Offender Management Bill

I will speak briefly because I am conscious that we wish to make progress. I strongly support Amendment No. 62 and share the concern that the model for setting up trusts with which the Government are presenting us is that of the early 1990s under the previous Conservative Government. That followed what was then the most fashionable business model, when it was believed that ““businessmen”” was a category that excluded all the other categories that we are talking about and that the pure businessmen model was somehow intrinsically better than local councillors. Anyone who was elected was clearly out. In the past few months, I have listened to a number of Labour Ministers, not to mention all the candidates for the deputy leadership of that party, talking about the importance of providing local democracy. I went to a meeting of the New Local Government Network last week to find out what that meant, and I have to say that an hour and a half later I emerged no better informed than I had been when I went in. For me, the high point of the evening was when the acting director of the New Local Government Network suggested that one way of improving links between local and national democracy might be to appoint people who had local government experience to the House of Lords. That indicated a basic lack of research into the current composition of the House of Lords. The Government’s approach here shares some of that same confusion. If we want the trusts to be locally based and locally informed and have the confidence of the local communities in which they work, there needs to be the strongest possible local representation on them. I was not entirely reassured when I heard the Minister say that we should let the trusts judge for themselves who is best placed to serve, but I think I understood her to say that this meant the chair, nominated by the Secretary of State, proposing other people to the Secretary of State. That is a fairly weak definition of local autonomy.