Police and Justice Bill

My Lords, I support all the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. I agree that the Government’s Motion should be accepted today. When the Minister tabled the raft of amendments at Third Reading in this House, that effectively ended the Government’s plans to put structural changes to the prisons inspectorate into statute. However, we were concerned that the late tabling of those amendments—a matter of minutes before tabling closed—meant that noble Lords were unable to scrutinise them and certainly unable to table amendments to them, as manuscript amendments are, of course, not permitted at Third Reading. At Third Reading, the Minister stated that refinements might be made in another place. I was intrigued to find that the exact wording, at col. 803 in Hansard, was ““minor technical adjustments””, to which the noble Baroness has referred today. In any event, the Government’s changes tabled for today are certainly welcome. They are more than technical adjustments; they make it possible for us to remove any objection that we would otherwise have had today. The noble Baroness referred to consultation. The Government’s amendment on that is hugely wordy and convoluted. Ours would have been better, but there we are—never mind, we will accept the Government’s roundabout way of doing it. On the Secretary of State’s powers, the Government are trying to assure us by saying, ““Never mind, this won’t really mean what it says””, which is that the Secretary of State interferes. We hope that this is an administrative matter and will not mean any diminution of the Chief Inspector of Prisons’ authority. The noble Baroness today said that the Government—and of course they would say this—wish to retain the option of reintroducing the merger programme at some future date, given the results of the programme for working together, which we know that the inspectorates wished to do in the first place. The noble Baroness will not be surprised if I say that, if any such proposal is put forward, experience of debates at Second Reading, in Committee, on Report and at Third Reading will show that this House will rigorously examine the Government's case before it will agree to the creation of the mega-inspectorate that was first proposed. We have arrived at the right conclusion by a very interesting route and I hope that we do not have to revisit the issue for some considerable time.