Offender Management Bill

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for moving the amendment. As we discussed Part 1 over a few days, it became increasingly clear that it was difficult to discern the co-ordination between probation delivery and the delivery of services within the prison estate. Although the Bill refers to offender management,the commissioning environment into which we are entering appears to concentrate the effort of the Government on producing organograms about how the commissioning would be done, but we could not see how that was seated within effective and clear lines of accountability and responsibility. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, is trying to find out from the Government about the overall view by the Secretary of State on where things are going wrong and how to plug the gap. The Minister has told us that, in the process of contestability, the Secretary of State would not always wish to commission services himself or herself but would delegate that to local areas. That was her attempt to dissuade me from supporting localism, as I see it. The difficulty is that if the Secretary of State wields the big stick and says to a local probation trust that it is not doing what it should and will not be allowed to commission services, he or she has to have a clear overview of what is happening and needs a clear reporting system up to him or her in order to take the appropriate decisions. The Minister may simply say that there are ROMS—regional offender managers—in place and that, as there is a regional structure, we should not worry. The problem is that the documents to which the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, refers cloud the issue. They look very good as far as concerns management-speak but not in the real world of trying to deliver services to what will be a multiplicity of contracting bodies. I am trying to find my way through this mesh of different bodies. If the Secretary of State steps in and says that probation trusts in an area have failed miserably and that he is going to seize power and commission services, how will he make those decisions, given, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said, that the organogram we have been looking at seems well and truly to bury probation services?