Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 23
Seventy-Eighth Report - Resettlement support for prison leavers
Published 11 Nov 2023
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Improving resettlement support for prison leavers All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
HMPPS told us it is proud of the progress made on employment support initiatives with 25% of prison leavers from April 2022 to February 2023 employed after six months, compared with 17% in 2021–22.57 But HMPPS’s plans to evaluate its employment initiatives are still in the early stages and as of May 2023 it had no firm plans to carry out essential impact evaluations. Determining whether recent improvements in prison leavers’ outcomes are attributable to its interventions or whether they may have happened anyway will be a key challenge for HMPPS.58 MoJ told us it is “hard to identify exact causality” in complex systems but it is confident that HMPPS’ employment initiatives in prisons are “making a big difference”.59 Managing increased demand
From: Public Accounts Committee, Seventy-Eighth Report - Resettlement support for prison leavers (HC 1329), 11 November 2023
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 14 February 2024 (deadline 11 January 2024).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government says it agrees with each of the Committee's recommendations on resettlement support for prison leavers, giving target dates for several of them.
- On inequalities, HMPPS is planning a programme of work to understand disparities in resettlement outcomes, and says that "By April 2025" it will deliver this analysis across prioritised thematic areas.
- On an action plan, HMPPS will "respond to the Committee by the six-month deadline" and says its plan will aim for "an adequate and consistent resettlement service" for all prison leavers by April 2025.
- On substance misuse, MoJ and the Department of Health and Social Care will develop a proposal on metrics, and the government says it will publish these metrics routinely, with a target implementation date of summer 2024.
- On evaluation, impact evaluations are "expected to be complete" by summer 2024, though findings on impact for some initiatives will only be available beyond 2024.