Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I will address three issues—first, as touched on by my noble friend, why this matters as an issue and why the House will want to give it particular attention; secondly, why the status quo is not an option, and I hope that I will help the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, in some small measure in that respect; and thirdly, I will make some suggestions for the elements of a reform strategy, many of which are implicit in the Bill, but sometimes one has to dig them out to make their importance transparent. Before launching into that, I ask for one or two previous offences to be taken into account. I was formerly a Charity Minister, and I still have a bias towards the voluntary sector. I asked, when I was in the DfES, if I could have offender education and training on my brief, and the then Secretary of State Charles Clarke agreed to that. I have a daughter who is a prison governor. I am an adviser to a company called Serco, which does some offender management, and I am chairman of an organisation that I founded called the Public Sector Reform Group. I will essentially be speaking today about public service reform. We know why it matters; it matters because of wasted lives. There are hundreds of thousands of young men and women whose lives are completely shattered for the 10 or 20 years that it takes for them to break the habit of reoffending. It matters to them and to their families deeply. They are not happy people, and the suicide rate is pretty appalling for people in that category. Secondly, it matters because of the cost to the Government. The estimated cost to the criminal justice system of reoffending is £11 billion. That is an enormous burden, which would be better spent elsewhere. I do not need to tell the House about the cost to society. I suspect that all of us in this House have been the victim of some form of crime at some stage. One knows the financial disturbance, but often the emotional disturbance is more upsetting, more painful and deeply shaking and shocking, even in its milder forms. This issue matters massively to society and to the House. How are we as a Government, but above all as a society, to reduce reoffending? We have got to get beyond quick slogans or cheap-party political jibes, because it matters so much to us all to succeed. It matters to local government, and it matters to business. If we succeed in reducing reoffending, we would not need substantial numbers of new prisons, and many of us would rejoice in that. Why will the status quo not do? Let me give three facts and leave it at that. Since 1997, crime has reduced by 35 per cent. That is not my figure; it is a British Crime Survey figure. Secondly, the Government have increased expenditure on the Probation Service in real terms, as my noble friend said, since 2001-02 by 40 per cent. That is more increased investment than the NHS has had in proportionate terms. The staffing of the Probation Service increased by 50 per cent in that period, yet the reconviction rate—although my noble friend put the best gloss on it that she could—appears to be glacial to most of us. We have a system in which crime is reducing, investment has been massive but performance appears at best to be flat. We cannot be satisfied with that as a model for change, given the importance of this issue; it screams out for a more effective reform strategy, as my noble friend Lord Carter set out in his eminently powerful report some years ago. What has gone wrong? Despite putting in that level of investment, and despite the broad consensus that the Carter report was right, why has it not happened? I shall state some quick headlines and then move on. We have clearly failed to innovate sufficiently, we have continued with existing delivery models that appear to have poor efficacy, we have failed to harness the best providers and we have certainly failed to join up the system. When I looked at that as a Minister in the DfES, there was no apparent nature of a system—it was a haphazard set of interventions that were not bound together into effective, offender-focused interventions that would bear down on the causes of offenders’ criminality in an effective way that was likely to reduce reoffending. You were lucky if you received drug treatment at the right time or if you got the right education and training; it was a miracle if someone supported you into work and it was happenstance if you got a home. We have failed to create strong enough reform incentives. Change in any organisation is painful; unless there are powerful incentives to change, organisations do not change—they dig in and resist and find rationalisations as to why they should not do so. Fundamentally, the system has remained input-focused, rather than outcome-focused. I shall touch on what that means later. At its simplest, we still have a statutory monopoly of provision; 97 per cent of the expenditure pays for state employees under a traditional model that does not appear to be working sufficiently. That is not a criticism of probation staff, probation officers or the good people who work hard and who have committed their lives to relatively lowly paid work in difficult environments. They are to be commended, but we owe it to them also to give them the opportunity to achieve better success, rather than being trapped in a sort of bureaucratic nightmare, which is where many of them are at present. What might be the elements of a more effective reform strategy? I shall suggest six things. First—we know it already—we are all largely agreed on end-to-end offender management, as articulated by my noble friend Lord Carter. We know why that matters; unless you address the homelessness of an ex-offender, unless you try to help them to get off drugs, unless you try to do something about their mental health problems, and unless you make it possible for them to be sufficiently educated and skilled and, I hope, motivated to work, they will not be able to get work. Unless you support them into appropriate forms of work through the sort of experiences that we have seen through Transco and others, but which are too few and far between, they will not get work. If they do not get work, you know what they will do to get the money to feed themselves or their other habits. One has also to address behaviour and, I hope, to provide an environment in which the relationships that are often the ways that eventually help people out of offending are nurtured in such a way that they perceive that a different way of life is possible—rather than repeatedly reoffending and coming out of it in their 30s or later. There is nothing new there; we know it and agree with it all. You have to address all