My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to joust with the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, as he is such a well read man and we heard about the Kaiser “dropping the pilot”. However, I like to think that the Opposition’s support for the Bill, which he again gave fulsomely at the end of his remarks, is like the rope that supports the hanging man—in saying that, I look to Lenin rather than the Kaiser—and so he introduces another amendment which would at least throw a considerable spanner in the works, if not wreck the Bill.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, that I, of course, consider the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, to be a saintly man. However, my reading of Lives of the Saints makes me well aware that one or two of them were quite capable of landing fairly lusty blows. Therefore, I have never equated saintliness or sanctity with pacifism or a lack of willingness to trade blows. If noble Lords read today’s opening speech of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, they will see that it contained a few lusty blows directed at the Secretary of State and the department, but is none the worse for that. I am sorry that, acting in their individual capacities and making up their minds individually, not a single Cross-Bencher managed to support me in the Division, as I understand it, but that is the nature of things.
The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, really should stop reading spy and thriller novels because his speeches are based entirely on sinister facts. As regards the FOI
request, our refusal to release the relevant information was based on the criteria in the Freedom of Information Act, which the Labour Government crafted. As he well knows, that procedure gives the Government the opportunity to develop policy before premature disclosure occurs. As in the previous debate, the noble Lord saw all kinds of sinister motivations behind the use of a management tool which his Labour Government developed in Whitehall to allow those developing policy not to make predictions but to test possible dangers before making policy public. We have published the process of evaluation of our pilots at Peterborough and Doncaster and our justice reinvestment pilots. We do not have formal evaluation reports of the other pilots because they were discontinued. However, we have learnt from the process of designing the pilots and we are applying that learning process to the design of the new system. That is part of our policy development process.
I have known the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, keep the House going for a long time over one wrong word in a piece of legislation so it is a little rich for him to ask what is in a word. I again make the point to the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, that we have given considerable assistance to small innovators in the voluntary and charitable sectors. We want to make sure that they play their full part. We are running a two-part £500,000 grant to voluntary organisations to overcome the barriers to their participation in the rehabilitation reforms. We will open up the delivery of probation services to a far wider range of potential providers, including the voluntary sector. We are keen to see partnerships between voluntary organisations or between private and voluntary providers coming forward for contracts. We continue to develop a strategy to support the voluntary sector to participate in future competitions and are working closely with the Cabinet Office to develop the capacity and capabilities of voluntary organisations to deliver payment by results contracts.
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The other point raised by noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, about Chinese walls is very valid and becomes more and more prevalent as various companies provide services across the criminal justice system. I assure her that if such Chinese walls are not already built into our system they will be. It is a very valid and important point.
I go back to the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, and myself that we are dealing with a considerable reoffending rate. Nobody puts it all at the door of the probation service. Nobody is accusing probation officers of not being up to the job. But when you have the kind of offending rates we have experienced—often called the revolving door—with prisoners coming out, often unsupervised, only to offend again, we are right to look at new ways and to try to bring in new ideas, new methods and new efficiencies to address this problem.
Amendment 2 would require the details of any system of payment by results to be laid before and approved by a resolution of both Houses before being implemented. It would also require the piloting of payment by results for three years, subject to independent evaluation and based on existing probation trust areas.
As with Amendment 1, I ask noble Lords to consider the full effect of this amendment. It would mean that any system of financial incentives for organisations to reduce reoffending would have to be subject to this three-year pilot. That could mean a probation trust looking to subcontract delivery of a community payback with an element of incentive for providers, just as much as it can mean a wider system of payment by results.
I will not dwell on this but I want to underline the full impact of what I would call micromanagement by Parliament. We firmly believe that paying providers by results will drive them to focus on reducing reoffending so we can make a difference to reoffending rates. The need to do so is pressing. If I said £14 billion I will correct it as my notes say £13 billion, so another one up for the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan. He is still buoyed up by the glory of the Welsh contribution to the British Lions’ victory; that and a slippery pitch. That last bit will be erased from the record by my staff before it goes into print.
The nature of what rehabilitation providers will do means that we intend to pay them through a combination of payment by results and more traditional fees for services. In his merry and engaging way, the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, was suggesting that we would be standing at the gate with a bag of money dishing it out for the merest improvements in performance. We believe that this scheme will produce the best of probation treatment with the incentive brought by payment by results. I should emphasise that the Ministry of Justice has consulted carefully on our payment by results approach. Our February 2013 consultation, Transforming Rehabilitation—A Revolution in the Way We Manage Offenders, sought views on how to get the right balance between incentivising providers and transferring financial risk to them, and on how to ensure that providers work with all offenders, including the most prolific and the hardest to help. We listened carefully to the responses and, as the consultation response, Transforming Rehabilitation: A Strategy for Reform, published in May this year, set out, we have refined our approach in response. I am aware that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, has been particularly concerned to ensure that providers are not able to neglect the offenders who are the hardest to help. As we have developed our payment by results approach, we have specifically sought to ensure that they are not.
We have not stopped looking at the design of our payment mechanism approach—I am aware of how important the details are to driving a reduction in reoffending. In May 2013, the Ministry of Justice published a draft Payment Mechanism—Straw Man document, which we are using in discussion with potential providers to make sure that we develop an effective final proposal. I will be placing a copy of this in the House of Lords Library so that it is accessible to noble Lords.
I say this again because noble Lords have been lured in that direction partly by the idea put about that we do not seem to have done any planning or consultation and that we have not put out information. We have been doing a lot of work, testing a lot of these ideas and bringing in a lot of experience and expertise, so let
us not be lured into the idea that Parliament or the country is being asked to accept a pig in a poke here. This is a system where I think we shall be able to see some real success and where the returns of that success will be enormous.
We propose that the amount that providers are paid will depend both on the proportion of their offenders who have completely desisted from reoffending and on the total number of repeat offences committed by offenders. Therefore, providers cannot simply focus on those whom they can easily stop reoffending; they also need to work with the most prolific reoffenders and to keep working with offenders when they reoffend.
Since the House last considered this amendment, the Ministry of Justice has published the interim results from two of our continuing payment by results pilots. As the Justice Secretary said when the results were published, the figures from the pilot at Peterborough prison, which is the sort of approach we want to see rolled out to all offenders leaving prison, are very encouraging. They show a sizeable fall in reconvictions and clearly demonstrate that, with targeted support and help aimed at the right people at the right time, we can divert more offenders from a return to crime. We will continue to learn the lessons from these pilots as we develop our final approach.
In the light of those arguments and the continuing open approach to developing our payment mechanism, I ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.