Offender Management Bill

moved Amendment No. 60: 60: Schedule 1, page 25, line 13, leave out ““four”” and insert ““five”” The noble Baroness said: In moving the amendment, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 61 and 64. In doing so, I welcome government Amendment No. 63, which goes a little way to satisfying our concerns, but not far enough. That sounds like an echo of my comments on the last group. The Government have conceded the point that one of the members of a probation trust should be a member of a local authority, which brings a guarantee of better local input and accountability than is in the Bill as currently drafted. However, the Government have so far refused to accept that one of the other members should be a magistrate. Magistrates currently sit as members of probation boards. Schedule 1 sets out some of the detail of the membership of the probation trusts and how they should follow good practice in their proceedings. Amendment No. 60 would change the minimum number of appointees for the probation trust from four to five, but it is simply a probing amendment to ask the Government to explain how they intend to fill the new posts. When we debated Amendment No. 14, we heard that the Government have already started to recruit chairmen and members, even though the Bill has not completed its passage through the House. On what basis is the selection taking place and what expertise will be required? The method of selecting chairmen is particularly important, as the Minister in another place said—in Standing Committee, at col.111 on 16 January—that it would be up to the Secretary of State and the chairman between them to decide how many members there should be on any given trust. Why do I believe that magistrates should continue to serve on local probation organisations as of right—where boards, now trusts? If I am not too careful, I will be in danger of repeating at length the arguments I gave during the passage of the Police and Justice Act last year as to the merits of having a magistrate as a member of a police authority, so I shall resist the temptation to go into too much detail. The Minister will recall that she reconsidered her position after a report on that Act last year and agreed that a magistrate should indeed be a member of the authority. That was a welcome development. I hope that she will take the same opportunity today to signal a change of heart with regard to the membership by magistrates of probation trusts. I strongly consider that magistrates should remain as a category of membership in their own right, not least because of the valuable expertise that they bring to the local criminal justice system. Magistrates have invaluable local knowledge—a prerequisite of their appointment as a magistrate to their local bench. Many of them are business people but all of them have a business-like attitude. They would not survive as successful magistrates these days if they did not. It is important that they should remain members of trusts as of right rather than being left to the melting pot of selection among all applicants who are swept up in the reference to ““other members”” in paragraph 3(1)(a) of Schedule 1. Amendment No. 64 is probing in nature. It explores the membership of trusts but goes wider and asks why the Government are not including in that membership representatives of the judiciary, police authorities and health experts. If they are not members, how do the Government intend that their expertise should be utilised? It will remain important for members of probation trusts to have the widest possible experience of the justice arena and a local community background. Magistrates fulfil that requirement admirably. I beg to move.