Offender Management Bill

First, I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, for coming into the Chamber a moment after she had begun her speech. I hope that she will not mind if I make some points about her very useful and helpful amendment. Without entering into the kind of speech that would be appropriate at Second Reading, I believe that our intellectual and moral incoherence about punishment is what lies at the heart of many of the practical difficulties that the criminal justice system currently experiences. There is very little clarity, and certainly very little consensus, in society about what we think punishment is and what we think justifies it morally. The result is that we become polarised into people who are soft on crime and people who are tough. The people who are tough are supposed to support punishment, and the people who are soft do not like it being mentioned at all. It is just possible that the arrival of these words in Clause 2 and the noble Baroness’s introduction of them as principles that should apply to the whole Bill—I am somewhat agnostic about which is better—in an amendment which the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, seeks to amend by removing those words, is some reflection of our anxiety, because we have no coherent intellectual consensus about what justifies punishment. It may have been a slip of the tongue, but I could not help noticing that the amendment refers to the ““proper”” punishment of offenders, while the noble Baroness referred at one point in her speech to the ““appropriate”” punishment of offenders. I am not quite sure whether there is a subtle distinction. I am also not sure whether the emphasis in subsection (2)(c) is on the noun or the adjective. Is it that the Probation Service is to be principally concerned with punishment or with ““proper”” punishment, presumably as against ““improper”” punishment?