Offender Management Bill

I oppose Amendment No. 1 and suggest that some of the arguments made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, on AmendmentNo. 2 are misplaced. I, too, was unable to attend the Second Reading debate because I was abroad, but I shall spare the Committee the speech that I would have made. I am sceptical about putting principles at the top of a Bill. As I recall, we went through this argument on the Mental Health Bill and I am not sure that we much advanced the sum of human knowledge in that discussion. I am opposed to establishing such principles in this Bill when there are good definitions of the functions and aims of the Secretary of State in Clause 2 and, although we may have some differences on this, a perfectly reasonable shot seems to have been made in Clause 1 regarding the purposes of probation. We do not need to reiterate that. Having a multipurpose array of saying roughly the same thing in different parts of a Bill can confuse the people who have to implement legislation. I do not think that subsection (1)(b) of the amendment is an appropriate way of dealing with providers of services. Much of this Bill is about changing the way that we deliver public services in a range of areas. It is called a commissioning approach. The point about commissioning is that the commissioner specifies in a contract what the providers of services are expected to do. It is not the sort of thing that we need to put in legislation, particularly given that the Bill makes perfectly good arrangements for putting commissioners in place. The noble Baroness’s amendment is misplaced. I listened with fascination as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, took us back to 1907. Social circumstances have moved on a little for the Probation Service since then. I would briefly mention the time that I spent as a special adviser in the Home Office just after the 1997 election, when we finally got round to sitting down and trying to change the training of probation officers, which was, until then, pretty much identical to the training of social workers. We had to confront a situation whereby some parts of the Probation Service were uncomfortable with the idea of enforcement. Many officers preferred not to take offenders back to the courts and if you looked at their training, you could understand why they had that level of discomfort. That issue has been dealt with and the training is now fit for purpose in the role of the probation officer in the modern world. We can have a debate on whether probation officers are there to enforce punishment, but they are certainly there to enforce the will of the court that has handed out a sentence. That means that they have to report back to the court when that sentence is clearly and repeatedly being breached by an offender. That puts them in an enforcement role and, I suppose, if you are an offender, they could be seen as being in a punishment role, because they are enforcing that sentence. This amendment is not necessary and the attempt of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, at an amendment to the amendment is based on a false understanding of the true role of probation in this day and age.