Employment support for ex-prisoners – the Work and Pensions Committee get the benefit of lived experience
Revolving Doors believes that everyone has the right to work. We know that good quality work can help to support recovery and desistance in a number of ways – through increased personal and financial resilience, through greater autonomy and self-esteem, and through new and broader social networks. While work isn’t a panacea, the evidence of the effect of employment on reoffending is persuasive. We also know that, despite a number of reforms designed to support people from prison into work, relatively few currently make the transition.
The Work and Pensions Select Committee is a cross-party group of MPs that provides scrutiny of Government policy and activity. While select committees don’t make national policy, they are influential and are highly effective in holding Government to account. When the Work & Pensions Committee announced in March that they were going to look into employment support for ex-offenders, we got in touch with them straight away.
Thursday afternoon isn’t a good time to invite a member of a select committee to anything – many MPs will be on their way back to their constituencies. We were delighted, though, to welcome one of the clerks of the Committee to the forum held on the 14th April, who observed a lively discussion with six members of the forum, all of whom have recent experience of serving a prison sentence.
A number of themes emerged, all explored in some detail. Essentially, there are opportunities to improve services and outcomes at every stage of the process. At key points – prison entry, while serving a sentence, ahead of release and on transition to the community, there are shortcomings. The group identified problems ranging from patchy access to education, training and employment (ETE) opportunities in prison, provided by staff who sometimes seem demotivated and, possibly, too ready to write-off people determined to turn their lives around. They also spoke about complicated systems, both in prison and in the community, that are rigid, inflexible, and don’t provide the sort of support that participants had wanted and needed.
There was unanimity around the importance of housing on release from prison – the Committee acknowledges the importance of housing and has included help to find accommodation in their inquiry. Participants, one of whom now works for a housing service that acts as a link from prison to the community, agreed that while there are examples of excellent and effective practice, provision was patchy and, overall, inadequate.
Finally, it’s important to stress that even if nobody from the Committee had been available, we would have had this discussion with the forum anyway. We’re determined to ensure that lived experience is at the heart of all our policy work, and yesterday’s discussion, in addition to being reported back to the Committee by the clerk, will also form the core of our written submission of evidence. There are usually restrictions on when written evidence can be published, as it becomes the property of the Committee once it’s been submitted, but we will post it on our website at the earliest opportunity and, with the Work and Health Programme being designed at the moment and devolution throwing up other opportunities, we will continue to find ways to influence labour market policy and provision for the revolving doors cohort.
