Offender Management Bill

My Lords, we on these Benches congratulate the Minister on her appointment to one of the most interesting but also challenging and delicate positions in government. I wish her well in managing to balance between the independent legal position and the advice to the Government which the job entails. We are discussing both amendments in the group, and we need to know more from the Government about their interpretation of Amendment No. 24. We take the point that what one wants from the voluntary sector may be a little different from what one expects from the private sector. One of the problems of the Bill is that we are talking about a mixed economy with a range of providers in which one may expect different backgrounds for different tasks. I note that the letter the Minister sent us on Amendment No. 24 sets out specifically that the Secretary of State will be required to, "““publish guidelines about any qualifications, experience or training required," for probation staff working directly with offenders. We need to know what the phrase ““direct contact with offenders”” means in rather more detail. Is that intended to mean ““not very many””, or does it refer to all those who will be writing court reports, because they are in effect dealing with offenders? As the Minister knows well, there are those outside who fear that the Bill is about cheap privatisation, putting in unqualified people working for for-profit organisations who will quote for work previously done by qualified people. Part of my problem with the Bill has been that the legislation promoted by the noble Lords, Lord Warner and Lord Filkin, was rather different from that being promoted by the Government. Indeed, the remark of the noble Lord, Lord Warner, on the last day of the Report stage, that the service had failed does not seem to be a good basis for saying, ““What we need now is to move towards a group of probation providers with fewer qualifications than is currently the case in the Probation Service””. While we are sympathetic to toughening up the qualifications required by moving towards Amendment No. 23, what we want to know the most is how the Government interpret their own amendment. Indeed, it may be appropriate for us to take this back again and come back at Third Reading with the wording slightly amended to a form which we can all accept.