Prison education builds skills for life, including reading and numeracy, alongside work-focused training. We are expanding prison apprenticeships and prison industries, providing work-ready skills to support rehabilitation.
I thank the Minister for the work he is doing in prisons to improve literacy, but last week the Government confirmed to the Justice Committee that core prison education provision has been cut by a quarter nationally under retendered contracts. The independent monitoring board recently raised concerns about the impact that that will have in prisons, including Rochester prison in my constituency, on prisoner rehabilitation. We know that stable work is one of the top factors in preventing male prisoners from reoffending, so education and training are therefore key to reducing our prison population in the long term. How will the Minister ensure that this will remain a priority?
It was fantastic to visit my hon. Friend’s constituency with her just last week to visit a facility in the youth custody service, and I look forward to visiting Rochester prison with her in the future. She is right to raise this issue. There are real fiscal pressures when the two twin strategic objectives for this Department are dealing with a prison capacity crisis inherited from the previous Government and pressures in our courts, but that does not mean that we are going to overlook the importance of educational work in the prison system. We are looking at working with the third sector and the private sector to ensure that we can provide adequate provision while maintaining our two strategic aims of stabilising the prison system and solving the backlog.
Next year, the Government will spend more money on education in prisons, yet they will actually commission 25% less education by way of quantity of service. Why are they doing such a poor job of commissioning education on behalf of the taxpayer?
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who asked this question last week as well. We are raising the quality of the provision of education, but he is right to identify some issues with the contracts that the last Conservative Government entered into, which we are having to look at and deal with. As I said to him last week, it is important that we look at alternatives to those contracts. As I have just said, that includes working with the third sector and looking at how we can get more private sector provision. It also includes, as he said last week, working with governors individually to ensure that they have more autonomy and power to bring in educational facilities from local colleges and universities where it is possible and safe. I am getting to work to do that this week.