My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. Over the years I have come to recognise that in the Minister we have a fully paid-up supporter of the probation service as well as a fully paid-up supporter of making improvements to the women’s justice system. Therefore, I am conscious that we are talking to somebody whose heart is certainly in making the improvements that we all know to be necessary. I also thank all those who have contributed to this debate. In various ways they have emphasised just how genuinely interested this House is in making progress and how disappointed it is that over the past 16-plus years we appear to have been there and then not there, and then there again and not there again, and so on. This has got to stop.
I do not discount what the Minister says about the commitment of Helen Grant and the leadership she is going to apply. That is not my point. I am not making suggestions for new structures. All I am saying is that in every other organisation things work where you have a determined Minister assisted by someone who is responsible and accountable to that Minister for the delivery. That is what is missing and it has been missing over and over again. It is not new and it is not something that I am plucking out of the sky, because it happens everywhere except here. I just pray that one day this penny will drop because I fear that Helen Grant, well intentioned though she is, will find that the advisory board will not be the mechanism and she will not be able to oversee the consistent delivery all over the United Kingdom. It is consistency that we want.
I deliberately did not mention all sorts of things that are in Transforming Rehabilitation because this is a much more general issue, but I am extremely encouraged by the Minister’s response to the suggestion of an annual report. That will be an excellent opportunity for this House to demonstrate not just its commitment to this but its very genuine interest and wish to apply the collective experience and knowledge in this House in the best interests of both the Government who are responsible at the time and the women whom we hope are going to benefit from what can be done. I am conscious that the Government have laid down things that they intend to do, which I hope that we can monitor, and on the hopeful note from the Minister, I withdraw my amendment.