Offender Management Bill

My Lords, the noble Baroness makes a good point that community sentences are much more effective than prison sentences—one with which I join her wholeheartedly. I want to go back to the issue of the delivery of services at a local level. I, too, speak from experience of having to work to change the culture in two large organisations. One was the Meat Hygiene Service and its veterinary provision and the other is the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service. One of the big issues about change is compliance, and learning good experience and good practice from other regions. If you work only from the local level, you lose those things. When I went into CAFCASS, there was some good practice around the country. Compliance with what was needed to change the system to ensure that more children could be dealt with was nil. Compliance needs to be clear across the country, because that is how you can make better use of resources. I would like to argue for more resources for all the services that I am involved in—I do—but I know that resources are finite and the only way to make better use of them is by changing the way that people work. That is why I hope that we will be able to move forward in a better way that changes services, gives greater direction when those services are not being changed, allows successful probation trusts to be innovative, and allows them to be able to work from probation trust to probation trust with the help of the centre to develop regional services of the kind that I know cannot be delivered locally. Then we will have a service to be proud of. I just have to say, because I cannot resist it, that on a historic day like today, it is fascinating to hear the Conservatives arguing for the retention of what appears to be the status quo in relation to the state—