Offender Management Bill

I support this amendment and endorse every word of what the noble Lord, Lord Judd, has just said. I shall speak also to other amendments in the group. It is important that we have in the Bill, at the very beginning of the first clause, this principal function for probation purposes as the reduction of reoffending and the rehabilitation of offenders. Everything else flows from it as we have already discussed at some length this evening. That, of course, includes the reduction of crime, as the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, states in his amendment. It is equally clear that the best chances of reducing reoffending lie in the community, and increasingly so as the figures demonstrate. There is a perception that community-based penalties involving unpaid work and a whole range of options in a community order mean that somehow the offender is getting off lightly or ““walking free from the court””. This is the perception of the tabloid press in particular and seems to have a powerful effect on the perceptions of others such as politicians, sentencers and the like. Nothing is further from the truth. Indeed, as all the recent studies and polls show, the public have no appetite for prison as punishment or believe that it achieves what is really wanted; namely, that it does not happen—that there is no reoffending—and that the offender makes good his offence against the community and the victim. Interestingly, this was even true of the attitudes of victims, as a recent poll carried out by Victim Support demonstrated. More often incarceration is the easy option. It is probably more unpleasant and definitely more likely to keep the offender on the offending path, but it is not easier. The really difficult thing is to change; habits, relationships, attitudes of mind, drug or alcohol misuse, habitual violence in the home or even in the school, or besetting mental health problems. Those are huge issues that have to be addressed in the context of a person’s life in the community—and involve the community, particularly in unpaid work—and are the context in which the probation officer has to ensure that the conditions of the court sentence are fulfilled. The results at present are that the reoffending rate for probation is 53 per cent compared to 66 per cent after prison, which rises to over 80 per cent for the youngest offenders. That is a terrible record. While we must all work to bring that down, there is no question of which approach is the more successful. It goes without saying that every effort must be made, through the widening of the net of specialist services in interventions, to deal with the particular issues related to the prospect of reducing reoffending and rehabilitation. Issues of education, particularly problems associated with speech and language difficulties, mental health issues and addiction problems are the sort of deeply rooted difficulties that must be addressed as part of the process of rehabilitation, and those, too, are best addressed in the community. All those concerned about these issues agree with the concept of end-to-end support, which we got from the report of the noble Lord, Lord Carter. It requires, however, a far greater degree of interagency working than we have in many areas today. Indeed, one extraordinary omission from the Bill is that there is no mention of the role of prison. If we are talking about end-to-end management, we are talking about a process that starts before court, will very often go through prison, and will come out into the community. At each stage, a hugely significant amount of work can be done, in particular at the stages of transition when people are at their most vulnerable. It is there that work between, say, the Prison Service and prison officers and those people who will field that individual in the community is vital if rehabilitation is to succeed. It involves, crucially, the Probation Service as the core offender manager from a pre-court stage right through. Community continuity is also key; as is a proper level of understanding of trust, which lies at the heart of good offender management. A roof, a relationship and a job are also recognised as the pillars of a successful strategy for ex-offenders to take their place again as citizens. However, it will only be when the root causes of offending are first and more effectively addressed that we will see significant change. That will involve massive rethinking of how to mobilise more effective interagency working across government departments, including health, education and housing, with a focus on those most vulnerable in our society and in particular those who are vulnerable to being drawn into offending. That will be the major challenge, and in a sense it is the overarching issue, but it is far wider than the scope of the Bill. In the mean time, the Bill would be inadequate if this principal function was not clearly stated at the outset, laying down a legal imperative for everyone from the Secretary of State down to follow.