Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, that we very much value that group of activists, individuals and collectives. Sustaining their commitment and giving them an opportunity to participate in a fair way is of great importance to us. Part of our work now is to understand better how we can make that activity more sustainable and easier for them and provide longer-term provision. The noble Baroness, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and other noble Lords will know as well as I do that sustainability was one of the difficulties facing the voluntary sector because of short-term contracts lasting just one year. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, was touching on the sustainability point in his comments about the need for footnotes to contracts. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, that it is important for us to come back to this. However, I should like to make a few remarks which I hope will be helpful. First, I apologise for not getting the agreements to the House more quickly. We did it as fast as we could. I could have waited until after today but I very much wanted noble Lords to have in their hands an example of the direction of travel. I thought that that might give some assurance that we were all thinking along the same lines. As noble Lords will know, local probation boards have been operating since April 2006 in accordance with service level agreements—SLAs—which are agreed between the board and the regional commission acting on behalf of the Secretary of State. I wanted to send noble Lords the extracts so that they could have a taster of how they work. I shall look at further extracts to see whether I can send anything else in addition. I think that an exampleof the current service specification of offender management is helpful. As noble Lords know, the SLAs are not legally binding but represent an important step forward in the move to a fully commissioned environment. As I am sure noble Lords are aware, we intend the first wave of probation trusts to go live in April 2008. At that point, those trusts will move from SLAs to legally binding contracts. The process of developing the contracts is now well under way and is taking the existing SLAs as the starting point. I emphasise thatit is a starting point. As far as possible, we want contracts to focus on outcomes in order to free trusts and other providers to be more innovative in how they achieve results. We are gathering the specifications for each area of work, such as unpaid work, into separate contract schedules that will sit under a generic set of terms and conditions. Drafts of most of the required contract schedules have been developed but they are currently subject to legal scrutiny. I am not able to share them at this stage, but I hope that if they are ready at a subsequent point we might be able to do something about that. However, I will send noble Lords a list of schedules so that they can see what we have in mind. We are consulting probation chairs and chiefs throughout the process so that, when we reach a draft that is ready for consultation, we will be happy to make it available to the House and to noble Lords who have attended this debate. I turn now to the specific contracts. I understand from the noble Lord that we can probably leave the specific elements of the amendment until the next occasion. First, however, I want to give one other piece of information which I hope will reassure the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, and give some comfort to the noble Lords, Lord Wallace and Lord Dholakia. We are constructing a demonstration project with Clinks. Here I should say that I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, will agree that Clinks is a small, dynamic organisation which has demonstrated clearly what small groups of people with passion can do. Clinks will look specifically at how we can develop and sustain this part of the market—the small-scale voluntary sector which makes up 70 per cent of the market and has a real passion and commitment to this work. These local providers do not want to enter into consortia and do not form part of national providers. We want to capture that. Clinks has kindly indicated that it will help us with the demonstration project and we hope to get something of good quality out of it. I can assure the House that the whole process has been very consultative. We are pleased that various parts of the sector have come forward and generously and willingly helped us to recast and recraft the contracts in a way that makes better sense for them—and therefore better sense for us because we will then be able to help the people whom we care about in more meaningful ways.