Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

Again I am grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman, as he has touched on a very important point. Both elements of the National Offender Management Service are overstretched at present. As a result, prisons do not do the job in terms of rehabilitation and deterrence that people fondly imagine that they do, and the probation service is unable to provide a satisfactory alternative that enjoys the public confidence. I am full of admiration for the work that probation officers do, but I recognise the constraints under which they work. Those constraints are extreme, and they are getting worse. The Government have hugely underestimated what is needed to provide an adequate service. Even if the probation service had sufficient resources to do the job that the Government expect it to do, the problem of how to manage offenders in the system would remain. That management task will be made immeasurably more difficult by the proposals that we are considering at present. The complexities presented by the movement of prisoners out of the prison estate, or their recall back into it, will be made much worse by the announcement that the Justice Secretary slipped out in a ministerial statement yesterday. In that statement, he made it clear that he is effectively abandoning the National Offender Management Service IT system that was supposed to provide the co-ordination between the prison and probation services. The NOMS system was supposed to track movements around the prison estate and ensure that absurdities such as prisoners getting lost or ending up in the wrong place would not overtake the probation service as well. The Justice Secretary has decided, however, that the original IT specifications were much too ambitious, were escalating beyond his Department's control and could no longer be afforded. He has therefore determined that the system will work only in prisons and that it will not extend to the probation service. The Justice Secretary did not in the first instance ask the probation service what it needed to fulfil its task. In fact, it needs a very sophisticated IT system, because in some ways, probation work is more difficult than prison work. For example, prison staff can at least hope that a prisoner's location—that is, his or her cell—is known, whereas probation officers cannot know as much about their charges. As a result, we have an inadequate system that will not now be improved. When NOMS was set up, we were given a set of high expectations that have been shown to be entirely imaginary, and I fear that we will end up with system that is grossly under-resourced. I regret that the Secretary of State was not able to make a verbal statement to the House on these matters, as I suspect that many people will not have read his written statement. Even if they have read it, I doubt that they will have understood it. I heard the right hon. Gentleman speak on the radio last night about his proposals, and he was finding it very difficult to answer some simple questions about how NOMS would develop. If he gets the opportunity to speak again—and the time constraints under which we are working mean that our expectations on that front must remain limited—I hope that he will set out how he intends to put right the difficulties that he has created by his decisions. We are right to question the Government's judgment on this issue, not on the basis of reducing the prison population—they are right about that—but in respect of how they are choosing to do it, the lack of resources they are prepared to put into it and in the arbitrary nature of many of the proposals before us today. The hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) focused on new clause 29, and I will carefully consider the points that he made. However, I do not want to see circumstances in which IPPs are artificially extended beyond the normal tariff for an offence simply in order to address the points that he made. I fully understand his point about the lack of opportunities within the prison system to satisfy the Parole Board and others of suitability for release and the need to arrange such matters much more satisfactorily. I am not sure that knocking the provision out would help that process; it may indeed hinder it. That is why I shall consider carefully before advising my hon. Friends on which way to vote if the hon. and learned Gentleman divides the House on the matter. However, I agree with the principle that he set out. We have a chaotic system that is dishonest in its treatment of offenders and the public reaction to that. We should and must do very much better in future.