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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: The Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, is planning radical reforms of the probation service, he is giving 70% of the work probation officers do to private companies and voluntary groups. Nearly half a billion pounds worth of government money is up for grabs for those companies that win the contracts. The Probation Officers Union are not happy about that, they say the changes will put the public at risk and they are going to go on strike on Tuesday. I spoke to Mr Grayling earlier this week inside Wandsworth Prison in south London and you can watch that interview in just a moment. So now, as I was saying, here’s my interview with the Justice Secretary in Wandsworth Prison. We’re in Wandsworth Prison, it’s one of if not the biggest prison in the land, here we are seeing prisoners clearly doing something purposeful. What is it and I guess you want to see more of it I guess?

CHRIS GRAYLING: Well this is one of the workshops that we’ve got around the prison serviced, we are trying to get as many of them as possible. This is teaching craft skills that we use in the construction industry, one of the great opportunities for people when they leave prison is to get them into construction deals. If you can deliver skills development here, get the basic qualifications, it equips them for work when they leave.

DM: But even with skills such as bricklaying, ex-offenders face tough competition for work.

CHRIS GRAYLING: All too often you’ll find Eastern Europeans doing that job, having your driveway laid but I’d actually rather we got that job for somebody who has been here, has done something wrong, has faced the consequences and been punished but actually it is in none of our interests if they go straight back out and re-offend. If we can get them a worthwhile trade and they can go on to have a law abiding life, everyone wins.

DM: But what is the reality for offenders leaving prison? Roy Furness left Wandsworth Prison 18 months ago and was met by a mentor from an ex-offender’s charity.

ROY FURNESS: When I walked out the gate, my first thought wasn’t ‘let’s go to rehab’ which is where I was going, my first thought was let’s go and score some drugs basically. Literally if I wasn’t met there, I’d probably be back in there and that was the cycle of my life completely, it was in jail, out of jail, in jail, out of jail. Basically it was because I didn’t know anything else.

DM: But the Union for Probation Officers says that the changes are dangerous.

SPOKESMAN FOR UPO: They want to hive off up to 70% of the work currently undertaken of the management of lower and medium risk offenders into 21 community rehabilitation companies and allow the remaining high risk offenders, around 30%, to be managed by the National Probation Service. That causes us serious difficulties in terms of understanding how the offender intervention system is going to work properly and in fact there is every likelihood it will fall into chaos and we are going to see more prospect of serious harm and possibly more deaths as a result of a fragmented system.

DM: So there are stark warnings about the changes but does Mr Grayling see himself as a man in a hurry, driven by reforming zeal?

CHRIS GRAYLING: Well I want to deliver change quickly but I don’t want to deliver change rashly. There are some really urgent imperatives, thousands of serious violent and similar crimes are being committed every year by people who have been to jail for short sentences, have come out onto the streets with £46 in their pocket and no supervision. Now I think that’s a scandal, I think it needs to change and it needs to change quickly. Now I’m going through a process that will in terms of our probation reforms have taken more than two years to deliver and my question to those who are saying go slower, go slower – just how long do you want it to take? These are crimes being committed today, victims of crime happening today. I think we need to move as quickly as we prudently can to change that.

DM: Big changes then to bring the private sector in so quickly and you mentioned it, you’ve heard the warnings then from senior probation officers, from people at the head of the Probation Trust saying you are doing this too quickly, you haven’t trialled it enough and you haven’t really consulted them.

CHRIS GRAYLING: Well I’ve got some people saying the change needs to move faster because they want the staff and I’ve got others saying they want to take more time on the change. What I do know is two things: first of all, the model which is closest to what I am trying to do, which is being carried out in Peterborough Prison, is now well underway. We published figures this last week showing it has had a very substantial effect on reoffending and the number of crimes committed by people coming out of prison. That’s a real sign of the difference we’d make if we introduced mentoring and proper supervision and proper through the gate service. The other part of it is the reality of what happens if we do nothing, if we move slowly. There are thousands of people who will in the next few months be victims of serious crime committed by people who are walking out of prison from sentences of less than 12 months and who get no supervision at all.

DM: Well that’s a damning indictment of the present probation service, you are saying it is not fit for purpose in effect.

CHRIS GRAYLING: It’s not the system, there is good work being done by individual probation officers around the system, there are Trusts that are doing a perfectly competent job but what I need to do is to reshape the system in a way that enables us to extend that supervision to all of the people who are released from prison, the ones who are most dangerous, who get no supervision at the moment and to do that in a way that changes the focus of what we do as well.

