the top end in terms of value, through to very localised contracts around specific provision in individual prisons. But, yes, it is of that order of magnitude.
Q628 Pam Cox: Do you feel that there is sufficient capacity among existing operators to meet the needs of the justice system?
Jim Barton: If the question is specific to prison operations, yes. The Committee will know that we have put in quite a lot of effort, over five years, to both ensure stability in that market and to try to increase some diversity—to create conditions that potentially encourage new entrants. Mitie won its first prison operator contract at HMP Millsike, ramp-up there continues, and the prison is stable. We have more organisations involved and interested in bidding for prison operator competitions than we did five to 10 years ago.
Is there much more distance to travel in that regard? Probably not. These are quite specialist contracts. They obviously have a quite significant risk profile—everything from operational to commercial risk. It is unlikely that if we were to give evidence in another five or 10 years we would have double the number of prison operator partners. The market feels quite stable as it is.
Q629 Pam Cox: Do you think there is a case for more publicly operated prisons? If we need more prisons, should they be publicly operated?
Lord Timpson: We have a pretty good strategy at the moment. The next prison that we will open will be HMP Welland Oaks, which will be publicly run. We will take our decisions from there. We are already gearing up and have an awful lot to do.
I go round publicly and privately run prisons. They run a big mix of types of prisons. A lot of it is down to the consistency of the leadership and the focus on standards and delivery. I take the position that the leadership is just as important as who runs it, but I know that a lot of the leaders in the private prisons have also worked in public ones; and they come back as well. We benefit from that mix. I encourage talking with each other and sharing ideas. There are great ideas in some of the privately run prisons, which I would like to copy, and we are doing some great things in publicly run prisons, too.
Q630 Tessa Munt: I want to move on to prisoners who have been released in error. I know that the Deputy Prime Minister has accepted all 33 of Dame Lynne Owens’s recommendations in principle, but five of those seem to be dependent on funding decisions for the future. The one I am particularly interested in is cross-agency digitisation and the full removal of paper records. The information that we have had over a period of time is that paper-based errors are one of the main reasons why prisoners are released in error. I wondered what you are going to do between now and the next spending review to try to stop further mistakes.
Lord Timpson: I do not think we will ever eliminate all mistakes when it comes to how we release prisoners, because it is incredibly complex. What is clear is that releases in error are down 32% against last year, so things are improving, but we still have a long way to go. We have committed £82 million of investment. That is £20 million on digitising the process, £50 million for Justice ID and another £10 million invested in AI.
What we really need in the long term is an end-to-end digital process, but we are still reliant on various different parts of the system, whether police, courts, prisons or probation, where paperwork comes in. I am sure some of you have been into an offender management unit. The staff there do an incredible job, working out some of the most complex calculations, often with people who have tens of aliases. To someone coming in from business, that is crying out for digital integration, and for simplicity. We need to make sure that we focus on linking up with the police and courts as well.
Q631 Tessa Munt: Thank you. The hourly Crown court checks that were brought in in March seem to have prevented 23 releases in error. Was that in a particular sector or part of the prison system? What caused those near misses, and why did that bit go right?
Lord Timpson: I think things are going better but they are still not right. Jim, can I hand over to you for the specific details?
Q632 Tessa Munt: I would be really interested to know why and where that happened, and whether it is a cluster or just chance across the sector.
Jim Barton: It is right that there are disproportionate rates of release in error across the prison estates. Complex factors drive that. The principle one is just throughputs. Some prisons are much busier in terms of the number of individuals where they have to perform sentence calculations and get those individuals out the door. There is, I think, a correlation between busy prisons that struggle for staffing as well, within offender management units. That puts pressure on colleagues to complete what Lord Timpson rightly described as complex cases. I think that that disproportionality appears in other bits of the system as well, in terms of the level of effective information exchange between different criminal justice partners into the prison system.
We are incredibly focused on this. As the Committee hopefully heard previously, that is why we accepted the 33 recommendations in full, and are working incredibly hard to implement them as quickly as we can, subject to funding.
Q633 Tessa Munt: Can you remind me, Lord Timpson: you said that out of the £82 million there was a wodge of money that had been shovelled aside for digitisation. How much was that?
Lord Timpson: It was £20 million.
Q634 Tessa Munt: Okay, and how much do you think the whole thing is going to cost, in the end?
Lord Timpson: I do not have that figure myself. I see, in the future, a huge opportunity across Government in how we embrace digital and AI. I can give a number of examples where AI is already making a huge difference to how probation staff work, and in prisons and adjudications, report writing and so on.
Another thing that is quite interesting is that when we started Justice Transcribe I was concerned that a number of probation staff would be nervous about adopting it—especially those who had been doing the job a long time. We are seeing that they love it, and the ripple effect is massive. They already say, “We could do this, this and this.” If you had asked me this question two years ago I would have been nervous that we would have to push things along, but now everyone’s arms are wide open.
Q635 Tessa Munt: I suppose part of my experience would be that, having gone into prisons, there is quite often all sorts of technology that takes your photograph on the way in but there does not seem to be anything on the way out. We do it in airports all the time and I am not quite sure why we cannot have a sort of passport-type technology that just zaps your eyes, and you get shovelled into the “no” channel if you do not match.
Lord Timpson: This is where Justice ID comes in. Maybe Jim could explain the details of that.
Jim Barton: Just to go back to a previous point, all the £82 million has gone on different forms of digital investment. The £20 million is the bit that has gone specifically on trying to digitise the process that offender management units have to go through to calculate release dates. As the Minister described, a significant proportion of the rest of the money is going on trying to create a common ID across the justice system. That is one of the areas of potential error, where we are handed paperwork from a different part of the criminal justice system without the means to correlate it back against our own records. The £82 million is all going on forms of digital innovation.
To the specific point that you raised, that is one of the aspects: we are now just working through what it would cost to deliver on the letter of that recommendation. There are a number of different aspects, but one is about improving CCTV within the prison estate, including introducing audio within the CCTV set-up, which is not common at the moment across most of our prisons. That work is still being scoped. I do not believe we have a figure to give the Committee today for what that would cost.
Q636 Tessa Munt: I am sure you will write to the Chair, won’t you? Can I just ask one other thing, which is slightly more victim-focused. That is the business of recommendation 27, which asks Ministers to “agree a ‘tolerable’ level (both in terms of volume and gravity) of releases in error”. I just wondered what “tolerable” meant, when you are a victim.
