Offender Management Bill

I support the amendmentfrom my own experience of seeing the lack of training among both public and private sector custody officers, which has always caused me considerable concern. In the previous days in Committee, we discussed the training of probation officers and the need for a long—indeed, degree-based—course in their work. To my mind, the custody officer, who has a very difficult task quite apart from the elements that are mentioned in the amendments, such as child safety, does not get good enough training to do their job, which is increasingly complex. It is small wonder that there are many problems connected with activities such as looking after young people, people with mental health problems or foreign nationals. Those run into problems because the staff are not trainedto deal with them. Indeed, I always remember an inspection of a young offender establishment that we had criticised for the appalling way in which children were being mistreated. The staff appealed to me to inspect them because they had not been trained to look after those particular people, and therefore that activity was an unfair burden on them. The Bill discusses the management of offenders. That management depends on the staff being able to carry out their tasks. If there is not a clear demand in the Bill that sets out the whole raison d’être of that management and reflects the scale and amount of training necessary to qualify people to carry out the tasks on the public’s behalf in these places, the Bill is defective. We should seriously consider whether these amendments should go into it.