Local Probation Boards (Appointment and Miscellaneous Provisions) (Amendment) Regulations 2006

My Lords, I am grateful for the attention and interest that the issue has aroused in your Lordships’ House. I thank all those who have contributed to the debate. I felt as if we were debating a Bill that has yet to be announced and is probably yet to be drafted; it has certainly not yet seen the light of day. However, it is anxiously anticipated. We shall probably debate at length many of the issues that were raised when and if—many of your Lordships expect that this will happen—a Bill on the National Offender Management Service is introduced. I shall try to restrict my comments to the matter before us and to the Motion that the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, has properly brought forward for our consideration. Everybody who contributed to the debate was aware that the regulations were subject to comments in the 46th report of the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee published last week. Before I explain the background to the regulations, I express my sincere apologies that the standard of the Explanatory Memorandum fell below that expected by the committee, and that it did not contain sufficient background detail. I apologise unreservedly for that. The Home Office has taken steps to remedy that and has put more information in an expanded memorandum. I hope that those who have had the opportunity to study it consider that the extra information is valuable. It was certainly intended to be. It was not in any way the Home Office’s intention to show disrespect to the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee or to sell people short, as it were, in providing the information that was properly required. That said, it is important to put the regulations in context. The purpose of the amendments is to ensure that from 1 April 2007 the regulations governing the membership of probation boards match the competencies and skills that will be required for boards to deliver in an environment of public value partnerships, mixed economy and competition. They amend the period for which a board chair or member can be appointed from three years to a period not exceeding three years and reduce the number of board members required for a local probation board meeting to be quorate. While this statutory instrument does not seek to pre-empt any future legislation in respect of the National Offender Management Service, it seeks to ensure that boards have the skills they require to operate in the current increasingly complexand competitive environment. Although these amendments have the advantage of preparing probation boards for the transition to the envisaged probation trusts, we obviously wish to address immediate improvements in performance through the regulations. The recently published Public Value Partnerships document requires probation boards to focus on public protection and the management of high risk offenders. As part of this strategy, boards will be required to increase their level of subcontracting to10 per cent in 2007-08. That means that boardswill require extra expertise on purchasing and commissioning standards. It is essential that boards are able to fulfil that function successfully. Skills in business acumen will ensure that boards have the necessary expertise to move forward confidently to meet future expectations and challenges. I do not think that should simply be read as meaning that we want those boards to be just like a business; that is not the intention. What we are after is adding something to the current range of skills that are quite properly contained in those boards. We certainly acknowledge that the boards have performed well; but in this era of expanded commissioning and the development of a more mixed economy in terms of service provision, added acumen must be an important feature of those boards. Each House of Parliament will, of course, have the opportunity fully to consider primary legislation in the proposed Bill relating to the National Offender Management Service and the future of probation boards. The proposed legislation will create probation trusts, which will be public sector providers subject to competition and contestability. Should legislation be successfully passed, the Government do not envisage a ““big bang”” move to probation trusts, but a phased approach over a period of years. The regulations address the period from 1 April 2007, with, at the earliest, some boards converting to trusts in 2008. That change is obviously reliant on legislation, but it is seen as part of a longer-term process. The regulations will allow boards to develop their skills and expertise, not just to meet the requirement of the public value partnerships document, but to allow them to be effective public sector providers in a future of mixed economy, commissioning and contestability. I will give noble Lords some brief background to why we seek to make the changes. When the statutory instruments governing the formation of probation boards were written in 2000 and 2001, they took into account the previous funding arrangements between central and local government, and they were intended to be a bridge between what had gone before and the new wholly centrally funded boards. It was therefore decided that each board would, where practicable, have four magistrate members and two local councillors. I wish the House to be quite clear that the regulation in respect of magistrate and councillor members does not minimise the value that we place on their contribution to probation boards. It is clear that each board will wish to retain magistrate and councillor members wherever possible, but we also need to ensure that they bring with them an understanding of the needs of greater business sensitivity to improve the performance of the probation service. Why are we seeking to introduce these regulations now? Board chairs and members are appointed to hold office for a maximum of two three-year terms, and thus a substantial number of chairs and board members who were appointed in 2001 will come to the end of their terms of office on 31 March 2007, and a major campaign is under way to recruit their replacements. The regulations allow flexibility in the length of appointment of up to three years, rather than a fixed period of three years. When this recruitment exercise was initially discussed, several boards identified an opportunity to reduce the quorum of board meetings, leading to smaller, more effective boards. Legislation requires that probation boards