Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. I am very pleased to be opening our debates on this crucial Bill whose aim is to improve the delivery of probation services, so as to reduce reoffending and better protect the public. The Bill will allow us to supplement the public sector probation service by working increasingly in partnership with the voluntary, charitable and private sectors, and with local communities. The Probation Service has a unique and crucial role throughout the criminal justice process. It is sometimes described as the glue which holds the various parts of the system together. It is vital that we look very carefully at fundamental changes to the way in which these services are delivered. I am very pleased to have the opportunity to do so today. We first set out our proposals in detail more than 18 months ago when we published our consultation document on reducing reoffending to protect the public in October 2005. I acknowledge that the proposals did not find favour with all of those involved. What is important is that over the past year and a half we have listened. We accept that many of the concerns that have been raised are legitimate, and that those raising them do so out of a genuine desire to improve on what we have proposed. That is why we have considered their suggestions carefully and, wherever possible, we have incorporated them into the Bill. The proposals in front of your Lordships’ House today are much improved. With your Lordships’ consent, we will make further improvements as the Bill progresses through this House. As noble Lords will know, the machinery of government changes announced recently will take effect on 9 May. Responsibility for this Bill will transfer, along with responsibility for the rest of the National Offender Management Service and policy on criminal law and sentencing, from the Home Office to the new Ministry of Justice. Let me assure the House—or rather I should say reassure the House—that although departmental ownership will change, the Government remain fully committed to the policy proposals set out in the Bill, which will continue its parliamentary progress as planned. Let me first set out why we think that change is necessary. This year the Probation Service celebrates its centenary. Noble Lords will wish to join me in congratulating all those who work in the service on reaching this milestone and to pay tribute to staff who do such a difficult, demanding and, at times, dangerous job on our behalf. Probation work was originally founded as a partnership between the public and voluntary sectors. Indeed, the Probation Service has its roots in the voluntary sector, with the first court missionary established in 1876 by Frederick Rainer. The first step towards the modern Probation Service followed in 1907 with the Probation of Offenders Act. Even today, public sector probation work is at its best in collaboration with communities and voluntary organisations. That is why it makes sense for those in the voluntary sector, who have so much to offer, to be given the chance to do more. I am talking about organisations with which many noble Lords have been directly involved, such as Nacro, Turning Point, and Rainer. We have worked closely with these organisations as we developed these proposals. When we started on this journey, there were concerns to ensure parity of treatment and that the smaller voluntary sector organisations would not get lost along the way. I am pleased that we have been able to meet those concerns, and that these organisations are now speaking out strongly in support of the Bill. As Paul Cavadino, the chief executive of Nacro, said recently: "““The Bill will improve the prospects for reducing crime by involving charities more extensively in the rehabilitation of offenders?." We have ensured that the role and importance of probation staff has grown immensely in recent years. Funding is at record levels, a 40 per cent increase since 2001. Staff numbers are also higher than ever: 7,000 more probation staff since 1997, including 1,471 more probation officers. This investment has been matched by increased effort from staff, which has helped to make a real impact on adult reoffending rates. We recently published the reoffending rates for 2004, which show that the rate of reoffending was 5.8 per cent lower compared to 2000 and 6.9 per cent lower compared to 1997. This takes into account changes in the characteristics of offenders. That means that we have met the target of a 5 per cent reduction set in the 2000 spending review. This provides us with an excellent foundation on which to build. We are on track to meet our aspiration to reduce reoffending by 10 per cent by the end of the decade. However, we are still only just over halfway there and must raise our game dramatically if we are to achieve it. That is why we have been developing the role of probation staff by placing them at the heart of the criminal justice system. We are repositioning them as end-to-end offender managers, with the responsibility for assessing offenders in order to draw up and oversee the delivery of a sentence plan from the start of a sentence to its end. We are developing the tools that they need. We have rolled out OASys, the comprehensive, needs-based offender assessment system, and developed the evidence-based programmes and other interventions needed to have an impact on offenders’ criminal behaviour. It is increasingly clear that the public sector probation service cannot tackle reoffending on its own. We need a more holistic approach that will enable us to deliver on the social causes of reoffending—such as homelessness, unemployment, and drug and alcohol addiction—identified in the July 2002 Social Exclusion Unit report, Reducing reoffending by ex-prisoners. That is why we launched the National Reducing Reoffending Delivery Plan in November 2005; why my honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Skills and I chair an inter-ministerial group to ensure cross-departmental delivery of plans to support crime reduction and the reduction of reoffending; why we now have reducing reoffending partnership boards in place in every region; and why local strategic partnerships are taking the agenda forward at the community level through the local area agreements. It is also why, in December 2005, I launched three reducing reoffending alliances: the corporate alliance to encourage more employers in the public, private and voluntary sectors to offer sustainable employment to ex-offenders; the civic society alliance to inform, consult and involve local people and organisations who can help find homes, jobs and support for ex-offenders; and the faith, voluntary and community sectors to build on the valuable work done with offenders by individual volunteers and mentors and by voluntary and community organisations. Yet the manner in which probation services are currently structured is inconsistent with this approach. Probation boards are responsible for the delivery of all probation services in their individual area against centrally set, top-down targets. They are trying to do everything themselves, and we think that they are trying to do too much. We need instead to ensure that the process of a tailored needs assessment and sentence plan for each offender is reflected in a commissioner’s assessment of the specialist providers required to meet specialist needs. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary described this succinctly when he said that: "““We should ask, ‘How we can best get the outcomes?’ and ‘How do we best put together the services available to us in the public, private and charitable and voluntary sectors to achieve those outcomes?’?.