Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I understood that it was precisely the role of Parliament to second guess the Government and to examine whether the proposals made by the Government have a clear rationale. I have struggled with the Bill to find the underlying, clear rationale behind it, and there have been points when I felt that there were two or three different Bills popping out from underneath it. As the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, will know, I have become increasingly sceptical about the mantra of public service reform, the employment of large numbers of outside consultants and the pressure to change for the sake of change and to push towards the private sector. We all agree with the principle of more integrated offender management, and we understand that the purpose is the reduction of reoffending and in parallel a reduction in prison numbers. When I read the Carter report—which has a good beginning and a good end, but I missed the argument in the middle that links the beginning and the end—I understood that one the major problems is that fines are not enforced. Nothing that we have read in any of the papers since then deals with how better to enforce fines, which might make a major contribution to a reduction in prison numbers. We talk about community penalties and community punishment, but that takes us into the question of which part of a mixed economy one is moving towards. There still seems to be confusion in the Bill about whether we are moving from public provision to largely private sector provision—for profits and for large companies—or to large non-profits that are commissioned centrally, or at the most regionally, or the voluntary sector, which is often much more local working with the community. I note that in the Government’s paper Reducing Crime, Changing Lives, the implication is very much that we should be talking about local community involvement, local community punishment and working with the not-for-profit sector. I hope that is the direction in which we are moving, but I am not entirely clear. Today’s very welcome Statement from the Government on constitutional reform suggests that we should be doing everything to move back towards local community and local engagement as far as we can. That is what we on these Benches support, and that is why we are so unhappy about the extent to which regional commissioning seems to be taking over from local boards. That is why we were so deeply unhappy when the noble Lord, Lord Warner, suggested that one would have trusts, which one would set up and abolish every day of the week, if you like. Some noble Lords will recall him saying very proudly that he had abolished 200 primary care trusts in a year and set up 55 more and thinking that that was an excellent example of our process of public sector reform. We therefore think that there is still a case for a pause. We have not seen the Government’s response to the many responses to their original proposals. I have read the Carter report, the Government’s response and all those things, and I still do not see an underlying rationale passing through them. In this process, we have had a succession of different Home Secretaries offering different things. If we are to make a very important change in the management of offending, we need to be entirely sure that it makes sense, that it lasts and that everyone is happy with the lasting settlement. We need to make sure that we do not rush through yet another change that will be succeeded with yet another change in three or four years’ time, but only after a large number of outside consultants have said that the last one did not work.