Offender Management Bill

I rise to speak to the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, and to the amendment to that amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. The first amendment offers the opportunity to focus on what the Bill stands for and what our National Probation Service essentially represents. It is about the provision and the nature of the service as well as about supporting people who are in need of such a service. It is about what the National Probation Service stands for in terms of values and principles and therefore what we want or need from such a service. It underpins the debates that we will have on the detail of the Bill because it addresses the extent to which the Probation Service will remain central to the business of offender management and explores the nature of the rolethat the service should play in the way we configure future offender management and community safety functions. The principles laid out by Amendment No. 1 at the very outset of the Bill assert their overarching relevance to all its aspects, rather than the narrower function of the aims, as they are referred to in Clause 2. They are then expanded and articulated in the detail of the probation purposes set out in Clause 1, which can be seen as the logical development from these overarching principles. They refer to the purposes of advising the courts on appropriate sentences and conditional cautions, supervision and rehabilitation, assistance to those on bail and working with victims, all of which must reflect and be embedded in those principles. One major omission is the purpose of tackling the underlying causes of offending, without which the goal of reducing reoffending is meaningless. We will return to this. There is a real problem in the language of the Bill, in which ““probation functions””, ““probation purposes”” and ““probation services”” seem to be used interchangeably, which is very confusing. Clarity is of the essence, and we should start with a clear statement of principles. The essence of offender management, which is at the heart of all probation services, is the fundamental belief in the capacity of people, including offenders, to change. It is the key. How we protect the public and reduce incarceration and reoffending is predicated on the belief that people can be helped to move from being an offender to being a citizen. That is the core of the value of the Probation Service and must be understood by all those who presume to reconfigure it. The principles of probation emanate from that belief. Deeply unfashionable as it is seems to have become, the phrase ““to advise, assist and befriend””, which has been referred to, encapsulates that humanity and the essential, personal quality of the nature of probation work, which we reject at our peril. I briefly raise one point that has not been discussed. It concerns the role and potential loss of the post of national director of probation. That post was created in 2001. With it came a significant move towards the coherent national framework that we have today. He is the accountable officer, answerable to the Secretary of State, dealing with issues of probity and due governance, carrying central responsibility for commissioning and being the point of reference for all chief officers of probation. He is the pivotal figurehead, spanning all aspects of probation work. He, I believe, is another detail absent from the Bill. Without debate that post has been downgraded in the new NOMS hierarchy, below that of both the chief executive of NOMS and the director of commissioning and performance. Itis not a mere detail. There is the real possibility that, as the commissioning of interventions goes out to contestability, this move will undermine the coherence so carefully nurtured and make the fragmentation of the service more likely. Coherence is a real and general concern; it is part of the very fundamentals of the probation provision that we are discussing. I would be grateful if the Minister could illuminate the Government’s thinking on that issue. The second amendment, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, represents another of those fundamental principles that I have been talking about. The role of the Probation Service, or any other provider of probation services, is to carry out the instructions of the court; it is not to punish. The court will already have been advised through reports drawn up by the probation officer of the circumstances of the offender before sentence, but it is the sentencer’s role and responsibility to punish. The sentence is the punishment under any of the multiplicity of options open to the court. The court will of course have in mind the principles and objectives that underlie the sentence, as will the probation officer; namely, the protection of the public, the reduction of reoffending, the needs of the victim, the awareness of what the offender has done and, of course, rehabilitation. It then falls to the probation officer to supervise the execution of the sentence to ensure that the conditions are met and, if they have not been met, to return the offender to court if necessary. It is greatly to be regretted that the service has been under growing pressure of the new ““tough”” enforcing ethos in the past few years. That has made its role more coercive and has resulted, inter alia, in a fourfold increase in automatic recall to prison for breach, which the Lord Chief Justice has described as a ““trapdoor to prison””. It has turned community service into community punishment. It has undermined the constructive role of the service and highlighted the primacy of punishment over rehabilitation. Like many of your Lordships, I have been a magistrate in the past and know what the process is about. It is left to the skill of the probation officer to enable the offender to comply through the process of the advice, assistance and befriending, through local knowledge of his circumstances, available resources locally and appropriate interventions. If things fail, the officer is expected to return the client to court for a further decision on what the next appropriate punishment might be. That is well understood by all parties. It is a contradiction to expect the probation officer to be both punitive and rehabilitative at the same time. Given the sanction of the return to court, the officer will do all he can to enable the offender to comply with the conditions of the sentence, and then to move forward, using all the interpersonal skills at his disposal, the development of a relationship of trust, a firm guiding hand and, very importantly, judgment. The process of changing lives or facilitating change is subtle and often slow, and it can often mean two steps forward and one step back, or possibly the reverse. It requires trust and commitment to move forward. I have never met a probation officer who sees himself as an inflictor of punishment. He has to choreograph carrying out the court’s instructions. The indicator of his success is that his client fulfils whatever the court has required and completes and discharges his probation. I suspect that the press and politicians have contradictory expectations of punishment. Theywant retribution, so that punishment involves real unpleasantness for the offender and suffering to, in some way, mirror the suffering of the victim. But they also want an end to the offending. The chances are that those goals are mutually exclusive. Few people go straight because of suffering or fear. Indeed, those are likely to have the reverse effect. As anyone working in prison, as I do, knows, the most difficult prisoners to manage are those on indeterminate sentences or a whole-life tariff, because they have no hope and nothing to lose any more. Hope and the possibility of change are two very important drivers in prison. All the other elements in the first five principles in the new clause are constructive and positive. We do not need to include the paragraph on punishment.