Offender Management Bill

I will speak as briefly as I can to support strongly two of the important three points made by my noble friend Lady Stern and referred to by my noble friend Lady Howarth. There is an understandable anxiety on the part of the Government to safeguard the public and to reassure them that public money is being well spent. There is a general unhappiness that the extent of the attention to measuring how effectively money is spent and how effectively outcomes have been reached in the public services can sometimes be counterproductive. The Minister may have heard about targets for policeon the ““Today”” programme this morning. Some estimates for social workers say that only 33 per cent of their time can be spent with their clients, with the rest taken up with administration of various kinds. The Government’s Green Paper on children in public care, Care Matters, showed that social workers wanted to spend more time with the children with whom they were working, to see them back into their families and to support them afterwards, but were prevented from doing so in part by the level of reporting that they had to do. Medical professionals report very much the same problem and are disheartened because they have less time to spend with their patients than they would wish. It is a general problem and one can see how it arises. If one has the confidence to build the professionalism of those at the front line and the culture around them, including immediate, first-line managers and leadership, one can begin to move away from those difficulties. Building positive relationships has been referred to several times this evening, including by my noble friend. The well respected 21st Century Social Work Review in Scotland, set up by the Scottish Parliament, reported the case clearly. It states: "““Identifying needs and risks through assessment and developing and implementing action plans to address these will achieve nothing without an effective therapeutic relationship between worker and client””." The report goes on to say that in recent years that relationship has been impeded and barriers have been created for various reasons. I strongly support what my noble friend said.