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/12/06; col. 594.]" The Bill before us today will help us find the answers to those questions. It will enable us to commission probation services from a range of providers in the voluntary, charitable, public and private sectors. It will do this by lifting from probation boards the statutory duty for providing probation services. We will create new public sector bodies: probation trusts. Regional offender managers, acting on behalf of the Secretary of State, will commission services. They will do so largely from lead providers, who in turn will sub-contract aspects of their service delivery to local specialist providers from other sectors. The lead provider in a probation area will be the public sector probation trust, provided its performance meets the requirements. We know that these proposals represent a step-change in the way that probation services are delivered, so we intend to proceed cautiously. We are not privatising the Probation Service. In fact, the public sector will continue to take the lead role. We have committed to keeping the core offender management work, such as supervising individual cases, in the public sector, which has the inherited expertise in the field, for the next three years. However, we will increase the opportunities for the charitable, voluntary and private sectors to deliver services, especially interventions, such as the provision of programmes on offending behaviour, drug treatment and other matters. They will 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. As I mentioned earlier, we have made improvements to the Bill to meet the concerns expressed by probation staff, stakeholders and, of course, those in another place. We will also be seeking to make further improvements as the Bill progresses through this House. To date there have been three main areas of concern: first, the pace and scale of change; secondly, the accountability and local links; and, thirdly, safeguarding standards and professionalism. We recognise that these are serious and legitimate concerns, and we have made a number of substantial commitments in order to address them. Let me first explain the commitments we have made on the pace and scale of change. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary has given a guarantee that core offender management work will stay in the public sector for three years. We have also listened to concerns about the role of probation in supporting and advising the courts. We agree that it would be sensible to defer the opening up of this area of work to other providers until such time as the changes have had a chance to bed down. We have therefore amended the Bill so that commissioners will not be able to contract with any non-public sector providers for the work which probation currently does in relation to courts. The provision could be repealed only by an order subject to affirmative resolution, so if at a future point the Government were to decide that the time was right to open up this work to non-public sector providers, they would have to make the case to Parliament, which would have the final say. Secondly, I turn to accountability and local links. The proposals in the Bill are devolutionary, and will strengthen existing local and regional arrangements for reducing reoffending across a range of partner organisations. We will continue to develop this in a number of ways. We will ensure that the duties to agree and have regard to local area agreements transfer from the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill. We will also transfer the commensurate duties to provide information and have regard to reports by local authority overview and scrutiny committees. We will require the membership of probation trusts to include a local authority councillor. The Bill already contains a statutory requirement for regional offender managers to consult on the services they commission. We will add a separate statutory requirement for the Welsh Assembly Government to be included in that consultation to ensure that the particular circumstances in Wales are taken fully into account. We will require trusts to report to local communities on the services they are delivering. Thirdly, I should like to outline the improvements we have made to safeguarding standards and professionalism. We have made it clear that all providers of probation services will be obliged to meet the same rigorous national standards for service delivery and staff training as the public sector. Also, as a result of an amendment we made in the other place, regional offender managers, when commissioning services, are now under a statutory duty to have regard to the same aims which currently apply to probation boards. Those aims are as follows: the protection of the public; the reduction of reoffending; the proper punishment of offenders; ensuring offenders’ awareness of the effects of crime on the victims of crimes and the public; and the rehabilitation of offenders. We believe that these changes represent real and tangible improvements. I hope that your Lordships will agree that we have been forthright in addressing people’s concerns. Before I conclude, I should like briefly to mention the other measures in the Bill. These are sensible provisions, which are designed to improve the effectiveness of the management of offenders and the security of our prisons. We will pilot mandatory polygraph testing as a licence condition for sex offenders after their release from a minimum 12-month prison sentence. We will remove the historical inconsistencies between staff working in public and private prisons to improve security in private sector prisons. We will update the 50-year-old laws prohibiting certain items inside prisons so that they match modern life; for example, banning mobile phones. We will make some amendments to improve the efficiency of the youth justice system, particularly in the administration of custodial sentences. One of these provisions has caused some concern. That is a measure to ensure that it would be possible to move 18-year olds serving detention and training orders out of juvenile establishments and into the young adult estate once the sentence of detention in a young offender institution—DYOI—is abolished. This purely consequential change takes account of earlier legislation. However, as some other legislative changes would need to be made before DYOI could be abolished, we have accepted the suggestion that all these changes, including the one currently provided for in the Bill, can be looked at together by Parliament once the current review of custodial arrangements for young adults has concluded. We will therefore seek to table an amendment to remove the relevant provisions for the time being. For all the strong feelings on the subject, I know from listening to all those with an interest in the probation proposals that, fundamentally, we all want the same things. We all want to allow professional probation officers the chance to concentrate on doing what they do best. We all want to make the best use of the record level of resources and staffing, and we all want to harness the skills and resources of other sectors. As I have said, I genuinely believe that the Bill has been much improved as a result of the constructive feedback and work that we have received from all quarters. I know that real change is always difficult, but I also know that without real change we cannot achieve real improvements. The proposals before the House today will enable us to support a flexible, innovative probation sector that will be better placed to make an even better impact on reducing reoffending. I therefore commend the Bill to the House without reservation. Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(Baroness Scotland of Asthal.)