Offender Management Bill

I very much appreciate what the noble Baroness has told us; it certainly helped me to see my way through these complexities. I am very glad that we have now got round to talking about where decisions should be made, whether nationally, regionally or locally. I preface my remarks by confessing that I have a preference for things being as local as possible, and I would be in favour of a much more localised criminal justice system. It would help local people to understand and trust the system, and local and visible criminal justice activities would be likely to raise confidence in it. It would enable us to have much more diverse provision because crime is very local. We know that the home addresses of those who are convicted are concentrated in certain areas, and that calls for an extremely specific and localised approach. If criminal justice were more local, it would encourage local services to have ownership of their ex-offenders. It would also enable the money that is spent locally to be assessed to see whether it really benefits the local area. I hope that the Minister can help me here, as I did not quite understand her explanation. I understood—although I am probably wrong—that a local area agreement is a decision between the centre and a local area that money from a government-devised programme will be passed to a local area and incorporated into its budget so that the local area can decide how it is spent, provided that outcomes are set out which are acceptable to all those involved. I certainly thought that that was what local area agreements implied. From what I have read about them in the past, they are a transfer of decision-making power from a central department to the local level in return for an agreement about outcomes. Is that what the noble Baroness was saying? There is certainly a lot to be said for local decision-making by people who live with the problems: they should have the ability to decide. However, I did not hear the noble Baroness say that there would be local decision-making. I have heard that the commissioning will be done by a regional person who is the agent of the Secretary of State. I understand that, in the end, local people and local structures can be involved, but there is nothing local about this system at all. Ultimately, Whitehall decides. I should be grateful if, in responding, the Minister could tell me whether I am wrong—or not, as the case may be.