Lord Timpson: There should be none.
Q637 Tessa Munt: Indeed. I accept that one is not going to iron out absolutely everything.
Lord Timpson: I think that what is important is that we continue the downward trend on errors. We were 32% down on last year. There were 179 releases in error in the last 12 months. It was 262. We have just got to keep bringing that down. I do not think I can give a figure. For me, keeping the momentum is really important.
Q638 Vikki Slade: I want to focus on IPPs, imprisonment for public protection. I have a couple of questions about those who have never been released and those who are in the recall process. I understand that as of March there were 896 prisoners who have never been released. Do you have any information on how many of those are beyond their original tariff, and what steps are being taken to overcome the systemic barriers for their eventual release?
Lord Timpson: IPP is a subject close to me and lots of other Members of Parliament and peers. I have employed lots of IPP prisoners, who are now Timpson colleagues and doing exceptionally well, but I also understand the challenges we have there.
To answer your first question, virtually all of them are over tariff—but not all of them. My plan is the IPP action plan: how do we help these individuals, who are often very complex and have lived chaotic lives with lots of issues around addiction and mental health? How do we get them ready so that they are safe to be released, to be neighbours of yours and mine?
We have seen a continuous reduction—I think an 11% reduction—in the number of never-released IPP prisoners. We need to do more work on getting them into the right prison. We are now up to—I cannot remember the exact figure—95-ish per cent in the right prison, but we need to run our prisons better. When our prisons are more stable and we can run more constructive regimes, that will make a big difference for them.
We are also recruiting IPP advocates, to have people in prisons who do arm-round-the-shoulder-type work with IPP prisoners, building confidence ready for parole board hearings. Approved premises are, to me, a really important area, which is often misunderstood, and where we carry a lot of risk. When IPPers go into approved premises, I do not think that 12 weeks is enough so I increased that to 16 weeks. Also, in most approved premises where they go, there is, again, someone there to do the arm-round-the-shoulder bit.
I think it is a combination: running our prisons better, which benefits everybody in the justice system, but also really focusing on IPP prisoners’ needs, and giving them that arm-round-the-shoulder support so they are ready.
Q639 Vikki Slade: On that topic, I was really pleased to see the survey that is going out to IPP prisoners. The families of several are in touch with me, and I am arranging to ask them to ask their family members to fill in the survey. What do you hope to achieve from the survey? What assurance can we give to our constituents who have family members who are IPP prisoners that filling out that survey will make a difference?
Lord Timpson: Before I did this job, I was chair of the Prison Reform Trust. Half the people around the boardroom table have lived experience of the justice system. I know that some of the best ideas come from those who are experiencing the area you are trying to improve. That is why their voice is very important. I am a big believer in this. I read the Inside Time newspaper, and all the letters. Their voice is really important. I also want them to have hope and confidence that if they work with us we can get them into a good place and they will have, hopefully, a successful parole hearing.
Q640 Vikki Slade: Thank you for that. I know my constituents will be grateful to hear it. Talking of prisoners who have been released and recalled, can I ask first about the RARR—the risk assessed recall review? My understanding is that 433 prisoners were eligible for that but only 83 actually went through the process. Can you share a little information about what it is, and why not everybody who was eligible went through the RARR process?
Lord Timpson: The number of recalls has fallen by 31% in 2025, so that is a positive thing. For those who are recalled, if we think that recall was unnecessary or that they would be better off back in the community, we now have a mechanism for that. I get monthly updates on its progression. The decision is based on the assessment of the experts who manage the risk within our prison system. This is their risk assessment. Do you want to come in on some of the details, Matt?
Matt Grey: In terms of the recall process, we are trying to be very careful to ensure that we do not recall this cohort unnecessarily. They are too easy to recall, and, as Lord Timpson mentioned, there has been a 31% drop in the rate of recalls. All the recalls that we undertake are signed off by senior staff in HMPPS, with an additional level of assurance around them to make sure that they happen only in circumstances where we really do not think they can go back. More broadly than that, there has been all the wider work to think about how we, through the action plan, put some support around IPP prisoners to reduce their risk.
We have been looking at the Sentencing Act to make sure that there are more opportunities for early licence termination. There are more opportunities now, in the new Sentencing Act, for people to have their licence terminated. The Victims and Prisoners Act also took out around two thirds of people on licence, and reduced that further. We are really starting to narrow down the numbers now, to a place where you can start to think much more about individuals and how to provide them with the right support, and not just look at large-scale numbers and how to make big policy changes to make a difference to them.
Q641 Vikki Slade: The Howard League report “Ending the Detention of People on IPP Sentences” suggested that the current recall system acts as a revolving door. Has what you just said changed the dial on that, in terms of the threshold—whether it is a minor licence breach or a genuine risk to the public? Do you think that has changed, or is there further to go?
Lord Timpson: The recall test has not changed. What has changed is that we now have a mechanism so that after receiving further evidence, or if things change, we can release them back into the community.
There is also the IPP challenge group. You have been speaking to some of the charities and the people involved with IPP. Dame Glenys Stacey now chairs that group. She is one of our non-exec directors. We are grilling into this all the time. We look at specific examples. One other area of IPP that is also important, but often forgotten, is that there are over 200 IPPers in secure mental health hospitals at the moment. How we transition them back into prison or the community, even though that is not recall, is another area where we are trying to help people progress. I believe in second chances and giving everyone an opportunity, and that includes people who are in hospital.
Q642 Chair: Last week I spent a morning at Wormwood Scrubs talking to IPP prisoners there. I am sure that you talk to cohorts in that way. They had a very high level of knowledge of the system; they had experienced it for many years. UNGRIPP figures show that 99% of IPP prisoners have passed tariff. There are a lot of good ideas about what should happen with the transitions with different categories of prisoners, but not a lot of hope. You said you wanted there to be hope, there. It really is far more a state of resignation or despair. I appreciate that you have the action plan, which is an alternative to resentencing perhaps, and that is a priority. Some members of the Committee are meeting privately next week to talk about this in more detail, but we are not achieving the reductions at any pace, are we? That is a favourite Government word, but it is not happening. It is coming down very incrementally, slowly, at the moment. You must be dissatisfied with that.
