Offender Management Bill

I had not intended to speak at this juncture but the speech made by the noble Baroness has spurred me to my feet. I am sure that she will not be relieved at what I shall say. I speak as a professional social worker. I do not have my registration yet. One day, when I get around to it, I shall clearly get it. Having said that, I am absolutely committed to high standards and quality of training, to which the Home Office and the Probation Service are equally committed. But every profession these days has auxiliaries who work with them. It seems that the Probation Service may be suffering from what the social work profession suffered from significantly in the past; that is, a professional pride that does not allow for alternative interventions. Certain social work areas have social work auxiliaries. Noble Lords have to look only at some of the home interventions and services to know that that has made a tremendous difference to the work, and to the work of the social worker as a whole, because the supervision is always left in the hands of the professional who understands. I speak as the person who trained thousands of volunteers for ChildLine to speak on the telephone to children in the most extraordinary distress. You could not actually see those children and the suggestion was often made that that was not as difficult as being face to face, but I have to say that it is far more difficult. Those volunteers learnt to manage that and many developed into counsellors and went on to further training. That does not diminish the fact that we had to have qualified supervisors always on call and on duty to help to support and develop the volunteers’ thinking. I do not believe that auxiliaries and other people working with trained professionals in any way diminishes the professionals, but I know that there is a resistance in some areas of probation, which I have experienced in other organisations, to engage because of the feeing that auxiliaries are doing jobs that they should be doing. Experienced probation officers can then get on and do the really difficult work, so long as they use their auxiliaries to do other work.