Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I wish to highlight two concerns. First, the Leitch report on skills, which was debated by your Lordships’ House last Thursday, clearly laid out that the shortage of skills in this country has affected our productivity over many years and that, if we are to be successful as a global nation in the future, we need to address this area. This was recognised in the Prime Minister’s reorganisation of departments when he put skills with education. The danger is that, while competition can have many beneficial effects, when one has different sectors competing against one another and there is not enough money available to fund the job adequately, sectors could compete downwards rather than upwards. For instance, voluntary organisations could train up staff and then those staff could disappear to the statutory sector because they would get more security there. That would not be helpful. Alternatively, the private sector could try to compete with the statutory sector and staff could leave the private sector to join the statutory sector because it provided more security. There would be a disincentive on the contracted-out sector to train staff because it would know that it would lose them to the statutory sector, and so it would pay less attention to the training of staff. There is also the question of releasing staff to spend time training and releasing senior practitioners to spend time training them. If attention is not paid to these matters, there could be unfortunate consequences.