DM: You’re not going to be able to stop it altogether are you? People out on probation, I mean there are so many out there that somebody is liable to commit a serious crime, are they not?

CHRIS GRAYLING: There is nothing I or anybody can do to create a 100% success rate in preventing reoffending but what we have at the moment is a situation where half the people who go to prison reoffend within 12 months after they leave and for people who get no supervision, two-thirds nearly of them reoffend.

DM: How many ex-offenders will be subject to this kind of supervision by private sector companies?

CHRIS GRAYLING: Well in total we expect something over 200,000 people to be going through either community sentences or through supervision in which private, voluntary sector and public sector work side by side.

DM: And what kind of crimes will they have committed?

CHRIS GRAYLING: Well there’s no simple answer to that because what happens today is the decision by a probation officer as to whether somebody is high, medium or low risk is very much about the individual circumstances.

DM: Somebody for instance who has been guilty of a sexual assault, a crime against the person or a serious robbery could be in that low to medium risk category?

CHRIS GRAYLING: That will only happen if it is the judgement of a publicly employed specialist member of the National Probation Service who judges that person not to be a high risk.

DM: You’d be quite happy with that, someone guilty of a sexual assault being supervised by Serco or G4S or someone else?

CHRIS GRAYLING: Well I’m very happy to see someone who’s life is not on the rails being mentored perhaps by a former offender who can help them perhaps identify a better way of getting on with their lives and that will only happen if a trained professional in public employ who is a specialist probation officer, who will carry out a risk assessment and says it is safe for that to happen.

DM: But Secretary of State, there will be members of Probation Trusts watching this interview right now, screaming at the television, saying but we already do that Mr Grayling!

CHRIS GRAYLING: Well let me give you a practical example of what you cannot do at the moment in the public sector. If I was running a probation provider I would be trying set up a mini housing association, I’d be looking to form long-term arrangements with landlords. One of the key questions when somebody comes out of prison is where they are going to be housed and I have sat with probation officers who have said, this person I’m working with at the moment is a real problem, they are sofa surfing. Now a public probation trust cannot start to set up its own housing association. Freed from the constraints of public sector rules, the ability to innovate, the ability to form new kinds of partnerships, they can start to address that kind of problem.

DM: And will it save money to boot?

CHRIS GRAYLING: Well this isn’t actually a money saving exercise. What we’re looking to do … it will bring down costs that I’m reinvesting in the support that we will be providing to the under 12 month people. My view is that you create a leaner, less bureaucratic system – everyone I talk to in the probation service says it is too bureaucratic – so we create a leaner, less bureaucratic, more decentralised system with greater professional freedoms to get on with the job of attacking reoffending, of mentoring and supporting those individuals in different ways, doing what works, doing things innovatively.

DM: What about that warning from the Chair of the Prison Governors Association, saying there is a serious threat to stability potentially?

CHRIS GRAYLING: We are taking the prison system through change, we are putting in place new ways of working, that’s certainly true but I look in the eye of the senior people who are long-term prison governors themselves, who are putting these changes in place. They are not coming from me, these changes, it’s their own approach.

DM: You’ve closed some prisons haven’t you?

CHRIS GRAYLING: I’ve closed some prisons, I’m in the process of building some new prisons. I’m looking to create a process where we bring down the costs in our prison system by making our prisons operate more cost effectively, closing some of the older more expensive prisons, opening newer capacity which is frankly better …

DM: So the new capacity is not there yet but you’ve closed the prisons, what about that gap?

CHRIS GRAYLING: We will go into the next election in 2015 with more prison places than we inherited, more adult male prison places than we inherited in 2010. There’ll be ups and downs on the way as we close new stock and open up new places elsewhere.

DM: I wanted to ask you more about economics. Have you read ‘Prisonomics’ the recent book by Vicky Pryce who of course was in prison due to the offence she committed with her ex-husband Chris Huhne, have you read that about the economics of prisons?

CHRIS GRAYLING: I haven’t read it, I’ve read what she said about it and I think the point she is missing is that people don’t end up in prison generally speaking for a first offence. Normally the people who end up in our prisons have offended again and again and the vast majority …

DM: The point she’s making, and it is a smaller proportion of the prison population, is on the women’s side of it, 80% of the women who are in prison there were there for 12 months or less, mainly for non-violent crimes.

