Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I have fewer conflicts of interest to declare than the noble Lord, Lord Filkin. My wife was the founding director-general of the National Probation Service and I was the Prime Minister’s strategy adviser for some years, involved, inter alia, in crime policy. The Bill should be supported by all those who believe that addressing offending behaviour is by far the most effective means of reducing crime. I think that almost all noble Lords who have spoken implied that they do. As a country, we have significantly reduced crime over the past 10 years or so. We have much to be proud of, but nothing whatever to be complacent about because crime in the UK is still high by international standards. This is a critical point to fasten on. One example of that is that, as yet, we have failed to contain the epidemic of acquisitive crime, which is sometimes violent, that is committed by problem drug users to fund their habits. There is an enormous amount of work still to be done in the criminal justice system. The system is far more effective than it was, but it must become far more effective still. My view is that NOMS is the most profound and progressive change in the architecture of the criminal justice system in recent times and offers the best hope of a step-change in system performance. NOMS introduces the radical notion of a single offender manager supervising offenders throughout their sentences, whether they are in prison or in the community. It marks the end of ““pass the parcel? which has characterised the criminal justice system for ever. For the first time, it makes possible a single point of accountability. Thus, NOMS offers a powerful opportunity to address, tackle and, ultimately, change offending behaviour. As a reform, it cannot reasonably be characterised—as some noble Lords have done—as unnecessary meddling, zealous perpetual reform or yet another scheme disconnected from what has gone before. It is not; it is a natural progression from what has gone before. It is important to be clear that NOMS does not displace the historic probation ethic, let alone emasculate it; rather, it places the offender manager at the epicentre of the criminal justice system. Moreover, the Bill arms the offender manager with the means to deploy the most effective interventions and to tailor to need. It will encourage and reward effective innovation and social enterprise in the voluntary sector, the private sector and, I stress, the public sector because competition is a stimulus and a spur. No one doing good work as a service provider in any part of the existing system has any reason to be fearful. There is much common ground between me and other noble Lords who have spoken, including the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, but I was perplexed by the emphasis she placed on centralism, which other noble Lords also mentioned, as if the only notion characterising offender management should be localism. Almost all day-to-day decision-making in this system must, of course, be devolved and local, but one reason why the system has worked so imperfectly for long periods of time is that it has not had a centre. Information in the system has not been brought together. It is not necessary to have a centre in order to have bureaucracy— the way some noble Lords have spoken about this, it is almost as if that is an end in itself. We need a powerful centre to identify trends—something we have historically not done well—to monitor the performance of the system, to assess the effectiveness of different kinds of interventions and critically, as the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, identified, to be able to track individual offenders across the system. It is true that most offending is local, but it is certainly not true that all offending is. It is vital—and there are some famous and tragic reasons to make us remember this—to be able to track offenders across the system. I have a final point: NOMS needs to be properly funded. If you take a strategic overview of the criminal justice system as a whole and look at the relationship between investment and outcome, it is clear that if we want—as we should—to achieve a further substantial reduction in crime, we need over time to shift the balance of resources away from policing towards effective offender management. Even in advance of that shift, the Bill is a critical step forward in building a modern and progressive criminal justice system. It has my wholehearted support and I commend it strongly to your Lordships.