Offender Management Bill

My Lords, like many other Members of this House, I find myself on the horns of a dilemma over the Bill. I strongly support the concepts that offender management is best done by a partnership of the public, private and voluntary sectors, and that there should be consistent management of the time that an offender is under sentence, whether in custody or the community. But I have considerable difficulty with how the Government seek to bring about the necessary improvements to how such partnerships are obtained. That is not helped by the inconsistency with which explanations have been given about how end-to-end offender management is to be conducted, how offender managers—currently probation officers—are meant to operate, and what tasks they would have to give up to take on the extra ones. Stripped of all its details, the Bill is about two things: offender management by a social market and the rape of the Probation Service in its centenary year. Anyone who doubts that should refer to paragraph 1 of the so-called consultation document, Restructuring Probation to Reduce Re-offending, already quoted. It sets out how the Government propose to introduce commissioning and contestability into the provision of Probation Services and the organisational consequences which flow from that. These proposals require legislative change and will form part of a management of offenders Bill which we will bring forward as soon as parliamentary time allows. The Government’s chosen vehicle for bringing this about is NOMS, which I refer to deliberately by its initials because I am uncertain what it actually is. Mr Paul Goggins, then the Minister responsible, said: "““The establishment of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) now provides clear leadership and accountability for the performance of all the correctional services and for reducing re-offending?.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/3/05; col. 652W.]" Yet, when I looked up the website this morning, I found NOMS described as: "““the system through which we commission and provide the highest quality correctional services and interventions in order to protect the public and reduce re-offending?." Is NOMS a system or a service? Is it there to provide leadership or commission services and interventions? I would be grateful for enlightenment from the Minister. As we all know, NOMS had a most extraordinary birth: the Government's so-called ““considered response? to the report of the noble Lord, Lord Carter, in which the concept was outlined, being conducted and a report written in 26 days over Christmas 2003. That was followed by a so-called consultation process, which was no more than asking a number of us to submit unacknowledged papers whose contents were studiously ignored. There has been an air of unreality about it ever since, which I found admirably summed up by Salvador Dali in 1940, in the catalogue of the surrealist exhibition at the V&A: "““I try to create fantastic things, magical things, things like in a dream. The world needs more fantasy. Our civilisation is too mechanical. We can make the fantastic real and then it is more real than that which actually exists?." I found myself reflecting on this. While I agreed with an enormous amount of what the Minister said, on NOMS I felt she was still in dreamland. Evidence of the rape of the Probation Service is contained in the Minister’s own words in summing up our debate on law and order following the Queen’s Speech: "““notwithstanding the huge commitment of the Probation Service, the improvements and the huge investment made—to have a situation in which we collectively have a reoffending rate of 60 per cent can never be described as a success.""We cannot accept that that should continue. It needs to change, but that change involves the creation of a partnership between public, not-for-profit and private agencies working together to satisfy the needs of both victims and offenders?.—[Official Report, 23/11/06; col. 537.]" I absolutely agree about partnership which, as she has told the House, is older than the Probation Service itself. But, by ““collective?, the Minister means the averaged reoffending rates of the Prison and Probation Services. With respect, the term ““reoffending? is wrong: the Minister is actually referring to the reconviction rate, the only data that is kept, which is entirely different. What she calls the reoffending rate is currently 67 per cent for adults released from prison, which means that the probation rate must be 53 per cent, or 14 per cent less. How does a lower rate justify drastic intervention when the higher one does not? Come to that, if Mr Goggins is right and NOMS is accountable for reducing re-offending, why is the dream not to be changed? The only justification for the introduction of NOMS—experience elsewhere—is from New Zealand, where there has been exactly the same result: a dramatic increase in the reoffending rate from prisons. In the context of the debate, I must question whether a better intentioned, more inappropriately titled, ill-timed, ill-considered or unnecessary Bill has been brought before your Lordships’ House. I choose those descriptions with great care and will briefly expand on each. I have already mentioned intentions. It is inappropriately titled because its contents are nothing to do with the actual way in which offenders are managed. The only mentions of ““offender? are in Clauses 30 and 31, to which many noble Lords have already referred, which will allow the Minister of Justice to send prisoners aged between 18 and 21 to prison. The Government in their 2001 election manifesto promised to review the treatment of and conditions for young prisoners, and I venture to suggest that things have come to a pretty pass if all that they can come up with is to send them, utterly inappropriately, to adult prisons. The Bill is not about the management of offenders, but the management of the management of offenders, which is something entirely different. It is ill-timed because the Second Reading is being led by the Home Office in the certain knowledge that the remaining stages will be led by the Minister of Justice. It is also ill-timed because when organisations are in crisis, as the Prison and Probation Services are now, thanks to overcrowding and the lack of resources, it is not appropriate to introduce expensive, untried theories involving considerable upheaval. I also suggest that it is irresponsible to commit £855 million to a bureaucracy called NOMS at a time when the Prison Service is being called upon to make cuts to its already overstretched budget. Immediately the formation of the new ministry was announced, I thought seriously of tabling an amendment