My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness the Chief Whip for that intervention.
I suspect that I am not alone in being in something of a quandary about the Bill. I entirely support the main intent behind it, which is to reduce the appalling reconviction rate that is an indictment of our offender
management system, particularly as regards those awarded short prison sentences who have the highest reconviction rate and are responsible for so many crimes on release. For many years, I have campaigned for many of the measures that it contains, so why should I be calling on the Government to slow down their headlong rush towards a goal that I share? I do so for two reasons, both based on personal experience. I spent 41 years in the Army before I became Chief Inspector of Prisons, a number of them in Whitehall. My memories of those days were revived today when I read the obituary in the Times of Sir Patrick Nairne, who was a most distinguished civil servant as well as a hugely cultured and civilised man. From him, and others like him, I learnt that when a paper or proposal was intended to be moved towards the Secretary of State, it should be put first to the Army board, but only after it has been properly researched and costed, which research included careful examination of all the consequences, intended or otherwise, that could be identified. Only after such proposals had gone through the Army board, the Chiefs of Staff and then Ministers, would they reach the Secretary of State, and certainly not the outside world.
When I heard about this Bill in the gracious Speech on 8 May, I little thought that it would be published the next day at the same time as the long-awaited response to the consultation document, Transforming Rehabilitation, to which it relates. However, what was even more worrying was that, having been subjected in recent years to a very low standard of impact assessments accompanying Bills, this one was also dated 9 May, which suggested to me that far from being a document which had informed Ministers and officials throughout their deliberations on the Bill, it had been added as an afterthought. Far too many of the impact assessments that I have seen recently seem to have only two options—take it or leave it; or, I, the Secretary of State, have decided that this is what I am going to do. That is one option and the other is to do nothing, which is not acceptable. When you are launching untried theories that affect the lives of literally millions of people, I suggest that this is bad government.
My second experience has been over the past 18 years, when I have been associated with the offender management system itself. When you get down to the guts of offender management, you find that it is all about enabling someone or some people to influence someone else to live a useful and law-abiding, as opposed to a useless and law-breaking, life—nothing more and nothing less. I have observed with considerable dismay the relentless advance of political and bureaucratic interference, and the time and ability of those concerned to do that, with the inevitable result that the reconviction rate has increased. The old Prison Commission, before it was abolished in 1962, was run from a house in Eccleston Square, with a staff of 128 people without computers. Now, admittedly with double the number of prisoners, the computer-assisted National Offender Management Service has a cast of more than 2,000.
Throughout the time that I have watched the system at work, I have been deeply humbled and impressed by the incredible dedication and drive of countless thousands of people working in and for the Prison Service and probation service, who have come up with successful
innovation after successful innovation only to see them killed rather than exploited by the bureaucratic system. If only the management system had the wit to monitor what was best and bring it into common practice, I believe that it could introduce cost-effective treatment of offenders in every possible condition.
3.45 pm
That has been the system until now but I am concerned about what is included in the Bill, particularly in the White Paper. It is unfortunate that we are discussing the Bill before the White Paper because the latter contains all sorts of ideas and proposals, none of which has been tried or costed, on which the Bill is based. Until now, no one has pretended that the market provides a better solution for enabling people to live useful and law-abiding lives than other people, and there is no evidence that it does so. The purpose of my amendment is to ask the Government to take time and give us time to think all this through. There has, so far, been no pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill. It has all been rushed through at breakneck speed, we have heard no reason why the Government seem determined to rush it all through, and we have had no explanation or answer to all the questions that were asked at Second Reading. We are, therefore, coming into Committee ill informed.
I remind the House of some of the questions that I asked at Second Reading but which remain unanswered. They are fundamental to the protection of the public, which is what rehabilitation is all about. What factors were taken into account in estimating that there would be a cost of only £27 million a year associated with the breach of licence and supervision conditions for short-sentence prisoners, which is part of the amendment I have tabled today? How many offenders were assessed as likely to breach? Were any facts, and therefore costs, deliberately excluded from the assessment? What factors did the Government consider in estimating that there might be additional police costs of only £5 million a year? What is the Government’s estimate of the cost of providing a rehabilitative service to offenders released from custodial sentences of less than 12 months, and how much of that are they looking to recover through competition? What about the cost of extending rehabilitative services anyway? There is no mention of any assessment of the ability of the private sector—which failed so spectacularly to provide security staff for the Olympic Games—to provide trained and accredited staff who can be relied upon to provide the regular contact needed with offenders whose chaotic and dysfunctional lifestyles are described in the White Paper.
What about the cost of the proposed reorganisation of the probation service? What about the assessment of the cost of training and accrediting non-public sector responsible officers? What about the analysis of the timeframe or content of the results for which providers will be paid? What about the estimate of new IT costs? What about how reoffending will be measured? What about how many additional short sentences are likely to be awarded or the impact of the new provision on either prisoners or the supervision of those awarded community sentences? Finally, how do the Government think that the introduction of the
market will improve existing arrangements where the probation service is involved in several essential local partnerships to do with the rehabilitation of offenders?
That is a considerable catalogue of uncertainty. I am concerned that if the public look at all this objectively they will, quite rightly, wonder how it was that the House of Lords, which is responsible for scrutinising Bills, allowed something to go through when it had so little information on which to base its judgment. That is in danger of dragging not just this House but the whole parliamentary system into disrepute. I question the need to proceed at such an absolutely headlong pace. I was told last night that one of the reasons for pushing ahead with the Bill is to encourage funding by illustrating what needs to be funded. I was also told that, instead of payment by results referring to individuals it will, in future, refer to what are called cohorts of individuals. A cohort of offenders will mean the group of people for whom a particular provider is responsible. The result will be a reduction in the reoffending rate in that group from a figure yet to be determined, and a reduction in the number of crimes that they are alleged not to have committed. When I questioned the Secretary of State about the word “reoffending”, he admitted that he actually meant “reconviction” because that is the only thing that you can measure.
We are therefore going into something totally imprecise. We do not know over what period this judgment will be made. Nor do we know how provision will be made for the achievement of the natural list of providers, in both the private and voluntary sectors, all around the country, that can provide consistent management, which is what these people above all provide.
I realise that it is very unusual to propose an amendment suggesting that the Bill be withdrawn at this stage. I do not want to press any further with this, other than to ask the Minister to agree to provide answers to all these questions and an explanation of why it is necessary for the House to press ahead in such an ill informed way before we proceed. We owe it to the millions of members of the public, whom it is the duty of the Government to protect, to ensure that any Bill affecting their protection is subjected to the best possible scrutiny before it is released from this place. Therefore, if we are not to be enabled to do this, the House has a right to know why, because it will be called to account by the public. I beg to move.