Offender Management Bill

My Lords, notwithstanding the elegance with which the Minister presented the Bill, I listened with growing admiration to the two speeches that followed her presentation. In my view they exhaustively covered the problems that the Bill creates for the future of the criminal justice system. They dealt with the detail and the whole. It is on the whole that I particularly want to address the House. Given those contributions, I can do so very briefly indeed. The thing that the criminal justice system needs more than anything is an opportunity to settle down to take advantage of the changes made and to restore its confidence in its ability to deliver what is needed to make our criminal justice system more effective. That is true of the courts, the Probation Service and the prisons. I stress only one great concern with regard to the speeches to which I referred—whether this is the right time to make a fundamental change to the structure of the Probation Service. One of the difficulties of managing the criminal justice system was that each of the agencies within that system had different boundaries and because of that found it difficult to co-operate with the other agencies. We now have 42 areas, the achievement of which involved a difficult and complex process during a number of years. Is it necessary to disjoint and distort what has already been achieved? I suggest that nothing that we have heard so far creates a case for the disruption that is bound to follow if the Bill is implemented. I would have said that even if we had not heard so recently that there was to be a new Ministry of Justice. The creation of that ministry is bound to cause disruption within two major departments both engaged in the criminal justice system. I have had the privilege to work particularly closely with both those departments. They have heavy burdens indeed. I cannot but believe that the period that will follow the creation of the Ministry of Justice will involve fundamental reform to what is now the Department for Constitutional Affairs. The load upon the latter department is already great and will be immensely greater as a result of that change. We have not even heard the detail of how it is to be organised. How will the finances of that new and large department be controlled to ensure that all parts of the justice system for which it is responsible receive their fair share? It is all too easy for one particular problem to disrupt the other parts of the justice system that are not directly involved in that problem. I urge the House to be cautious about introducing changes of this nature involving as they do the abolition of the boards, which have done excellent service, without being satisfied that there will indeed be put in place the resources that will be necessary to achieve the improvements that we would all like to see. Of course, there are aspects of the Bill to which no one could object, but those have been identified by the previous speakers, and I do not believe that I need to say anything further. Here, we are in a situation where there is a heavy onus on those who support the Bill to ensure that it can be introduced into law without disrupting what is happening already in the criminal justice system.