Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I support the amendment. I am most concerned about the continuing professional development of probation officers, which is costly to ensure. It involves a probation officer having time away from dealing with clients and administration; that is one cost which has to be set aside. It also requires a senior probation officer to have time away from dealing with clients or administration, so that is another cost. It is very easy for an organisation which is worried about its expenditure to cut back on the time allowed for continued professional development and to cutback on supervision from senior officers. That is catastrophic for the retention of staff and the ability of staff to form and keep therapeutic, if you like, relationships with those in the front line. I am grateful to the Minister for sending me a sample contract, which is helpful to some degree,but the minutiae of practice—supervision, for instance—is not laid out in it. In one sense, one understands why—it seems like only one detail of practice—but that kind of detail can get lost. For instance, we are talking now about having different providers and we heard earlier that there is no reason to judge one kind of provider against another; that we should use simply outcomes to judge performance. I have a lot of sympathy with that point of view. But if one looks at care homes, at children’s homes or at prisons, one finds that where private providers are involved—although there are good examples, particularly if the private provider has worked in the industry in the past—there is the danger, where one is trying to save costs and looking at the situation in a strictly businesslike way, that one cuts back on the essential support for those working in the front line. It can be really costly to spare the time for people in the front line and their managers to sit back and reflect on practice, yet that is exactly what the social care White Paper, Options for Excellence, has emphasised. We need to do more to help staff to reflect and we should be developing learning organisations. That is the way forward. I would appreciate reassurance from the Minister that he takes that concern on board, and that—I know we will talk more about this issue on AmendmentNo. 24—in the minimum standards there is a strong protection for the supervision of probation officers in the future. There is real concern that it is already deteriorating.