Offender Management Bill

My Lords, the arrival of this Bill has been awaited for some time and in the process has generated increasing levels of concern among all those involved in the quality of provision, care and management of people who offend in our communities, and in particular among those who provide those services. That concern has focused principally on the implications for our National Probation Service, the last remaining branch of our social services with a specialist 100 year-old professional expertise in the field, which the Minister has acknowledged. At the heart of these concerns is the very real fear that what this Bill will achieve is the fragmentation and ultimately the possible destruction of the Probation Service. Should that be the case, it would be a tragedy. The failure to reduce the re-offending rate over the past 10 years lies principally in government policy, with successive Home Office Bills, changes in sentencing and the need to appear tough. That has been coupled with a failure to promote effective community services as alternatives to custody, with their emphasis on reparation and rehabilitation, which are demonstrably more successful at reducing re-offending. Prison clearly does not reduce reoffending, where the rates range roughly between 65 per cent and 80 per cent, depending on the age of the offender. Current prison overcrowding makes rehabilitation virtually impossible, but the preponderance of short sentences of a year or less, where probation is not on offer, are long enough to cause damage such as the loss of a job, home and relationship, creating just the problems that lead to reoffending. This is further linked to the issues of entrenched mental health, drug addiction, communication problems and education and training issues that can take years to put right. Reoffending is not, therefore, a failure of the Probation Service, although the wholesale reorganisation of structure and role as set out in the Bill seems to imply that in fact the Government believe that to be the case. However, there are elements in the Bill over which we have common cause with the Government, particularly on the need to improve and develop a wider range of services to maximise flexibility and facilitate specialist input, and so free up the Probation Service to perform its core functions still more effectively. Increasing the involvement of a wider range of specialist providers in a properly managed way in partnership with the Probation Service should indeed be part of this. We know that a wide range of organisations is lining up to offer their services—Barnardo’s, Rainer, Nacro and ACEVO, to name but a few of the big players, not to mention private providers—but the issue is whether the Probation Service will be allowed to retain its core function as the central offender manager, while opening the way to these other providers of specialist interventions. In 2003, the report of the noble Lord, Lord Carter, Managing Offenders and Reducing Crime—and I am delighted that he is with us today—produced proposals with the aim of reducing reoffending through more consistent and effective end-to-end offender management. We agree with that approach. Yet when it comes to end-to-end management, the Bill is silent on the linkages, roles or responsibilities of prisons and their staff in that management. There was an implied wish in the noble Lord’s thinking, I believe, to break down the silos between prison and probation, and for the system to become more integrated, which is absolutely right. However, the current proposals do nothing to break down the silos; instead, by maintaining separate service level agreements for prison and probation and then introducing separate service level agreements within probation, one for offender management and one for interventions, the result is three silos, which will facilitate neither consistency nor effectiveness The solution, as set out in the Bill, is the removal of the responsibility for the provision of probation services from the National Probation Service—only reorganised, as we have heard, in 2001—and the abolition of the 42 probation boards that deliver their service locally, in favour of investing all responsibility for the provision of probation services in the Home Secretary, who can then award contracts for the provision of probation function to ““any person?. Here I declare an interest as a patron of the Probation Boards’ Association. There is to be a purchaser/provider split and the introduction of contestability, in the belief that this will drive up standards. The commissioning of services is to be dedicated to probation trusts via 10 ROMs, regional offender managers, who are not actually mentioned in the Bill but will replace the probation boards. These are not primarily locally accountable, but are answerable to the ROM and the Home Secretary. Where is the evidence that that proposed highly centralised Home Office-led arrangement can achieve the stated objective, which we all support, of promoting community safety and reducing reoffending? What are the arguments for the breaking up of an established, essentially locally based and delivered service and replacing it with a multiplicity of services without the basic infrastructure of locally commissioned work? Is this really necessary? And where is the evidence that contestability improves the quality of service delivery in a sustained, systematic way? It is little wonder that the Probation Service feels itself to be under threat of fragmentation or even extension, and we share those fears. Given that he deemed his own Home Office not fit for purpose, it is incredible that we should be expected to have any confidence in the Home Secretary or believe that the new split Home Office will be any more able to provide a better, more efficient, reliable or effective service than the Probation Service it is proposing to dismantle. Now is surely not the time to be making such an act of faith with the latest reorganisation and its attendant inevitable costs and upheavals, even if it were the right solution. If the Probation Service had been shown to be failing, this drastic upheaval could be understood. But, as we have heard, it is much praised by Ministers. It has shown very strong delivery on the four functions that describe its work—public protection, offender management, interventions and organisation efficiency and effectiveness. It shows very strong performance on service delivery functions, particularly interventions. All this was reported by the director of probation in his latest probation report. Elsewhere, the Government have been pursuing policies which underline the importance of local services, which we heartily support. But the proposals, as they stand, will actually remove the essential local element and introduce instead an additional layer of very expensive regional bureaucracy. Figures contained in the winter supplementary estimates for 2006-07 show that the total amount due to be spent on the new centralised and regionalised bureaucracy of NOMs was £855 million, compared with £832 million for the whole of the Probation Service. It is not only expensive, it is unrealistically unwieldy. For example, a ROM in the north-west region, based in Manchester, is expected to link