Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I am very happy to follow the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, because there are a number of deep philosophical issues on which I disagree with him. This is very much a new area for me and I have been on a rapid learning curve. I thank the West Yorkshire Probation Board, the West Yorkshire Probation Service, the governor and staff of Leeds Prison, the Bradford Youth Offending Team and a number of other agencies in Bradford for the two days of intensive education and training that they gave me, which I hope has contributed a little to my rehabilitation. I have also had a number of conversations with people from Serco—a potential provider in this area. I approach the Bill with some underlying misgivings, and some of them relate to the assumptions which feed into the Bill concerning the new public sector management, as spelt out by the noble Lord, Lord Filkin. After all, as an approach to public service reform, the new public sector management has its origins in public choice theory. It is a largely American theory produced by columnists of undoubted right-wing orientation steeped in the American mistrust of government and the state as such, and the assumption that public servants are motivated only by self-serving interests—primarily economic—and can be held in check only by transferring functions to the private market sector or by imposing strict contractual conditions and targets. I remain puzzled as to why this approach has been adopted so uncritically by a Labour Government. Within the United States, that approach has always been modified by a greater confidence in local, as opposed to central, government provision of services. In the United Kingdom, with the new local government network and many others, local government is mistrusted and central government rule all. The more things are transferred to the centre, the more it is believed that efficient delivery will be possible. The Bill takes further a process that has swept across the government of England in education, health services, policing and transport: a reduction in local autonomy and accountability and a transfer of authority to the centre. The ““central push?, which the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, described, is exactly what is intended here. It is a central push because we do not trust local agencies. NOMS is no longer to be responsible to any local bodies but will be responsible upwards to the Home Secretary and, now, the Ministry of Justice. Probation boards are to be replaced by trusts, which, as with national health, will report upwards to the centre. As we examine the Bill in detail, from these Benches we will be concerned to reinforce further the local links and, where possible, some degree of local accountability, recognising that in Yorkshire we are already moving from four probation boards to one regional offender manager and that we need as far as possible to limit, if not reverse, that process. I have a further concern about the approach of new public sector management. It tends to be a one-size-fits-all approach. Mistrust of professionals, especially in the public sector, as the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, made clear—