Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I, too, should like to congratulate the noble and learned Baroness. It is a great source of encouragement to many of us that that particular and distinguished office can be held by someone as committed as she is to the rehabilitative and restorative nature of our criminal justice system. With regard to these two somewhat competing amendments, I have to say that on reading the material, I was somewhat agnostic about which approach I preferred. But I should like to make just one point about which I hope that the noble and learned Baroness will be able to enlighten me. The problem seems to be that the Probation Service suffers from two alternative messages. On the one hand, we speak of it as thriving on localness and voluntariness, independence, imagination, innovation and so forth. This is the approach we all want to take until things go wrong. When they do so and the headlines roar, it is then very easy to talk of what happened as though it was a failure to adhere to the national standards we all expect. What is really important is that we should clarify the national standards we all expect and to which officers of whatever part of the service will be held to account and we should clarify the areas where genuine innovation and initiative will be encouraged. It would be most unfortunate if innovation and imagination were encouraged, but only to the point where people were sat on heavily if those innovations and experiments did not work out.