Offender Management Bill

My hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham made the point that if he votes for the amendment on the amendment paper today and it is passed, certain agencies will be excluded from consideration. I am simply making that clear to the House. To support the amendment is to go backward. The amendment covers the provision of approved premises—a subject raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Judy Mallaber)—which, if it were made, could be provided only by the probation service. At present, approved premises are provided by organisations such as the Langley House Trust; the amendment would stop that happening. I understand where my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow is coming from, but the amendment would do those things and take us backward, which is clearly not where we need to go. We want to move forward cautiously. That is why my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and I listened to the concerns put to us, and why we tabled new clauses 11 and 12, which set out the relationships that we think are important. We were told that court reports are a significant element of what needs to be protected, in the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow. We understood that, and that is why new clauses 11 and 12 were introduced. I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Patrick Hall) that clauses 11 and 12 go together. That is part of negotiation and achieving consensus, and we thought that we were moving in the right direction. Most hon. Members will know of my trade union background; I thought that, in negotiations, people on both sides gave a bit, but clearly that is not the understanding of some of my hon. Friends, as there has been no movement towards what we are trying to achieve. My right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen has a wealth of experience, as he is not only a former Minister but the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee. He hit the nail on the head when he talked about the need for us to look for innovation and new ways forward. He was concerned about the pace of the changes that we are trying to undertake. I agree with him and, perhaps more importantly, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary does, too. That is why we have tried to be accommodating. We have tried to understand that the ideological background to some of the concerns is a worry that we are talking about pure privatisation, but we are not. The measures are about making sure that we raise capacity, so that we have the best providers. In 2006, we announced our intention to complete up to £250 million-worth of probation business. Both the public and voluntary sectors can bid for that work, and that is the important issue. The measures are about raising standards and making sure that the best providers are in place. My hon. Friend the Member for Reading, West (Martin Salter) mentioned the letter from the YMCA, but that is only one letter. Hon. Members have received a number of contributions from voluntary sector bodies that say that they can and want to do more, but are prevented from doing so. Surely that is not right. We have strengthened local accountability, and hon. Members have accepted what we said about strengthening local area agreements to make sure that links are in place. The excellent work that has already been achieved, to which hon. Members have referred, can be built on. We do not want to remove the good work that takes place; we want to build on it and extend it further. I share the enthusiasm of my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt), who mentioned circles of support. A voluntary sector organisation that mentors sex offenders, and that works in difficult circumstances, achieves a superb reduction in reoffending rates, and that is what we want to happen, but under the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow, they will be prevented from doing that. If a public sector provider is good enough, it will have as much chance as anyone else of winning the work, and I think that in many cases, it will; we have no problem with that. We have referred to the number of organisations that support what we are trying to achieve. It must be unique—at least in my time as a Minister, as far as I can recollect—for the Local Government Association, numerous voluntary sector organisations and the CBI to accept what we are trying to achieve. That leads me to the role of the Opposition. What we see from the Conservative Opposition is outright opportunism, again. They supported the Bill on Second Reading. They said that they sought improvements to it, but that if those improvements were made, and we ensured that there was no top-down structure, they would support the Bill. Clearly, they are not prepared to do that; they are prepared to put party politics before attacking reoffending and related issues. I particularly welcome the statement from Mr. Martin Narey, a former director general of the Prison Service. His background is in public service—he supported the introduction of private sector operations in the prison regime—and he now works for Barnado’s, which is one of the main charities supporting children. He says that more can be done. My hon. Friends should accept our assurances in the spirit in which they are given. We will not move too fast, and we will take time to make sure that we do this properly. We have put safeguards in place to ensure accountability, so we will achieve what we are trying to achieve, which is reducing reoffending rates and the number of people in prison, and making sure that offenders are rehabilitated and integrated into society. If we achieve that, we will achieve a great deal for our constituents. I was asked what type of activity is covered by the Government amendments. The answer is all the work that the probation service does with the courts, including pre-sentencing and other reports, advice on breach hearings, bail and general assistance. As for the issue of offender management, we have made it clear that for the next few years we expect the supervision of individual cases and reports to courts and the Parole Board to remain in the public sector, which has inherited expertise in that area. Public protection is important, and we do not want to put the public at risk, which is why we want to proceed cautiously and make sure that we take people with us. My hon. Friends’ ideological fears are fundamentally misplaced. This is not about privatisation but about making sure that we have the best provision to tackle reoffending. Multi-agency public arrangements, which are unique to the UK, are in place. It was this Government who introduced those arrangements, to make sure that the public were protected and that responsible agencies worked together. Across the world, MAPPA is regarded as a step forward, as it has established partnership between agencies which people did not think could work together. The hon. and learned Member for Harborough attacked NOMS, but 95 per cent. of its budget is spent on the front line. NOMS has been set up with existing resources, and it employs 69,500 front-line providers and 2,500 back-office staff, so it is not top heavy. I hope that the House has listened to what we have said, and backs the consensus that this is an acceptable compromise by supporting the Government amendments. Question put and agreed to. Clause read a Second time. Amendment proposed to the proposed new clause: (a), in line 2, leave out from ‘trust’ to end of line 8 and insert—