Offender Management Bill

My Lords, we all seem to be able to agree about the main objectives of any offender management system—the wish to protect the public, to punish, to reduce reoffending and, of course, to deter. However, we seem to be having a great deal more difficulty in agreeing how we are going to do this. It is interesting today to hear the paradox of people talking on the one hand about fragmentation and on the other about centralisation. There are many challenges in this. We need to examine them. Most societies struggle to find a balance between how they operate fines, community sentences and custodial sentences. Always we seek to maintain the integrity of the justice system. The integrity and credibility of the justice system is the rock on which this is all built. We have to balance that with quality and cost. The issue today is not so much about that balance but about how we deploy the resources we have allocated for the care of all offenders. It is worth reflecting for a moment that each year in this country we spend about £3.2 billion on looking after offenders. Contrast that with the fact that we spend only—I say ““only?—£4.5 billion per year on oncology; that is, caring for everybody in this country needing cancer care. One of the key roles for government must be to set priorities between the different calls on resources. One of the very difficult things in this area has been to provide government with evidence of what works. I have never been active in any area which was so strong on assertion and so short on facts. It is really interesting if you look around worldwide. Billions of pounds a year are spent on incarcerating people and trying to stop reoffending, yet the absence of credible studies which tell us what interventions work is very thin on the ground. The only one I can give any credibility to is the work of the Max Planck Institut in Germany. That showed over a great longitudinal survey that we would be lucky if we could reduce offending by between 5 and 10 per cent. One thing I want to counsel in all this is that we must not get carried away by what the prospects for this are. We must always be realistic. One of the critical things is getting the evidence, and getting it in a secure way so that we do not confuse short-term blips with long-term trends. Nothing diminishes the authority of the system more than to overclaim, only shortly later to have that authority undermined by events disproving the early blip that was claimed. Any offender management system needs the confidence of the public and sentencers; it needs the support and belief of those who work in the service and, in particular, of the professionals. We have had a strange situation—other speakers have referred to this. We have had a very fragmented system with fragmented responsibility. The DCA was responsible for fines, and prison and probation were—in what somebody called modern jargon—the silos in the Home Office. Of course, that led to the well rehearsed gaps as offenders moved from one silo to another, and to the realisation that we needed to do something about end-to-end management to get this to work. The recent announcement of the creation of the Ministry of Justice puts the offender experience, as perhaps one should call it, under one roof. That is to be welcomed. I should say to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, that I quite see his point. I know it will be difficult, but it is very nice when we talk of things being joined up to get everything in one place.