My Lords, the amendment addresses the growing trend of government to outsource the provision of public services to private contractors. Something like £95 billion a year is now tried up in such contracts. They cover a whole range of services, but the Ministry of Justice has been at the forefront of this development in public policy. One thinks of the controversial issue of probation, which we have debated at length, notwithstanding the Government’s initial decision not to include it in legislation. We also have the experience of a number of private prisons—certainly under the previous Government as well, but now clearly to be promoted even further. We have for some time now seen court staff provided to magistrates’ courts and elsewhere by private contractors. We have had the shambles of the interpreter service, again in the hands of contractors. In the Bill we have, as we have already heard this afternoon, provisions about tagging. We will come in due course to the controversial provisions about secure colleges.
Public providers still operating in some of these areas, such as in the case of prisons, have to comply with the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, but the private contractors do not. That strikes many as a complete anomaly. Why should a private
prison such as the Acklington prison in the north-east of England, where I come from, which has experienced great difficulty since privatisation, not be subject to FoI requests when one of Her Majesty’s prisons, perfectly properly, is? Why should those who look after certain detention centres for asylum seekers be immune from FoI requests, particularly given the constant flow of unfortunate stories that we hear from such places, while a public institution is, perfectly properly, accountable? I have already quoted the Information Commissioner’s comments in addressing the Justice Committee last year, but I will repeat them. He asked,
“if more and more services are delivered by alternative providers who are not public authorities, how do we get accountability?”.
Even the Prime Minister is on record as being in favour of transparency. A couple of years ago, he spoke about the power of transparency and why we need more of it. He also spoke of leading the most transparent Government ever. Transparency, of course, has a number of meanings and one can accept that, in a certain respect, his Government is exceedingly transparent—but it is not particularly transparent when it comes to the letting of contracts, particularly to these third-party organisations.
My honourable friend Dan Jarvis said in a debate in Committee on the Bill:
“The rewards that third parties stand to gain need to go hand in hand with the duties of transparency and information sharing. The public should be able to ask … how, and how well, the service they are paying for is being run”.—[Official Report, Commons, Criminal Justice and Courts Bill Committee, 18/3/14; col. 187.]
The Labour Party has pledged to extend the FoI legislation to contractors of public services. Why will the Government not at least match Labour’s pledge to do likewise and extend the freedom of information provisions to these companies, which are carrying out important and, in many cases, extremely sensitive areas of public provision? It would appear that those companies are essentially immune to the same processes that would apply if they had remained in public hands. Particularly given the great concern about the developments in the probation service, it is not time that the Government acknowledged that there is force in this argument and, accordingly, accepted the amendment? I beg to move.
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