My Lords, I start by expressing my regret that I did not have the benefit of being on the Front Bench when the Bill was last considered by your Lordships’ House. It was of course my noble friend Lord McNally, whom I am glad to see is in his place, who had the privilege of debating the Bill with noble Lords. I have, however, read the Official Report of those debates very carefully. I am struck by the expertise and passion displayed by all noble Lords who spoke. I have myself sat as a recorder so I have some experience of the issues that offenders face when trying to turn their lives around. However, my own experience pales in comparison with the experience and careers of many who have been involved in the justice system who have spoken during the passage of the Bill. I am sure that the collective experience of all those noble Lords will inform today’s debate, just as it has informed previous debates.
Commons Amendment 1 returns to the issue that dominated discussion when the Bill was last in your Lordships’ House: the Government’s reforms to probation under the Transforming Rehabilitation programme. It may help if I briefly summarise those reforms. Their aim is to reduce our current high reoffending rates. Almost half the offenders released from our prisons,
and around one-third of those serving sentences in the community, offend again within a year, and of course prisoners released from short custodial sentences, who have the highest reoffending rates, receive no statutory supervision at all. I pay tribute to the excellent work that is already done by the probation staff with offenders subject to supervision in the community. They do important and difficult work. However, I am sure all noble Lords will agree that there is much more that we could do to address the causes of that reoffending, whether that is housing, physical and mental health issues, substance abuse or literacy, numeracy or employment skills.
It is unfortunately the case that we have to do so in the context of financial constraints on government spending. We spend around £800 million a year on probation services, a significant part of the Ministry of Justice’s budget and one that cannot be exempt from these pressures. We have a choice: either to make cuts to the current system, which of course does not provide supervision to the short-sentenced offenders who need it most, or reform the system so that our resources can provide support to all the offenders who need it. The current Lord Chief Justice put this challenge well last week when he said:
“The starting point is that we must be radical in our thinking”.
The Transforming Rehabilitation reforms rise to that challenge. We are seeking to draw on the experience and expertise of a wider range of organisations from across all sectors to support low-risk and medium-risk offenders in the community. We want to give probation staff working in those organisations much greater autonomy to support offenders as they see fit and to encourage innovation. We are creating a new National Probation Service—the NPS—directly to manage all offenders with a high risk of causing serious harm, together with any other sexual or violent offenders subject to multi-agency public protection arrangements—MAPPA.
The efficiency savings that these reforms will generate will be reinvested in two major prizes that many noble Lords have long argued in favour of. The first is a through-the-gate system of support for everyone released from prison, so that the same organisation is working before their release and afterwards. The second is the extension of supervision after release to short-sentenced prisoners, which is at the heart of the proposals in the Bill and which will allow us to support some of the most prolific offenders in our criminal justice system.
It was clear at Second Reading and beyond that many noble Lords wanted a greater chance to scrutinise these changes that the Government are making to probation services. That is what I understand to be the purpose of the amendment tabled on Report by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, which Commons Amendment 1 would remove. I remind noble Lords that the Secretary of State’s powers to commission services from a wide range of organisations already exist in the Offender Management Act 2007. Those powers, which both Houses approved, do not provide for parliamentary scrutiny of the services that the Secretary of State commissions. Nevertheless, I understand why the House might have taken the position that it did in June last year. At that stage, while the Government
had announced their intention to commission probation services from a wider range of organisations, we were still developing the detail of how the new system would work. Nine months on, the position is different.
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The Government have published extensive information about the reforms. That includes full details of how the operational processes in the new system will work, a list of organisations that have passed the first round of the competition for rehabilitation contracts, and draft contracts. Copies of all those documents—they form a significant pile: I have them here—have been placed in the Libraries of both Houses. I have also discussed the detail of the reforms with a number of noble Lords in recent weeks and offered opportunities to meet to noble Lords of all parties. That information addresses, I hope, the many questions that noble Lords raised about the reforms in May and June last year. Let me summarise some of the most important of them now.
First, there is the crucial issue of engaging with and supporting those already working in probation—what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, described at Report stage as “taking people with you”. We are working closely with probation trusts to make sure that probation staff have the information and support they need while these changes take place. We are committed to treating staff fairly during this period of transition. I am pleased to say that we have reached agreement with the trade unions and the employers’ side over a national agreement for staff transfer, which will protect the terms and conditions of staff transferring to new rehabilitation companies or the NPS.
