Offender Management Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord will know that in the local criminal justice boards and in the way that we structured the Crown Prosecution Service and the other services, we made a commitment that they have a mirror. He will remember that when we were discussing the rearrangement of the police areas we wanted to maintain coterminosity as far as possible. I assure him that we have not resiled from the belief that coterminosity would be the best possible way forward. We have set the criteria for the trusts, but we anticipate that this will have to be a gradual process and that very few boards will be ready to transfer to trust status in 2008. This gradual process will give us an opportunity to have the measured response that was spoken about by the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles. Probation commissioners and the National Offender Management System will learn from the first transition experience. All boards will have the opportunity to demonstrate that they meet the criteria, and we will assist those who do not meet them to improve. A number of noble Lords mentioned the Scottish system. The noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, was first. The Scottish system is subject to wholly different pressures from those in England and Wales. The model to reduce reoffending in Scotland will be based on a new local government body, the community justice authority. That model is not transferable to England and Wales without radical changes to our central and local criminal justice structures. It would not introduce the system of commissioning and contestability that we see as key to driving up performance. The noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, and the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, mentioned that regional offender managers would replace probation boards. They will not. Regional offender managers will act as strategic commissioners of services and allow providers much greater flexibility to determine how they deliver services than is possible under the current, centrally managed system. Probation trusts will replace boards as the public sector provider. Trusts will act as lead providers at local level, subcontract services to other local providers and work closely with local authorities. A number of noble Lords, particularly my noble friends Lady Gibson and Lord Corbett, raised the issue of training. We expect every organisation employing staff working with offenders to invest in skills and professional development for their staff. We will ensure that all providers awarded contracts have sufficient trained staff for the services they are delivering. We will do so by means of an assurance and accreditation process appropriate to the type of service and contract value. As such, we need a sufficient number of trained staff to deliver services, whichever provider is awarded the contract. Therefore, as the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, made powerfully clear, any agency which employs or seeks to perform this task must have appropriately professionally trained individuals. I absolutely agree with him; this is not ““either/or?—it is ““and/and?. We need to garner as much support from all the different sectors to enable us to deliver the change needed. It is a false dichotomy to face it in a different way. There was almost a clash of the Titans in terms of ideology between the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, and my noble friend Lord Filkin. That is not how we see this. This is about what works and delivering change that makes a difference. One of the wonders of this Bill is that I have about 10,000 things that I would like to say to your Lordships, and in great detail I am afraid. There are so many important issues that we will have to debate. There is the whole issue about how we make local accountability happen and make it real. What about the difficulties that have arisen in relation to young offenders? I made it clear in my opening how we propose to deal with that. There is the review. We have an opportunity. We understand what people are saying and we have said that those issues can be debated in that context after the review comes about. We have listened very carefully, and I hope that noble Lords will think that that is a sensible way forward. The noble Lord, Lord Dear, and others say, ““Well, we can go back to the situation we were in and that would be a consummation devoutly to be wished?. It may be, but it is not possible.