Lord Timpson: At every prison I go to I meet IPP prisoners. I sit in their cells and talk to them, and I am sure you have similar conversations. I also spend a lot of time looking up why they are there and how they are progressing. These are often very complex people. There are lots of issues around addiction and mental health. A lot of these people have been released, so the Parole Board felt they were safe to be released, and then they had been recalled. We have to keep progressing. An 11% reduction in the never-released cohort is progress. I would love more. For example, I have introduced the trialling of ROTL—release on temporary licence—for IPP prisoners, just giving them that opportunity to prove themselves to the Parole Board. For a lot of IPP prisoners, it gets harder and harder for them if they do not work with us, but we have to run our prisons better. If they run better, they will get more opportunities.
Q643 Chair: Some IPP prisoners will be in open prisons at the moment. If they are, and are compliant, why can you not look at the release of that cohort of prisoners?
Lord Timpson: That is part of the Parole Board process of testing them in open conditions. Last week I looked at a couple of examples where IPP prisoners had been recalled from open prisons back to closed prisons because of concerns about their risk. That process works. I am a big fan of open prisons. It is a fantastic opportunity for people to integrate back into society and also to get a job.
Q644 Pam Cox: I move to the transition from custody into the community, starting with one of the most challenging aspects of that: post-release deaths. In 2025, 77 people died within 14 days of being released from prison. That is 28% higher than the 60 deaths recorded the previous year and, as I understand it, is the highest since records began in 2021. Why has there been a record high number of deaths post release?
Lord Timpson: Any death post release is awful. If you look at the number of releases over the past two years, because of all the changes we have been making to manage capacity in our prisons, which was a situation we inherited, there has been a lot more churn and more releases. I can hand over to Matt for some of the details.
Matt Grey: In terms of the whole numbers, the actual number of deaths post release in published statistics is stable. Obviously, they are far too high because we do not want to see anybody released and dying under our supervision, but there have been some concerted efforts over previous years to look at how we tackle this issue, particularly given, as Lord Timpson mentioned, the numbers of releases we have been doing through things like SDS40 and changes to fixed-term recall have given us a large tranche of releases. We have seen two challenges. One is the continuing challenge of homelessness and how we tackle that. As you know, the Government have a target of halving the number of people who are released to homelessness on the first night, and we are working towards that. We are expanding capacity to provide some of that support.
There is also a nexus with substance misuse. We know that for an awful lot of people who are released the cause of death, if not a contributory factor to cause of death, is substance misuse. We are looking at how to ensure they get continuity of care on release. Whether or not they are homeless, that is critical for us. We have seen real improvements in continuity of care rates for people being released. That has gone up from 38% to 53% over the past four years. We have also rolled out a series of six health and justice partnership co‑ordinators. These are people who work in the prison system but make the join-up with community links to ensure that, if there are substance misuse issues, these people are referred to the right pathways so that support is available to them.
We have also rolled out something called the probation notification action programme, or PNAP. I am sorry for the terminology. That is a system which allows us to make sure probation practitioners know when they have caseload being released who have substance misuse needs, so they can make sure they are also prepared to support them. It is important we get that right because we know that people who are homeless and have substance misuse needs are in a very difficult situation. It is about how we provide the right join-ups to get them that support. That has led us to focus on how we provide that in pre-release planning, ensuring that we have the right pre-release panels in place to look at the totality of people’s needs. We are also investing in how we make sure we have the right systems to assess those needs at the right point in the sentence, so we know when people are coming up to release if they have a substance misuse and accommodation need, and we can join up those services.
As I said, we have accommodation for homelessness. I am sure you will want to talk about CAS3 shortly. We provide CAS3 as a stopgap and additional mechanism, but there are people released from prison who have quite complex needs where CAS3 may not be the right service for them and they might need to be referred to other specialist provision. Whether or not they take that up, we try to make sure they arrive in the right accommodation. We also have people who do not arrive at the accommodation they have been referred to, so how do we make sure we provide support for them? There is a whole host of complex reasons why that happens.
We have a death under supervision panel that means we review every death of which we are notified, so we can look at how we learn lessons from that as well and put that back into the system. It is a priority for us to make sure we are focused on this cohort.
Q645 Pam Cox: For the benefit of those watching, how is it possible that people are released without a roof over their head? How would you put it in lay terms?
Lord Timpson: If we go back, we inherited a justice system running way too hot. That meant there was pressure on every part of the system and housing was a significant part of that. At the moment, 15.8% of people leave prison with nowhere to live. I managed to get a cross-government agreement to halve that by the end of this Parliament to 7.5%. That is still too high, and we need to go further. All the evidence is clear—this will not surprise the Committee—that if you leave prison with nowhere to live you are more likely to reoffend. That is why we have an extra 100 CAS3 beds, but we are also developing a new digital system, which hopefully will be ready soon, called the single accommodation service. It is basically a digital version of Yellow Pages. We will have a much more joined-up approach so we can find where the accommodation is.
Take, for example, Hope Street—a number of you may have visited it—which is a fantastic facility in Southampton for women. It has never been full, although we know there is demand for that. That is because, digitally, we are not as connected up with our housing providers as is possible, and there is also too much inconsistency. Some local authorities have a good track record of housing people on release; others are nowhere near good enough. I have a big push on housing and am all over the data, but for me the big one is to get this agreement to halve the number of people leaving prison with nowhere to live, but also to have a digital back-up to it.
Q646 Pam Cox: While we are on the subject of health and wellbeing, Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, produced a very comprehensive report on the health of prisoners and those on probation. How is the MOJ doing in implementing many of the very robust recommendations in that report?
Lord Timpson: I had the pleasure of meeting Chris and his team. It is an area in which I am really interested. We had a long conversation. For me, it is about partnership working as well, because in a prison not all staff work for HMPPS; a lot work for the NHS and other health providers, too. It is about how we have an environment where prisons work better. That for me is a real focus because, if they work better, we can get people to healthcare and give them much better treatment. I hand over to Matt.
Matt Grey: We welcome Sir Chris Whitty’s report; it has been really helpful. I particularly welcome the fact that he looked at people in both custody and the community and, crucially, the release point. The report makes some fantastically helpful recommendations. We are working very closely with NHS England colleagues to see how we can implement it. Of course, within that, we are working through the changes that are happening to the NHS and its commissioning, and how we manage that.
