Offender Management Bill

No doubt he is outgoing, now. He said:"““It centralises everything on the Home Office and removes responsibility from local people who govern the probation service.””" The Government claim that the Bill is all about contestability, opening up the provision of offender management services to the private and voluntary sectors. The Home Secretary wrote in The Daily Telegraph on Monday that"““the voluntary sector is queuing up to help.””" Let me be clear. We welcome wider involvement and greater competition in the delivery of those public services. We welcome the involvement of the private and voluntary sectors and the innovation that they can bring to probation services. But the Government have offered no compelling reason why we need yet another piece of legislation to increase their own self-imposed level of 3 per cent. of expenditure that is currently outsourced. That the Bill is not necessary to achieve that was made clear by hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber during this afternoon’s debate. In addition, we were told by the Probation Boards Association that the level of private and voluntary sector provision"““was at least twice as much before the Home Office, under the current Government, decided that was not money well spent””," so they halved it. It is clearly possible to double, if not treble or quadruple, the quantity of service provision from the private and voluntary sectors without any new legislation. In December, the Home Secretary told the Home Affairs Committee that the Home Office should spend"““a little more time delivering””," and a little less time ““passing laws””. I urge the right hon. Gentleman to heed his own advice. The second ground for opposition is that the proposals focus on yet another organisational restructuring—the third probation service reorganisation in six years. It is impossible to improve service delivery in that way. The constant bureaucratic reshuffling is—again, I quote the head of the Probation Boards Association this morning—““ridiculously expensive””. He is right. It is estimated that the provisions of the Bill will require a further 1,600 civil servants to operate—I heard the Under-Secretary set his face against that—and the Government are spending nearly £900 million on NOMS headquarters, which is £60 million more than they are spending on the front-line delivery of probation services. The final reason why the Opposition will vote against the Bill is that, as it stands, it is a real distraction from the problems at hand. There have been 60 Home Office Bills in 10 years, during which time reoffending rates rose by 10 per cent., which is an historic increase, but the Government still have not learned one self-evident truth: they cannot legislate their law and order failings away. The reason for the soaring prison reoffending rate is the failure to retrain and rehabilitate in prison, and the reason for that is the chaos and disruption caused by the Government’s failure to provide enough prison places. The Bill will do nothing to solve that. The reason for many of the serious crimes and even murders committed by those on parole and probation is the fact that the Government cut the number of face-to-face interviews before release by 90 per cent. The Bill will not solve that, and it will do nothing to stem the danger to the public that is the direct result of chronic prison overcrowding—a problem that the Government predicted, but a responsibility that they abdicated. The benefits claimed for the Bill do not, in fact, require legislation, but its harmful aspects are a direct result of it. That is why we will vote against the Bill on Third Reading, and why, when the Bill goes to the other place, we will seek to amend it drastically to remove the massive over-centralisation that it entails.