Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I regret delaying my noble friend on the Front Bench but this is an important amendment on important issues. Perhaps I may start where there is substantial agreement, if not unanimity, across Front Benches and around the House. We are agreed that it is important that action is taken to reduce reoffending and better protect the public. I do not think that any of us—I hope none of us—is content with where we are; change is necessary. I think there is agreement, certainly with the main opposition Front Bench, that we need a wider diversity of supply and we need contestability in the system if we are to get better outcomes and results. I hope there is agreement that that requires innovation about how we deliver these goals. This will not be achieved by just doing more of what we are doing at present. Therefore, if there is substantial agreement, at least with the opposition Front Bench, on those elements of what the Bill needs to be about, the debate becomes one about means rather than ends: how do we get to a system thatis better at protecting the public and at reducing reoffending by better harnessing the diversity of supply and contestability and creating a culture where the existing deliverers rethink what they are doing to get better outcomes and better results? The amendment is flawed because it will not lead to the shift of culture, thinking and role that is required to achieve these ends. It will not lead to significant use of the voluntary sector. It will not lead existing delivery bodies to realise that they have to think about how and when to use other suppliers, nor that their current processes may not be the most perfectly designed to get the required results. I say that for two reasons. First, we know it if we look at public service reform over the past 20 years. That is what happens to institutions; when they are required to make a significant shift, they usually do the minimum necessary to comply. It is as if the opposition Front Bench had said to local government in the 1970s, ““We won’t have compulsory competitive tendering but we will have voluntary competitive tendering. We might do something about it if we thought what you did was unsatisfactory””. Nothing much would have happened, and not enough would happen in this context if we passed an amendment like this. People would do the minimum necessary to avoid intervention by the Secretary of State. That matters a lot, because it would not reduce reoffending. Secondly, it would not be possible to have regional commissioning. I would have thought it was self-evident to most of us that there are a limited number of occasions when regional commissioning is in the interests of reducing reoffending. They will be few and far between, but there are occasions when you want to commission on a wider scale than the local, and you certainly want to be able to commission across the prison gate. The amendment is not likely to make that happen. The fundamental argument is the one of shift of culture. We would get incrementalism. We would get, largely, the status quo, and there would be lots of legalistic arguments about when the Secretary of State was justified in intervening. We will not shift culture, and I fear that this is in part a wrecking amendment, disguised in the seductive clothing of localism. For that reason I do not find it persuasive.