There has been some real focus on the back of Chris’s report about how we make sure we are doing the right pre-release assessments to understand people’s needs. We are rolling out new technology in that space, but bringing people together to understand the needs and make sure we are doing referrals properly. As I mentioned, we have the probation notification action programme. With that rolled out, it enables us to ensure that health partners, probation and wider service delivery partners are all aware of needs to make sure we are supporting those individuals. We are making good progress on the report. There is more to go. We need to work with the NHS as it understands how its reforms are taking shape and where the commissioning lies so we can properly inform the commissioning process. We look forward to working on that.
Lord Timpson: Can I just mention drugs and his focus on addiction in prisons? We set up the DAREP, the drug and alcohol recovery expert panel. They have been fantastic in supporting us on that, but also drug-free wings is an area in which I am really interested. I am ambitious for us to do more. How all our drug-free wings work is quite inconsistent, so that is a real area we need to push on.
I am also interested in supporting autistic prisoners. We are doing some fantastic work in some prisons on autistic wings, training staff to be autism-aware and how to have an environment in which they are far more successful. It has been and will be really helpful.
Q647 Tessa Munt: Can I go back to the subject of women? We know, do we not, that historically and possibly currently women were placed in prison as a place of safety, as opposed to not necessarily having met a custodial threshold? I know that the Mental Health Act 2025 was given Royal Assent back in December. Has all the machinery worked to put that in place, and how is it going? What is the impact of that?
Lord Timpson: Not all of it has been switched on yet.
Q648 Tessa Munt: Oh, why?
Lord Timpson: There are certain parts of it, such as mental health beds and so on. I am clear that prison is not a place for women who are just unwell; prison is a place for people who are on remand or who have committed serious offences. I can hand over to Matt for the actual details.
Q649 Tessa Munt: I would be quite interested to know when you think those bits will come into force.
Matt Grey: We are looking to commence in 2027. The reason for the place of safety is that we need to ensure there is sufficient bed space available in alternative provision. We do not want to be in a position where, though we will not hold women in a place of safety, there is nowhere else for them to go. There is a gap in the service provision and we need to wait to ensure the whole system is ready and able to manage the changes set out in the Mental Health Act. There is still some time before we are ready to do that.
Q650 Tessa Munt: Where do you anticipate those women will go?
Lord Timpson: This is where the intensive supervision court is coming in. How do we divert women away from the justice system? One of probably the most memorable days I had in the job quite early on was a visit to the intensive supervision court for women in Birmingham. It is brilliant; it is absolutely fantastic. It offers wraparound support to divert women, because women come up from the cells in crisis. They are traumatised. Many of them are victims and we need to help them. That is why I am pleased we are growing to six intensive supervision courts, which I think is part of that process of diverting women in crisis away from the justice system and wrapping your arms around them, because prison is not always the right place for them.
Q651 Tessa Munt: There is some work going on, is there not, in the north-east health and justice hub? I wonder whether one of the three of you is familiar with that, and what conclusions you may have come to as a result, or whether you would like to write to the Chair about that afterwards.
Lord Timpson: We will write to you, because I am not sure exactly where we are up to on the data. I know that is a really useful trial.
Q652 Warinder Juss: Before I ask you about employment and reducing reoffending, I want to touch on what Pam Cox talked about in terms of health and wellbeing, and also the questions you raised about substance misuse. Two weeks ago, I went to Wormwood Scrubs to play chess with the prisoners at their chess club. It was a very positive experience, not only for me to try to understand the prisoners but for them having somebody coming from outside to engage in an activity with them. I had a chess colleague say to me that it is better to be addicted to chess than substances. To what extent are activities of that nature something we should look at to try to improve the health and wellbeing of prisoners, not only while they are there but also to help them assimilate into society when they leave?
Lord Timpson: I am a big fan. Chess in Prison is a brilliant organisation. I have played chess with them upstairs over the road at one of their events. When we talk about purposeful activity, it is not just about sitting in a classroom or learning a skill; it is about having an experience and intellectual challenge with other people. I also think that reading is brilliant. Lee Child is our prison reading laureate. We have music and singing. There are so many different ideas we can bring in. Over the years, I have watched Billy Bragg perform in Liverpool Prison and lots of other things. This is where we need to be better at welcoming third-sector partners and volunteers, and not make it too difficult for them. I know so many people who would love to come in and give a talk about something or explain a hobby and get people out of their cells. Sometimes the system is too difficult with vetting and so on. I am a big fan. The Chess in Prison team does a really good job.
Q653 Warinder Juss: We know that there is a very positive co‑relationship between improving employment prospects and reducing reoffending, and that if employment prospects are there reoffending is significantly reduced. Are you doing anything in particular to improve employment prospects for prison leavers and for those being supervised in the community?
Lord Timpson: Employment has been a good news story. When I set up the employment advisory boards four and a half years ago—in fact Alistair was one of the pioneers—14% of people left prison and had a job after a year; now it is 38%; and my ambition is to get to 50%. I believe that to get to 50% we need better integration with probation as well, so it is not just about doing employment work. In prison, it is about following that into our probation offices as well. The employment advisory boards now are very settled and are performing well. We also have the employment councils working above them; they work with DWP, housing and so on. I really do not want to mess with it. They are doing such a good job I want to let them get on with it.
Q654 Warinder Juss: You spoke about purposeful activities. We have seen prison workshops in prisons and how well they work, but there are not enough of them. Is any work being done to improve the availability of prison workshops?
Lord Timpson: Some of our Victorian prisons are not designed to have loads of workshop spaces. If you go to HMP Millsike, the workshop spaces are fantastic. It has been designed around personal activity and getting people out. We have over 70 potential workshops that either we need to spend a lot of money fixing or find people to go into them, so the employment advisory boards and employment councils are now focused on attracting other businesses. I am also interested in what we can do within the public sector. We make everything in a cell apart from the mattress and duvet. If we can make almost everything that goes in our cells, surely we can make things for other parts of the Government procurement system as well. I am interested in both attracting outside companies to help train them and do some of their business, and make stuff for the Government.
Q655 Warinder Juss: Are those conversations taking place?
Lord Timpson: Very much so.
Q656 Warinder Juss: We know that prison employment leads have been very successful, but sometimes progress is hindered because of transition being managed in the community. We understand that there are community-based employment leads being trialled at the moment. Could you give an account of how those trials are taking place and what success you are having with them?
Lord Timpson: I had a meeting with DWP Ministers this morning. We talked about that transition, the role of work coaches and how they can work better with prison employment leads. In some places it works really well; in others it can work better. On the community side of things, I will hand over to Matt for the details.
