Offender Management Bill

I said that there was no similar requirement for prison officers to be trained in this way. I was not making the point, as the noble Lord seemed to imply, that there was no training for prison officers in the public sector. My concern is that there needs to be equal treatment across both sectors. The overriding desire, which we all have, is to raise standards and to ensure that the proper and appropriate training is in place so that standards across both the private sector and the public sector continue to rise. The noble Lord has previously made the point that some of the best practice from the private sector has had the beneficial effect of working to improve standards in the public sector. In some ways, that is the benefit that we are trying to achieve in part here. However, this amendment would be a rigid and constraining way of trying to achieve an objective that we all share: to raise standards across the public and private sectors.