Offender Management Bill

I am interested in this amendment; a later amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson, which has now been withdrawn from the Marshalled List, was aboutthe adjudications that are carried out by directorsof private sector prisons. That matter causes considerable concern to the Prison Governors Association in particular. When the private sector prisons started, the post of controller was put there as well, as I understand it—the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, will know better than me—to be the monitor of the contract. That is a very important role. One of the things that I found disturbing in the recent reports by the chief inspector was the suggestion that there are attempts to work around the contract and not to honour it in total. If there was not a contract monitor there to see it, there might be even more such attempts, which would reduce the effectiveness of the whole custodial operation. As well as the suggestion that adjudications could now be carried out by the director on the grounds that directors have proved themselves as being just as capable of running an establishment as the governor of a private sector prison, I understand that it has been suggested that one of the two monitors or controllers could now be removed, which would be a cost-cutting exercise. That would be enormously unwise because the duties of monitoring a prison, particularly as they become more and more complex, with more and more contracts to be monitored, are more than a full-time occupation. I have talked to some of the contractors, who are deeply concerned about this. Looking at this amendment and the whole way in which the private sector prisons are conducted, it is important that the issue of monitoring the contract by people who are there is looked at very seriously so that we—the public—can be confident that those prisons are really being conducted in the way in which we would expect them to be. That is why we have our—the public’s—monitor there on our behalf.