There is then the important issue, raised at Second Reading and beyond by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, and my noble friend Lady Linklater, of making sure that rehabilitation providers and the NPS work effectively together. In particular, there is the need to avoid offenders whose risk category changes falling through the cracks. In the autumn of last year we placed in the Library details of how the new system will prevent that. Once an offender has begun to be supervised in the community by the NPS, that offender will continue to be supervised by it, even if their risk of serious harm decreases later in their sentence. Responsibility for low or medium-risk offenders whose risk escalates to high will transfer to the NPS, but the transfer will happen in a way that minimises the risk of destabilising the offender. For example, the rehabilitation provider will generally continue to be involved in delivering some interventions to the offender, even though the overall case responsibility has moved.
There is the important issue of the skills and training of staff supervising offenders, raised in particular by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. The NPS will continue to use the probation qualifications framework—PQF—to ensure staff competence. For the new rehabilitation companies there will be a contractual requirement to maintain a workforce with appropriate levels of training and competence. They can use the PQF or—for cases where there might be an excellent member of staff such as an ex-offender, who has gained skills from a non-traditional route—an alternative
framework to evidence that. I am sure noble Lords will agree that we should not lose particularly valuable experience just for the sake of a qualification, provided that those who are responsible are satisfied that those who are unqualified have the ability, experience and skill to perform the relevant function. The Government are also supporting probation representative bodies to establish an independent probation institute, an idea raised by my noble friend Lord Marks at Second Reading. That will help to promote the development of innovation and share good practice across those working in the NPS and the rehabilitation companies.
There is also the need, raised my noble friends Lord Dholakia and Lady Hamwee, to ensure that we have a diverse market and that bigger organisations do not crowd out smaller voluntary or community groups. Thirty bidders have now been shortlisted as lead providers, covering 50 organisations from a wider range of sectors, including 10 probation mutuals. A further 800 organisations have expressed an interest in playing a role as part of the wider supply chain, with more than 550 voluntary sector organisations among that number. We have published a set of market stewardship principles that demonstrate our commitment to ensuring that these organisations are treated fairly by larger providers.
Finally, there is the question, raised by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, in Committee and on Report, of how the new rehabilitation companies will take part in existing statutory and non-statutory partnerships. I can now confirm—this is set out in clause 3 of the draft contract which he may well have seen—that they will be contractually required to participate in the relevant statutory partnerships. For example, companies will be designated as a responsible authority under Section 5 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and as such will be subject to the associated statutory requirements with regard to community safety partnerships. They will also be contractually required to engage in non-statutory partnerships aimed at protecting the public from harm and safeguarding vulnerable adults.
All of what I have just described is set out in extensive detail in the documents the Government have provided to both Houses. It builds on nearly 20 hours of debate on this Bill in your Lordships’ House and 26 hours in the other place, much of which focused on the detail of the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, and there were four votes in the other place in support of the reforms. We will, of course, continue to make more information available to Parliament as the reforms progress. This will include final versions of contracts, a revised version of probation national standards and details of the organisations which are successful in winning contracts.
I conclude by stressing again that the position now is different from that in June last year when the House last debated this issue. The probation reforms are being implemented under powers that both Houses agreed as long ago as 2007 and which are settled law. While those powers do not require parliamentary scrutiny, the Government have stuck to their commitment to provide extensive information to both Houses about the reforms. We have acted on the concerns raised when the Bill was last in this House, for example,
through supporting the establishment of a probation institute and by publishing a consultation on the statutory and non-statutory partnerships that rehabilitation providers should be required to participate in. The elected House has made its support for the reforms clear.
At Second Reading, the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, drew on the words of Caliban in “The Tempest”, fearing—inverting his words, I think—that the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms would,
“give hurt and delight not”.—[Official Report, 20/5/13; col. 664.]
I cannot promise the House a thousand twangling instruments, but if I may turn to the words of Prospero to conclude my remarks, I hope I can,
“promise you calm seas, auspicious gales, and sail so expeditious”.
I hope that the commitments and reassurances I have set out today have calmed the tempest of noble Lords’ concerns and urge the House to agree with Commons Amendment 1.
Amendment to the Motion