My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, for his helpful explanation of the amendment to Clause 8 in his name, and for helpfully setting out the concerns that lie behind it. I understand them, and why the noble and learned Lord seeks to make sure that Parliament is given the opportunity to consider a report by the Secretary of State about how the recall adjudicator model will operate before the provisions can be brought into force. I have no objection to the principle of what his amendment is seeking to achieve and am happy to make a commitment that before the recall adjudicator provisions are brought into force, the Government will produce a report for Parliament on matters such as the recruitment process, qualifications, training and costs.
The amendment of the noble and learned Lord is quite specific on some aspects of what the report must contain. I bear in mind what he said, namely that this should be a minimum, as he saw it; we do not indeed anticipate that it would be restricted entirely to those matters. In particular he is specific about the anticipated costs of the recall adjudicator system compared to the costs of recruiting more Parole Board members and case managers.
While the Government would be happy to provide an analysis of the respective costs and benefits of the new model—and indeed we will be publishing a further impact assessment on this—we would not wish to be tied to including in the report such a direct comparison of the sort prescribed in the amendment. This is a constantly evolving area of work, with the Parole Board itself driving forward changes to its process, and new operating models, and we would want our cost-benefit analysis to have the flexibility to take account of those developments rather than tying ourselves in the legislation to making this very specific cost comparison. But we will provide information as to costs.
However, I accept the point and agree that our report should set out the respective costs of the new process and systems compared to carrying on with the Parole Board model. The Government’s position is that we would have no objection to providing a report on the sort of information that the noble and learned Lord asks for, but until we have had more time to consider exactly what that report should contain and how best to present the information, we would not wish to be constrained by the exact requirements of the noble and learned Lord’s amendment.
When the Government introduced the recall adjudicator provisions, I explained that the aim was to introduce greater flexibility in the way that determinate recall sentences are reviewed and to allow the Parole Board to concentrate its resources on indeterminate sentence prisoners. There is a great deal of further
work to be done on the detail. The noble and learned Lord was quite right to identify the case of Whiston and the decision of the Supreme Court, which enabled the Government to bring forward this amendment, albeit on Report—but we would not have been able to bring it forward before then because the decision had not been reached. I think that inadvertently the noble and learned Lord suggested that the decision had been reached in 1914. It was a little more recent than that—2014, to be precise—but I am sure nobody misunderstood that. The Government move a little faster than that.