Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment, as I have done previously. I do so for a very particular reason in addition to the reasons given previously, which included the fact that the Secretary of State had announced that he was not going to move offender management from the public service for three years, but that interventions would be open to contestability. That seems to me absolutely right. I do not know whether noble Lords read in the Sunday Times over the weekend an article by my successor as Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, in which she said: "““The drivers of the next crisis are already in place. There are 9,500 lifers and indeterminate sentenced prisoners—far more than any other western European country and far beyond the capacity of the prison service that holds them, the parole board that will need to decide on their release and the probation service that will have to supervise them for lengthy periods””." In the context of this amendment it is interesting that the Parole Board has really been brought into the front line. Indeed, the growing number of indeterminate sentenced prisoners are choking the ability of the probation boards to get through the work. They can do it only if they have the very best professional service. Therefore, it seems to me absolutely vital that this should remain in the hands of the professionals because it is now such an obviously front-line service.