Offender Management Bill

When the noble Lord, Lord Judd, moved Amendment No. 3, he gave a characteristically thoughtful analysis of the whole issue of probation purposes, which has driven this debate very well. The amendment puts the reduction of offending and rehabilitation at the heart of the definition of ““probation purposes””. While I wholeheartedly agree with the principle of the noble Lord’s amendment that rehabilitation should be at the heart of probation purposes—he knows what is coming here; he can feel it from afar—I do not believe that it should have priority over the other matters listed in Clause 1. I shall not tire the Committee by repeating those, as I hinted when I dealt with my Amendment No. 1 that they ought to be treated equally. However, the noble Lord is right to direct the attention of the Committee to the importance of rehabilitation, as he did in our debate on Amendment No. 1. Amendment No. 4, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, is similar to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Judd. Perhaps I can be cheeky and say that if the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, had been minded to press ahead with it, I might have to question whether his amendment was placed in the right part of the Bill. I suppose that that really is cheeky, given that I have been accused of putting my amendment in the wrong place. My concern is that the inclusion of the reduction of crime as part of the meaning of probation purposes may not exactly achieve what the noble Lord intends. The advantage of Amendment No. 4 is that it would effectively place a duty on the Secretary of State to reduce crime. That is an entirely proper and admirable aim, but I do not think that the Secretary of State needs any inducement to do that. I feel sure that any Home Secretary has that as his aim. The difficulty here, of course, is that we are talking about different Secretaries of State. We need to recall that, throughout the Bill, we are thinking either of the Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice—the Lord Chancellor—or of the Home Secretary, who as Secretary of State has direction of the police forces and other forces that try to reduce crime. Here we see a well intentioned amendment serving very well to highlight the difficulty with the Bill.