I want first to add a comment to Mr Blair’s response to Mr Johnson’s question.
It is not just about money, although money is great and we would always want more so that we could do more. On the information and evidence that criminal justice social work receives to inform our risk and needs assessment and the level of service/case management inventory tool, what is sorely lacking is the summaries of evidence that are narrated in court. More often than not, the social worker is entirely reliant on the information that the offender provides for the criminal justice social work report.
This has been a bone of contention for a long time and has been raised on numerous occasions in every conceivable forum. It is a critical part of enabling the social worker to provide a much more evidence-based and objective report on risk and need. Without it, we are entirely reliant on the offender’s version of events. There may be important information missing from that, particularly in relation to victims. We get such information on sex offenders and that is helpful and informative. My plea is for that to be considered for other offenders.
I appreciate that there are practical issues relating to how those summaries are often narrated in court—they are not written down, which creates a problem. I am sure, however, that there is a way to get over that hurdle. It would significantly improve the strength and quality of risk and needs assessments if we were to have that information routinely on every occasion.
I want to say a few things on the issues around alcohol. In our submission, we noted that how people change their behaviour is not a linear process; people go through a cycle of change, sometimes several times. Relapse is not always the case but, more often than not, it is part of the cycle. I am sure that we can all think of examples from dieting or trying to stop smoking of how often people go back to their previous behaviour and start the cycle again. With alcohol monitoring, there is a risk that things can be seen too much in black and white. If we are going to have legislation on that—which I support—we will have to have the right guidance so that there is a recognition that there is a high likelihood that someone who is required not to use alcohol will breach that requirement at some point, and that, therefore, on-going management of that individual will have to be part of the sentence. That is a critically important point to make. Parole licence conditions often say that someone must not drink, but that creates a problem in cases in which there is a dependency, because it is asking something that is just not possible. We have to be mindful of that when we are creating the legislation and the landscape around remote alcohol monitoring.
We must also not forget the post-sentence issue—this applies to all electronic monitoring and, indeed, potentially all sentencing options. Research suggests that, when somebody gets to the end of the period of statutory supervision, there is often a question of how they can sustain the level that they have reached. If somebody has made good progress through their CPO or their prison licence, how can that progress be sustained beyond that period of statutory supervision? We have to give considerable thought to that. The solution might involve the third sector or further resources. However, if we are looking at this as a medium to long-term issue, we have to build that in. People will only be on CPOs for a maximum of three years. Most people on licences will not be on those licences for ever. What happens after that? Social work will obviously try to link people into community-based resources, but those resources need to be there in order to make that work.