CHRIS GRAYLING: Yes, but they will typically be people who have committed crime after crime after crime and it is generally not the case in our society that most people who go to prison do so for a first offence. They are people who have had community sentences, the vast majority of people in our prisons – and in short sentence prisons it is something like 95% - have had cautions, have had community sentences first and eventually society has to say enough is enough, you will lose your freedom because it is not acceptable for you to go on like this.

DM: So do you think she should have gone to prison?

CHRIS GRAYLING: Well I think it is a matter for the courts as to whether she should or she didn’t. I think it is a dangerous situation where people who are in the public eye don’t go to prison when they commit offences because the system has to be credible for everyone in our society.

DM: Can I ask you about the men’s side of the equation and what we’ve seen in Wandsworth here today as we’ve been walking round and looking at some of the work and training that the inmates are getting. They have to sign in on a board and we are obviously not allowed to show that and identify people but a large proportion of the names there are East European. Is that a concern to you?

CHRIS GRAYLING: It is a concern. We have about 10,000 foreign national prisoners in our jails at the moment in a variety of different guises, some are on remand, some people are serving sentences, some people have completed their sentences are awaiting deportation. Yes, I want to bring that number down and one of the measures we are looking to continue as part of in participation of the European Justice and Home Affairs area is the new prisoner transfer agreement that actually comes fully on stream over the next two or three years. I hope that will start to make a real difference.

DM: Do you think as UKIP is saying, as Nigel Farage is saying, criminal gangs are coming from East European countries and operating in this country and he singles out Romania. Do you agree with that and is it going to impact then on the prison population?

CHRIS GRAYLING: There are certainly criminal gangs operating in this country from other European countries, I’m not about picking out individual nationalities. We have had issues for example with people coming from non-EU countries, we’ve just completed a prisoner transfer agreement with Albania and we are about to send the first Albanian prisoners here. These things can come in waves, we already deport about 4,000 foreign national offenders a year, that is not high enough and we are doing everything we can to both increase the number of transfer agreements we’ve got, to streamline the deportation processes but one thing I do feel very strongly about is that if somebody commits a crime in this country, what I am not going to do is just release them on the streets of another country not facing any kind of punishment at all.

DM: We’ve talked during this interview, and I’ve put to you several criticisms from people in very senior positions within so many parts of the justice system, from people in the prison service, from people in the probation service, I left out Lord Neuberger of the Supreme Court when he issued warnings about legal aid. It seems time after time after time you brush those aside and say, I know best.

CHRIS GRAYLING: Look, there are two parts to this. We have got to meet the financial challenge so the difficult decision we’ve taken over legal aid is not a question of I know best, the reality is that I can only deal with the world as it is and not how I’d like it to be and in a time when we continue to have a massive budget deficit, where I have to bring costs down, yes I have to take some difficult decisions and where we are taking difficult decisions where it involves change, of course people are going to be uncomfortable. Difficult changes are always unwelcome while they are happening but on the probation front, my message is very simple – this is not simply a money saving exercise, it is about using the money we’ve got more wisely to deal with what I think is our biggest criminal justice scandal, the fact that people who are most likely to offend, the people that go to jail for less than 12 months, who are most likely to walk back onto our streets again and do something really horrendous in our society, are getting no supervision at the moment at all and I think that’s a scandal, I think it’s got to stop and to those who say don’t do it, take more time and the rest, my message is: what’s the alternative? Are we just going to stand to one side, leave those people for years and years and years to come just leaving more victims of serious crime?

DM: I just want to end with one last innovation that’s happened on your watch and we saw last week cameras in court in England in the Court of Appeal. Is that something, subject to analysis, something that you could see extended, you’d wish to see extended into other courts?

CHRIS GRAYLING: I think there is a really positive argument for extending it. I think we have to do it step by step, what we don’t want to do is end up with a kind of road-show you can see in some US trials where you have got some controversial figure in court, the jamboree of media around the case, wall to wall coverage. I don't think that would serve the interests of justice. Having the opportunity for people in this country to see the quality of our justice system in action, to see the big decisions, where justice allows them to do so and you can’t do so in a way that might for example compromise a retrial, but I’d like to see it extended but I think we have to do it very carefully. This is not something that can be a revolution, it has to be an evolution.

DM: Secretary of State, thank you very much indeed.

CHRIS GRAYLING: You’re welcome.