This is the nub of the argument: I accept that the Minister believes he is acting in good faith under the Act, but what I am saying is that the interpretation I gave from the Dispatch Box, and that other Ministers gave in another place and in this House, was that the Act could not to be used for the Minister’s current purposes. My interpretation was that the Act could be used to contract the voluntary and private sector to deliver some services, but not the core probation service, which is what the Minister seeks to do. We can disagree about that—it is a matter of conjecture—and I think that the appropriateness of our comments could be tested under Pepper v. Hart.
If the Minister votes for new clause 1 he will have an opportunity to bring back new proposals and, as has been suggested, to pilot them so that we do not have to take a serious gamble and have an artificial split between public and private providers, or face the risk of cherry-picking and big companies hoovering up contracts. Moreover, we would not have the risk brought to my attention by a probation officer in my own constituency who corresponded with me this very week. She will remain anonymous because of her current status, but she said in her letter:
“This system is not tested. It’s just ideas and assumptions based on political ideologies. Knowing the work as intimately as I do I can’t tell you how risky this is.”
I know from my time in the Ministry of Justice that there will be risks and challenges in the management of offenders. One of the serious cases with which I had to deal as a Minister was when a low-level offender who was being supervised by the then London probation service broke into a property in Lewisham, close to the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), undertook a burglary and, in doing so, murdered two individuals, set fire to them and burned the property down. The offender was given sentences of 40 and 35 years respectively and is, as we speak, serving them at Her Majesty’s pleasure. That was a low-level offender who committed a high-level offence. There is always risk.
I accept that that happened under the probation service—mistakes will happen; this is a risky business—but I am worried about the steps the Minister is taking without the pilot proposed by new clause 4 or the brake and proper parliamentary scrutiny proposed by new clause 1. That raises the risk even higher in a system that, by its very nature, is risky.