Offender Management Bill

All those issues will have to be looked at. Let us not consider this from the point of view of the voluntary sector or the business sector; let us look at the innate conflict that those two sectors may argue the public sector currently has. The public sector can currently say, ““We are going to advise the court that it should only ever place people in the public sector and not in the voluntary sector or the private sector. We believe that we should maintain a monopoly in relation to those issues””. We are taking all of that argument away and saying that there are certain objective outcomes which we should ask of all those who seek to do this work. There are certain conflicts of interest that we all need to bear in mind in determining how these will be phrased. We can do that through the contract by setting clear targets in terms of outcomes. What outcomes do we need to see? What training should the people undertaking this work undergo? What probity should these individuals demonstrate? If we take it away from private, public and not-for-profit voluntary and ask what are the criteria—criterion if it is singular—that each of these competing entities needs to satisfy in order to get the commissioned contract, that would give an objectivity which would enable us to get the best from all sectors. Perhaps I may take this opportunity to remind the Committee of what our view is as a result of the empirical data that we have. We believe that in order to meet the needs of the individual offender and the individual victim, it is likely that you are going to have to have a partnership response, which may in part be public, in part be private and in part be voluntary, because that will respond best to the identified needs of the individuals with whom we are faced. This is not about the Probation Service, it is not about the private sector and it is not about the voluntary sector. It is about the needs of the individual people we are supposed to be serving, and any structure which meets those needs is the structure that we want.