Prisons and probation services are failing to meet the needs of newly released long-term prisoners, 1 in 7 of whom end their sentence with no idea where they will spend their first night on the outside, according to a report campaigners have called "devastating".

The damning report into the national Through the Gate (TTG) resettlement scheme was jointly released on Wednesday by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Probation and Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Prisons.

It described how prisoners suffering from mental illness and addiction struggle to access services after leaving, while many are released without anywhere to live because of a lack of housing and delays to state benefits.

TTG, part of the Transforming Rehabilitation programme, is delivered by the 21 privately run Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs), which took over from probation trusts when the service was privatised in 2015.



In October 2016 the two inspectorates reported that TTG was providing a poor service for short-term prisoners – and they have now concluded that the programme is having little or no effect on long-term prisoners' lives.

In a jointly written foreword, Dame Glenys Stacey, the chief inspector of probation, and Peter Clarke, the chief inspector of prisons, said that if TTG services were removed tomorrow the effect would be "negligible".

They continued:

There is much more CRCs should be doing to make a difference to the lives of those they are meant to be helping, but we found them focusing most of their efforts on meeting their contractual targets, to produce written resettlement plans. Responding to the needs of prisoners received much less attention, but meaningful expectations are not specified clearly in CRC contracts, and good, persistent work is not incentivised or rewarded None of the early hopes for Through the Gate have been realised sufficiently.

The gap between the aspiration and reality is so great, that we wonder whether there is any prospect that these services will deliver the desired impact on rates of reoffending.

The report warns that:

– 10% of prisoners in the sample it studied, 98 prisoners across nine prisons, were homeless on their first night out of prison.

– Just 18% of prisoners in the same sample were released with any employment or training in place.

– Just two prisoners were actually found accommodation through the TTG scheme; three more were placed in housing designed for home detention curfew, and five more only found somewhere to stay on the day of their release.