Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I thought of leaving a long pause to wait for one of my supporters to stand up and make his or her speech. At the end of my remarks I will not appeal to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, not to test the opinion of the House. I did that in Committee because I thought that it would be useful to allow my colleagues to read his speech before coming to a conclusion. Rather than just reading the speech, perhaps seeing the result of the vote—whichever way it goes—will also be an opportunity for them to do so. At the start of the remarks of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, she echoed the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. Using the word that they both used, the House is being asked to vote on sacrilege. Essentially, that is the case for the prosecution: we are about to destroy something of real merit. That is certainly not the intention of the Government. We do not intend to dismantle the youth justice system. We want to build on what has been achieved over the past 10 years. I agree that this debate has been dominated by well informed, experienced speakers who care passionately about youth justice. My experience in my department is of finding similar qualities in the people dealing with this. It is not a matter of uncaring bureaucrats and caring Peers; those qualities exist across the board. The noble Lord, Lord Warner, suggested that what has happened sounds like an episode of ““Just William””. Unlike Violet Elizabeth Bott, I promise that I will not ““scweam and scweam and scweam”” if things go wrong. As with earlier debates, I will report back the result of this one to colleagues. However, I will not hold noble Lords in suspense: my brief does not allow me to make any concessions today. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, slightly overeggs the pudding in that the separation between strategic and operational matters is not as clear as he made out. I think that the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, made that point. There is real benefit in the department and the Minister providing strategic leadership while retaining the real success of the MoJ—the holistic, local response to youth offending. In referring to the situation in young offender institutions and advocacy, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, may have been trying to return to a matter raised in Committee. We recognise that advocacy and social work provision in youth offender institutions is important. There are legal responsibilities on local authorities and prison governors to safeguard and promote the welfare of young people in custody but we realise that responsibility for funding these services is complex. We have been working on a solution and I expect that I and my colleague, Mr Crispin Blunt, will receive official advice on funding soon. I will write to the noble Lord later this week or next week, putting forward solutions on that point, which he raised in Committee. I echo the noble Earl’s tribute to Frances Done and her chief executive. They have behaved exemplarily throughout in steering the organisation through a period of uncertainty while maintaining the high quality of service which we expect. It is interesting that the noble Earl mentioned the need for local authority initiative. The thrust of the policy the department is putting forward in these new arrangements is that we keep the best of the localism of the youth justice system but encourage local authority initiative and co-operation even further. I suggest to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, that undoubtedly the YJB has had an impact but that the holistic approach of the youth offending teams may best explain the success gained during the past 10 years, which has been mentioned on a number of occasions. I emphasise again that we are not going to abandon the lessons learnt in the past 10 years but will build on them. It is worth pointing out that youth policy is not the only policy that the MoJ looks after. I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, and the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, mentioned this. One might equally ask whether one needs a similar arm’s-length body for women, the mentally ill or an educational training body. I see lots of nods across the House. Perhaps that is where we have an ideological difference—““When in doubt set up an arm’s-length body, or, if not, a tsar””; that was very much part of another age. It is worth pointing out that Ministers and departments can be responsible for distinctive policies that they can pursue successfully, without necessarily setting up an external body to help them to do that. On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, I can give him an answer. I think I have said previously that all Ministers are birds of passage. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, also mentioned that. However, it is certainly not the intention within our new structure that the YJB be absorbed into or placed under NOMS. I pay tribute to the contribution of all faith groups, and of the leadership of the Church of England and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool, to counsel and service in our prison and youth systems. However, I ask the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds to look at our Green Paper on the rehabilitation revolution, because that fits in a lot with what we are trying to do in our approach across the board to the treatment of offenders and to reoffending. The noble Lord, Lord Newton, said that he had not melted into the night. Knowing him so well, I honestly never thought that he would do that. Again, I emphasise that I do not believe that separation is strength in the way that some noble Lords advocated; nor is this going back to where we were 10 years ago. The attack on the policy has relied very much on a concept of going back to where we were. That is certainly not the intention. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, rightly reminded us that we are talking about not only the kind of concern for young offenders to which the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, referred, but our responsibility to the victims of youth crime to make sure that we are getting this right. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, with great precision, seems to have set out ministerial powers that are clearly considerable but fall short of being able to abolish the body. We have never claimed that the YJB was ineffective, but we claim that removing a layer from the system is not vandalism. I was interested in the intervention of the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, and the example she gave of advice and intervention. Again, I doubt that that kind of expertise or professionalism would be absent under the proposals we put forward. However, I welcome her view that this is issue is not party-political. One has to look only at the list of noble Lords who have spoken to know the breadth of cross-party views on it. The noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, referred us to the Scottish panel system. I recently visited Edinburgh and talked with the Scottish Minister of Justice about that country’s approach to youth justice, which has aspects of some value that we could study. I also heed his warning that it would be wrong for the department to become defensive rather than proactive about its responsibilities. I do not believe that this will be so under the system that we are putting forward. There is an important function for the YJB in commissioning the secure estate. However, it is important that this responsibility should be taken within the department, with the Minister taking direct responsibility for it. The noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, said that this was not the end of the story. Certainly, whichever way the vote goes later this afternoon, the statutory instrument will still be debated. However, it would be unfair to those who work in youth justice to suggest that, if the Government were to carry the day today, there would be another opportunity to change policy at the statutory instrument stage—although technically that is true. As I hinted, I cannot concede on the abolition of the Youth Justice Board. Nor am I able to accept that the establishment of an executive agency would be appropriate or proportionate. As I said in Committee, there were good reasons to establish the YJB at arm’s length from the Government. This enabled it to lead the national rollout of youth offending teams and to establish a dedicated, secure estate for young people. However, a decade on, that work is done and we can handle within the MoJ the residual responsibilities of the board, while leaving alone the thrust of youth justice at the operating level of the YOTs, where it has been extremely successful. It is not true that we have not consulted. We have had 13 youth justice seminars across England and Wales as part of our Breaking the Cycle Green Paper. Early responses to that paper indicate that what is wanted is strategic leadership, cross-government working, a dedicated focus on youth justice and fewer central burdens on the YOTs. These responses are all in accordance with our proposals to bring the functions of the YJB into the Ministry of Justice. I am not sure that either eloquence or a peroration will work on this issue. I hope that I have met the points that were made and explained how people can come honestly to a different view. It is not—I hope that here the case for the prosecution has been dismissed—a callous act of vandalism by the Government. There is an honest difference of opinion in the House about how to build on the success of the past 10 years of the YJB. However, honest differences can exist in a framework of mutual respect, and I hope that that will remain. I certainly respect and appreciate the many contributions that have been made to this debate today.