Matt Grey: We have had prison education leads for about four years now. It has been really positive. They have worked in partnership with prison work coaches. We have worked to make sure that they do not do the same thing and are both additive. We are looking at the communities and how we make more use of the range of services that DWP offers. DWP has a tremendous range of opportunities. There are definitely ways we can tap in more to some of those services that we have not made as much use of so far. We need to do more. That was the conversation Lord Timpson just referenced.
As for community employment needs, we are trying to recognise that there are different challenges in different parts of the country. There are some local trials of community employment leads, but nationally how do we make sure we are making use of everything the DWP has to offer, particularly given that a lot of the people who are under probation supervision have never gone into custody? We want to make sure they do not just find themselves as a member of the community and put on probation. They still need to look back to the DWP as their lead department for job support. We do not want to step too far away from that, but we recognise that people in the criminal justice system have additional complexities. There are opportunities to think about the additional wraparound support we can provide. We are testing that.
We also have through-care support in the form of the Creating Future Opportunities service. CFO has been running for around 20 years now across prisons and probation. We rolled out that evolution a few years ago. That provides through-care support for individuals with more complex needs who are furthest from the jobs market so we can make sure they get the right wraparound support in custody, and we support them through into the community as well to help them get those jobs. That has been really positive; there is some good evidence of the impact of that. There is the work we do; there is the work DWP does; and then, critically, it is about how we find ways of joining up some of the services more effectively.
Lord Timpson: ROTL—release on temporary licence—is up 25%. That is another important part of it because, if we can get someone a job when they are in prison, they are more likely to carry on that job when they are on probation.
Q657 Warinder Juss: It is clear from what you said that you are committed to improving employment support in the community. Is there any plan to roll out those community-based employment leads nationally? If that is the plan, have you any timescale as to when that might be done?
Matt Grey: It is still being tested locally. All those community employment initiatives are local for the time being, so we are not looking at whether they can be rolled out nationally. The big change we are planning is that there are changes to CRS, the commissioned rehabilitative services. That stopped providing ETE support—I will have to confirm to the Committee the date when it stopped. We are trying to look at how we do more under the future model. We will be bringing in as part of future community support, in 2027 for men and 2028 for women, more wraparound support as a replacement for CRS, including thinking about how we build jobs and skills. We will use some of the community employment lead work to help inform the supply chain and how it might provide those services. We will see more support for people on employment in the community through that model, and we will keep an eye on their success in the community and get the employment lead model as well.
Q658 Pam Cox: I want to turn to residential alternatives to custody. Women’s residential centres offer an alternative to custody but also intensive support that can prevent offending and reoffending in the way you described earlier. What plans do the Government have to create more of those centres and ensure that existing ones like Hope Street are properly and fully used?
Lord Timpson: I want to see them full. I am a big believer in residential women’s centres, but I am also a big believer in non-residential women’s centres. You need to have both. For example, Willowdene is another example of a fantastic organisation that we work with. There is the great work of the Women’s Justice Board. How do we divert more women away from custody? We have a total pot of £32 million in the women’s diversion fund exactly for these kinds of areas. To take Hope Street as an example and your question of how we fill it, it is about technology and how we get different parts of the system talking to each other. We know there is enough demand from women who want to be there. What happens there is absolutely world class, but digitally we need to be better. I know it sounds as if there is a very binary element to it, but it is not just about having the centres; it is about being able to fill them.
Intensive supervision courts are another way of diverting women away, and maybe keeping them at home with their children. The tough love that you get from the intensive supervision court is really powerful. I do not know whether any members of the Committee have ever been or want to go to an intensive supervision court. It is superb, but it works only when you get that wraparound support of DWP, employment, mental health, drug work and so on.
Q659 Pam Cox: Given what you say and your clear commitment to all of that, why did the plans for the centre in Swansea not come to fruition? How far was that to do with the connection between the MOJ and local planning authorities?
Lord Timpson: They put a proposal forward and it was not accepted in the round of everything else we had been looking at. We are still looking at what opportunities we have with the site. It is something we are looking at, but one thing I am pleased about is that Swansea is one of the cities that has a women’s intensive supervision court going there as well, so it is another part of our diversion strategy.
Q660 Pam Cox: I speak from some experience of this. We were offered something like that by the MOJ in an area I know very well. The MOJ rather parachuted in and did not really connect properly with the local agencies that already provided existing support and did not win over the friends it needed to bring a facility like that into a residential area. I just wonder whether lessons are being learned from that kind of experience.
Lord Timpson: I hope they have been. On the Women’s Justice Board, we had a lot of very open, frank conversations about the relationships across the sector and where people were offered support and it was not always taken. Hopefully, one of the main strands of work we have done on diversion is building on those links and being adaptable. One thing you find, certainly with women’s centres, is that they come in all different shapes and sizes, and offer different types of services. Some are specialists on drugs; some do not have anything to do with anybody involved with addiction. We need to be more open-minded and keep looking to work with people who can help women who often have quite specific challenges, especially when it comes to children. At Hope Street you can be there with your children; in other centres you cannot, which puts off a number of women.
Q661 Pam Cox: Given that range and variety, would it be possible for you to send a list of all the facilities that you know of, residential and non-residential, to the Committee?
Lord Timpson: Of course.
Pam Cox: That would be helpful; thank you.
Q662 Chair: To be clear, it is a budgetary decision; that is the reason you are not funding more residential women’s centres. That is what you said in your letter to us.
Lord Timpson: I had a question from one of our probation officers at the roadshow last week about all the things we need to do to improve probation. I said that, if I could go to the Bank of England and take out all the gold bars and spend it on this, that is what I would do, but I have only a limited amount of money and I need to spend it wisely.
Chair: I am going to change the order because Sir Ashley has to go for whipping duties.
Q663 Sir Ashley Fox: Minister, can I ask you about the Probation Service? What is the average caseload for a probation practitioner at the moment, and, in your view, what would be an appropriate target?
Lord Timpson: The average at the moment is 32 per caseload. It has come down significantly from where it was. As for where it will end up, I will hand over to Jim for the details. One thing I have learned about this is that there are some probation officers who will need a very small caseload because they are dealing with people with exceptional complexity, national security work and so on; other probation officers can deal with a much bigger volume. While we talk about the average, there are also quite big differences in it. We also have a lot of new staff and they need an opportunity to get up to speed and gain their confidence as well. As part of our plan for April next year, where supply will equal demand in probation—extra staff, technology and so on—Jim, where will that land us?
