Offender Management Bill

rose to move, as an amendment to Motion E, leave out from ““House”” to end and insert ““do insist on its Amendments Nos. 23 and 38””. The noble Lord said: I am moving this Motion on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay of St Johns. I am very grateful to the Minister for her remarks. I note that she says that the amendments’ purpose eludes her. Although I have never been involved in Bill preparation, I rather suspect that, as in many other things, two fundamental questions have to be asked: is a proposal achievable, and is it affordable? In all the time that I have been involved with the criminal justice system, I have discovered that what is missing in both prisons and probation is actual detail of how much it costs to deliver what the Government say that they want delivered. Without that sum as a benchmark against which to judge all the proposals put forward and all the costs that they involve, you cannot possibly know whether you can afford it and, therefore, whether it makes sense to put the proposals forward. The amendments refer in particular to Part 1, which is to do with probation. I am sure that the Government must have ringing in their ears the experience of the introduction of custody plus, which was trumpeted with great assurance. Probation was asked how much it might cost. It assessed that custody plus would add one-third to every probation budget. It was offered sums in the region of £60,000 to do what would cost several million pounds. Of course it could not be done and custody plus—a perfectly valid and sensible idea—collapsed. It was not achievable because it was not affordable. What has worried me throughout the Bill’s passage—and indeed when the Government say that the Bill has been fully debated in Parliament—is that the costs have been neither presented nor debated. Therefore, the amendments were tabled to encourage an examination of those costs, to make certain that yet another sensible proposal that had received support across the House would not fall flat on its face purely because the issue of affordability had not been worked out in advance. Having tabled the Motion, I was intrigued to see the remarks of the Chief Inspector of Probation in his annual report. I should like to quote two passages. The first is on ““sustainable incremental improvements”” and the fact that, "““we also see a major strategic threat to this progress in the form of an ever increasing squeeze on the capacity of the NOMS system to continue to deliver ... By capacity we mean not only resources in terms of money and people in relation to increasing demands, but also the other tools with which to do the job such as the IT infrastructure””." He goes on to say that, "““it is clear to us that when the costs of new work, new requirements and new infrastructure have been taken into account, resources have in practice still not kept pace with the increasing demands ... Over the past ten years the increasing demands have included new Orders or requirements for drug treatment and testing, for accredited programmes and for managing prolific offenders, extended periods of post-release supervision, increased public protection expectations, enhanced standards of quality for unpaid work and other supervision requirements. Case numbers have also increased by taking in less serious offenders … In addition, a pay deal in 2006 for a layer of managers (excluding Chief Officers) that was agreed nationally must largely be funded locally ... Now the prospect of Offender Management, a principle almost everyone supports as a principle, risks being proven undeliverable in practice due to the additional increasing demands it will introduce. The Government was right to postpone the introduction of ‘Custody plus’ … because of the capacity problem, but even so demands are continuing to increase faster than resources. This exacerbates the problem of public expectations rising faster than the capacity to satisfy them … it will still not be sufficiently established to enable its true purpose of enabling offender managers to manage cases effectively for several years””." That is the warning from the Chief Inspector of Probation. I had the experience, for five and a half years, of trying to issue similar warnings about what was happening in prisons and they were not listened to. I was, however, hugely encouraged to read the debate in the other place, when Mr Patrick Hall said, "““in practice, how offender management will be delivered at the local level is so detailed and often so complex that it will be practically impossible for the Secretary of State to take over all those functions””." The Minister, Mr Hanson, replied: "““I need to reflect in greater detail. I have tried to assure my hon. Friend that the approach of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and myself … we have said both publicly and privately … provides the opportunity for us to reflect seriously””.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/7/07; cols. 365-66.]" The purpose of my amendment is not necessarily to insist so much as to ask for an assurance that reflection will be given to all these points before something unaffordable and unachievable is embarked on, with all the difficulties that that will inevitably bring to the Government. I beg to move. Moved, as an amendment to Motion E, leave out from ““House”” to end and insert ““do insist on its Amendments Nos. 23 and 38””.—(Lord Ramsbotham.)