Offender Management Bill

I do not intend to detain the House at great length, but I want to say a few words given that we are having the crucial part of our discussion right at the beginning. Nobody can doubt the important role played by probation services. There is a churning of people who regularly commit crimes against our constituents, and breaking that cycle is an absolutely crucial public policy objective of the Government and is in the interests of everybody in this country. I ought to say straight away that my party has no innate hostility to diversity of provision—far from it. The voluntary sector is currently involved in providing probationary services in some circumstances, but our objection to the Bill and the Government’s intentions is that we do not wish to see legislation starting from a top-down, prescriptive assumption that is driven by the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State will be responsible for commissioning services either directly or through his agents—the extraordinarily named regional offender managers. That gives us a sense of the tone and style of this arrangement; people with such overbearing and rather grand titles will impose their blueprint on those who serve at a more local level, which gets to the crux of our frustrations and our problem with the Government’s position. As we are in the business of citing organisations in our support, the Probation Boards Association emphasised recently that crime is a local phenomenon with local causes and solutions. That is very much my experience. I represent a sizeable county town in the largely rural county of Somerset, and doubtless it has problems that are familiar to different communities throughout the country, but specific problems may not be replicated in quite the same way in, for example, the constituency of the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard), who represents a part of our capital city. We need probation services that are finely attuned to the individual needs and requirements of each community, and an approach driven from the top down by the Secretary of State with his regional enforcers seems unlikely to achieve that desired objective. We are looking, in microcosm, at the wider problem with the Government’s attitude to public services. Perhaps it is a hangover from the previous Prime Minister, Tony Blair—