Offender Management Bill

Is it not interesting that they say such things to people they talk to? I dare say that if I were employed by the Secretary of State for Justice, I should find it convenient to look forward to all his plans, not least because I might hope they would include me. But let me return to Leicester race course, where there is a very fine straight mile. The Minister rightly praised the Leicestershire and Rutland probation service and also said that the creation of NOMS—that bureaucratic blancmange placed between the Secretary of State and the Prison Service and the probation service—had not quite turned out as he wished. I paraphrase what was said, of course, and I do not have to be careful about what I say as I am not a NOMS employee. It is fair to say that most dispassionate observers of the creation of NOMS will have wondered why so much money was spent and what it was designed to achieve, and also why it was necessary to draw people from the Prison Service, the probation service and other limbs of the Home Office and other Departments and to push them all into the NOMS headquarters. For instance, why were all the regional offender managers put into post? I believe that there are now about 2,000 new civil servants working for NOMS. What benefits have accrued both to the public in terms of reducing reoffending and enhancing public protection and to the Prison Service and probation service? I acknowledge that these are still early days as we are only in the third financial year of NOMS, but it is difficult to discern any benefit that the public or public services have gained from the change. Its creation did not require legislation, but it is sometimes referred to in legislation, and the Minister found it difficult to praise it wholeheartedly when he visited my constituency. I have provided some background, and I now wish to discuss how we got to where we are. This is not the first Offender Management Bill. Another one was introduced before the 2005 general election, which the election prevented from being enacted. The pre-2005 Bill came out of a report referred to in amendment No. 23, which was published on 11 December 2003: ““Managing Offenders, Reducing Crime: A New Approach””. That led not only to the creation of the pre-2005 Bill, but to the collation of responses to the consultation document ““Restructuring Probation to Reduce Re-Offending””, which anteceded the 2007 Bill. We and the House of Lords suggest that those two reports and the review of the responses to the second report should at least be publicly understood, and discussed and digested by the Government, before the Bill is enacted. We do not seek to kill off the Bill; if we had wanted to do that we would have attempted to do so on Second Reading, when we gave it conditional support—although our hopes were disappointed by the time we reached Third Reading. We want to produce the best Bill in order to do what the Attorney-General asked us to do: to reduce reoffending and increase public protection. On 6 January 2004, the Government published ““Reducing Crime, Changing Lives”” in response to Lord Carter’s report ““Managing Offenders, Reducing Crime: A New Approach””. It proposed to merge the prison and probation services and to open up work with offenders to both internal and external markets. It also set up NOMS, with its national and regional structures. Interestingly enough, on 20 July 2004 the Minister of State, Northern Ireland Office, the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale, East (Paul Goggins), who is one of the many Labour Members of Parliament who have become Ministers in the past 10 years—[Interruption.] He swapped jobs with the Minister—what a treat for everybody. Anyway, on 20 July the hon. Gentleman, when he was Under-Secretary with responsibility for correctional services, announced that the Government had decided that their original proposal for the immediate establishment of NOMS regional boards and the separation of probation staff into offender management and interventions needed more time. He said he had decided that the option of moving immediately to create new regional boards was unlikely to deliver better management of offenders and better services—his main two objectives. He also said that he wanted to concentrate on delivering end-to-end offender management and that he would introduce greater competition, because he had concluded that those objectives could best be achieved through 42 probation boards. How times have changed. In 2005, the Management of Offenders and Sentencing Bill was introduced in the other place, which would have abolished the probation service and introduced a fragmented market. By this time, the notion of merging prisons and probation appears to have been forgotten. However, the Bill did not proceed, partly because of an unexpected and strong opposition to its proposals in the other place and because of the intervention of the 2005 general election. Ever wishing to consult, the Government issued yet a further consultation paper, as mentioned in amendment No. 23. It was called ““Restructuring Probation to Reduce Re-Offending”” and it was published in October 2005. That led to much discussion, and some response from those interested in the subject. By the end of the consultation period, on 20 December 2005, we had learned that of the 748 people and organisations that had responded, only 10 were in favour of the Government’s proposals. Despite that overwhelming rejection of the restructuring ideas, the Government have pressed ahead with the Bill, which had its Second Reading just before Christmas 2006. The Government’s view at that stage—it changes from time to time as they are a flexible collection of people—was that the changes were required because too many offences were being committed, reoffending rates were far too high, the performance of the probation service was poor, and matters needed a good shake up—never mind the fact that it would be the third shake up since 2000. If one keeps shaking things, they tend to break, but here we are, watching the Government shake it up a bit more. Our complaint, which we share with the other place, is that the Government’s decision to introduce the Bill in its present form is not evidence-based. It ignores the responses to the consultation exercise; it promotes consequences that are foreseeable, but which do not appear to have been foreseen by the Government; it transfers commissioning powers away from local areas and into the hands of NOMS and therefore into the control of the Secretary of State, as mentioned in the debate we had earlier today; it reduces ministerial accountability; it undermines much of the probation service’s ability to do its work; it may compromise training standards, although we may have a chance to discuss that point later this evening; and it may undermine the concept of a probation profession, a point that was made by Labour Members earlier. All those arguments are worth restating, because the Government are not sure of what they are about. This is the third restructuring of the probation service since 2000, but they have not prepared an adequate business case to justify their proposals, nor produced any evidence that the restructuring will reduce offending or increase public protection. Moreover, the Opposition have managed to discover that the proposals will be hugely expensive. I mentioned, in a recent intervention on the hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne), that NOMS has a budget that is about £60 million or £80 million bigger than that granted to the front line of the probation service. The Government are spending hundreds of millions of pounds on chairs, desks and filing cabinets for the NOMS headquarters, and on moving no doubt highly qualified officials from the prison and probation services and the Home Office to an office in Whitehall where they wonder what they are supposed to do. We believe that that money would be better spent on probation officers, and on supervisory provision through the private and charitable sectors. The Government might need the delay and time for consideration that the amendments would provide to ensure that the legislation produced is not muddled. I urge the House, or at least, as much of it that is here—