those issues at once. However, it is not what is happening now. It is not what has happened after a 40 per cent increase in investment. Therefore, we cannot be satisfied with carrying on as we are and in thinking that throwing a bit more rhetoric at it will do. So in addition to all those, the second thing that we must do is to motivate a collective commitment. What do I mean by that? It has to be a priority across all of government, not just of one part of government; it has to be a priority for society and it has to be a priority within local government. Thank heavens that the Local Government Association has shown good leadership in the Neighbourhood by Neighbourhood report, which is first class. It states that local government wants to step up to the challenge of taking on greater responsibility for playing its part in addressing reoffending. Why? Because, for example, Leeds knows that the reoffending is taking place in Leeds. The offenders do not go away. They come back to Leeds after they have been in clink. Therefore, if they continue reoffending, it is Leeds that suffers. Reoffending in Leeds is Leeds’s problem just as much as it is the Government’s problem. Therefore, the LGA was saying that it wants to work in partnership with a more effective reform strategy—and that report was pretty positive about the broader reform strategy that underpins this Bill—and that it wants to be part of it. We clearly have to find powerful ways, through this Bill, of fine-tuning that, such that we go out and lock a strong partnership between central government, local government and civil society to address this. That is enormously positive. There are clearly other commitments that one is looking for, along with partnership with the health service, but let me not go into that. The third element of a reform strategy is harnessing best talent. A cruder way of putting it would be ending monopolies. Some of us believe that having mixed markets of supply, harnessing voluntary sector talent, is essential to getting better outcomes. Therefore, the shift to a commissioning model, while still strongly respecting public sector providers, is fundamentally right. We should be completely agnostic and not doctrinal about public, private and voluntary sector providers, and we should make an assessment on which appears to be most effective at getting better outcomes in particular circumstances. The noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, asked why we should do it. Regional offender managers are necessary because it is not going to happen unless ROMs make it happen. That is why this Bill is necessary. I see that she shakes her head. Why not? We have waited five or six years since this money was progressively thrown into the Probation Service and nothing much has happened. Where is the recipe from the opposition Benches to reduce reoffending without having a central push to change the system? It will not happen without ROMs. Fourthly, one has to motivate improvement. Some of us who were unreformed, having managed public services and tried to reform them for far too many years, have seen the power of competition to stimulate performance and improvement. It came as a surprise to some of us but that power is deeply and strongly there, and the evidence is there for those who want to see it. You will not stimulate people to go into a competitive environment unless there is a push; again, that is why ROMs are necessary. Providers will not voluntarily push themselves into that position. If the opposition Benches need reminding of that, they should ask why they forced CCT. It was because local government would not have done it by itself. Fifthly, we have the use and development of the voluntary sector. Others will probably speak more eloquently and knowledgably than I will on this, so I will move on swiftly. There is a consensus around the House that we want to use the voluntary sector more. The noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, asked why we needed the Bill in this respect. It is because, at one point, the Home Secretary set targets to probation boards and the percentage that was commissioned to the voluntary sector crawled up to 7 per cent. To try to go into reformed mode and reduce the amount of central dirigisme, Charles Clarke backed off on the targets and—whoops—the figure fell down to 3 per cent very quickly. The voluntary sector will not have a stronger role in this agenda unless ROMs are there as the reform vehicle to make it happen. To pretend otherwise is to kid ourselves and is to play ducks and drakes with support for the voluntary sector when there are other bits of politics to play for. The last, and I hope not the most abstract, point is that we have to move to a system that seeks to pay for, and focus on, outcomes, because those are what we want. We do not want, in truth, to have lots of staff or processes; we want to reduce reoffending. The traditional public sector model focuses on supplying inputs and hoping that something will happen at the end. It often fails to join up or to powerfully motivate the system towards results. Therefore, although this is not part of the Bill, perhaps the Government ought to think about how they can move to a system whereby they incentivise providers, whether they are public, voluntary or private sector providers, and reward them for the outcomes that they get. In other words, a provider could be rewarded by the proportion of offenders whom it gets into and keeps in work for two years, the proportion of offenders who come out of jail X and get into secure supported housing within a month of release, or the proportion of offenders who get off and stay off drugs for six months as a result, and there should be a specific incentive to do so. Lastly, in time we should move towards a system where a mixed pattern of providers are rewarded by the extent to which they reduce reoffending over two years. I argue that because you do not want to specify the inputs; you want to incentivise those in the system to be creative about finding better solutions to old problems and use the reward mechanisms powerfully to motivate them to do so. For those reasons, this matters massively to all of us in the House and these reforms are extremely important. I hope that we can move beyond the cheap rhetoric of claiming, ““Leave things as they are, it’s all all right really. Let’s try to do it another day or forget about it?, or ““The Government are stupid and haven’t thought things through?. The issue is too important for that. We have to find ways to reduce reoffending and we have to bend our collective efforts to finding how to do so more positively in the future. I trust, and am confident, that the House will do so.