Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I remind the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, that this Bill achieved its Third Reading in another place by a majority of only 23 votes, which may colour his reflections. This is the fifty-third Home Office Bill to be introduced to this House in the past 10 years. I suppose that we can make an evidence-based judgment, which is the popular thing to do, that the results of legislation are not necessarily or often commensurate either with the effort that goes into them or with the expectations of those who make the law. I rather chime in with the right reverend Prelate. It is a matter of immense sadness to me that this Bill is, or is thought to be, necessary. What is happening in our prisons and judicial system is an immense pointer to the failure of our polity and our society. The first duty of a state and a society is to provide a secure and happy life for its members. Every member of this society and state who goes into prison represents a failure. We are collectively responsible for this, the noble Baroness and I perhaps slightly more than others as she is, and I have been, a part of government. We are seeing an increasing proportion of our young people going for an increasing proportion of their lives into a sterile and debilitating environment, which is not what they were created for. Therefore, I look with sorrow at the vast sums being expended, or proposed to be expended, under this Bill in the setting up of NOMS. I hope that the noble Baroness will refer to the figure which most people are quoting from the Napo brief, which states: "““Figures contained in the Winter Supplementary Estimates 2006/7 show that the total amount due to be spent on the centralised and regionalised bureaucracy of NOMS was £899 million?." Then it made an invidious comparison. That money is being spent after failure, to correct it. It should surely be spent before failure in order to prevent it. Since I was in government, I have spent all my spare time trying to direct things to prevent young people getting into crime. The time to get to them is when they are about to be excluded from school. They need a mentor. The principle of demanding friendship, as advocated by the right reverend Prelate, is needed far before the Probation Service is in question. It is needed when a child is turned out on to the street with no provision while all his or her contemporaries are in school being looked after and directed. Who are the people we are dealing with and how have they got to where they are? I suppose that a typical example would be someone who is unemployed because he is illiterate. He or she comes out of school unable to communicate on paper or, very often, verbally. People who are illiterate have low self-esteem. Because they have low self-esteem they go into drugs; because they are on drugs, they have to feed their habit; and because they have to feed their habit, they have to commit crimes, which are often violent. At that point, we wake up and say, ““We must protect the public?. Until two days before, they were the public. We have to bring them back into society where we should be as one, not two. So I speak from a position of profound regret and pessimism. Turning to the Bill, I echo what has been said. The Offender Management Bill is an extraordinary name, with no mention of national offender managers or ROMs—an unfortunate term which in computer language indicates something that cannot be changed once it has been made. One hopes that these people will learn as they go along. It is even odder—and here I chime in with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf—to dismantle, change and reassemble the Probation Service at a time when the responsible ministry will be dissolved and reformed. Presumably the Minister will be dissolved and reformed in some metaphysical sense and the Bill will be taken through by someone else—unless she changes position, as she has done with such distinction occasionally in her career. To change the Probation Service and the department running it at the same time is bad enough; to make the change before completion of the young offender review is worse; but to make it just before a change of Prime Minister and probably a grand reshuffle superimposed on everything else will make it worse still. It is extraordinary to do this in parallel with another piece of legislation which, in my view, we should have had first. I refer to another quaintly named piece of legislation—the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill—in which an important part of the work that we are trying to do here is being done in another place. All that makes for bad legislative and administrative management. However, we have this Bill and it is to that that I must confine my remaining remarks, many of which I can cast aside because they have already been made. I should like to refer to the Minister’s letter of 16 April, which most noble Lords have received. In the second paragraph, on page 2, she writes: "““We will ensure that probation is fully embedded in the Local Area Agreements which are being put on a statutory footing by the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill?." That is the Bill that I have just cited. Further, the definition of ““health? in the title is very odd. In that Bill as drafted, it is the local probation boards that are specified. We shall need to see an amending provision in either that Bill or this one before the Minister satisfies us that the protection will continue. Not only that, the provision is made by including the boards in a list in Clause 80(2), while in subsection (6) of the same clause the Secretary of State is even empowered to amend by order that list by, "““removing from it any person for the time being mentioned in it?." As I read it, such an order would be subject to the negative procedure. Again, that is something that we shall have to look at closely, and I give the Minister notice of it. The Bill does not tell us on what scale the trusts are to operate. I say ““regional? because the word has been used in many documents, but are we talking about eight regional trusts with a ninth for Wales, as has been suggested? Is that the scale of intimacy, detail and local knowledge that we are seeking in these people? These will be trusts consisting of a chairman and not less than four others. How are five people, when they are quorate, to grasp the intricacies and variety of the area for which they are responsible? We need to know this, and I would like to see an amendment restricting the areas perhaps to a police area or one related to the equivalent judicial administration—I cannot think of the machinery. In that form and with those duties, they should not be required to be responsible for so large an area. We have talked about ““a local councillor?, which I think we need to see provided for in the Bill, and like the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, I am extremely worried about the magistracy. The people who know how to do this are not businessmen. Businessmen can help on the business side and perhaps a business chairman would be a good thing, but you want practitioners on the board who actually know where the shoe pinches so that the shoe can be made the right size. Turning to Clause 30, I share the reservations expressed by many noble Lords, especially the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and by the Rainer Foundation, in which I should declare an interest as a patron. The foundation has expressed a number of other reservations, although broadly it supports the Bill. At this stage I shall conclude merely by going back to where I started. I shall join with my noble friends on the Front Bench in trying to improve the Bill by whatever surgery is necessary. But all along I want noble Lords to consider that we should do anything we can to save money being spent on messing about with the machinery when the management of that machinery is also being messed about with, and the Government departments managing the management of that machinery are also being messed about with. That money would be far better spent on children before they become criminals than on trying to catch them after they have.