One problem with piloting this Bill is that I am supposed to sit here and listen to all the aspersions about the capabilities of my department and the intentions of my Secretary of State, as well as all the other brickbats that are thrown. However, if anybody takes on board anything like the full intention behind the amendment, it will be clear that the two noble Lords want to throw a considerable spanner in the works. If that upsets them, I am very sorry but it is true. I remain committed, as I hope the House does—it gave the Bill its Second Reading and went through Committee—to what I have always seen as the deal that this Bill puts forward.
That deal is that we are putting forward a major reorganisation of probation in a way that releases the resources to provide care, guidance and support to a very important section of those who have been sentenced to fewer than 12 months—the group that is most likely to reoffend and to get into that whirligig of crime that we are trying to break. I say that each time the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, tables one of his amendments to delay the Bill. We are putting this forward with good intention, with a great deal of preparation and work, and with a clear determination to put before the House as much information as we can. We are developing a case and we will go into a certain amount of commercial negotiation but with the full acceptance that we are doing something very radical. To use the statistics from a leaked report, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, just did, is not worthy of him.
I know that the noble Lord gets upset when he is attacked, yet when one rereads his speech one sees that he is very willing to dish it out. He throws out figures of 80% of this and 60% of that when he knows as well as I do that we are talking about a specific management tool that was used and developed by the previous Labour Government inside government, not to assess definite threats or problems but to identify issues that need further work. That is what the process is.
We have had it before with other Bills—this sudden idea that somewhere inside government these risks are being hidden from the public and Parliament, when the Opposition know full well that what is being gone through is an exercise that enables those who are working on these various bits of policy to identify which particular area of policy they need to develop, do work on and make proposals in relation to. It is not, and never was, a forecast of what is going to happen. It is disingenuous to suggest to the House that that is what it is.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, was right to look at the amendment as it stands. It is very widely drafted. It states:
“No alteration or reform may be made to the structure of the probation service”,
but that would not just encompass national changes to a new framework; it would also mean that probation trusts in the current model could make no change to their set-up, however minor, without parliamentary approval. I do not want to dwell on this, but I ask the noble Lord to think carefully about whether that kind of parliamentary micromanagement is sensible in legislation.
I turn now to the detail of the changes that we are proposing. First, let me put on record that the Government recognise the excellent work that is done by the probation professionals across the country. I have said that time and again from this Dispatch Box. Our proposals for reform seek to build on those achievements, not to minimise them. We are doing that in two ways: first, by extending rehabilitation to all offenders who need it through the provisions in this Bill; and, secondly, by seeking to restructure the way in which these services are delivered by opening up the delivery of probation services to a wider market and by bringing the retained public sector probation service into a national entity. These latter elements of our reform proposals are crucial to the core aim of our proposals: to break the cycle of reoffending. We do so for three reasons. The first is that by opening up the provision of rehabilitation services to the private and voluntary sectors, we are seeking to promote additional innovation and investment. Despite the excellent work and commitment of those supporting offenders within the public sector, we are unable to achieve this fully under our current structures.
Secondly, by restructuring the public sector probation service into a national entity, we are focusing public sector resources on areas where it is most needed: on protecting the public from harm and providing clear and impartial advice to sentencers. By managing this service nationally, we are seeking to drive excellence across the country, bringing all delivery of these services up to the level of the highest performers.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, through both elements of this structural reform we are seeking to drive efficiency and savings in current practices and to provide the necessary investment to open up provision to all those who need it. I remind noble Lords that we simply cannot afford to expand rehabilitation to short-sentence offenders without these savings.
I now turn to the detail of the structural reforms that we are proposing. We are committed to maintaining a strong local delivery structure within the public sector probation service. Although current trusts have clearly built excellent relationships with other local delivery partners, much of this local working does not take place at the level of the 35 existing trusts but within the 150 local delivery units that sit beneath them. Our firm intention is to retain a strong local delivery structure based on these units, providing clear representation and involvement within both local authority and criminal justice areas.
Senior managers in the new organisation will have a strong presence within the National Offender Management Service and the Ministry of Justice, with directors for both England and Wales sitting on the NOMS board. Probation has often been viewed as the junior partner within NOMS, and this reorganisation is an opportunity to remedy that.
For probation functions that are being competed for, we are committed to retaining the skills, expertise and experience of operational staff currently within trusts. We are working closely with unions and associations representing probation providers to ensure that any process of selecting staff for the new structures is fair and minimises disruption as far as possible. We have also been engaging with interested parties to develop proposals for a professional body for the probation profession, and are strongly supportive of this idea.
We also recognise how crucial working in partnership is to the successful rehabilitation of offenders, and how probation trusts are integral to many of these excellent local partnership arrangements, including integrated offender management. The Government are determined not to disrupt this, and we are clear that contracted providers will need to demonstrate how they will engage effectively with key local partners when they are bidding for contracts.
As I set out in my earlier correspondence to noble Lords, we have already consulted extensively on the proposals in Transforming Rehabilitation: A Revolution in the Way We Manage Offenders. We received almost 600 formal responses to the consultation and held 14 consultation events that were attended by over 800 stakeholders, and the views received were invaluable in informing the reforms set out in the strategy published on 9 May. Both the transforming rehabilitation consultation document and the strategy were presented to Parliament, and we continue to welcome further interest from parliamentarians in these reforms.
I recognise the expertise that many Peers have on these issues, and I am committed to ensuring that noble Lords are kept informed of and involved in these reforms as they are taken forward. A number of other supporting documents have been and will be published that are available via the Ministry of Justice
website: namely, the summary of responses to the consultation, the payment mechanism Straw Man and the prior information notice. In order to make them more easily accessible, I will place copies of these and all future documents giving further detail about the design of the new system in the House of Lords Library. I am happy to arrange an all-Peers meeting as and when we publish further documents. If it would be helpful to Peers, I will also explore through the usual channels the possibility of an opportunity for further parliamentary debate on these proposals outside the realm of this Bill.
In short, I am absolutely committed to ensuring that the Government engage with Peers and other parliamentarians as we develop the detail of our reforms. However, I stress again that the significant benefits that these changes will deliver, including the extension of rehabilitation to short-sentence offenders and the creation of “through the prison gate” resettlement services, are affordable only as part of a wider package of reforms. I hope that Peers will be able to support the Government in taking these reforms forward.
I hope that these points of detail will provide noble Lords with some reassurance as to the structural changes we have proposed, and in light of this I ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
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