Offender Management Bill

I support these amendments. I wish to comment particularly on Amendments Nos. 38 and 40, which concern negotiated partnerships. There are enormous difficulties involved in contracting out human services that are intended to deliver care of other human beings. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Judd, will agree with me that the inquiry of the Joint Committee on Human Rights into the care of elderly people has highlighted the great difficulty that local authorities have in contracting for the care of elderly people and building values and flexibility into contracts. It is easy to state in a contract, ““The floors must be very clean and so they must be swept every day, preferably between nine and 10””. It is more difficult to state, ““Sweep the floors between nine and 10 but if an old lady is crying and is deeply upset stop sweeping the floors, put your broom away and care for the old lady””. It appears that we are not yet very good at drafting contracts that lead to such outcomes. The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, produced an interesting report on Doncaster prison, I think; I hope that I shall be forgiven if that is not correct. It was pointed out that various matters that were not in the contract were not being dealt with. The contract did not state that lavatories had to have seats, so they were not replaced. It did not state that beds had to have pillows, so they were not replaced. That highlights another difficulty: how long should a contract be and what should it specify in order to achieve the outcomes that I am sure we all want? How can you, in a contract, deal with innovation? How can you go back to your contractor and say, ““We have learnt that this should be done differently””? That is very well expressed in the contribution by Ellie Roy, the chief executive of the Youth Justice Board, which the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has already referred to. She said: "““It is easier to get change where you have a service level agreement which is more fluid than it is with formal contracts. Where we have formal contracts with the private sector, there are real challenges about getting change in those and there is invariably a cost involved because you have to go through a formal re-negotiation of the contract and there are costs to making changes””." However, a partnership is a very different relationship. A partnership is based on people saying, ““We will work together. We who are giving you the money and you who are doing the work will work together. We promise to be flexible if you come to us saying that something needs to change, and you need to be flexible if we come to you saying we have decided that there is a better way of doing this””. I cannot understand how there is any other way of delivering what the Minister has said to us more than once that she wants, which is that this should be based on the needs of the people who come for the service. One assumes that the people will be different every week and every month. How can the service be based on a rigid contract? There is going to be a need for a much more flexible approach. On our first day in Committee, I referred to the paper by the University of Glasgow and the eight points summarising how people come to give up crime. I remind the Committee that one of them is that, "““offenders are most influenced to change … by those closest to them and those whose advice they respect and whose support they value””." That implies working with local groups, neighbourhood organisations and groups of people in the community from which the offender has come. It is highly unlikely that such small organisations will be able to enter into the sorts of contractual relationships that commissioning envisages. I support the amendment.