have a membership of between seven and15 members. Some 36 of the 42 boards have opted to reduce the number of board members, and that is most easily achieved if we reduce the present quorum of board meetings from seven to five. It is a positive message that local boards want smaller boards anda reduced quorum at meetings. Now, with the recruitment campaign under way, this is the right opportunity and environment in which to make the changes outlined in the regulations. To facilitate the preferred reduction in the size of boards, we need to rebalance the board profile. In addition to the chair, the chief officer and the judge appointed by the Department for Constitutional Affairs, the board would lack balance if it were to maintain the block of four magistrate and two councillor members. This inflexibility regarding membership creates a lack of local choice. A number of Members have already referred to the importance of partnership, and we place a very heavy reliance on that because we see it as having great value. We believe in the importance of local choice; and that is what we want to ensure in the future. With no reduction in the current arrangement, there would be a board of nine—the chair, the chief officer, the judge, four magistrates and two councillors—and if a board wanted to reduce its total membership from 15 to, say, 12, that would allow for only three lay members. We do not think that such a position is sustainable, as we feel that boards need to have a more balanced and broader membership. We entirely accept the argument made by a number of noble Lords about the value of rooting probation boards in local communities, and we have sought to retain and enhance localism in the current recruitment campaign. The local response to the campaign has been excellent, with more than 3,000 applications, and the interview process is now under way. As part of the recruitment process, Ministers and officials specifically wrote to, among others, MPs, the Local Government Association and the Magistrates’ Association, encouraging locally based individuals to apply for board membership. These regulations meet the needs of today’s probation boards and will allow them to be more effective and responsive, providing them with more local discretion and the ability to meet more closely local circumstances and needs. We consider the regulations as essential to the development of probation boards, and that is why we wish to introduce them now, thus allowing the challenges to be met in the interim period between now and the introduction of probation trusts. I listened very closely to what was said about the value of the local magistracy and local councillors. I assure the House that we do not in any way devalue the contribution that those members make to the work of probation boards. It is not our intention to force them out and eliminate their representation on boards. I was an elected member of a local authority for some 16 years and I know the value that local councillors can add to other local services. Indeed, I think that over a considerable number of years my authority regularly appointed members to probation boards, and many of them were, as ever, involved in the work of the magistracy. I know, too, from my work in local crime and disorder reduction partnerships that a broad mix of people has to be involved in the localist aspect of criminal justice. I bring that flavour to this debate, and I know that it is a view much shared by Ministers in the Home Office. Noble Lords made a number of specific points and raised concerns. The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, was concerned about the position of alcohol services. That will be the subject of contestability withinthe new arrangements, as with many of the other probation programmes. However, I think that the noble Lord was probably more generally concerned about outsourcing. As is the case now, there will be a variety of providers, from which I think the service is benefiting, so that expertise can be focused on the service that is required. That is one reason why, in a nutshell, we need a broader range of membership on the boards. We need to develop the ability to manage contracts and ensure effective supervision of the different providers. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, was, as ever, very concerned about morale in the service—a matter that he has raised in connection with other services, not least the Prison Service and the Prison Service inspectorate in recent weeks. It is obviously an important issue. It is worth saying that, as we have been in government since 1997, we have put significant funds into the probation service and there has been a large increase in the number of people employed in it. The statistics that I have tell me that the number of those employed has risen by some51 per cent. When we came into government, I remember hearing much criticism of the previous Government over the way in which it was thought that the probation service had been run down. I make no comment other than that. It was during the previous Government’s time that the ability to fund trainees on degree courses was taken away. I know that Paul Boateng, one of our early Ministers for the probation service and prisons, reinstated that in 1997. The attrition of probation staff—the rate of turnover—is much lower in comparison with other areas of public service. Our feedback shows that the service is developing well; it is responding to different pressures within the criminal justice system; and it is meeting those challenges with confidence. There was some criticism of the consultation process that was conducted prior to this statutory instrument. I willingly place in the public domain and confirm points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, and the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and others that there was no formal public consultation exercise because we did not consider that one was required for this statutory instrument. That is not to say that we do not recognise the importance of consultation, because we do. However, we have consulted informally with a number of probation boards and probation members. We have sent correspondence to local authorities, to the Local Government Association, the Magistrates’ Association and the Probation Boards’ Association, in which we clearly trailed and explained the changes and actively encouraged councillors and magistrates during the application process to apply for positions as members of boards as part of the continuing recruitment exercise.