Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I am not saying that he may not, but the functions of the Lord Chancellor and those of the Secretary of State for Justice are separate. When we looked at what should remain as the core functions of the Lord Chancellor, we decided that they should not be subject to changes in the machinery of government in the normal way and that if the core functions of the Lord Chancellor were to be changed, one would have to come back to Parliament, which would have to speak. The noble Lord will remember from his days in government as a Secretary of State that machinery-of-government changes can happen very quickly. Indeed, when the noble Lord’s party was in government, I recall occasions when a department was changed and neither the Ministers nor the officials knew anything about it until they read it in a press release. Of course, those days have changed somewhat, but machinery-of-government changes can still take place in that way. We made a distinction between the Lord Chancellor’s core functions and an ordinary Secretary of State’s role. For example, before the Ministry of Justice changes, the Lord Chancellor retained certain specific functions as Lord Chancellor but he also had different functions as the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs. At present, those two posts happen to held by one person but at some future date, if another Administration wanted to do things differently, there would be nothing to prevent the two functions becoming separate because they are quite distinct. There are numerous references to the Lord Chancellor in the statute book but, as I have tried to indicate, they relate primarily to functions associated with the judiciary. The functions with which the Bill is concerned are not judicial and it is therefore appropriate that they are exercised by the Secretary of State for Justice rather than the Lord Chancellor. I hope that, in the light of that explanation, the noble Baroness will be content not to press her amendments. I invite her to look at the functions that we set out in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, as that clearly delineated the functions that would be reserved to the Lord Chancellor and would not be subject to machinery-of-government changes.