Chris Grayling MP: Here are the reforms I'm announcing today to support and manage offenders

Chris Grayling is the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, and MP for Epsom and Ewell

If you sit with a group of current or former offenders, you almost always get the same message. Most started on crime when they were young, would like to stop, but often do not know how to get their lives back together, and get themselves into a position where they get a stable home and a job. And all too often when they leave prison, the easy option is just to do the same thing all over again.

Crime in Britain today is very different to what it was a decade or two ago. There has been a steady decline in the number of people committing crime for the first time. There are fewer entrants to the criminal justice system. And crime is falling as a result. Better policing, tougher punishments, more thoughtful interventions by the voluntary and public sector, often supported by private sponsorship, are helping steer more and more young people away from the temptations of crime.

None the less, there is a hard core who are different. More and more of our crime is being committed by the same people, going round and round the system again and again. Chances are the person who walks into a prison for the first time will end up back there again and again over the course of the following decade or more. Reoffending in Britain today is moving upwards.  Almost 50 per cent of those who do time in our prisons will reoffend again within a year. And yet we know the things that can make a difference. Stable relationships. Somewhere to live. Mentoring and support. A job.

But our current system is a chaotic mix of the good and the bad. Within probation trusts there are hardworking people doing a professional job in containing crime. Within parts of the voluntary sector, there is excellent work helping to build stability in the life of an offender. However, it’s patchy. And inadequate and chaotic. The Justice Select Committee found recently that only 25 per cent of probation staff time is actually spent working with offenders.  I want a system where probation professionals can focus on what they do best - doing what works to tackle individual offenders' specific needs.

Worse still, prisoners who go to jail for less than a year get no support or supervision at all after they leave – and most go back to a life of crime. There is little relationship between where you are detained and where you will live after your release. More than a hundred prisons, all over the country, send released prisoners back to London. Small wonder there is little or no adequate through the gate support to ensure that prisoners are properly prepared for release and then given guidance when they get there.

That’s why we are pushing ahead with the most radical reforms to our system of supporting and managing offenders for decades. At the heart of the reforms are three big changes.

The first involves extending supervision to all prisoners when they leave prison, and not just those who serve more than a year. There will be no more offenders walking down the street outside their jail with £46 in their pocket, often nowhere to go, and no one to help them. It has been a travesty, and it will stop.

The second involves a massive shake up of our prison system, so we can provide proper through the gate support. In future, almost all prisoners will spend the last few months of their sentence in a prison local to their home.

The third involves the creation of that new type of through the gate support. We’re bringing in the best of the private and the voluntary sectors to reinforce what the public sector does. I want to see a new kind of service emerge, where prisoners are met at the gate by a mentor who has already planned for their release while they were still inside, who has worked out where they will live, what extra support, like rehab or training, they will need, and will serve as a wise friend and supporter to them for a year after they leave.

And crucially, we will give the organisations who deliver that new service much more freedom and much less bureaucracy to operate in – but in return they will be partly paid by results. That’s absolutely the right way to deliver innovative new ideas, but to protect the interests of the taxpayer.

Of course that won’t work for every prisoner. There are some deeply dangerous and unpleasant people out there, and they will continue to be supervised closely by   a new National public probation service. Wherever there is a serious risk of harm to the public, we will make sure that it is Government and the public sector that watches over that risk.

Today marks a major milestone in the development of our plans. There’s been enormous interest from both the private sector and the voluntary sector over the last few months. We’re now inviting them to state a clear interest in being part of our tendering process. And we’re setting out in much more detail how the new system will work. 

The Conservative Party will always take a tough line on crime. If we are not the party of law and order, we are nothing. But in the interests of our society and the victims of crime, we also need to understand the reoffending problem, and take real strides to solve it. That’s what these reforms are all about. 

Chris Grayling MP: No more Sky subscriptions. No more 18 certificate DVDs. Why I'm launching today's tougher prison regime.

Chris Grayling is the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice

The Conservative Party is the party of law and order, or it is nothing at all. The public have always known that Conservatives will take their protection most seriously, and that belief should never be allowed to wither.

But we are no longer simply the Party of hanging and flogging. The world has moved on. Today’s Conservatives must find the right balance between punishment and rehabilitation. Punishment, because crime should have consequences. Rehabilitation. because reoffending destroys lives - and the cycle of people rotating round and round our criminal justice system costs a fortune and leaves far too many victims.

Whether you are the hardest hardliner on crime, or the woolliest liberal, we all have an interest in effective rehabilitation. That’s why we are pressing ahead with the biggest reforms to our probation system in a generation, and why we are looking at new ways of detaining teenage criminals to improve their skills and education.

But we need to act in our prisons too. In too many ways, the regime in our prisons has become too lax. Rewards are given for simply being passive, not for self-improvement. Perks are available that many on the outside cannot afford – or which are wholly inappropriate in a prison. All of that has to change.

Chris Grayling MP: The charities and groups who will help deliver our Work Programme

Chris Grayling is Minister for Welfare Reform at the Department for Work and Pensions.

Today we fire the starting gun on what I hope will be a revolution in the way  government works.

That revolution comes in the form of the Work Programme, the biggest welfare to work plan that this country has yet seen, and more importantly probably the biggest payment by results scheme that any Government has attempted.

Gordon Brown launched welfare to work in Britain thirteen years ago with the advent of his New Deals. But his approach just didn’t work. Top-down programmes were designed in Whitehall, and willing companies were paid to deliver those programmes with little incentive to succeed.

As one participant wrote to me in frustration a few years ago, it seemed to those taking part that they were just “bums on seats” for the organisations running the New Deals.

Billions of pounds were spent to little effect.

