Offender Management Bill

Before the Minister sits down, I should like to add that we have had a useful Committee stage, looking in detail at a whole range of issues, but at the back of the minds of a number of us in the Committee are some underlying doubts about the rationale of the Bill. When I first heard the Carter report, I failed to understand the noble Lord’s logic. In some ways, I still fail to understand the logic of what is proposed in the Bill. We here are all committed to better offender management, to bringing down the prison population, to managing better rehabilitation and even to the better enforcement of fines—which was the bit of the Carter report that I understood—but we are not entirely convinced yet that the Bill helps to achieve those underlying objectives.