with and understand the needs of literally thousands of sentencers from Crewe to Carlisle and commission services relevant to their court needs as well as the range of community responsibilities, MAPPA duties, victim support and the myriad tasks that are required of them. At the same time, this ROM is expected to understand the needs of the district and unitary authorities across the whole of the north-west. Even using the advice of the newly constituted probation trusts, this is the antithesis of a locally based service. There is not a shred of evidence as to how this vastly expensive extra regional layer of bureaucracy and the breaking up of the current integrated probation services will achieve reductions in reoffending. The elementary fact is that crime is a local phenomenon where the causes and the solutions must be local. Involvement of local communities is essential, as is working with the police and other local government agencies. This is what the Probation Service does; it describes itself as the glue which holds the criminal justice services together from the courts through to post-sentences and life licence. It is this lack of local accountability in the Bill about which we have the strongest reservations. They are shared by not only the influential LGA but also many of the larger voluntary organisations which might hope to play a part in the wider roles that may be offered to them. There is the recognition that there is a real need to lock plans and services into local area agreements to promote accountability, consistency and avoid fragmentation or duplication. It is also essential for the promotion of local community involvement and confidence in offender management such as alternatives to custody which need far more, not less, attention paid to them by all concerned. We will be looking for clarification and much reassurance on this. We welcome the concessions made at Third Reading in the other place, referred to by the Minister. A significant one is that the Probation Service alone should retain the responsibility for providing court reports and any other assistance to the court in determining an appropriate sentence. Thus it implicitly recognises the central skills and expertise of the Probation Service, although it also undermines that commitment with the caveat that it can be reversed by statutory instrument. Further, what were described as core offender management tasks would be reserved for the next three years. We believe that these tasks should also be reserved as a fixed restricted probation provision, along with the court report writing, since they are essentially linked functions involving ongoing risk and needs assessment. It would establish a stable and strong public sector core to the work which should mitigate the risks of fragmentation. Another worry is the proposed purchaser/provider split, with regional offender managers contracting the services and introducing contestability, which allows the private and voluntary sectors to compete for services. Again, that means that the decision-making process would inevitably be at a distance from the delivery or the offender. Indeed, there are already well established relations between the Probation Service and the voluntary sector and a readiness to continue to develop those working partnerships. However, there is now real concern that the contestability environment will set organisations against each other and vying to claim best value—which begs the question what best value actually means. There is also the concern that in this process the smaller, essentially local voluntary organisations may lose out and, lastly, that for those awarded contracts through a new bidding process there will be the perception by clients that they are no longer independent services free of officialdom, which matters a great deal, but part of a government machine. There is no evidence that the introduction of contestability will drive up standards. This is simply an act of faith in market forces—except that this is not a normal market situation since the source of demand within the justice system is triggered by the state itself, which in turn is a supplier of services as selected by the Home Secretary and the consumer. To the extent that there is market choice, it operates by proxy through government agencies. The role and composition of the new trusts also give cause for concern. Little has been specified as yet in the Bill, although the Home Secretary has agreed to the inclusion of local government representation and, I believe, a magistrate, with a local chairman being desirable. But there is still uncertainty as to how many there will be, how they will be composed, whether they will be geographically or function based and how locally accountable they can be when they are principally answerable to the ROM and the Home Secretary. In particular, there is uncertainty whether they are likely to enter into commercial contracts with private sector providers. That would preclude judges from having a seat at the table, which would be another serious and dangerous break in the chain of end-to-end management of local sentencers. I would be grateful if the Minister could give us some clarity and answer some of those questions. Lastly, the contrasting experience in Scotland is worth noting, and we could learn from it if we so chose, as it shows that an alternative scenario is possible. The Scottish Executive put out a proposal for a single correctional agency for wide consultation. In the light of the responses, which were highly critical of the idea for all the reasons that we have rehearsed today, especially with regard to the need for local working and accountability, the Scottish Executive decided to listen. The subsequent Bill resulted in the Management of Offenders etc. (Scotland) Act 2005 and, inter alia, the establishment of a national advisory body for offender management to agree strategy, local councils brought together into community justice authorities, and a statutory duty on the Scottish Prison Service and local authorities to work together and form effective local area partnerships to deliver integrated services. It is an excellent model, which is being brought into play after a shadow year, and I should welcome the Minister’s view on it. There are other aspects of this Bill that give us cause for concern, and we look forward to discussing them in greater detail, but I have concentrated on the most contentious first part because we run the risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, with seriously damaging results. It is just not good enough to emasculate a National Probation Service because of difficulties and failures for which it is not responsible and with which it has been struggling to cope in the face of underinvestment, impossible workloads and growing demand. To spread the load among other providers so that it can do its core business more effectively is desirable but to invest all authority for choreographing the management of offenders right at the top away from where the business actually is, while giving the business to all comers in a competitive but phoney market situation, is to invite chaos. In the interests of achieving a workable Bill, I hope that the Government continue to have ears to hear.