Offender Management Bill

Rainer obviously has concerns about accountability and local partnerships, which it believes have been addressed. Voluntary organisations are coming at the Bill from both sides. All Members will have seen briefings from certain voluntary organisations that are fully in support of the proposals, but other voluntary organisations that have significant involvement in probation work are making it clear that they do not want change, because they do not want to be seen as agents of the state. They want their independence, and believe that they are in a stronger position when working in a co-operative fashion with the probation service than if they were seen as in charge of probation work with offenders. On the question of some probation boards failing, in every service, some people provide good standards, and some do not. Generally, however, our response is not to tear up the whole structure. If a school fails, we do not start to tear apart the whole education system. If there are failings in local government, mechanisms and pressures are in place, such as the best value regime, to encourage councils that are not delivering on particular services to improve. We are told that reoffending rates are too high. If we look at what is happening in the criminal justice system as a whole, however, that is not surprising. Probation services do not supervise every offender; they are involved in the supervision of some offenders. Reoffending rates are lower among those who are supervised by the probation service than they are among those who are not. Prisons are overcrowded to such an extent that educational and drugs rehabilitation work is suffering badly in many prisons, and people are being moved around from one prison to another in an effort to cope with all the pressures. They might be in the middle of a drugs rehabilitation course in their prison when they are moved to another prison where there is not such a course—or not one of the same nature. There are also huge numbers of people in prison who have serious mental health problems, and there is nowhere near enough capacity to deal with them either inside prison or outside when they come out. On top of that, it is now required that serious offenders—particularly sex offenders, as we were discussing earlier—are subject to much greater and more in-depth supervision. If reoffending is so important that it is the central issue, why has a target on that never been one of the targets set for the probation service? The Government have set a list of targets for the service, and it is meeting—or is very close to meeting—most of them, and it has been improving. Therefore, it is now being castigated for not achieving a target that has never been set. That does not make sense to me. The service has been in its present form since only 2001, and for the last three years it has been under constant threat of reorganisation and privatisation, but it is, in fact, doing quite well—so why do we want to tear up the structure? Why are we proposing privatisation? I ask that question because, as I have said, the Bill allows for privatisation in any part of the service, not only in voluntary sector involvement. I accept that the Minister has moved somewhat. New clause 11 is a shift; there is no question about that, and I welcome the fact that there has been that shift and that there is a recognition that at least one bit of probation service work should be fundamentally public sector. Unfortunately however, we have also got new clause 12. It allows new clause 11 to disappear by the passing of an order. That provides very little protection, because we all know how orders are dealt with and pass through the House, even when they address quite controversial subjects. I have in mind an order on a controversial subject that passed through the House in the past few weeks: the renewal of control orders under anti-terrorism legislation. Some people probably have not even noticed that that happened, even though the issue was extremely controversial when the primary legislation was dealt with. Even in such circumstances, little attention is usually paid to an order passing through the House two or three years later. Therefore, there are no guarantees whatever in what is being offered. That is not to say that I do not trust the word of the Minister, because I do trust what he says: it is not his intention to move wholesale and to move quickly. I do not doubt his word for one moment. However, Ministers change. [Interruption.] As a colleague says from a sedentary position, that is perhaps especially the case in the Minister’s Department. Departments also change. We hear that there might be some changes in structure soon—although I do not know whether that will happen—and that what we are discussing might cease to be a Home Office responsibility altogether. I must also say that some Ministers in this Government have form—if I can use that phrase in the current context. For example, when foundation hospital trusts were introduced, we received assurances that we would move cautiously, slowly and gradually—but we did not. I have heard the same assurances on a number of other matters, but we did not move cautiously, slowly and gradually on those either. Therefore, there is some form which must be taken into account. All that can be guaranteed in respect of what the Government are proposing is that the national service will become fragmented, that there will be myriad providers, and that we will lose local connections because commissioning will be at regional and national levels. I acknowledge that some things need to be done at national level. For example, electronic tagging is currently done nationally through contracts with a couple of private companies, and if the probation service has to deal with someone who has a tagging order it must make arrangements with the company concerned. However, many Members in various debates on the Bill have cited examples of good work, and what has struck me about every one of them is that it is co-operative work at local level involving the local probation board, or perhaps a local voluntary organisation or a local private company. That work is happening in a co-operative way and at local level.