Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I have necessarily stayed out of the discussion on this Bill until now, owing to pressure of underwork. Memories of our debates in 1991 were so sharp and poignant when I heard what was being proposed in Clause 19 that I felt I had to come, reluctantly, to your Lordships’ House to express my dismay. As I recall, the support of wavering Conservative Peers like myself was solicited by the Government of the day—and by their Home Office spokesman the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, whom we all hope to see back with us before too long—for the proposal that two pairs of eyes from the public sector would see what was going on and that things that should not be known in public were not being done in secret. The focus of this concern was adjudication—how fair and appropriate their punishments were to the people concerned. When you take freedom from a citizen, you assume a terrible responsibility. When you take it from more than 80,000 prisoners, it becomes enormous. When a significant proportion of those are handed over to an organisation other than the state it becomes necessary to retain some hold on what is done. As I understand it, Clause 19, by transferring the right of adjudication to a governor, makes the monitor no longer necessary for the functioning of the prison. The monitor is necessary for its fair functioning, but not necessary for its economic functioning. This reminds me of what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said a moment ago about the danger of figure-fudging. Contractors have targets to meet—haven’t we all these days?—otherwise they are in breach of their contract. Therefore, it is very important that the statistics, which reveal the performance against the target, are managed suitably for the contractor. In other words, there is a strong conflict of interest between the interest of the state in fairness and the interest of the contractor in profit. That may be an odd sentiment to express from the Conservative Benches, but we are dealing with matters of principle, and I believe that this House consented to this form of prison on the principle that there should be representatives of the public sector in it to act as referees and whistleblowers, and to protect the defenceless against injustice where the private sector was clearly motivated on occasion to commit injustice. For those reasons, I wholly support the amendment.