Offender Management Bill

My Lords, we will discuss that further—perhaps outside the session—but the question of how one restores the confidence of the public service and of local officials is very much part of what some of us wish to pursue. I refer to the purchaser/provider split and contracts based on contestability. All those underlying assumptions run through this Bill. There are limited timescales for contracts and the assumption that mistrust is built in between the principal and the agent. Accountability is through markets and targets rather than through democratic scrutiny. If the initial reforms do not succeed, we have to change the structure again. After all, in the Government’s approach to public services, there is an almost Trotskyite commitment to permanent reform. The status quo is not an option—we are told that by the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, and we have been told it on many other occasions in many other sectors. The Government find it easy to pull up the roots to see how the plant is growing. The Probation Service has, after all, operated only since 2001. At the briefing on the voluntary sector we were told that the level of commissioning from the private sector had gone down sharply since 2001. That is partly the result of the previous reorganisation. Now we are having another reorganisation to reverse what went wrong last time. Leaving things more at the local level where relations between the voluntary sector and the public sector are often good and close, as I have seen, should perhaps be allowed rather more. One size does not fit all. Patterns of contracting modelled on the oil sector were applied to the rail sector with disastrous results. This sector has a number of special conditions. There is the unavoidable and highly desirable and necessary engagement of many agencies in dealing with offenders, including prisons, courts, police, probation officers, social services, learning and skills councils, hostel providers and voluntary organisations of many types. Interventions have to take account of local conditions and individual needs. There is a limit to how far they can be squeezed into a single national model. When I hear the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, talking about imposing the same rigorous national standards on all concerned, I am a little worried that we shall impose one single national model on the diverse conditions of local crime and local offending across the country. Then there is the need for trust among those who work together. Long-term relationships are required for trust, and I am not sure how compatible that is with contestability. The briefing talked of building a more joined-up management process at the regional level, in which regional offices of central departments, such as the Department for Education and Skills, the departments dealing with social security matters, and so on came out of their silos—a good new management term. But what we need is more joined-up government at the local level. If the regional agencies increase fragmentation at the local level, we will have lost more than we have gained. From these Benches, we want to probe the relationship between the public sector and the voluntary sector. From those to whom I have listened and from what I have read, I get a more mixed picture than that suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland. There are some within the third sector who are enthusiastic about the Bill. They see themselves as contractors to government on a much larger scale. Others see their role as being complementary to the role of the state and as having distinctive and different functions. They are worried that the new style of regional contracting will force them into a role with which they will not be happy. Quoted in the Social Market Foundation and Rainer pamphlet I found so helpful, Patricia Hewitt talks about the National Health Service—but the same applies here—saying that if we are to be successful in building a closer partnership with the voluntary sector, "““the mindset of commissioning needs to change?." There are diverse views within the voluntary sector, in which local voluntary organisations, which see themselves as befrienders of the alienated and confused ex-offender—the traditional role of the Probation Service, which it has now sadly lost to become more of an agent of the state—would be threatened by a more remote regional offender management contracting system. In his excellent piece in the SMF/Rainer pamphlet, Julian Corner says that he is concerned, "““that the state will almost invariably incline towards solutions that can be delivered en masse through target-driven performance systems and that it is fully capable of doing so in the face of common sense … Unless there is seriously intelligent commissioning behind it, efficient delivery can often be the enemy of effective delivery?." In the same pamphlet, Rod Morgan goes on to say that he worries that, "““the new breed of correctional technicists … developing the promised land of cognitive behavioural offender programmes and electronic surveillance?," will squeeze out those concerned with the particular problems of confused and alienated ex-offenders. On the ground in Yorkshire, I found close co-operation between the third sector and the public service. There is a Shelter office inside HMP Leeds. That sort of thing should be encouraged. I know that there are mixed views about that sort of relationship, but it is highly desirable. There are three probation hostels in west Yorkshire, run by church agencies; again, that is highly desirable. I was told more than once that a local Muslim charity played an immensely helpful role in helping to re-establish trust between the Kashmiri community and the rest after the riots in Bradford. I also heard people saying that they were not at all sure that a regional offender manager would even be aware that there was a local Muslim charity in Bradford. We on these Benches are concerned to protect the voluntary sector from too close an embrace by the state, to preserve local links, and to resist the replacement of the assumption that what drives the voluntary sector is a large dose of altruism combined with some expectation of economic recompense with one which implies, as the new public management theory does, that only economic incentives count. I have discovered no great enthusiasm for greater private sector involvement, and an active concern that it would threaten further fragmentation. I discovered that the concept of offender management is already fully grasped and works through close co-operation between agencies, prison officers and those outside but that those on the ground are struggling to cope with overcrowded prisons, the consequent overload on rehabilitation, education, training and so on, and with pockets of poverty, unemployment and social dislocation—from which flow so many of the offenders with whom they work. We must deal with that underlying problem, and that is not served by constant restructuring. From these Benches, we shall therefore be probing the rationale for so many of the proposed changes in the Bill.