And yet Britain desperately needed effective welfare to work. Throughout the good years for the economy jobs were created – between three and four million in total. And yet again and again those jobs went to migrant workers entering Britain from overseas. People travelled thousands of miles and found work. Those on welfare down the road stayed there.

Chris Grayling MP: How the Government's Work Programme will tackle long-term worklessness

Chris Grayling is Minister for Welfare Reform at the Department for Work and Pensions.

The one thing this Government cannot be accused of is a lack of ambition. After thirteen wasted years, we are determined to get to grips with the deep seated economic issues and the profound social problems that are holding this country back. Our welfare reform plans lie at the heart of both those challenges – and today marks a big move forward in making those plans a reality.

Over the next few years the arrival of the Universal Credit, together with our planned benefit cap and changes to housing benefit, will have a huge impact on the welfare state.

But the first big step down the road to reform will come in the spring and summer of next year. Firstly, we will begin the task of migrating 1.6 million people off incapacity benefit, with the goal of getting as many as possible back into work.

And then next summer we will launch the Work Programme, Britain's biggest employment programme for decades, to provide them with the specialist support that those who are stranded on benefits need to help them get back into work.

The core goal of the Work Programme is to tackle one of the key failings of the past decade. Under Labour employment in the United Kingdom rose by nearly four million. And yet the vast majority of the new jobs created were taken up by people moving into this country from overseas.

Chris Grayling MP: We will make work pay

Yesterday evening ConservativeHome published a ten point briefing to the Coalition's historic welfare reform. On Platform today Chris Grayling MP, Minister for Employment, explains the reforms.

There’s no point being in Government if you can’t make a difference.

And if you don’t arrive in Government determined to act quickly and effectively, before you know it the chance will be gone.

That’s why reform can’t hang around. And nowhere is reform more needed than in our welfare state.

Worklessness in Britain today isn’t simply a consequence of recession. Of course unemployment has risen sharply because of the economic difficulties of the past two years – and that has to be tackled. But even in the good economic years of the past decade, when millions of people managed to come to the UK from overseas and find work, some five million people in this country remained stranded on benefits. One in five households had no one in work.

We arrived in Government with one big plan for reform already well developed. The Work Programme, which we will launch in 2011, and for which contracting is already well under way, will transform the welfare to work landscape. It will put an end to the situation where anyone who can work will be able to sit at home on benefits doing nothing. There will be much better back-to-work support available to claimants, but if they refuse to use that support, they will lose their benefits.

But five months into Government, the Work Programme is no longer the only key welfare reform in town. The plan to replace our creaking benefit system with a new, single Universal Credit will transform the welfare landscape in Britain.

The Universal Credit is based on a simple premise – that work should pay for everyone in all circumstances. We have to end the absurd situation where people doing more for themselves and their families can end up losing 95p in the pound of the extra money they earn, as they lose benefits and tax credits, and pay more tax. Under the new system, that can no longer happen. Instead, state support will taper away at a constant rate as people work more hours or move up the income scale.

The concept for the Credit has not come out of the blue. It was worked on in detail before the election by Iain Duncan Smith’s team at the Centre for Social Justice. But having watched the last few months from the inside, I cannot help but be impressed by the way in which he has turned his vision into a tangible plan for action. And, I should say, by the way a team of sometimes maligned civil servants have risen to the challenge of planning massive change.

The desire for radical change to our welfare system is to be found right across the coalition. A welfare state is not somewhere that people should live – unless circumstance has made it impossible for them to work. Instead it should be a ladder up which people climb. To escape the cycle of deprivation and poverty that has dogged so many of our communities over the past, long thirteen years.

We now have our vision of change firmly in place. Now the task is to deliver it.

Chris Grayling MP: We must end the extreme deprivation of Britain's cities

Chris Grayling MP is Shadow Secretary of State for Work & Pensions.

The contrasts in British city life have seldom been so stark.

Cities today have social divisions as wide as has been seen in Britain for generations – in many respects since Victorian times. Areas of the same City where almost every child lives in poverty, while nearby virtually none do. A life expectancy gap between the rich and the poor that is as wide as it has been since the nineteenth century.

Within our Cities we have local areas of extreme deprivation and social alienation from which few people escape. It’s as if there are glass walls around them – a parallel culture existing alongside all of us in our daily lives.  Where the violent and controversial world of the films Adulthood and Kidulthood come to life.

It’s a world where generations do not work.  Where children are falling behind before they even start school, and struggle through their education underachieving and falling further behind still.   Where often the gang culture on the streets offers a kind of stability and support that family life could never offer.  And where educational failure is followed by worklessness and all too often crime, antisocial behaviour, welfare dependency and often mental health problems.

Chris Grayling MP: A new kind of welfare state

Chris Grayling MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and 'Shadow Minister' for Liverpool, explains what a Conservative government would do in order to tackle welfare dependency.

A few weeks ago I was walking through Toxteth with a local youth worker. As we walked down one street I asked her how many people in the street had a job. She paused for a moment and did a brief mental count. Three, she said.

That street is less than a mile from Liverpool City Centre, site of the development of one of Britain’s biggest new shopping centres, the new Echo Arena, a planned cruise ship terminal, new hotels and plans by Peel Holdings to turn part of the old docks area into a Canary Wharf style development.

It just makes no sense at all. People trapped on benefits – a dependency culture – such a short distance from an abundance of new opportunity. It has to change.

Britain has nearly five million people on out of work benefits. We have proportionately more children being brought up in poverty than any other country in Europe. We have a cycle of dependency and underachievement that is spreading from generation to generation. We are paying a huge human and financial cost.

It’s against that background that we set out, in January, the outline of our plans for the most radical reform to our welfare state for half a century and more.