Jim Barton: To build on that a little bit, the range at the moment is between about 20 and the high 40s in terms of a caseload that individuals might hold. The Minister is correct that 32 is the national average. To explain some of that range, our model is that we focus resource where risk is highest. If an individual were to hold some of the highest-risk offenders on our caseload, they will have a lower caseload as a result. They need the time to work with those individuals and address the risk and need factors that they present. For somebody who predominantly holds a lower-risk caseload, that would mean that they end up having more individuals to manage at any given point in time.
We hope to see those numbers come down, but our primary focus is on ensuring that probation staff are spending less time on administration and more time on quality face-to-face assessment and supervision with the individuals whom they manage. The Minister has referenced already Justice Transcribe. It will save the equivalent of 450 probation staff across the country. That is one of four digital tools that we have successfully rolled out in the last three months. Add them all up together and they are worth the equivalent of an extra 1,200 staff in the Probation Service every year. Our real focus is on reducing the amount of low value-add administrative tasks that probation needs to undertake so that its time can be spent on quality supervision for individuals. We have not set a target, but we would hope that that average of 32 becomes a number that starts with a two.
Q664 Sir Ashley Fox: In March 2026, there was a shortfall of 1,556 full-time equivalent probation officers against the target level, which would suggest that at the moment they are dealing with far too many cases. Is that a reasonable assumption to make?
Lord Timpson: It is running too hot. We inherited a system that was broken and we are putting it all back together again. That is going to take time. We are recruiting the most new starters we can. It is limited to about 1,300 because the existing staff basically do the buddying-up training. Obviously, we want to improve retention. Retention is improving, but it still has a long way to go. Sickness is too high. We are over-recruiting at the moment from where we thought we would be, which is positive. We did a big recruitment campaign on TV and so on, which has really helped. We need to get to that point and we are not there yet.
Chair, if you would ever like me to come and present my probation roadshow to the Committee, I will very happily do that to explain how all these bits of the jigsaw come together to get to that point in April. It is unfair on our probation staff, and the victims on whose behalf they work, to ask them to do something that is very difficult to do at the moment. By April, we should be there.
Q665 Sir Ashley Fox: Minister, are you confident that you will have enough staff to cope with the effects of your reforms in the Sentencing Act? Some of those reforms have come into effect, and more are yet to come into force. That will place an extra burden on the Probation Service. Are you confident that by the time we get to next April you will have enough staff in place to deal with those reforms?
Lord Timpson: Yes, I am confident, but I am not getting overconfident on this at all, because there are a number of moving parts. You never know the numbers coming through the system, which can change. We have a massive increase in electronic monitoring. There are lots of other moving parts to this. It is around training. It is around more technology and more systems, a thing called ARNS, MPOP and so on. We have to land a lot on an organisation that is already moving pretty fast. I have regular weekly and monthly meetings. Are we on track? At the moment, we are on track. I feel the team is doing an amazing job, but we need to recruit extra people. We just need to keep the stability in the system. We also have to get through September, which is the next bump in the road. After that, we should have much more clarity on the direction in which we are going.
Q666 Sir Ashley Fox: Are you monitoring how staff are coping with these new burdens that are being placed on them? What is the reaction from staff?
Lord Timpson: I will hand over to Jim on that.
Jim Barton: Absolutely. Lord Timpson already referenced the face-to-face contact that he is having with practitioners across the country at the moment. I run a programme called Our Future Probation Service. The task that we have been set is to reduce workload in probation by 25% by April of next year. As the Minister has referenced, we are confident that we have a plan to achieve that. We also know that it is one thing having a theoretical plan; what matters to all of us is that that plan translates into reality for probation staff in all our offices around the country. We are doing lots of work with our regional probation directors—I think you heard evidence from a few of them earlier in this inquiry—to make sure that their voices are heard around the perspectives of their management team and their staff as to whether those changes are landing.
The Minister referred earlier to the fact that we have already introduced most of the Sentencing Act, essentially: the presumption against short custodial sentences, the expansion of the maximum duration of suspended sentence orders from two to three years, and doing away with post-sentence supervision. One legacy of the Transforming Rehabilitation era is that all those things have been implemented and implemented well, and many of them are really welcomed by probation staff. It is fair to say that post-sentence supervision was seen as a bit of a back end of a camel stuck on the front end of a horse. It did not really work in terms of giving them the levers they needed to work effectively with individuals on their caseload.
There is a huge amount of focus on September, when two things will come together. The first is the introduction of the progression model. The consequence of the David Gauke review in the Sentencing Act to move to a default that individuals are released from custody at a third of their sentence and are then subject to more intensive probation supervision places a pressure on probation in terms of the additional volumes of releases that we need to prepare for. We are absolutely on track with that. The commencement order was signed and laid last week. It sets out the detail as to how we are going to introduce the progression model. Operational guidance is now with colleagues in prisons and probation so that they can start that preparation work.
The second thing that changes in September is that we are introducing a new framework for supervision in the community. It is designed to better focus probation resource at the front end of a licence or community order—because evidence shows that we can have more effect with individuals when they first arrive on to the probation caseload—and to focus that resource even more on the higher end of cases from a risk perspective to make sure that, where there are challenges around probation resource, we are targeting our activity and efforts on where it can have the greatest effect to protect the public. We will also drive that definition of risk more based on algorithmic risk assessment tools that have been trained, which is the jargon, over many years based on all the evidence to assess risk better than a practitioner can in most circumstances. Those changes are designed to ensure probation can really focus on where it can have most effect in supervising individuals on release or who have arrived straight to us as a result of a community order or suspended sentence order. It is a lot of change, undoubtedly, but we have a plan and we are on track with it.
Q667 Sir Ashley Fox: A lot more prisoners will be released into the community earlier. You talked about high risk, and that will be assessed, if I understood you, according to AI algorithms, presumably along with probation officer assessment. Is it a combination of the two?
Jim Barton: Just to clarify, it is not AI in the sense that we are asking Copilot to assess an offender’s risk. This is a trained algorithm that basically uses all the facts of that case based on the wealth of evidence that we have around reoffending proclivity, reoffending as an event or seriousness of reoffending to define risk. Then you are absolutely right: it is overlaid by practitioner judgment, to see if there is anything that that algorithm cannot take account of that the practitioner determines would result in a different conclusion.
Q668 Sir Ashley Fox: My concern is: are the public going to be protected from this larger number of prisoners being released early? Do we have enough probation officers ready for September? Is your algorithm going to work?
