Cameron’s missed opportunity

As David noted earlier, the big headline in Nick Clegg’s speech this morning is that the government will hold some kind of inquiry into the riots after all. This climb down in the face of demands from Ed Miliband makes it all the more baffling that Cameron didn’t announce his own inquiry earlier. If he had taken the initiative, he could have determined both its terms of reference and membership which would have ensured that it came up with the right answers.

But, in policy terms, I suspect the more important announcement is that prisoners leaving jail will now be placed straight into the work programme. The work programme, masterminded by Chris Grayling, promises to be one of the coalition’s most successful initiatives. It works by paying private companies and voluntary groups to get the unemployed into work with the payments being linked to the people placed in jobs staying in them.

By putting all prisoners into the programme on release, the coalition is making it far more likely that they end up in employment and thus that there’s a better chance of them going straight.This is the kind of tough-minded and strategic approach that we need to the question of how best to rehabilitate criminals.