Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

It was decided that this was more descriptive of what the Bill was intended to do. I also draw the attention of the House to the fact that, late yesterday, I tabled Amendment 198, which added to the Long Title, "““to make provision about the rehabilitation of offenders””." It is probably the only criticism that I would make of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, but I sometimes think that—rather like his desire for committees in the structures we were talking about yesterday—he gets obsessed with form rather than substance. The rehabilitation of offenders is in the Bill. What is more important, it is in the daily action of the Ministry of Justice. Ever since I became the Minister, every day I have emphasised the importance of rehabilitation, for exactly the same reasons as the noble Lord, Lord Judd, gave. It is a win-win. If you can rehabilitate, you save the public purse from having to put someone in prison again at a cost of £40,000 or £50,000 a year. You save future victims from the crimes that that person would have committed. Actually, it is a triple whammy, because if you can really rehabilitate, you get a taxpaying, constructive member of society. Everything that we have been doing, especially in Part 3 and the piloting programmes, is aimed to get effective rehabilitation. I am very much impressed at the attention paid to my speeches at Liberal Democrat conferences. I shall take even more care over them in future. As for the rest, you will have to wait for my memoirs. I do not think that changing the Short Title at this stage of the process is helpful or will have an effect. On what the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, said right at the end, this is an extra half day in Committee for the Bill. Perhaps if we all made a resolution to make shorter speeches, we would not find ourselves debating these issues at 23.33. In the mean time, I hope that the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment.