Offender Management Bill

I do not think we have been silent. Let me remind the noble Baroness about the history of what we inherited. When the Government came back into power, there had been a gap since 1995, when the previous Home Secretary terminated training arrangements, and a three-year gap during which no qualification training was available. Since 1998, more than 5,000 probation officers have achieved a diploma qualification. The Government currently invest £43 million per annum in the programme, and the contracts are sound. In order to assess whether the Government are committed to training, one has to look at what they have done, and a fair scrutiny of the Government’s record would show a clear commitment to training. I remind the Committee that the system of training that we are all rightly applauding is now carried out without any statutory basis at all. We are not talking about changing the situation, and our commitment to training has been maintained with that being the case throughout. It may assist if I explain more how training operates now and what our plans are for the future, which may give a little reassurance. The current diploma in probation studies is the recognised qualification for probation officers and combines the national vocational qualification, NVQ, at level 4 with a BA honours degree. It is achieved within two years and is delivered by a combination of work-based learning and academic study. The Ministry of Justice holds five contracts with approved higher education providers for the degree element and the NVQ is administered via City and Guilds. The costs of development, delivery and quality assurance of the diploma are met from the NOMS budget. In 2008, the diploma will be replaced by a new qualification pathway that will cover all practitioners currently working at the levels of Probation Service officer and probation officer. This revised qualification route will be modular and more flexible. It will provide for the first time a national qualification route for Probation Service officers and will be available to all practitioners working in offender management and interventions. The qualification will be based on national occupational standards and will be academically externally accredited. Entrants with existing relevant qualifications will be eligible for credits to exempt them from repetition. The qualification will be subject to a national specification and will be developed, procured and, therefore, quality-assured by NOMS. All future providers—I emphasise, all—will be required to adopt this national qualification route for staff and to source delivery from a nationally accredited provider. We are setting the same standard for everyone. A number of noble Lords have asked—it is implicit in the debate—how this will operate as we move into the new arrangements proposed by the Bill, where services are delivered under contract. We will award contracts to providers in the first place only if they are able to demonstrate that they will have staff who are appropriately trained for the services they are delivering, and the contracts will set out our clear expectations in this regard. We know that we will need a sufficient number of trained staff to deliver services, whichever provider is awarded the contract. So, to enable us to meet the need, the National Offender Management Service plans to continue central commissioning and quality control of probation training, based on workforce planning, for the foreseeable future. NOMS will continue centrally to allocate training funding to develop and maintain the qualification and to quality-assure its delivery. I turn now to the detail of the amendments, starting with Amendment No. 67. We discussed this issue when we debated Clause 3 earlier in the Committee. My noble friend Lord Bassam made clear that the definition of ““any other person”” in Clause 3 also includes organisations and institutions. That is also the case in Clause 6. So perhaps I may respectfully suggest that Amendment No. 67 is unnecessary. The same can be said for Amendment No. 68. Clause 6 is permissive in that it allows payments to be made to any other person or institution, "““for any purpose falling within the probation purposes””." The cost of training, of course, falls within the probation purposes and it is not necessary to make explicit reference to it. As drafted the amendment is technically deficient in its reference to ““probation officers””, which is not a statutory concept either under current legislation or this Bill. The existing legislation refers to ““officers of a local probation board””, which is updated in the Bill to ““officers of a provider of probation services””. The point is that the probation workforce does not comprise solely probation officers, as the noble Baronesses, Lady Howarth and Lady Linklater, and others have made clear; there is a spectrum of people who assist. I agree with my noble friend Lord Warner that right across the public sector we have developed programmes for working with volunteers and subsidiary workers to increase and improve performance. I add to the list that he gave, of course, the teaching assistants upon whom we have come to rely and who give such valuable and powerful service to the teachers, parents and children of our country. I understand the sentiments which underpin Amendment No. 85, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, but it would not deliver the improvements she seeks. I remind her that there will be no difference in the qualification requirements demanded of providers, regardless of whether they are within the public, private or voluntary sectors. I can also confirm that people supplying reports will continue to be trained and have the same competence as they do now. The first part of the noble Baroness’s amendment would require the Secretary of State to make provision for national qualifications for all staff employed by a provider of probation services. In our debates on the Bill, noble Lords have frequently emphasised the importance of allowing local areas to make decisions for themselves, yet this proposed subsection envisages the Secretary of State prescribing qualifications for all staff employed by providers. It would catch staff at the most junior administrative grade right up to chief officers. As I have said, we employ cleaners in many probation boards and I suppose it would include them as well, skilled as they often have to be. Employers would no longer be free to make basic choices about such things as whether top probation managers take NVQ-based qualifications or MBAs. I hope noble Lords will accept that that is not sensible. The second subsection requires the Secretary of State to accredit training providers for a minimum of 10 years. Again, this is excessively prescriptive. It would lock the National Offender Management Service into terms that may prove disadvantageous for a long period and would stifle innovation. However forward-looking we are, we cannot know what will be appropriate in 10 years’ time. It would also lock other potential providers out of the market for too long for their knowledge to remain current. So it is potentially also anti-competitive. The requirement on providers to employ sufficient staff with degree-level qualifications is, I know, intended to maintain standards, but it could have the reverse effect. It would enable and could encourage providers to employ staff with irrelevant or outdated degrees simply to meet a quota. The risk is that such people become a cheaper alternative to those who qualify via the nationally approved route. I do not believe that that is the intention of the amendment. Amendment No. 86 is similar in effect to the first part of the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, in that it requires the Secretary of State to make provision for the necessary qualifications for an officer or a provider of probation service, a term that, as was the case with my noble friend Lord Judd’s amendments, casts the net beyond the group of staff that the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, most wishes to catch. I understand why the noble Baroness has phrased her amendment that way, because it leads into the later amendments about which we are likely to be in agreement. Amendment No. 87 seeks to rectify that by referring to ““all practising officers””, but that is also technically deficient. We know what kind of staff it is intended to catch, but it actually fails accurately to define them. In many ways, that brings us to the nub of the issue. Legislation is too blunt an instrument to deal with the complexity and create the flexibility that we need. It is for the centre to set the broad framework, but it is for the commissioners and providers to decide what qualifications and experience are required for particular tasks and how best they can be delivered. Some aspects of service delivery—with high-risk sex offenders, for example—will require particular types of training and experience. We also need to be able to respond flexibly to changing patterns of crime and offences. What should matter to Parliament is that these arrangements deliver the outcomes that offenders and communities need. Our next set of amendments, in which we consider standards, rightly addresses that issue. I appreciate the opportunity to debate the amendments and the way we have been able to explore these issues, but I am not sure that these provisions should be included in the Bill.