Youth Justice Board for England and Wales (Amendment) Order 2008

I also join in welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Patel of Bradford, to his new role. Perhaps I may also thank him for the time he took last week, when we thought we would be discussing the order, to speak to me briefly about our concerns with it, or lack thereof, which is a perfectly valid interpretation to put on it as well. I do not have any great concerns with the order, but there are two or three things which I wonder whether I might be able to flesh out. The Explanatory Memorandum to the order, as well as the Minister in his remarks, refers to Ashfield and explains how it is currently contracted out, but says that the Youth Justice Board wishes to take it under its remit. It says that it will be, "““more appropriate for management of the contract to transfer to the Board””." That is vague terminology. For those of us familiar with the history of Ashfield—and it was only 2003 when the Youth Justice Board in shock and horror walked away from it, given its extremely alarming track record at that point in time—this seems to be rather cryptic. What does ““more appropriate”” for the management now mean? Why is it more appropriate now when it was not appropriate then? Since we had a little bit of additional time, I took the trouble to look up the Ministry of Justice’s NOMS, Nationally Commissioned Services annual report. The key performance targets for Ashfield show that of the targets missed, serious assaults cause most concern and continue to be actively monitored at the establishment. So there are still issues. We are not all there with Ashfield. Given the vagueness of how this provision is worded, and with the knowledge of Ashfield’s history, one wonders what is appropriate about doing this now. Moreover, to be specific, in reading the literature around this, I cannot see the obvious benefit of this transfer. I say that with some reason. Previously, when we have had problems in Ashfield the accountability and the responsibility—particularly in terms of answering here, but generally the accountability—seems to have fallen between the cracks. Each body would say that that particular area concerned was not their responsibility and that it was the other body’s responsibility, whether it was the Probation Service, NOMS, the private contractors running it, or so on. Can the Minister tell us who will now be responsible and accountable the next time something goes wrong? That was my broad point, and then I have one or two specific smaller queries. They concern Article 3, which makes a consequential change to the Young Offender Institution Rules. Where the board has entered into a contract for running young offender institutions for people under 18, it allows for the director of that establishment to make a disclosure of certain information to an officer of the board. That is a pretty wide purview. What is the relevant interest? Why do they need to be able to disclose this information to an officer of the board? It seems rather macro, individual level information. Why do the people whom the information concerns have to be identifiable? That is the way I read it—they are identifiable. What I am trying to say is, since you are identifying the individual, would this information be for statistical monitoring purposes? In that case, should it not be anonymised so that it is not evident who the particular individual was? Who is an officer of the Secretary of State? Again, there are concerns about data and privacy information here. Would it be any civil servant? If so, why would they need to have access to this information? What evades me in general is why somebody so far removed from the running of the estate should need to have that kind of information. Why would an officer of a young offender institution, rather than that particular youth offender institution, be involved in requiring and possibly storing this information, and how long would that information be kept? We look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say. We have some sympathy with the broad outlines of what he is trying to do.