Offender Management Bill

My Lords, that is a point, but if you look at the rest of Europe, those separations have proved to be strong and well established. On balance, that move across will be beneficial. I should declare an interest as the author of the 2003 report, Managing Offenders, Reducing Crime, which led to the call for the creation of the National Offender Management Service. Three key points emerged from that report. First, resources should be taken into account when sentencing. Secondly, as everyone has noted, offender management should be joined up. Thirdly, and probably most importantly for this debate, each of the key components, such as fines, community punishment and prisons, should be made effective. The issue was what role contestability should play, because it is an important driver. I shall come back to that point later. I have always been absolutely clear that probation, with a good IT system, is the glue—others have used that word—that holds the offender management process together. I am also clear that although I favour contestability, I never envisaged, or indeed believed, that we would see the wholesale privatisation of probation. I have sometimes thought in the last couple of years as I have watched the debate that there are many similarities, at least in some quarters, with the dog watching television—he can see it but he does not get it. Whether by design or misunderstanding, some people have sought to conflate the issues of marketisation—that is, contestability and privatisation—while seeking to ignore outcomes. After all, positive outcomes are what we are trying to achieve. This is not about inputs, as others have said. Like others, I have gone around the country in recent weeks, talking and listening, and I see widespread support for the mixed provision of many aspects of probation from the voluntary sector, the private sector and parts of the public sector where alternative providers have already come to play a valued role. However, genuine concerns have been expressed—I subscribe to some of them—about the courts and offender management being dealt with separately. The Government have responded to those concerns by setting a three-year period, which should give a breather to let the right assessment be made. The idea that the proposed reforms to probation would damage the ethos of the service and would threaten and fragment it is, frankly, unreal. Indeed, if I have read the 1907 Act correctly, it suggested even then that, in addition to publicly salaried probation officers, others could do the work. It is a long established tradition. Some of the things that have been said diminish probation officers, who after all are professionals. We know what defines a profession. A profession is defined by training, qualifications and standards. It is certainly not defined by who the employer is. If we were to start down the road of a profession being defined by who employs the staff, that would lead us logically to taking the legal and accountancy professions into public ownership, which I personally would not favour. The real benefit that we should expect to see from these reforms is innovation, as others have said. We are looking for other solutions. We have not made the progress that we should have made, despite enormous endeavours, and are looking particularly at interventions. One of the things that shocked me when I conducted the original review was to be told repeatedly that the voluntary sector did not have the capacity to do this work. It simply was not there, the problem was too big, and people would not come forward. Yet when an advertisement was placed locally in a certain part of the country, seven organisations came forward, three of which locally people had not experienced before, and five of which demonstrated that they were able to do the work. As noble Lords have said today, around the country the voluntary sector is prepared to step up to the plate and, I believe, can form a key ingredient to going forwards. Noble Lords have also referred to contestability in terms of the standards and, I believe, tensioning which will come from a competitive process. There is no doubt in my view—we have seen it in other sectors, particularly the Prison Service—that contestability was not the process of getting new people in; it was the effect on the existing service. People, when shown the way, behave brilliantly. It has been suggested that the marketisation process in the Prison Service was a simpler model than that proposed for probation, but that was not so. Although 8 per cent of the Prison Service was privatised, there was a sea change in the way in which the whole service was run. The result was to free up hundreds of millions of pounds which has been spent on rehabilitation. It has not been sucked out of the service and spent by the Chancellor elsewhere. It has been taken from guarding measures and put into proactive programmes which, if one looks at the results, are beginning to bear fruit. I have got the sense from many people that probation should focus on building its progress since the formation of the National Probation Service. Its biggest task is to convince the public that community punishment has validity and bite. It was best summed up the other day when one of the few criminal defence solicitors still speaking to me said, ““I’ll know you’ve got it right when my clients, on receiving a community sentence, don’t thank me for getting them off?. We have a problem, which it would be silly to ignore. If we want to get our prison population to the right level, we have to get community sentences right as well. However, I encourage probation to have confidence in its achievements and new measurement tools, and be ready to move on from what I hear is a defensive position to a position where it can play its full part, which is its due, in the reforms going forward. After all, it is a growth business. In 10 years, the number of people employed in the Probation Service has increased from 14,000 to 21,000. There is a commitment to the Probation Service, so it can move on and can play the key part. Those of us who were involved in probation prior to the 2000 Act know that the local nature of probation services was not good. We did not get 1,000 blooms of light; we tended to get inconsistencies and not a very good service. The NPS has helped us to move forward on that. The fact remains that what happens to offenders is so critical that often the issue comes to Parliament and the Secretary of State. Therefore, I am very sure that there should be clear accountability, which should flow. Very good points have been made about local representation. I am looking forward to studying the detail to see what we can do, but I do not want to see gestures. I want to see real local involvement in how this is conducted. The proposals, particularly on concessions, represent a measured way forward. Above all, we need to get out and do something. We have tarried a long time and do not need to debate and tinker with it. We need to make it clear to the people who need help that programmes are there, and make it clear to all those who work in probation services where their future stands. I commend the Bill.