Offender Management Bill

We on these Benches have a great deal of sympathy with the amendment. It opens up the question of the future relationship between commissioners of probation services and the various bodies from which they commission, be they private, for-profit providers or non-governmental organisations. As the noble Lord, Lord Judd, remarked, the not-for-profit sector—the charitable bodies—has divided views on this. I recognise in the language of the Bill all the terminology of new public management, which the Minister, too, uses with relish. There are contractual relations between the principal and the agent. The agent who provides the services is in a purely executive, thus subordinate, role. The principal sets the terms of the contract in targets, performance measures and other metrics. There are bonuses for good performance and penalties for bad performance. One has to ask whether, in relations between commissioners of probation services and charitable bodies, that is the correct relationship. We are talking about local provision of services for offenders, so we are at the heart of what probation is about. For the private sector, this is entirely correct, but the problem that we need to address is whether one should treat the private and charitable sectors in exactly the same way and thus risk reducing the charitable sector, as the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said, to being merely a provider of services in an executive capacity to commissioners who entirely set the agenda.