My Lords, I support in broad terms the need for the commissioner to have more powers to intervene on behalf of victims, and my questions are about how that should be done most effectively to create the atmosphere that is needed.
For many years we have had people who have intervened on behalf of suspects, but very few people who have been able to intervene on behalf of victims, and I really support that changing. Amendment 30 talks about the ability to produce reports. My questions are about whether the reports are the right way to achieve the outcome, when people in fact want individual interventions for their particular problem. To give more powers to the commissioner to intervene in individual problems might be more powerful.
3.45 pm
First, the Government ought to be clear, if they are to follow Amendment 30, what the inspection burden will be, which is growing for many public services. Police, prisons and probation have multiple inspectors carrying out multiple inspections together and sometimes they have not agreed their priorities. This causes time and money to be spent on their recommendations. It would be helpful if they were sometimes able to agree those recommendations before they published them. I am afraid that does not always happen. Adding more reports and inspections has to be thought through before it happens and not afterwards, because the
compound effect of these inspections is not always helpful. The irony is that sometimes inspections have not prevented any of the things they were worried about. Usually, reports are retrospective about something that has happened, and do not stop something that should not have happened.
My second point on this amendment is something we need to be clear about. Is the idea that, if there is a simple breach of the code—for example, in one person’s case—then subsection (2) of this proposed new clause will kick in? Or will there have to be a general failure across a number of cases? I am not quite clear what standard must be achieved before the inspection and report have to kick in. A simple failure in one case would not be sufficient but, of course, multiple failures over a sustained period would. A strategic failure of course might engage this type of inspection and report. So I ask for more clarity about when it will kick in and what standard will need to be breached.