I am grateful to my hon. Friend.
There are concerns about the contracting structure that will be introduced as a result of the Bill. I want to repeat some of the concerns that have been expressed about the way in which the contracts will be priced. It has been presented by the Lord Chancellor this afternoon and more generally as being predominantly a payment-by-results model which will seek to introduce new private funding into a marketplace where, within the public sector, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) pointed out, it would be difficult to find those levels of additional funding, particularly in these times of public spending constraint.
The point is that a very small proportion of these contracts, it seems, will genuinely be payment-by-results contracts. Substantial elements of these contracts will be subject to meeting court requirements, which means that there will have to be enough money in those contracts to ensure that those court requirements can be adequately met by the contractors. That, for a start, will leave relatively little room for manoeuvre in pricing a more discretionary element and an element that is about payment by results.
It is also the case, as my right hon. Friend pointed out, that within the existing spending envelope not only are these providers to manage about 150,000 existing offenders subject to supervision, but to take on board a further perhaps 50,000 within the context of the same funding envelope. That is not credible. It means either that we will have a very poor quality of intervention and/or cherry-picking, with a substantial number of those offenders receiving no support of any value at all.
I am also concerned about the way in which the pricing structures will respond to what a number of hon. Members have talked about—the changing risk profiles that we see when offenders are subject to supervision. As others have said, offender risk profiles are not static. Risk profiles can vary. Offenders can be beset by a range of external pressures and circumstances—bereavement, loss of a job, ending of a relationship, becoming homeless and so on—all of which can take a relatively stable low to medium-risk offender and suddenly catapult them into being high risk. At that point, we understand that the low or medium-risk offender would switch from being supervised by a non-statutory provider into the public probation supervision system. They would be supervised within the statutory sector.
But I do not think we have been told—perhaps the Minister will intervene on me if he has information to share about this—how that would be reflected in the pricing and the reward for the private contractor, and what additional resources would be made available to the public probation service if the risk profiles that had been assumed in the initial pricing of the contract turn out not to be what is experienced in practice.