Lord Timpson: Yes. Also, we have a £700 million increase in our budget, a 45% increase in the funding in probation, which we needed—more staff, more tech, more housing and so on. We are on track and will manage that risk. You are right: there will be more people in prison and more people in probation than when I started my job, and that trend is going to continue. We need to manage them all better both in prison and in probation.
Chair: Thank you very much. I want to get one more topic in, in the last 10 minutes, but, Pam, do you want to ask a question?
Q669 Pam Cox: It was just on that point that Sir Ashley made. As I understand it, the OASys system has been used in probation for many years, which is a quantitative means of assessing and calculating risk. The use of tools to calculate risk is nothing new. I believe it was introduced by the previous Government many years ago.
Jim Barton: That is absolutely correct. OASys is a system that we are replacing. For the last few years, it has used an algorithmic tool called OGRS3. We are upgrading that to OGRS4. OGRS is an acronym. It basically takes the latest evidence and data to ensure that that tool is even more accurate in the assessment it is making.
Lord Timpson: One other thing for Sir Ashley is that when people leave prison there is a presumption that they will go on electronic monitoring. Some of them are tagged at source at prison; others are tagged as soon as they get home. That is another part of our risk management strategy.
Chair: Let us have some questions on electronic monitoring.
Q670 Tony Vaughan: I want to continue on this theme, because the question of public protection following release and how we use electronic monitoring for that is important. What is the anticipated increase in the numbers of offenders who are going to be tagged now compared to September 2026? Are you confident in Serco’s ability to deliver that expansion given the concerns in their contract performance in the past?
Lord Timpson: I will focus initially on Serco. One of the many problems that we inherited was an electronic monitoring service that was not working. Everything was in red and the alarm bells were ringing everywhere. I decided to sort it in the way that I would sort it out in business, which is getting everyone around the table, including Serco, and saying, “Let’s deal with this.” There were some difficult conversations, lots of regular meetings, lots of challenges, and in February we got to a place where contractually everything is in green. That does not mean everything is perfect. There are lots of things that we still need to improve around data and so on, but we are in a much calmer place. The good thing is that the technology works really well. We are also opening up the access to live monitoring for probation staff, and how we link in with the police is getting much better. There are lots of things going well, but you are right; how do we ramp up to the next stage? One is that you need money. We have £100 million of extra funding to buy more tags and pay for the services.
Q671 Tony Vaughan: Is this GPS or RF tags?
Lord Timpson: It is a mixture, with alcohol tags as well. Jim can give us the detail.
Jim Barton: There are a few things to add. I first got involved in electronic monitoring in 2020. At that point, the caseload was about 10,000. Today, it is 28,000, so there has been significant growth during that period, including the introduction of new technologies. GPS is now the most used form of tag. As for the roll-out of alcohol monitoring, I think we are still the only jurisdiction in the world that utilises alcohol monitoring across the country. About 5,000 individuals with a—
Q672 Tony Vaughan: It is a tag.
Jim Barton: Yes. A sobriety tag measures blood alcohol through sweat. For 97% of the days that individuals have an alcohol tag on their leg, they are sober. If you take a step back and reflect on it, they have a tag on their leg because they previously had an alcohol problem, so that is quite dramatic.
Your original question was: what is our forecast for where we will get to? We are re-running the numbers at the moment. Against that current position of a caseload of 28,000, we think we will probably be nudging 40,000 once we have fully implemented all the ambitions that Lord Timpson and the Deputy Prime Minister have announced. We are confident in both Serco and Allied Universal, which provide the tags. Orders have been delivered around the additional stock of tags that we will need: RF curfew tags, GPS and alcohol. Serco has a really strong track record over the course of the last year or so at responding to additional demand, notwithstanding the very difficult territory that we were in 18 months or two years ago. If we focus initially on fixed-term recall 56, this was, again, a Sentencing Act change introduced from March this year washing away FTR 14 and 28 and replacing that with 56 days as a standard fixed-term recall period and extending eligibility for that. I think I am right that about 2,000 individuals were released under the application of that scheme, of which just over half were tagged. Serco absorbed that additional volume without seeing any deterioration in contract performance. It has stayed green against all of its contractual indicators during that period.
Q673 Tony Vaughan: You indicated quite a large increase of offenders who will be on these tags to manage them in the community. What are the carrots and what are the sticks to ensure that if there is substandard contract performance you can take action in the moment to steer them back in the right direction?
Lord Timpson: Do you mean Serco or the offenders?
Q674 Tony Vaughan: On the part of the Government, what are the carrots and sticks that you can pose to Serco to make sure that it actually pulls its socks up if that seems necessary?
Lord Timpson: There are two parts to that. One is the contractual obligations that we pay for as a Government, and the other is the ongoing relationship that we have with them. It is very much a partnership. It is around its teams working with our teams and our data working with its data. The technology needs to keep moving on as well. We have the levers in the contract. I have been really pleased with how we have turned what was a very difficult relationship into something that is really positive.
Q675 Tony Vaughan: What was the problem there? One might suppose that the elements that you just described are all constant and have been constant throughout the periods of poor contractual performance. You must be saying more than the fact that you all get on a bit better. There must be an imposition of some kind of threat or penalty that you can impose if you need to, versus incentivisations if they do.
Lord Timpson: There are certain parts of the contract that we cannot go into, but Jim can enlighten us on what we can.
Jim Barton: First, just to describe what was different then that led to the problems compared to now, essentially, there was a performance deterioration in the period immediately before Serco took on the contract and then the first few months of it operating it, and that performance deterioration was dramatic. From my perspective, that was principally around—forgive the managerial speak—the productivity that Serco was able to extract from its staff at that point in time. Essentially, there were fewer visits being undertaken and then completed successfully than it had assumed would be the case. That led to a backlog. The challenge, as ever with backlogs, is you then need to climb the mountain and some to be able to get the additional capacity to then burn down that backlog.
Serco was very seized of the scale of this challenge for it and for UK Government plc, because of the focus and tone that Lord Timpson and others applied at that point. Serco to its credit invested significantly—literal investment and then investment of senior management capability—to turn that picture around. We are in a very good place at the moment in terms of Serco’s performance, but none of us is at all casual or relaxed around it.
On the question of penalties, there is a service credit regime within the contract during that period in which Serco was not meeting service levels. We applied that service credit regime in full.
