Offender Management Bill

I apologise for having been delayed and not hearing the first three minutes of the exposition of my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham. There are two concerns on which I would appreciate a response from the Minister. First, the businesses that I have spoken to are very keen to work with governors in prisons rather than remotely through a third party. They are taking a risk in taking on ex-offenders, so they need to develop a relationship of trust with the governor who is responsible for that prisoner. A comment on that would be very welcome. Secondly, I am not sure that I quite understood the position being proposed, but I notice that, to a degree throughout the Anglo-Saxon world, there is a rather fragmented approach to services for vulnerable people. For instance, in children’s homes in the United States, one sees examples both of shining good practice and of appalling provision. I think that that is true in Australia too. It is all rather piecemeal. Having visited children’s homes and private providers in this country, I know that some produce fairly good training packages of their own. Some recognise that they need to attract good people to the work in children’s homes because of the challenging children that they have to work with, so they develop a course at a university so that there is a career progression for their staff to work towards a degree in therapeutic childcare. Each of those organisations is reinventing the wheel for themselves. There is no sense of being joined up, which is something that the state might have provided as a framework in this area. In Germany and Denmark, the state has a role providing that sort of professional framework for the people working in those situations. I was alarmed by what my noble friend said about the danger of fragmentation of provision and the lack of clarity about what is required.