Offender Management Bill

I understand the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, about seeking more clarity on how the trust will operate. I have no quarrel with that. However, the nub of the amendments—leaving aside the government amendment—is that they require the Secretary of State to secure the agreement of both Houses of Parliament when they set up, alter the name of or dissolve a probation trust, or amend an order in any way. I suggest that that provision is unnecessarily restrictive and out of kilter with the way that Parliament has authorised the Executive to operate in a number of other areas of public policy. The one I know very well, and the one to which the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee draws attention, is the area of NHS and primary care trusts. I do not want to push too far the comparison between probation trusts and primary care trusts, but primary care trusts are bodies that handle a substantial amount of public resource. They receive directly from the Secretary of State the money for commissioning healthcare services in their area. They currently spend about £60 billion of public money each year. There is no requirement on the Secretary of State for Health to lay an order when he or she dissolves a primary care trust or to consult both Houses of Parliament on that order. He simply makes the orders to abolish, to change the name of and to establish primary care trusts. It is not as though Parliament did not consider informing the legislation whether that should happen. It did not happen by accident. Parliament decided that when you change strategic health authorities, the supervisory body for primary care trusts, an order should be laid before both Houses of Parliament and that there should be a process by which Parliament approved that set of changes. Therefore, Parliament has consciously allowed the Secretary of State the authority to make an order without scrutiny by Parliament but admittedly after a process of public consultation, which is good practice anyway, to change those primary care trusts. I have to confess to the Committee that as a Minister I made orders last year abolishing about 200 primary care trusts and establishing about 50 new ones. That was done after a process of public consultation and in accordance with the wishes of Parliament. I suggest to the Committee that there is a reasonable comparison between primary care trusts and probation trusts. Admittedly, we have had that kind of delegated autonomy for health for a longer period possibly than we have had with probation. Nevertheless, primary care trusts spend an enormously greater amount of money than probation trusts. They commission a diverse range of services which affect the individual citizen. So there are some reasonable comparisons there.