My Lords, we now come to the black hole in this legislation. Astonishingly, given the scale of the changes proposed for a major national public service, the Bill does not deal with the proposed restructuring of probation. It is quite remarkable that this should be the case.
I have complained from time to time about the Government’s habit of engaging in pre-legislative implementation. What they are doing to probation is, in fact, worse: they appear to be about to implement their proposals without any legislation at all. What we see in the Bill is a series of consequences of their proposals rather than a proposal. This is in connection with a service which has met and exceeded all its targets, which won the British Quality Foundation gold medal for excellence for its achievements over many year and which has very high ratings from those with whom it has to deal: 98% of victims approve of the work of the probation service in the feedback that they have supplied and 82% of supervisions were completed satisfactorily. The record on the timeliness of reports to courts was as high as 99%. Only just under 50%—49%—of what is by any standards a difficult client group were placed in employment after serving their probation order.
Yet the Government now propose a massive change which will effectively exclude around half the work of the probation service from its future deployment. Some 70,000 cases will be effectively privatised. The probation service will be unable, in its present form, to bid to carry out the work which the Government have determined will be subjected to competitive tendering.
The service has done well in reducing reoffending. The Secretary of State has drawn attention to the reoffending rates. He has noted that, for those serving sentences of less than 12 months, reoffending rates have been rising. We have heard today about the scale of the problem of that group. Of course, that is a group for which the probation service has no responsibility. Where it has responsibility, for those with longer sentences, it has done extremely well in reducing reoffending. The Government propose effectively first to nationalise and then virtually to privatise most of the probation service. They will centralise control. Probation trusts will disappear. There will be 21 areas in which the work will now be carried out by tendering. This will mean that much of the work currently carried out by the probation service, and all the work on short-sentence offenders which has not been carried out by the probation service but which the Bill seeks to address—I repeat that we welcome that—will now be carried out on a contractual basis.
There are many concerns about that. Certainly, one of the effects is likely to be a reduction in the degree to which justice is local and greater difficulties for voluntary
organisations wanting to be involved in the work. There would effectively be a binary system of risk, with categories of low and medium risk to be dealt with by organisations other than the probation service, but with the probation service being responsible for high-risk cases. Of course, this appears to ignore the fact that there is movement between the categories. Around 25% of offenders will change from one category to another, many of them becoming higher-risk.
The proposals will clearly lead to confusion. There is a risk, to which I shall return in greater detail when we discuss an amendment specifically dealing with the issue of risk, of the public lacking the protection that a properly administered probation service can afford in the 15,000 or so cases a year that move into the higher risk category. As we shall explore later, it is very difficult to see how those cases will be effectively managed.
We need a proper legislative framework for this exercise of transferring responsibility into the private sector. The Government display, as usual, a touching faith in the competence of the private sector but their record in this area of justice is not very convincing. There have been the huge profits made in relation to an inefficient and inadequate system of tagging, with many failures of the system and a great cost to the public purse. The Minister will no doubt say that that has been changed, that there will be new equipment, and so on. Be that as it may, the original providers certainly did very well for themselves but not very well in relation to the purposes for which they were contracted. Just yesterday we heard the appalling news about the young offender institution run by Serco, one of those massive organisations that purport to be able to do everything anywhere. It was a terrible report on the mistreatment of offenders in a young offender institution.
The unwavering determination of the Government to move from public provision to private provision potentially poses a risk to the interests of the community in matters of safety. We need a proper legislative framework if there is to be any change in the probation service. We need reassurances about a whole range of issues and we need parliamentary approval for a scheme which may bring changes to the probation service, a service that is highly successful.
The purpose of Amendment 20 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and myself is to seek to ensure that any change in the probation service will take place only after the full details have been discussed and approved by Parliament, rather than by executive order or, as it may be, by statutory instrument. This is so important that it deserves to be dealt with by primary legislation. That would certainly be my preference. At the moment we do not have the details and I do not think that the Government have worked them out. They are rushing to implement this programme. Mr Grayling wants things in place in time for the general election. This is too important an issue to be rushed in this way, especially when they are doing so behind the curtain.
We have seen many changes to major public services under the present Government. The health service is in turmoil, despite all the warnings and a very long legislative process. There is a grave risk that we shall
see something similar in terms of the impact on the service if the Government press ahead with untested, undebated and unapproved legislation to change what has been a very successful service. I hope that the Government will think again about this. I hope they will see the force of having their proposals properly scrutinised, debated and approved, if that is what Parliament wishes. At the moment, it does not look as though Parliament will have that opportunity, and that simply is not good enough. I beg to move.