Offender Management Bill

The new clauses and amendments give rise to some key issues. The aim of the Bill is to improve the delivery of services to reduce reoffending and better protect the public. It offers a pragmatic approach to tackling the diverse needs of offenders, which require a diverse response. I have frequently emphasised, as has my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, my appreciation of probation staff and the difficult and dangerous work that they do on our behalf. I have frequently paid tribute, too, to the improvements in performance that the probation service has achieved in recent years. The current arrangements have delivered a great deal, but we need to deliver more. To do so, we must free the public sector from the burden of being responsible for all the probation services in 42 individual areas. We must give the public sector freedom to focus on its strengths, while opening the door more widely to providers in the voluntary, charitable and private sectors so that they can show what they can do. We must be able to commission services, not on the basis of ideology, but on the basis of what works in particular circumstances and who is best placed to deliver it. If a voluntary sector organisation has particular expertise in an area of service delivery, we should be able to make full use of it. If it makes sense to commission a specialised service across a region, rather than in small area-based packages, we should be able to do so. We should be able, too, to commission services that span custody and the community to improve continuity in the provision of services across different parts of an individual sentence. We want to increase the involvement of the charitable, voluntary and private sectors, especially in interventions—for example, in the provision of programmes on offending behaviour, drug treatment and so on. Many voluntary sector organisations are already doing good work in those fields and we want to build on that. We want them to work alongside the public sector to develop expertise and strengthen partnership working so that a more diverse range of provision is available in due course. I know that many Members are concerned about what that means for the public sector. As my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and I have made clear on numerous occasions, the public sector will continue to play a key role in those arrangements and we intend to proceed cautiously. Most services will be commissioned from lead providers at area level, which will sub-contract to a range of other providers. In most cases, those lead providers will be part of the public sector probation trust, and we have always said that the bulk of core offender management work such as writing reports for courts and supervising individual cases will remain for the next few years in the public sector, which has inherited expertise in the field. We have consistently made it clear, too, that the Bill will not lead to a ““dumbing down”” in standards. Whether work is carried out by a trust or a non-public sector provider, it will still be delivered by appropriately qualified, professional probation staff. I accept, however, that the House still has concerns about the pace and scale of change, and about what might happen in future.