My Lords, noble Lords will be relieved to hear that this is not an amendment on which I propose to divide the House. Rather, it is an attempt to try to elucidate some of the issues around the question of risk, to which I have previously referred. It is a matter on which the Chief Inspector of Probation has commented. In particular, she has drawn attention to the movement between risk categories, which is generally assumed to be in the order of 25% with a significant proportion moving from a lower to a higher risk. Indeed, studies carried out by the inspectorate show that as many as 50% of offenders change category. There is a real concern that, given this binary system, the information required to transfer from a low or medium risk to a higher risk category, which would involve a change in supervisor from the organisations that are to be contracted under the payment-by-results system—assuming that they are non probation service, as the Government intend—to the probation service as the body responsible for high risk offenders is, to put it mildly, unclear.
The potential problem is that the information may not be timely, if it is available at all. That may lead to high risk offenders not receiving the degree of skilled supervision which is primarily available from the probation service. What the amendment seeks to do, quite simply,
is ask the Government to work through their proposals more substantively than so far appears to be the case with a view to defining the categories more clearly. In particular there is a suggestion that the definition should exclude from the low and medium risk categories those offenders who have been convicted of offences, as the amendment states,
“of a violent or sexual nature, stalking or domestic violence”.
Those should always be regarded as potentially of high risk. The effect would be that people in those categories would be supervised by the probation service. Given the nature of the offences, that seems to be a sensible precaution that will allow the service to monitor the offender and, as I indicated in the previous debate, to relate to the victims. These victims will clearly be vulnerable individuals and usually, although not necessarily, women. It is as much the job of the probation service to protect the safety of those people as it is to promote the rehabilitation of offenders.
Even if he cannot give assurances today, I hope that the noble Lord will consider coming back at Third Reading, perhaps with some formulation that would meet the objectives here. They are not at all inconsistent with the thrust of government policy but do identify a potential problem given the split of responsibilities to which we have referred and which we debated earlier. I hope that, in that spirit, the noble Lord will look at this issue again and respond in a way that would not only be satisfactory to your Lordships’ House but would meet the concerns raised, perfectly legitimately and forcefully, by the Chief Inspector of Probation. I beg to move.
5.15 pm