Offender Management Bill

moved Amendment No. 5: 5: Clause 3, page 3, line 21, after ““arrangements”” insert ““for co-operation”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, in the United Nations and other international institutions there is often a provision for an explanation of vote. I have been anxious to have an opportunity—this relates directly to the amendment—to explain why I supported the Government on Amendment No. 2. I supported them because I was convinced that the dynamic is there for co-operation and because my noble friend was extremely persuasive in arguing that the whole principle of co-operation and partnership is central to everything the Bill is about. I suppose that if I had any degree of anxiety, it would be—one that I have expressed before—how far that genuine intent of Ministers is institutionally shared to the full everywhere that it should be shared. I say to my noble friend that the purpose of my amendment is to give substance to what she argued so well. If the whole cause of co-operation and partnership is central to the Bill and everything it is about, it seems a bit peculiar that when it comes to the making of contracts and agreements we just talk about provision. We need to support my noble friend in ensuring that the words are in the Bill to make it explicitly clear what these agreements and partnerships are about. It seems not altogether impossible that as time goes by—and this tends to happen in life—bureaucracy reasserts itself. There will be those who see the relationship with, for example, the voluntary sector, as the sub-contracting arrangement; that it isabout encouraging voluntary organisations to gear themselves to be effective, efficient and more economic providers of service than the Government are able to be. We have heard both in Committee and this afternoon that that is not the intention of the Government; the intention of the Government is to engage these people. I have some difficulties with the phrase ““third sector””. I did not ever feel when I was director of Oxfam that I was director of part of the ““third sector, I believed that I was director of Oxfam. That is something very different; and I will obviously not go into it now. We need to be very clear, and fair to everybody, that these contracts and agreements are about what the Minister has emphatically assured us is her intention, the purpose of the Government and central to the Bill. From that standpoint, I hope that the Government will at least feel able to take this point seriously and see how it might be met. I beg to move.