Justice Committee - weekly update

19 Jul 2019 04:17 PM

At the end of sitting weeks the Justice Committee publishes a brief summary of its activities in the form of a weekly update.

This week (commencing 15 July 2019)

Report on Transforming Rehabilitation: follow-up

This week we published a short report on probation, following up our report last year on the same subject.

We said that the Government must address the damage caused by the mistaken Transforming Rehabilitation reforms. We called for:

The Government to explain how it will recruit and retain more probation officers, including setting out current, planned and achieved numbers
Greater transparency of future probation funding, so public spend can be clearly scrutinised
Measures to ensure that the involvement of the voluntary sector, which has been pushed out, is protected and encouraged
Evidence that the £43m additional funding put into Through the Gate resettlement services (for people leaving custody) is making a difference
The MOJ to update us on their work to accommodation needs of prisoners on release, since homelessness figures are shocking

Read the report

Evidence session on Tuesday 16 July

This week the Committee held its final evidence session for its inquiry into prisons governance. The Committee took evidence from:

Dame Anne Owers, National Chair, Independent Monitoring Boards
Peter Clarke, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons
Robert Buckland QC MP, Minister of State for Justice
Jo Farrar, Chief Executive, HMPPS
Phil Copple, Director General, Prisons, HMPPS

The Committee asked questions about the oversight role of the Inspector and Independent Monitoring Boards; performance management; prison safety and decency; funding; leadership, and many other issues.

Published correspondence

Future business

Next week, the Committee will meet one more time in private. We will next meet in public after the Summer recess.

Further information