Offender Management Bill

I, too, apologise for not being here when the amendment was moved. The noble Baroness may have referred to the five-day juvenile awareness staff programme introduced to prepare custody officers to work with children. It is a step forward—a very small one, given that the programme lasts only five days—but I would be grateful to hear how far it has been rolled out. Can we expect every custody officer working with children to have gone through the JASP course? In Norway, prison officers have a two-year course of training. First, they simply have a responsibility as a turnkey and in their second year they go to correction college, or whatever it is called. They have access to a dummy prison and are encouraged to travel, perhaps coming to England to see what we do here. They are obliged to undertake a period of community service so that they learn about the sort of clients with whom they are dealing. I suggest that that is what we should aim for when we are talking about reform of these services for adults and especially children. It troubles me that we do not yet have really good supervision for custody officers, and I hope that that will improve. One hears on visits to these settings that the younger the offender, the more difficult they are to manage and the more expertise is required to do it well. I hope that the Minister can provide some reassurance. I strongly support the amendments.