Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I strongly support that last contribution. Courts punish and their agents enforce the orders that the courts have given. We are asking for a probation service, or providers of probation, to enforce those orders. I understand, having heard the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Rosser and Lord Warner, that there is an underlying sense that they want to ensure that people do not think that non-custodial sentences are an easy option and therefore want the word ““punishment””to be attached as closely as possible. We now have community punishment orders, which are part of the way in which the Government are trying to get that message across. We will come back on a later amendment to the question of who is responsible for punishment and how it is carried out. It is a very important distinction in the role of the state and of those actors, public or private, who carry out the orders of the state. The Bill is intended to enable private actors to carry out some of those orders, but not, I suggest, to allow private actors to punish on behalf of the state, which would be improper. That is an important distinction, which we should not cross. When I read the Carter report, I understood that part of the problem of our currently overcrowded prisons was the failure to enforce fines. That seems to have been lost in all this. Part of what we are trying to do with the Bill is to provide non-custodial ways of enforcing court decisions. Reduction of offending should be a major part of this, and rehabilitation has to be part of that. Therefore, it seems to me that the language matters a great deal. The instructions that we are giving to the providers of probation are to enforce the decision and to promote rehabilitation; they are not to be the punishers.