Offender Management Bill

My Lords, we now reach the concluding part of this interesting debate. All of us agree that the incidence and, to a lesser extent, the nature of crime may vary from place to place and from generation to generation. Equally important is to recognise that crime is something with which all societies have to come to terms in their own ways. Over the years, there have been continuous debates about the underlying causes of crime and a good deal of research into the efficacy of various responses. The Home Office has not been an exception. In the past few years, a number of structural attempts have been made to develop an integrated correctional service that is better equipped than two separate services to reduce reoffending. The question that we must ask is: has the Home Office got it right? Does the NOMS Bill offer better solutions of tackling and dealing with those who offend? More importantly, if NOMS is an end-to-end streamlining process, why is there only a cursory mention of prisons in Part 1? Today’s debate points to serious concern about the role of prison and the Probation Service. I am not surprised. Most research has tended to refute rather than to confirm hypotheses about the causes of crime and the effectiveness of punishment and treatments. It is clear that the political mood continues to be conditioned by hunch and gut feeling rather than by the considered results of research. Why else should we be dismantling the present services and proposing something different? I suspect that the success or failure of the NOMS Bill will be judged on two criteria: first, whether it is better than the systems we have in place; and, secondly, whether it helps to reduce the number of re-offenders and therefore the prison population. I have no dispute about the priority that is being given to crime prevention in its broadest sense and to schemes for diverting as many young offenders as possible from the criminal justice system. There is nothing soft about that approach. It is a realistic appraisal of the strictly limited contribution which the criminal justice system can make to reducing crime. There have been many debates in your Lordships’ House about punishment and the aims and effectiveness of sentencing. It is clear that Parliament has never attempted to identify the purposes of sentencing or to prescribe the relative priority that the courts should attach to them. I served as a magistrate and as a member of a board of visitors for a local prison for more than 14 years. I welcome the local nature of justice and one thing that I have learnt above all is that rehabilitation and reparation are more likely to be possible in the community than within the artificial and restricted use of prisons. Unfortunately, the prison population is now in the region of 80,000. A large number of people will continue to pass through our prison system, some staying for a few days, others for many years and a few will never be released. The prison rules proclaim that, "““the purpose of the training and treatment of convicted prisoners shall be to encourage them to lead a good and useful life?." Yet we know that there has been a dramatic loss of confidence in the rehabilitation potential of prisons. The prime concern of our Prison and Probation Services is to prepare inmates to have a renewed measure of self respect, enhanced self control and a broader range of skills than to find that when released they leave in the same frame of mind as when they arrived. Even that could be grudgingly acceptable, except that we know that their reoffending rate within two years could be between 65 and 85 per cent. By any standards, that is a failure. The question is: could NOMS offer a better solution? The success of NOMS will be judged by one key and overriding measure—whether it can reduce reoffending. That is the biggest challenge facing the Home Office. Repeat crime costs some £1 billion, let alone the cost of its impact on victims. My noble friend Lady Linklater has stressed the need for institutional clarity. Offenders are managed both inside and outside the prisons. Is there a clear distinction of who does what and where? Structures are easy to impose. It is difficult to make them work if clarity is lacking. I am disappointed that the Probation Service that I knew during my magisterial days is to disappear in preference to a seamless system. Equally, I regret that the last friendly face before a sentence is pronounced is now to become an agent of the Government. Local accountability, local knowledge and local involvement have served our courts well. This has helped in reintegrating offenders into their local communities. Part 1 of the Bill gives the National Offender Management Service the power to commission probation services from any provider—from probation trusts, from the private sector or from the voluntary sector. I do not think that many of us would dispute that. I have consistently advocated the greater involvement of the voluntary sector, in partnership with the Probation and Prison Services, in working to rehabilitate and resettle offenders. It is right that we extend the involvement of voluntary organisations in working with offenders and their families. There are fears that the process of commissioning and contestability introduced by the Bill could damage genuine partnership by promoting divisiveness and free-for-all competitions. In the course of the Bill’s passage through this House, we have the opportunity to scrutinise its provisions to ensure that that does not happen. Voluntary agencies do not want to run prisons or to run probation areas, nor do they wish to carry out core probation functions. That was spelt out by my noble friend Lady Linklater. Instead, they are keen to provide more services of the kind in which the voluntary sector has particular strengths, which were mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Corbett of Castle Vale, such as accommodation, employment, education, mentoring, addictions, mental health, work with offenders’ families and community engagement. Those services are crucial to the reduction of reoffending. For example, ex-prisoners