Uncork the Gauke! In the coalition years, whenever George Osborne found himself in a tight spot as Chancellor, advisers would send for David Gauke, who was then a Treasury minister. The tall, imposing but unflappable Gauke would tour the radio and TV studios to deliver a measured message of reassurance, calming the political waters and restoring some credibility to whatever government policy was in the spotlight.
This week, Gauke has been uncorked again – this time by Labour – to solve the prison capacity crisis. When the party came to office, the population in men’s jails across England and Wales was rising so fast it was about to outstrip the number of places. Emergency measures, including the early release of inmates, gave the government some breathing space, with funding made available for 14,000 additional places by 2031. But ministers were aware that without more fundamental changes prisons would still run out of room, so they turned for ideas (and political cover) to Gauke, a lawyer who served as justice secretary under Theresa (now Baroness) May.
The MoJ and the Home Office are heading in different directions
The 53-year-old’s review, published today, recommends a massive switch from imprisonment to community penalties and remote monitoring. Prisoners could qualify for early release after spending one-third of their sentence in custody through good behaviour and compliance with prison rules under an ‘earned progression model’. Jail terms of less than 12 months would be used only in ‘exceptional circumstances’ and there’d be an expansion of suspended and deferred prison sentences.
The most powerful argument for shifting from imprisonment to community-based sentences is money. The bill for keeping someone in prison for a year is almost £54,000; community sentences cost around £3,000, on average. For some groups of offenders, particularly those convicted of non-violent crimes who do not pose a physical threat to the public, such as fraudsters, there’s a strong case to be made for a regime of tagging, curfews, travel bans and other restrictions as an alternative to custody. But the widespread use of community orders and supervision suggested by Gauke risks undermining public protection and confidence in the system – and will not slow the cycle of reoffending.
Reoffending rates are defined as the proportion of offenders who, within a 12-month follow-up period, commit a further crime which they are convicted of or given an out-of-court sanction for. When offenders receive a community order, the 12 months starts from the moment they are sentenced. For offenders who are jailed, the clock starts ticking when they leave prison. Claims in the report that community sentences are more effective at cutting reoffending than prison sentences are misleading because the prison reoffending rate takes no account of the time prisoners are in custody – when they are clearly not committing further crimes against the public. There’s a real danger that the substantial reduction in the use of imprisonment proposed by Gauke, amounting to 9,800 fewer inmates by 2028, won’t in fact lead to significantly less reoffending. It could conceivably increase it.
For his plan to work, there would have to be a huge turnaround in the performance of the already overstretched probation service, which is struggling with a shortfall of 1,500 staff. Gauke calls for more investment, but it’s not just about resources; officers are bogged down by bureaucracy and many lack experience and professional curiosity, vital tools to do the job. The latest annual report of the chief inspector of probation, published in March, revealed that of the 24 probation ‘delivery units’ observed, ten were rated ‘requires improvement’ and 14 as ‘inadequate’.
Central to Gauke’s proposed reforms is a massive shift towards electronic tagging and GPS tracking, with tens of thousands more offenders expected to be monitored remotely. But the record of SERCO, the company contracted by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to fit the devices and ensure they’re operating, does not inspire confidence, with reports that some criminals have gone weeks without being tagged. Ministers have described SERCO’s work in this area as ‘unacceptable’, after it failed to meet 11 of its 14 key performance indicators, and there’s a serious risk that the plans will come unstuck unless there’s a dramatic improvement.
At 192 pages, there is, however, much to commend in the report. Among a series of practical and well-thought-through proposals, it calls for legal changes to speed up the deportation of some of the 10,800 foreign nationals in prison, suggests courts be given greater flexibility to impose driving bans as part of a sentence and says chemical castration should be used more widely on sex offenders. And, crucially, it correctly identifies the main risk to its ‘bold’ ideas failing to succeed in limiting the prison population: the political need to be ‘tough’ on crime.
If the proposals contained in this review are to be anything other than a temporary reset, politicians need to resist the temptation to believe that…every problem in the criminal justice system should be answered by legislating for longer sentences.
So says Gauke, hinting at an issue that has seldom been spoken about since Labour came to office: that the MoJ and the Home Office are heading in different directions.
In 2010, after May was appointed Home Secretary, she used to tell a joke about her counterpart at the MoJ, Ken Clarke. ‘He lets ‘em out, I lock ‘em up,’ she would say, in a reference to the two departments’ competing priorities. The same is true now. As the MoJ tries to clear a record backlog of court cases and contain the growing prison population, the Home Office is pursuing policies which are likely to do just the opposite. Its investment in 13,000 extra neighbourhood police officers will result in more arrests and charges, as will new powers to tackle antisocial behaviour and a raft of fresh offences on child criminal exploitation, knife crime and assaults on retail workers.
In the months ahead, the Home Office will also come under increasing pressure to fulfil a promise made in Labour’s general election manifesto to ‘drive up’ the proportion of crimes solved, particularly shoplifting, sexual offences and domestic abuse. Even a modest one percentage point rise in the charge rate, which at present stands at a paltry 7 per cent, would mean a further 50,000 prosecutions.
It was not for David Gauke’s review to resolve this apparent contradiction in government policy, between the desperate need to limit the prison population and election promises to bring more offenders to justice. But ministers may well discover that it’s impossible to achieve both.
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