opposing this Second Reading. Having taken advice from many quarters, I have decided instead to table a commencement amendment in Committee to defer the proposals in the Bill until they have been considered and brought back to the House by the new Ministry of Justice. I was interested to see that a carefully planned strategy is one of the concerns of the CBI, whose support for the Bill is clearly commercial. I could go on and on about ““ill considered? because many noble Lords have quoted examples. I was interested, and particularly glad, to hear the Minister say that the Home Office has listened to what has been said. In 1973, I was in America with the then Chief of the General Staff. I listened to a distinguished American diplomat, Averell Harriman, say that: "““The trouble with this country is that it is governed by whiz kids, and the trouble with whiz kids is that they haven’t got time to listen?." I have found that the trouble with the whiz kids in the Home Office is that not only do they not listen to hard facts and practical experience, but they airbrush anything or anyone who presumes to question their theories. We have heard about the 738 of 748 people who responded against the consultation document. The chairman of the Probation Boards’ Association recently asked a senior Home Office whiz kid whether chief officers of probation, who have more than 20 years’ experience in the field, had been consulted about what was proposed. ““No, we don’t consult them because they’re too junior?, was the response. The galling thing is that those of us who have tried and still try to persuade the whiz kids and their political masters to listen have done and still do so because we care as deeply as they do about improving the criminal justice system, motivated by practical experience, not untried theory. What concerns me most about what is going on is the failure of the whiz kids to accept the limitations implicit in their lack of practical experience of working with or managing people. Those of us who have spent our lives doing so know from hard experience that the only indispensable tool when working with people is other people. This is particularly true of offenders. What offender management should be all about is making certain that there are sufficient numbers of trained people available, in custody and in the community, to work with offenders, helping them, in the words of the statement of purpose of the Prison Service, "““to live useful and law-abiding lives?." That is where partnership comes in, because to do it effectively, every possible source—public, private and voluntary—must be tapped. The management of the management of offenders should be all about ensuring that those who work with them have the resources that they need to do the tasks, which include consistent direction and training as well as facilities. When dealing with people, professional judgment about quality is far more important than bureaucratic measurement of quantity or process. Of course, obtaining what is required could be called a social market, but it should be driven by those who know what they want and how to use it—such as professionally trained probation staff—not by those who only know how to let contracts. What I also find difficult about all this is that what is currently in place is capable of providing precisely what the Government want. I shall remind the House of what the system is and what is needed to do all that has been mentioned from all sides of the House. What is needed is clear and consistent direction and resourcing from top to bottom inside the prison and Probation Services and the partnership of all the people who work with them. Two machines are particularly required to do that, both of which are in position now. First, there must be a ministerial policy board to direct the director general of the Prison Service, the director of the National Probation Service and the chairman of the Youth Justice Board, each of whom needs an executive board underneath him. As I have said many times, the Prison Service must reorganise itself because its structure is not fit for purpose. It needs directors of each type of prison to be responsible and accountable for the consistent direction of what goes on in their type of prison. Prisons need to be reorganised on a regional basis so that there are sufficient places close to home for all prisoners of each type, with the exception of high-security prisoners. Regional managers should be appointed to be responsible for supporting governors with what they need to deliver programmes from regional resources. They should also be responsible for regional population management and control to make certain that people are not moved inappropriately away from where they are based. Probation boards and chief officers of probation should continue as now to commission Probation Services from the partnership of all those involved and ensure that the work of community justice authorities, courts forums and the multi-agency public protection arrangements is maximised and expanded. In addition, it would be sensible to form adult offender management teams, male and female, on the model of the successful youth offender teams, which should also be run by local government. That would free overstretched trained probation officers to deal with the heavy end of the offender spectrum and would ensure professional oversight of more than 100,000 lesser offenders in the community who are currently unsupervised. On the strategic direction side, we have the criminal justice boards, whose virtues the Minister so frequently and rightly extols, and the national criminal justice policy board, which is ministerialy chaired and consists of officials from all the members of the partnerships, including the voluntary sector, local government and the private sector. There are also area criminal justice boards, on which the Prison Service regional manager and an appropriate probation person can sit, responsible for regional policy. All that can be underpinned by local area agreements, which have been highlighted many times. That machinery would work. I hope that the Ministry of Justice will look carefully at what is said in this debate as well as what is said in the other place before determining what to do. The last thing I am opposed to is progress, but I am very chary about disrupting those in busy services who are trying to do what they can in difficult circumstances. The subject of offender management is too serious to be risked by the sport of theory. I am delighted by what I have heard from all around this House this afternoon because, once again, it is demonstrating its wisdom in its desire to protect the public as the Bill progresses through our deliberations.