Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I am delighted to see the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, in her place. I assure her that the Government take very seriously her comments about co-operation. I hope I will be able to help the House to agree that there is very little, if anything, between us. I agree with the comments made by my noble friends Lord Warner and Lord Filkin about how this matter should be looked at. The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, has asked some very pertinent questions. We have moved quite a long way forward. The Scottish model, which the noble Baronesses, Lady Linklater and Lady Carnegy of Lour, have referred to, is admirable but set in a slightly different structure—a different system—and would not necessarily fit that easily here. I have listened carefully to all those who have spoken. We are still very much in agreement about the importance of partnership working and the close co-operation between agencies involved in the supervision of offenders. The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, is therefore right when she says that the whole Bill is about partnership; it is about nothing if not that. No one doubts that the task of reducing reoffending can be tackled effectively only by a full range of agencies working together. It is just not going to happen unless that occurs. That is whywe have established, both through statute and administratively, a whole range of mechanisms to facilitate multi-agency working. I outlined those mechanisms in Committee on21 May and followed that up in greater detail in my letter of 4 June to noble Lords who had spoken in Committee. I do not apologise for the fact that that detailed note spanned over eight pages, because it was important for us to track through all the different statutory and other arrangements that we have in place to ensure that co-operation is embedded as a reality—it is systemically there—and cannot be inappropriately uprooted. I shall not repeat that detail today, but I remind noble Lords of the examples contained therein—the crime and disorder reduction partnerships, through which we delivered the prolific and other priority offenders programme; the multi-agency public protection arrangements; the local safeguarding children boards; the local criminal justice boards; the regional reducing reoffending partnership boards; and so on. All those initiatives have created a culture change in the way in which agencies now work together. In the past few weeks I have been privileged to go up and down the country and speak to many of those working in the crime and disorder reduction partnerships, and I have been deeply impressed by what I have listened to. I have heard police officers who know as much about what is happening in education and health as they do about what is happening on the streets, and vice versa. They are thinking laterally; they are planning together; they are plotting, frankly, against the crooks and how better to address some of their needs. It is truly inspirational. So often we believe that by legislating we fix things. In fact, by legislating we create a framework within which others can fix things, and we already have much of that legislation. I do not disagree with the noble Baroness when she says that co-operation is vital. The question we now have to address is what we can do to facilitate even greater and more effective co-operation. We have to cast our net more widely than we have in the past, so that arrangements encompass not only statutory agencies but all those agencies, from whichever sector, that have something to offer in the reduction of reoffending. That is what our proposals in Part 1 seek to do. The importance of co-operation is crucial to those arrangements. As I pointed out in Committee, Clause 3(3)(a) explicitly enables the Secretary of State to authorise or require—I emphasise ““require””—providers to co-operate with one another and with other agencies involved in crime prevention, crime reduction or work with victims. Those expectations will be clearly set out in contracts. The extent to which probation boards are ableto demonstrate their commitment to partnership working is one of the key criteria in the process that is under way to determine which probation boards should move to trust status first. I hear what the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, says about making sure that co-operation is real, but this is a way in which we think we can deliver it. Thanks to the amendment agreed in Committee, the Bill now includes, in Schedule 3, a provision to ensure that probation providers participate fully in the negotiation and delivery of local area agreements. This apparently straightforward amendment sits entirely outside the rest of the proposals in Part 1.It deals with the arrangements that we currentlyhave, whereby local probation boards operate in accordance with the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000. It seeks to require local probation boards and other organisations that are involved in the supervision of offenders, such as the Prison Service and other organisations that are designated by order, to co-operate with one another. Now we know that that is really all that it does. The amendment is technically deficient—I do not complain about that because it was what the noble Baroness was saying that was important, not the technical deficiency; we could, I am sure, cure that if we thought that we should do—and it fails to connect with the rest of the proposals in Part 1. It also fails to offer any real alternative to what we do now. None of us is naive enough to think that a simple duty to co-operate, without any worked-out system to underpin it, will change the way in which agencies work together. The amendment certainly will not facilitate the greater involvement of voluntary sector providers, nor offer more flexibility in commissioning of services. It will not, for example, enable any services to be commissioned regionally or across the prison gate—the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, mentioned that. It maintains the existing divisions between agencies and geographical areas, which our proposals aim to bridge. I welcome this debate and the support from all sides of the House for the principle of co-operation, but this amendment will not help us to achieve it.I invite the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, to withdraw her amendment. This has been a valuable debate because it has reinforced again the fact that there is no disagreement in this House about the importance of co-operation or about the need to embed it between all agencies—public, private and not for profit. We are all conjoined in our belief that that is the only way in which we will reduce reoffending in our country.