Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I moved Amendment No. 10 formally partly not to hold up the process. Therefore, I hope that I may be allowed to say a few words on this Motion. First, I apologise that noble Lords have had to hear the substitute from these Benches rather than the real expert—the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, has been detained in Scotland on family business. This has been a very steep learning curve for me, which I have nevertheless thoroughly enjoyed. However, I watch the Bill leave this House with foreboding. It seems to me that it has several different rationales and several layers of the Labour Party’s modernisation project for the public services, which remain unresolved. I very much thank the Minister for the way in which she dealt with the Bill, although I was not always entirely sure that she was in full sympathy with some of its aims. The noble Lords, Lord Warner and Lord Filkin, sometimes sounded a great deal more enthusiastic about some of its aspects than she did. The noble Lord, Lord Warner, suggested that the principles that applied to the National Health Service would apply to the Probation Service and offender management. I passed that remark on to staff at Doncaster prison—a private prison—and was greeted with complete and utter horror. They said that the last thing that they wanted was to have the same churning reorganisation. The noble Lord, Lord Warner, accused the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, of being anachronistic. As the Minister will know, I think that there is nothing so anachronistic as a management fashion that is now 10 years out of date. The Bill does not deal with some of the underlying problems that we face as a country in offender management, such as the non-enforcement of fines. The Carter report, which is where we started, referred to that problem in its analysis but did not deal with it in its conclusions. There is an immense problem with overcrowding in our prisons, which means that many of the things that are most important in terms of reducing the rate of reoffending simply cannot be done. The two prisons that I have been to over the past few months cannot fulfil their education and training programmes, while the resettlement problems are enormous. Overcrowding in prisons, as we all know, also means that people are being imprisoned further and further away from their home base and are transferred more often from one prison to another. The resettlement people at Doncaster prison told me that they now have to deal with resettlement issues connected to East Anglia and the Home Counties because so many prisoners in Yorkshire are now drawn from the south-east. There is a range of issues here with which I feel we have not fully dealt and the Bill does not fully deal. Perhaps I may touch on a particular issue on which we have not put down an amendment at Third Reading because we were discouraged from doing so by the Public Bill Office: the question of Clause 19, which covers the removal of the statutory duties of the controller and passes them on to a private prison. On Friday, I asked whether I could talk to people about this in particular, and I am grateful to the staff of Doncaster prison for arranging for me to see a controller. I also happened to meet a deputy controller from another prison and a former controller now working for the regional offender manager. They all said that they were not entirely sure why Clause 19 is in the Bill. They said that there is no demand for it, while the most experienced observed that it probably came from the understanding and expectation some years ago that statutory duties of adjudication did not take very much time and that the main job of the controller was to monitor the implementation of a private sector prison’s contract. ““But””, they all went on to say, ““we have now all discovered that statutory duties and adjudication take a great deal of time””. If those duties are transferred to a private prison, additional staff will be needed to cope with that, with some adjustment to the contract to pay for those staff. There is no financial saving to be made. As I dig into the Bill, I have a number of questions for which the Government do not appear to have a clear and coherent underlying rationale. While we accept that this Bill will now pass and go back to another place, Members on these Benches are unhappy that, while we have managed to improve it in a number of areas, it was not subject to pre-legislative scrutiny; it would have been a perfect candidate for such scrutiny, as some of its contrasting rationales could have been ironed out at that stage. We have done our best, but I fear that it may not be enough.