Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I rise to speak to the amendment and to echo what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said about Amendment 21B. I am conscious that one cannot repeat arguments made in Committee. I, too, remember the remarkable unanimity around the Committee. I am grateful, as before, to the noble Lord, Lord McNally, for the efforts he made to continue the discussion. I am only sorry that I could not attend that meeting, but from what I have heard about it, and from a letter that the Minister wrote to the noble Lord, Lord Elton, which I hope he will forgive me for quoting, I believe that what is at the heart of the Government’s proposal is a fallacy that for years has influenced the consistent failure of the criminal justice system—namely, that policy and operations are one and the same thing, rather than one being the practical deployment of the other. This was brought home to me when a senior official told me that she wished that I would stop talking about strategy. ““We don’t need strategy; all we need is strategic direction,”” she said. I asked what that meant. ““Top down, of course,”” she said. That is nonsense. Having something said from the top down does not make it either strategy or strategic direction. I do not dispute that the youth justice system, like any other system, requires cross-departmental working based on one strategy and binding on all concerned. I do not dispute that the Minister for Prisons and Probation, Crispin Blunt, the Permanent Secretary, Sir Suma Chakrabarti, or the director-general of the justice policy group, Helen Edwards, are committed to leading and maintaining a dedicated focus on youth justice within the Ministry of Justice, and to ensuring that the necessary skills and expertise are retained. However, these are inward and invisible signs relating to the production of policy that they are responsible for overseeing. What is also needed, as in all effective systems, are outward and visible signs of the delivery of policy in the form of operations that must also be overseen. This confusion between policy and operations is reflected in Crispin Blunt's letter to the noble Lord, Lord Elton, in which he argues that, "““it is not efficient or sensible to have this unique oversight of part of the offender/potential offender journey through the justice system … A unique body for one part of the journey does not help overall policy formulation … Bodies for every group deserving of special oversight (women, foreign nationals, BME, addicted, mentally ill, learning disabilities, young adults etc) would not improve but complicate matters. My time and that of senior officials would be spent even more managing these relationships, not trying to make a coherent system work for all””." Very few people undertake a journey through the justice system. The majority undertake a journey through only one part, which is why separate programmes need to be made for these parts within the whole. Tell the chief executive of a business that it is not efficient or sensible to have separate departments for finance and sales. Tell the chief executive of a hospital that there is no need for special oversight of surgery, paediatrics, mental health or pharmacy because that complicates matters. Tell the headmaster of a school that you do not need separate maths, science or language departments because it takes too much time to manage the relationship between them. Tell the Chief of the General Staff that you do not need directors of armour, artillery, engineers, communications or medical services because their expertise does not help overall policy formulation. Come on. This discloses a complete lack of understanding of how systems work in the real world. Systems work where every element within them is co-ordinated into a coherent whole, based on a binding strategy—and where each, as well as the whole, is separately led. Ministers and senior officials who suggest that they might have to spend time managing relationships between different parts are disclosing that their system is incoherent. If there was a proper chain of responsibility and accountability, they should only have to deal with someone who was responsible and accountable to them for making the system work. That person will require machinery to enable him or her to do that, but its working will be nothing to do with Ministers or senior officials. If it is, they are guilty of the prime sin of senior managers, which is micromanagement. They are responsible for ensuring that the whole is directed: in other words, for ensuring that everyone knows what is to be done. They are not responsible for the minute details of process—in other words, the minutiae of how—which regrettably has become the practice in the recent past because so few Ministers and senior officials, well versed in how, seem to know how to do the what. The Youth Justice Board may not be the complete answer to the operational part of the youth justice system, as has been freely acknowledged. Looked at holistically, it includes prevention as well as cure and after-care, and much of its responsibility rests with local government. If it is to be made to work effectively, bearing in mind how many different departments and organisations are involved, it must have an overarching strategy and a coherent structure in which someone is responsible for oversight of policy and someone for oversight of operations, as every other working organisation has. It may be that after the consultation on the Green Paper Breaking the Cycle, the Ministry of Justice will decide to manage the youth justice system differently. But, until that discussion has been held, and until the operation structure to sit alongside the announced policy structure is confirmed, it makes little or no sense to do away with the body that should not only play a key role in those discussions but which has been responsible for introducing the acknowledged success stories, such as the youth offending teams, the reduction in numbers in custody, the reduction in the reconviction rate and providing direction to the previously undirected children’s custody provision. However committed, no Whitehall Minister or official could have achieved that. These are testing times for the criminal justice system with cuts coming on top of already inadequate provision. I know that the Public Bodies Bill results from the Government’s obsession with the alleged plethora of public bodies that seem to be obfuscating responsibility and accountability. However, here it is a Whitehall ministry and not a public body that is guilty of obfuscation. Obviously the Government cannot do away with the ministry but they can do away with the proposal—as they have done, thankfully, for the Security Industry Authority and Schedule 7. I believe that when they think through how the minutiae of a coherent youth justice system is made from so many different elements, they will be thankful that they retained a Youth Justice Board that is responsible and accountable for making it work. I therefore very much support the amendment.