David Lammy - National EQUAL Offender Network
Congress House, London - 31 March 2008

I would like to start by thanking the LSC for asking me to share my thoughts about the how we get offenders back into learning and then into work. How we can offer them a chance to have a fresh start by improving their education and skills.
At the December NEON event, I had the pleasure of talking to Erwin James, the ex-lifer turned Guardian columnist. I'd like to start with a quote from one of his columns. He says: “The majority of people who are churned in and out of the system year on year are those with limited skills and abilities. They are people with failings, with educational deficiencies, mental health problems, emotional disturbance…”
Erwin, like the people in this room is a passionate advocate of rehabilitation policies. He praises the army of teachers, trainers, facilitators and counsellors trying to help break the cycle of offending and imprisonment.

Your work is crucial to breaking that cycle - it's an exciting time to be involved in offender learning, I feel like we are gathering momentum. We have achieved a great deal, but our efforts to improve offenders' prospects of finding work and are pressing.
Because the more successfully we work to unlock an offender's potential, the less likely we are to have to admit failure by locking them up again.

There was praise for the way skills and employment are organised in prisons in the Anne Owers report, but she said best practice was patchy. The recent NAO reports on offender learning and on probation emphasised the need to examine how and where we are spending our money and to ensure we are getting the most from it.
This means we need to learn from your projects which have led the way on innovation and spread good practice.
When the formal inspection of learning provision was first introduced in prisons in 2002-3, only around two in ten providers passed. That was clearly shocking, and although it was up to seven in ten last year, we can't rest until offender learning is of the same calibre as other sorts of provision in the system.
We now know much more than we used to about what qualifications are being done where and by whom.

So our next urgent step is to understand how to put those qualifications to use by getting offenders into jobs. Recent evidence suggests that the problem is not finding employers to take on offenders and ex-offenders, but ensuring the offenders are ready for the world of work.

Tackling these issues is important as it is a cost which society bears every day.

The prison population continues to rise. The number of adult prisoners has risen by 36% over the last decade and by last September stood at almost 82,000. And that's not counting a further quarter of a million people either on probation or on license.
I know you won't expect me of all people to mention this without also mentioning the fact that a disproportionate number of them come from black and other minority ethnic communities. Communities that also suffer disproportionately not only from poverty, but from poverty of educational achievement and poverty of aspiration.
All these things are linked.
The cost to taxpayers of re-offending by ex-prisoners alone totals £11 billion.
And the key statistic here is that more than half of all offenders are convicted of a subsequent offence within two years of being released.
We hold some of solutions to reducing that figure in our own hands.
I'd like to go through our approach with you and also talk about what we're going to need your help to do.
The first priority is learning and skills, because they play a strong role in preventing young people from becoming offenders in the first place. If you truant from school you are 30 times more likely to become involved in crime and half of all offenders were excluded from school.
It might seem obvious but I think it bears repeating that if you have no qualifications to begin with then you are much more likely to become a criminal - 52% of male and 71% of female prisoners have no qualifications whatsoever.

The good news is that we have started to shift these figures in the right direction. The bad news is that there is still a huge amount to do.
I'm glad to be the joint chair of the Inter-Ministerial Group on Reducing Re-Offending where I can see the backing these policies have across Government.
As Frances has explained, we are launching a new strategy of reducing re-offending later this year following our consultation.
The complexity of the causes of re-offending cries out for multi-agency working. That's why we need to support what the education and skills sector is doing with the close involvement of the Department for Work and Pensions on prisoner employment and benefits issues; that of the Department for Communities and Local Government on accommodation questions; and that of the Department of health on prisoner wellbeing.

The people I talk to about this say the same thing. That offenders in the community and in custody desperately want opportunities to better themselves and improve their prospects. I have seen this for myself and I have seen the way in which it can turn lives around.
The proportion of offenders participating in learning and skills had risen to 35% by last year but we desperately need to increase that. And we must now track then into sustainable employment.
As you will know, following the 2005 Green Paper, Reducing Re-Offending through Skills and Employment, the Next Steps reforms were announced in 2006. A partnership approach was essential to making this work because creating a co-ordinated and integrated system can have a huge impact.

I know Equal Engage has contributed a great deal to this agenda and now this needs to be mainstreamed. I'm keen to see examples that you are hearing about today from Trackworks, Intercontinental Hotels and others used to form new partnerships.

I want to see more public sector involvement and particular following the example of Southampton City Council leads a partnership to consolidate services for offenders. And I want to see many more companies like Cisco Systems and Bovis Lendlease making links to provide training and jobs.
These schemes work because employers are engaged with them and offenders know that their training is leading to something less vague and more concrete.

I want to see more local action where offender learning is joined up with businesses. We can learn lessons from these schemes and from your work.

Offenders in the community can access the mainstream help that the LSC and Job Centre Plus offer - though some will need help to prepare them for those interventions. It is important that we signpost probation services and trusts to the wide array of help available and that those who deal with probationers don't end up having to re-invent the wheel.

In prisons we will be promoting three models that appear to work well and secure more jobs for offenders.

First, the Trackwork/National Grid model, where prisoners are released under temporary licence to develop industry specific skills and receive a firm offer of a job on release, as long as they perform.

I don't have to tell you how important that firm offer is.

Second, the Railtrack model, where the company sets up training facilities inside the prison to deliver industry-specific qualifications for jobs on release.

Third, the Prison Industries model, where prisons set up workshops that employ prisoners make money for the prison and these skills are useful to offenders on leaving prison. This is an area ripe for expansion as Debra Baldwin has indicated.

Employers have told us that they do not have a problem employing offenders, but if we falter with the supply of work-ready offenders then we will miss a golden opportunity. And employers will simply look elsewhere for labour - usually to overseas.

Going back to Erwin's quote from the start, helping offenders to get their lives back on track means helping them to do more than address their skills needs. These are people who often have overlapping disadvantage - mental and physical health problems, emotional disturbance and drug addictions.

So another strand of Next Steps is about developing an integrated set of services, the “campus” which will bring together and co-ordinate the delivery of the interventions an offender needs. It will also ensure they are tackled in the right sequence and are mutually reinforcing. And we need to deliver this in a smart way.

I'm delighted to see that the Next Steps test beds regions have risen to this challenge are developing models for a virtual campus based on good practice I saw in Sweden last year.

And the environment must exist where offenders are presented with rewards for positive behaviour and punishments for negative or disruptive behaviour.
For example: ensuring employment opportunities are only offered as a reward for keeping clean of drugs. The test beds are developing employability compacts which will make this evident.

Conclusion

As the minister for skills, I am constantly pushing the message of “skills for life” and continuous training for people throughout their careers and for offenders it is no exception.

That does not mean that probation services should follow ex-offenders for the rest of their lives, but instead probation services can try to instil a sense of the link between learning and earning. We need to link an offender's good learning habits whilst in our care to the continuing need to learn and train when they are out working with an employer. The Train to Gain scheme offers a particularly good opportunity to press this forward.

I'll look forward to hearing from Steve Waldron in a minute about the offender perspective. But I'd just like to conclude by saying that I firmly believe this is the only way we can reduce re-offending which blights the lives of offenders and their victims, and the only way to reduce the bill to the taxpayer. I know you will rise to this challenge. Thanks.