Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I have listened with a certain amount of incredulity to what has been said because every single person who has spoken has spoken in support of what the amendments are trying to achieve. I am also confused, and always have been, about the criminal justice system in this country. Nobody knows the costs of imprisonment or probation. Therefore, we are all talking in riddles, because we do not know what we are talking about. What do I mean by that? We have said time and again what ought to be done with offenders, but nobody has actually costed that. Therefore, if you do not know how much it will cost to provide what you say you want to provide, it is no good deciding who will do what because you do not know whether you will have the resources to do it. I am sorry to go back to my previous Whitehall experience in the Ministry of Defence, but every year when there was a White Paper or a list of tasks, they were costed. We passed the costs upwards to the Treasury. Usually, the Treasury did not give enough to provide what was needed to match those tasks. You went through what was called a basket weaving exercise where you looked at all these tasks and at what was desirable, essential or nice to have to do them. You then presented Ministers with a series of options, explaining that because this was the only resource that you had, these were the options. You asked, ““Which ones, Oh Minister, are you going to take and which are you going to give up?””. When I went into the Home Office I was very surprised to find how many prisoners were idle because there simply were not programmes to do what was required to prevent them reoffending. Nobody knew how much it would cost to provide those programmes. They did not know how muchit would cost to provide classrooms, education instructors or whatever. So when they said that prison cost X and so much per year, what they meant was what it cost per prisoner out of what they had been given. But they did not calculate the difference between what they had and what they needed. Exactly the same is true of probation. You have only to ask the chief officers of probation about this. In Committee, I described this as like trying to land a jumbo on a postage stamp. They have now been told that their budgets will be frozen for three years. So it is no good listing all the things that we want them to do with the public sector, the private sector and the voluntary sector, if they do not have enough money to buy what is needed. That is an academic argument. I like two things about the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay. First, she makes provision for that sort of basket weaving exercise to take place in the form of a plan in which the Secretary of State, and everyone else who needs to be, is involved. It includes working out the cost of what is needed. That will have to go to the Treasury. If the Treasury does not give you the money, there is no point in planning to do something when you cannot get the resources. Secondly, in the event of failure, the noble Baroness’s amendment proposes a new clause to make certain that there is a machinery to do something about it. Everything else that we are discussing has nothing to do with whether it is public, private or voluntary sector provision: it is all about the reality of enabling probation staff to do the task—the rehabilitation of offenders—which this Bill is all about. Therefore, I could not support these amendments more.