who get and keep a job have their likelihood of reoffending cut by between one third and one half, and getting offenders into stable accommodation reduces their reoffending rate by at least one-fifth. Of course the Probation Service must embrace changes and that is well accepted by the probation board and Napo. It would be wrong to criticise them. They are not afraid of challenges. That was clear in my discussion with those bodies. The history of the past few years has shown that the Probation Service is often reluctant to engage the voluntary sector in partnership when it is not required to do so either by legislation or by centrally driven targets. Until 2001, the Probation Service had an official target to devote 7 per cent of its resources to partnerships with the voluntary sector and, while it has never quite achieved that percentage, the target pushed the service to devote around 5 per cent of its budget to such partnership arrangements. However, the 7 per cent target was removed in 2001. After that, the proportion of probation budgets spent on contracts with the voluntary and private sectors plummeted to less than 2.5 per cent. Even where the Probation Service asks voluntary organisations to provide services, a range of problems is often attached to the contracts that are offered. Frequently, contracts do not pay charities the full costs of providing these services, and contracts with voluntary organisations are generally only for a year at a time, making it difficult for charities to plan ahead. I am glad that the Probation Service has begun to remedy these matters. Last year, the service adopted a target of devoting 5 per cent of its budget in 2006-07, and 10 per cent in 2007-08, to partnerships with the voluntary and private sectors. The national director of probation has given instructions to probation areas that, in future, contracts with voluntary organisations should provide full cost recovery and should be for periods of at least three years. As a result, the proportion of probation budgets devoted to partnerships has now increased to around 4 per cent. The Probation Service clearly sees that it is more likely to be regarded favourably as a lead provider if it can show that it has a wide range of healthy partnerships with the voluntary sector. However, many fears have also been expressed about how the Bill’s arrangements for commissioning and contestability will work in practice. Probation staff have expressed concern that standards of service could be reduced and the public put at greater risk if services are contracted out to the private sector. The voluntary sector has expressed concerns that, in an all-out competitive free-for-all, it could lose out to glossy bids from the private sector, which has more back-up resources than charities to put into the bidding process. There has been concern that, in a competitive process, small and local voluntary organisations could lose out to large national agencies. There has also been concern that most contracts with voluntary agencies will probably be subcontracts with larger lead providers—either probation trusts or private companies—and that those could still fail to provide full cost recovery or contracts of reasonable length. There have also been fears that providers might not abide by best practice in equality and diversity. It would be helpful to have the Minister’s assurance on this subject. Over the two years leading up to the Bill, Probation Service representative organisations and voluntary agencies have discussed these issues at length with Home Office Ministers and officials. NOMS now appears to take the view that probation trusts will normally be the lead providers and that other agencies will receive subcontracts from them. The Bill has been amended to provide that core functions, such as court work, will not be contracted out for at least three years, as the Minister mentioned. There has been a strong emphasis in government statements on the need for carefully planned partnerships drawing on the complementary strengths of the statutory, voluntary and private sectors. The Government have said that they will look more favourably on bids in which larger organisations partner smaller and local organisations. NOMS policy statements have also said that contracts with voluntary agencies should provide full cost recovery and should last for periods of three years or more. Those are welcome shifts in the Government’s position. However, it would be preferable for guarantees of this kind to be written on the face of the Bill. For example, the Bill could be amended to provide that probation trusts continue to be lead providers of core probation services, other than in exceptional circumstances of persistently poor performance. At the same time, the Bill could be amended to ensure that at least 7 to 10 per cent of Probation Service budgets are devoted to partnerships with the voluntary sector. It could require that contracts and subcontracts should reimburse providers for the full cost of the services that they provide. The Bill should require the Secretary of State, when deciding which organisations should receive contracts to provide services, to take into account providers’ practice in promoting equality in respect of race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, age and religious belief. With amendments of this kind, the Bill could ensure that the changes that it contains promote greater genuine partnership between the public, voluntary and private sectors in promoting rehabilitation and reducing reoffending. I have been asked by my noble friend Lady Walmsley to flag up her interests in the Bill as the party’s education and children spokesperson. She cannot be with us today but hopes to take part in Committee. We have the opportunity to put right some of our concerns. The question remains: does the Bill significantly and materially improve the delivery of all the crucial tasks to reduce reoffending? If we are not careful, this Bill could be a disruptive distraction from those real challenges. By tampering again with the Probation Service, we are in danger of missing the bigger picture.