Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I support the amendment and wish to make two brief points. First, the noble Baroness gave a mythological illustration. I can bring noble Lords nearer to reality with an illustration of what happened when the Welsh CAFCASS was split from the main body of CAFCASS. The Welsh decided to pay its staff more than we paid ours in England. As a consequence, we experienced considerable difficulties in negotiating because the costs of paying all the staff in the English regions would have been considerably more than in Wales. That illustrates what can happen. Secondly, this demonstrates that the probation service is a national service. Our earlier arguments about local and national are illustrated here. Some things need to be national. It underlines what the Government have been trying to present: having some issues where you can look right across the piece—collective bargaining—but ensuring compliance in other issues. The value of having similar pay and conditions is that you can have similar expectations of people undertaking a task. That needs to be driven, I fear, from the centre. That does not mean that I am a centralist; I think there are great issues about local determination. The noble Baroness pointed out that flexibility at local level is possible within collective bargaining. With those two points I support the noble Baroness.