Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I can see that we shall have an interesting debate. A number of people have agreed that offending has gone down—we mentioned 35 per cent, but we can debate those issues. As we proceed, we can debate with great joy that crime has gone down. I shall set some of the background in context, because it has been suggested that huge amounts of money have been expended and, by implication, wasted. The National Offender Management Service has been set up from within existing resources. It employs 69,500 front-line members of staff, including the Prison Service, against 2,500 back-office staff. There is a commitment to reduce the back-office staff to just under 1,800 by the end of March 2008, and a further commitment to halve the NOMS HQ, excluding the Prison Service, to 600 by 2010. NOMS spends 95 per cent of its budget on the front line. To contextualise that spend, I should say that we now have 20,000 more prison places than in 1997 and are committed to building another 10,000, as your Lordships know. We have had no category A escapes since 1997. The rate of drug taking in prison has been cut by 64 per cent in the past 10 years, from 24.2 per cent in 1996-97 to 8.8 per cent so far this year. I commend the work of my noble friend Lady Massey and those who have worked so hard with her on that. It has been a dramatic and important achievement. In 2005-06, over 50,000 offenders completed 6.5 million hours of unpaid work, worth £32 million to the taxpayer. It is easy to forget that, although we have had a challenging time, there has been a massive change, predicated upon joint working. Anything which has succeeded has done so through people working together. I very much bear in mind what the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, said about end-to-end management not being middle-to-end. That is why one cannot just look at the work undertaken by the Probation Service within the context of the National Offender Management Service. One must look more broadly at what we have done with the reducing reoffending plans in every area, the work I am undertaking as chair of the Inter-Ministerial Group on Reducing Reoffending, the work in health and education, and the work that Phil Hope and I are doing on learning skills and improving and addressing the gap. I absolutely agree that it must be end-to-end, but not all of that will be done by this Bill. The Bill embodies and articulates the changes we must make to this part of the system to enable that process to be completed. Understandably, there were some causes for anxiety. The right reverend Prelate suggested that only a few offenders had experienced end-to-end offender management. Offender management is being implemented in phases; phases 1 and 2 are already under way. Phase 1 began in 2005-06, with offenders supervised in the community, covering over 170,000. Phase 2 began in November 2006, with determinate sentence prisoners serving 12 months or more and assessed as high or very high risk. When phase 2 is fully implemented, it will cover some 11,000 offenders. The noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, wanted me to confirm a number of statements about requirements. I confirm that we will require trusts to report to local communities on the services they provide. I also confirm that commissioners will be required to consult widely in their commissioning plans, and trusts will be a key part of that process. The noble Baroness also referred to the Children Act. This is one of a number of consequential amendments to other pieces of legislation which we will bring forward to ensure that the existing responsibilities of probation boards in relation to other agencies and partnerships are properly fulfilled under the new arrangements. That takes up the concluding theme of the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman, who essentially said that none of this will undermine the commitments we have made on other things, or disrupt the wonderful work of the children’s trusts. I assure the House that every endeavour will be made to ensure that that does not happen.