Offender Management Bill

I shall speak for a considerably shorter period than I had intended to. However, one of my reasons for wanting this debate was that there was a long gap between the stated intention of bringing a Bill to this House and the way that the change was already being implemented without any form of legal framework. The position was just developing. My second reason was that if that were possible, why on Earth did we need a law in any case? If the intended change was being implemented, surely there was no need to look at these things further. Like my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham, I certainly support the amendment because it would give us and the Minister the opportunity to spend time discussing how it is intended that the purposes will be rolled out. That would be our starting point. The objection to the proper punishment of offenders is exactly as spelt out by my noble friend and others. The sentence is the punishment. Again, following what my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham said, if there is a breach within the sentence handed out, of course that is a reason for bringing the offender back to court. However, I also have a great deal of sympathy for the position of probation officers. The Probation Service has been messed about and changed a number of times over the past 10 years. It has been given a new framework and should be allowed time to settle into that. I have not yet heard any justification whatever for the changes which have already been made and which will continue to be made. The history of the Probation Service and the whole penal system, almost from its beginnings, has been spelt out magically by the academic experts, and so we can be in no doubt about that side of things. So far as I am concerned, protecting the public, reducing the level of offending, ensuring that offenders are aware of the effect of their crimes on victims and, above all, the rehabilitation of offenders are all crucial objectives. Of course, we will never be able to stamp out reoffending completely, but here—in this, I agree with some of the other points that have been made by noble Lords—we need to think of rather more effective ways in which the rehabilitation of offenders can take effect. I was going to spend some time talking about where I would start. I shall not now do that but will come back to it later. I would start with the whole throughput—the end-to-end management—relating to young offenders, which I hope I will be told is exactly what is intended. We can see how young offenders have been failed again and again before they have even reached prison. We have heard plenty about that in recent years. My final point is the one that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, mentioned concerning training. The Home Office has been totally involved in the training of probation officers—indeed, I gather that it set the entire framework for it. It also commissions certain universities to provide that training. However, the commissioning does not seem to have been very satisfactory because the universities have been given only about five or seven years—a very narrow amount of time—in which to get the right people to give the training necessary to reach the top level. I shall certainly come back with an amendment at a later stage and will support the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Judd, to ensure that any form of probation work of the level that we are talking about is undertaken only by those who are trained to the top of their ability, as is currently the case with probation officers. I hope that that is understood. I do not think that that exists at the moment. I understand that the Ministry of Justice has been thinking about this and considering an equivalent form of highly professional degree training on the same level as others at the top of their professions in social work.