Tony Vaughan: All right. Is there time, Chair, to ask a last question about women in prison?
Chair: Just about.
Q676 Tony Vaughan: I will ask this very quickly. You rejected the Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee’s recommendation for a new electronic monitoring strategy but agreed that clear communication is essential if the expansion of EM is to work. Could you set out what strategic action you are taking ahead of the expansion of electronic monitoring? Are there any particular things that you are doing to ensure that tagging is imposed in a way that is trauma-informed? There have been quite a lot of reports, particularly from Women in Prison, talking about women being tagged in houses with abusive partners, health concerns not being taken account of and things like that.
Lord Timpson: There is a lot of innovation going on in the tagging arena. One is proximity tags, which helps victims to be informed of when their perpetrator is near them. They have the freedom not just to stay within a certain area but to go across the whole country. So far as how we manage that risk, we have a presumption that people will be tagged when they leave prison, but it needs to be done in a safe and humane way. Jim, can you give us the details of how it practically works in that case where they are asking someone to go and live with an abusive partner?
Jim Barton: Without knowing the facts of that case, that should not happen. That is the starting point. For any individual to be subject to a tag, particularly a curfew, there is a requirement that we undertake domestic safeguarding checks to ensure that there are not factors around that individual being confined to a home address as a result of a curfew requirement that could expose them to a risk that we think is unmanageable or disproportionate. Apologies, I am not across the facts of that specific case, but the headline is that it should not happen because we mandate safeguarding checks before imposition of a tag requirement.
Q677 Tony Vaughan: Is there a contractual mechanism whereby, if that did happen and somebody complained about it, it would be held against Serco?
Jim Barton: To be fair, that would not be a Serco responsibility or risk. The assessment as to whether somebody should be tagged sits predominantly with HMPPS. There is some nuance. Obviously we have immigration cases as well where that assessment will be done by the Home Office, but it is our assessment. Serco staff have safeguarding training. There are instances where a field monitoring officer has gone into a home address, observed features or factors within that domestic environment that they consider to be of concern, and reported that to Serco, which reported it to us, and action has been taken.
Q678 Chair: Thank you. Serco did not tell us when it came before the Committee a few weeks ago how many additional clients it would have—how many more people would be tagged. Do you know what that figure is?
Jim Barton: We do not know precisely as yet, because there have been some adjustments in our modelling. As I referenced, the current caseload is about 28,000. By the time we have implemented all the reforms that we plan, which is not just progression but things like piloting proximity monitoring, rolling out acquisitive crime to the other half of the police forces that do not have it at the moment, rolling out domestic abuse perpetrators on licence to the few probation regions where that does not happen, we will be nudging a caseload of 40,000.
Chair: Okay.
Jim Barton: I am looking forward to my stats colleagues being cross with me when I am back in the office.
Q679 Chair: If you want to correct that or add information to that—
Jim Barton: It is of that order of magnitude but is not yet a final fixed figure.
Q680 Chair: To make the maximum use of our time, can I ask you this? The majority of recalls are not for further offending. Seventy-five per cent of IPPs are not for further offending. That is wrong, is it not? That needs to be addressed. One radical suggestion would be that probation officers are not doing the recall. There is a perception that probation officers are recalling for understandable reasons because they are risk averse. How would you address that?
Lord Timpson: The release test has not changed in many years. What is clear is that in 1990 there were about 100 people in prison back on recall and now we are at well over 10,000. Something has clearly gone wrong. What has gone wrong is that there has been a lack of investment in the justice system, a lack of investment in our Probation Service, and a lack of will to address all the issues. These people have committed serious offences, but they are often the most complex people in society, and we need to be much better at finding them a home, dealing with their addiction issues, supporting them with their mental health challenges, getting them a job, and giving them that wraparound support. If we do that, it means that we are far less likely to need to recall somebody. People are recalled based on the recall test. Our probation staff do an incredible job. I take your point that we need to keep investing in our staff, but I am envisaging that with more stability and higher functioning of our Prison and Probation Service you will see fewer recalls.
Q681 Chair: I do not want to put words in your mouth, but you are saying that if you can improve the morale, performance and resourcing of probation, that will correct itself.
Lord Timpson: Yes. If people leave prison and they are not addicted to drugs, they have somewhere to live, they have a job and their health journey is linked in when they are released, they are far less likely to be recalled because they are far less likely to present a high risk.
Q682 Chair: Finally, you said that you plan to deliver face-to-face expectation with the highest-risk offenders through an overall rebalancing of staff time away from lower-risk offenders. Does “lower-risk offenders” mean people who have committed less serious offences, or does it mean less prolific offenders? There is a perception that prolific offenders should certainly be subject to that scrutiny.
Lord Timpson: It is based on risk. Chair, let me give you an example. When I was running the Timpson business, I employed lots of people who had been to prison. A number of them went to prison for quite a long time, and a number of them became incredibly successful colleagues having highly paid jobs with a lot of responsibility. I always thought it was a bit of a waste of public money that they still have to go and see their probation officer once a week when they are doing a brilliant job and their life is completely turned around. We are much better off using that resource on those who are the highest risk. That is what I mean by rebalancing it.
Q683 Chair: Highest risk of committing further offences.
Lord Timpson: Yes, and how we judge risk. There are lots of different ways we judge risk.
Jim Barton: And risk of committing seriously harmful further offences. It is not simply the act of committing an offence but the level of harm that that offending profile could pose to the community.
Q684 Chair: What do you do with perhaps less serious offences but very prolific offenders?
Lord Timpson: One area that I believe we should focus on and probably focus more on, seeing it through the intensive supervision course, is the wraparound support. When I went to Liverpool, I went to the intensive supervision court, which is basically focused on heroin and crack cocaine users. How do we deal with this health problem? How do we deal with this addiction? That is where our focus needs to be. The reason for prolific offending is virtually always to do with mental health and addiction. One area that we are really pushing—in fact I have a big roundtable next week—is around gambling addiction. One thing that we recognise is that gambling is a significant extra part of the story that we probably have not understood as much. Gamblers Anonymous goes to Wormwood Scrubs twice a week to do sessions, which I think is fantastic. I would like to see more of that.
Chair: Good. Thank you very much. There we are. We have almost exhausted, I hope, you and certainly our questions. Thank you very much for coming today. Thank you for helping us get through the questions with your very clear and succinct answers. We have a series of votes, so I am going to close business for today there.