Offender Management Bill

I support the amendment. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, for bringing the Scottish experience into our discussions. I declare an interest as a member of the Scottish Executive’s national advisory board on community justice authorities and convener of the Scottish Consortium on Crime and Criminal Justice. I, too, very much appreciate the material that was sent round electronically by the Ministry of Justice late on Friday. One paper on the strategy for reducing reoffending says that to deliver results we need simultaneously to tackle the education, employment, financial, housing and health barriers that offenders face while providing support to ensure that they are able to access mainstream services and are effectively reintegrated back into the community. I very much welcome the reference to mainstream services, because once people have been labelled offenders and have been described as the responsibility of one service, mainstream services can be very happy to say, ““They are not our responsibility. This is someone else’s business. We are already under enough pressure, thank you””. The idea of a duty to co-operate will overcome any temptations in that direction. A duty to co-operate can help those supervising offenders to make demands on those mainstream services without which they will not be able to rehabilitate. I refer in particular to the statutory duty on prisons. It is very new in Scotland that prisons should have a statutory duty to co-operate with the community justice authorities, which can therefore make demands on them. In a sense, the Bill has an emphasis on individuals and their procession through a system, but there is enormous scope for co-operation much more widely than just in relation to the individual pathway of a person through a prison and out into the rehabilitation service. There are ways in which co-operation between institutions can be very beneficial. For example, Edinburgh prison has half a floor devoted to offices where people who resettle ex-prisoners have a desk, a telephone and a lockable filing cabinet. They can be there at any time, and prisoners come to see them. Another way in which co-operation can be beneficial is when prisons make a relationship with the local authority and agree to inform the authority who is coming out when and what they might need. Those are simply examples of what could flow from a duty to co-operate. I very much support the noble Baroness in her amendment.