My Lords, the noble Lord has fired a salvo of questions and critiques of the Government’s proposals. It will be interesting to see what defence the Minister can put up to them. The noble Lord has made many telling points, not least the question of the timetable, which looks ridiculously short. The Secretary of State in his previous capacity introduced the markedly unsuccessful Work Programme, which was also rushed through with pretty abysmal results. There must be some danger, particularly if the exercise is rushed, that we will see repetition of that. It occurred to me to think as the noble Lord was talking about this transition that one can envisage staff members being involved in that transition. Does that mean that they take, for example, their caseload with them? Will the cases of those who are being supervised and who will transfer into the payment-by-results system remain with probation or, if the probation officer in question is to be moved over—presumably some of that will happen—will the case go across to the payment-by-results providers? Or will they be excluded? It all seems highly mysterious.
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I cannot resist, largely because I have been asked to do so by my noble friend Lord Ponsonby, recounting something that he reported to me which illustrates some of the problems that one might well encounter with the involvement of these private contractors. A colleague of my noble friend apparently visited a building scheme to which Serco had brought offenders to be involved in a community payback scheme. Several of them were standing around doing nothing. My noble friend’s colleague asked what was happening. “Oh,” said the representative of Serco, “the beneficiary” —that is, the owner of the building—“hasn’t provided the paint”. In other words, people were standing around doing nothing because the system had not operated in such a way that the materials required were on site. That was either the fault of Serco for not doing it, or of a contract which did not specify that they should do it, or of the beneficiary for not providing it if he was expected to do so. It is an illustration of the problems that we can easily get into, and a telling case
to support the noble Lord’s amendments to require rigorous scrutiny of and regular reporting on what will ensue if this legislation is passed.
However, the point raised tonight about the timetable requires urgent attention in itself. It does not look realistic—unless, of course, pre-legislative implementation is already under way again and contracts are already being discussed and developed with some of these suppliers. If that were happening, it would be quite wrong.
I hope that the Minister can give us some assurances, and I entirely endorse the noble Lord’s repeated request for information to be made available in advance of Report stage which is, after all, only a few days away, on 25 June. If we are going to consider amendments, they will have to be tabled before then. We have only a week, really, in which information can be meaningfully made available. If we cannot have that assurance then I am afraid that Report stage will be unsatisfactory from the perspective of the House and embarrassing for the Government. I hope that the Minister can avoid such an embarrassment.