Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I do not think that the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, has been harsh, he has just got hold of the wrong end of the stick. If we wanted to destroy the clause, the amendment would have been quite different. My noble friend, with her considerable experience in Scotland, has been able to identify good practices there. Her amendment seeks to find out whether it is possible to establish a system in which a duty is placed on agencies to co-operate with each other. That is an important point. I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, is aware of the fact that until there was a duty to co-operate in terms of the duty to promote equality under the Race Relations Act, agencies did not have to do anything. They could sit quietly; the Race Relations Act could not damage them because they were doing nothing unlawful. At the same time, they never promoted equality to the extent required under this proposed new clause. By promoting this duty, there will be a positive response in terms of co-operation between different agencies. Let us look at what happened when this issue was debated in the other place. The Bill received its Third Reading in the Commons on 28 February. It was amended by the Government so that court work is now exempt from its provisions. However, Clauses 2 to 5 still open up the work of the Probation Service to market forces and privatisation. A consultation document entitled Restructuring Probation to Reduce Re-offending was published on 11 October 2005. It is an interesting paper in which the Government propose to abolish the National Probation Service and replace it with a fragmented market of competing providers. It received 740 responses, of which under1 per cent were in favour of the proposals, which demonstrates very effectively that people are still unclear about this. All my noble friend’s amendment seeks is to make sure that agencies co-operate with each other so that in the end-to-end management of this service, there are positive outcomes.