Offender Management Bill

May I make it absolutely clear that there are two different areas: crime prevention and crime reduction? As the noble Baroness says, there is work that deals with a different category of persons before they offend. Then there is work to reduce reoffending by those who have offended. This is not semantics: I understand what the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, says. Inasmuch as one prevents those who have offended in the past from offending again, one is reducing the level of offending overall because one is stopping the people who have already been at it from continuing it. Of course that makes sense. So there is the role of the National Offender Management Service, which is there to deal with those who have offended and to prevent them reoffending. The other role has been retained by the Home Office and is being undertaken in partnership with the prevention role of the Youth Justice Board, the DfES, the DCMS, the DTI, and the DWP, which gets people into jobs early and ensures skills acquisition. That is all prevention. However, there is an opportunity for both to work together and with wider government, because each contributes part of the continuum. There is no confusion. I should say to the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, that this is part of that continuum. We should not see this as a series of guttural stops, because they are interrelated. One example is employment. We are trying to encourage a whole spectrum of employers to join us in preventing offending, reducing reoffending and employing those who have reoffended. A bank would be unlikely to employ bank robbers because of the FSA. Obviously it would not be a terribly healthy thing to do, even if they had been rehabilitated, but they may be very good at working with us in schools to try to get skills acquisition and in prevention roles. We may be able to bring those roles together. This is part of a continuum; it is not confusing the two. This is about understanding that if we are to intervene appropriately in crime, we must have the three levels. We must try to prevent those who we feel may be vulnerable to crime from becoming involved. We must reduce the opportunities for offending by working with business, because sometimes we can design crime out, for example by making cars harder to steal and by making mobile phones that are non-transferable. All that helps us to reduce crime. Then there is reducing the level of reoffending. Those three things on occasion have to be conjoined. They may be dealt with by different people, but they are dealt with none the less. That is what I was responding to in respect of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. We are not confusing the two, but we have to see it as a bit of a relay where a baton has to be passed on and we have to work together in order to make the difference that we seek to make. That is what I was saying, and I would not like to mislead the noble Baroness.