My Lords, I support the general thrust of the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Marks. As he said, they would oblige a responsible officer to have regard to the offender’s caring commitments when arranging a community sentence.
My understanding of the present position is that in probation reports, done by what will be the National Probation Service, probation officers will take into account personal circumstances when making recommendations to the court on the likely sentence. It would be the responsibility of the responsible officer that the sentence is completed as required by the court and in a timely manner.
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At present, the probation service, together with its own local service providers, will have a whole system of non-statutory guidance on how to deal with particular circumstances. The noble Lord, Lord Marks, has highlighted one aspect and referred to other matters, such as religious convictions, education requirements and the like. Although the amendment is quite specific, it raises a much wider question about how questions of judgment on behalf of the responsible officer will be implemented by the organisation for which the responsible officer is working. It is not too much to imagine a commercial organisation having particular requirements of a responsible officer which may be at odds with that responsible officer’s judgment.
I was thinking, with my commercial hat on, about what a commercial approach might be to this cohort of offenders. I have come up with a fairly crude approach which I will outline to noble Lords. I divide the cohort into three. The first group I call the “no-hopers”: people who are fully expected to reoffend or to breach, and so would need minimal input from the responsible officers. The second group I refer to as “worth a try”, which is where the bulk of the effort would go; there would indeed be a genuine effort to
rehabilitate this group. The third group I describe as “easy money”, where there is every expectation that they will not reoffend and will therefore need minimal supervision.
Although I am sympathetic to the amendment as described by the noble Lord, it raises a wider question of how current best practice as provided by our probation service might be superseded by the commercial interests of the provider, particularly given that that provider will be paid by results, and when we are led to believe that the results bonus will be less than 5% of the total value of the contract. That raises a fundamental question about the judgment which the responsible officers must make and how that may come into conflict with that of their employer.