My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister and to other noble Lords for theirs contribution to this short debate. I begin with the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, about the potential conflict of interest. If I may say so, it is potentially rather worse than the two instances that she gave because, in addition to the two services that she referred to, these contractors may be involved in two other areas. The first is increasing involvement with the police service and the second is the latest proposal for the privatisation of the courts. The whole spectrum of the criminal justice system could thus, in one way or another, come to be run by one of these bodes. Therefore, I think that there is real substance in the point that she made.
The noble Lord was kind enough to compare me with Lenin. Apart from the hairstyle I do not think that there is a huge resemblance. He referred to Lenin’s famous dictum about giving support to the social democrats that the rope would give to the hanging man. I would never do that, except possibly to Liberal Democrats, which is a rather different category.
However, there are more serious issues here. The noble Lord quoted with approbation the results of the Peterborough pilot—not so much the Doncaster pilot for fairly obvious reasons—and said that it has shown an improvement of 6%. That was true but it took the situation back only to the preceding year of the period. The crucial point is that the two probation trust pilots were terminated. We still do not know, because no Minister has condescended to tell us, why those two pilot schemes in Wales and Staffordshire in the West Midlands, run by the probation trusts, were terminated;
not only that, Ministers will not give us the evaluation. Yet, in Peterborough and Doncaster, not yet halfway through the proposed piloting period, they disclosed results. I find that inconsistency wholly inexplicable.
On the question of payment, I am not asking for details of the eventual payment scheme, but for an indication roughly speaking of what percentage might be attributable to the results. What proportion are we talking about? Are we talking about 10% of a fee, something up to 20%, or somewhere in between? There is no indication at all of the proportions that the Government might be contemplating. It is nice to know that at some point information will be placed in the Library; it will be a little late for this House to use unless the Bill comes back from the Commons in a different form.
Moreover, in relation to piloting, I spoke in Committee of another pilot that the Government are conducting on drugs offences which will not report until 2017-18. The Government, quite rightly, have not produced evidence on that yet but they will not implement anything until those pilots are completed. That is the thrust of the amendment. I repeat that we want reoffending reduced. We like the notion very much of affording supervision to a great many more people. We are not convinced that the Government have the evidence yet on how to do it efficiently, effectively and economically. This amendment would help them to do that in a timescale that I repeat is less than the timescale of the various other pilots about which we have heard. I am afraid that the Minister has not given satisfactory answers to the questions that I and others have raised and I wish to test the opinion of the House.