My Lords, I have to admit that I have been seriously concerned about the Transforming Rehabilitation agenda ever since the White Paper and this Bill were published at the same time as its announcement in the Queen’s Speech last May. That may seem perverse when, like, I suspect, every other noble Lord, I also admit that I have no quarrel with the Government’s intention to do something about the group of offenders with the highest reoffending rate—namely, those sentenced to less than a year’s imprisonment without any subsequent community supervision—the previous Government’s announced plan for doing this having proved unaffordable.
My concerns began with the consultation that preceded the White Paper. As in too many other Ministry of Justice consultations, I have come across no one whose contribution has been acknowledged, nor any evidence of any notice being taken of any expressed concerns. Following that sham, neither House has been given an opportunity to debate the White Paper because its agenda is not the subject of this Bill. When I tabled an amendment asking for that to be rectified, the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, pointed out quite rightly
that my wording was faulty because the Offender Management Act 2007, already quoted by the Minister, which the Government claim allows them to alter probation provision in any way they wish without consulting Parliament, did not mention “the probation service” but rather “probation services”. I pressed my amendment to a vote because I thought that my error could easily be corrected and I hoped that the House would understand that I was seeking an opportunity for it to exercise its constitutional duty. Secretly, I hoped that the Justice Secretary, if he was as confident of the viability of his proposals as he made out, might be happy to debate them, first, because he would feel that he need not fear any query and, secondly, because of the legitimacy that such a process would give them. I hoped in vain. Since then, an increasingly long list of subsequent happenings have served to increase my concern that the Ministry of Justice would be unable to deliver what was being announced without prejudicing the ability of probation services to protect the public.
When the previous Government brought before Parliament their proposal to change responsibility for the national structure and provision of probation services from counties to trusts in the 2007 Act, I remember the debates about what would happen should a probation trust fail. Ministers said that the Bill gave the Justice Secretary the power to dismiss a failing trust and make other arrangements for the provision of probation services in its area without having to come back to Parliament. However, that power was limited to “a probation trust”—words used several times in Section 5 of the Act, quoted by the Minister in another place. I submit that for the Government to press ahead asserting that “a” means “all” is a wilful misinterpretation of the Act, not least because, had there been any indication that that was what the previous Government had intended, I am sure that the point would have been vigorously debated in this House.
My concerns are not about the intention behind the Bill but the practicalities of delivery and the denial of any opportunity for either House to scrutinise them. If the proposals go horribly wrong, the public, whose protection will suffer, will rightly blame Parliament, and I can just imagine the ministerial blame-dodging that will follow—not least following the leaked internal Ministry of Justice assessment of the high risk of launching something so far-reaching but as yet unproven, a disclosure resented but still not refuted by the Government. Parliament has every reason to seek discussion of its potential position. As the late Paul Goggins MP, a former Prisons and Probation Minister, said in the other place on 3 December:
“Our electorate expects us to ask questions, not simply to take at face value the kind of proposals that are being offered to us”.—[Official Report, Commons, Offender Rehabilitation Bill Committee, 3/12/13; col. 225.]
To prove that I am not alone in my concerns—some of which are set out in a list of 50 questions that I have given to the Minister and will willingly share with any noble Lord who is interested—I will cite a number of recent happenings. Last November, three chief executives of probation trusts took the bold step of writing open letters to the Justice Secretary asking for delay. Last December, the Chief Inspectors of Prisons and Probation
published a damning report on offender management in prisons, doubting whether it could deliver future NOMS expectations. They believed that the current position was no longer sustainable and should be subject to fundamental review as part of the transforming rehabilitation agenda. That was without the addition of offender supervisors employed by community rehabilitation companies responsible for sentence planning both in their contract package areas and in resettlement prisons.
The Justice Select Committee in the other place, having already drawn attention to the inability of the Ministry of Justice to manage contracts—witness high-profile cases involving G4S and Serco—said in its interim report on the proposals, dated 14 January that,
“there is a lack of systematic information about the risks they might encounter during implementation and full operational conditions and the steps that they will take to mitigate those risks. They also do not appear to have devised clear contingency plans in the event that the competition fails to yield a viable new provider for a particular area … We wished to examine the affordability of the reforms … but we have been unable to determine whether sufficient funding is in place on the limited information that the Government has provided. Furthermore, a key question for the Government is how the focus on reducing reoffending will be maintained while the restructuring of the market that is necessary to create the desired efficiencies takes place”.
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The lack of funding information includes how much it will cost to supervise 50,000 short-term prisoners per year. The Government refuse to publish their estimate because they claim that to do so would inform those who might be bidding for contracts. Informed estimates by people who know the current cost of supervision are that it will cost between £75 million and £130 million a year. Is it realistic to expect that such a sum will be raised from the competition to provide probation services? If it is, it appears to anticipate a pretty hefty profit margin. Bearing in mind its track record and how long such things take, is it also realistic to expect the Ministry of Justice to satisfactorily let 21 community rehabilitation company contracts in two months? Four days ago, the National Audit Office, in a landscape review of probation, said:
“Although organizational changes can be implemented relatively quickly, implementing deeper changes to working practices, system developments and cultures will take months and years. In addition, if the system is to achieve real efficiencies and planned cost savings, then departments, agencies and local criminal justice partners need to implement as a priority an agreed and coherent plan to address problems with the flow of information”.
On information flow, the National Probation Service currently operates some 2,000 separate IT programmes which require co-ordination. What faith can one have in the ability of the Ministry of Justice to do that, when only last Thursday it announced the collapse of a £1 billion tagging scheme launched by the Justice Secretary last August as the start of a revolution in how we supervise offenders? The preferred contractor said in response that the Ministry of Justice had wanted the development of a project that did not yet exist and went on to say:
“The MoJ have been an extraordinary diversion of much of our resources for two years now and this cannot continue, and we are excited for the prospects of the business now we are free of this unproductive and frustrating relationship”.
Finally, I will quote from one of the many letters I have received from senior probation officers, who are now leaving in worrying numbers:
“It would be a deep personal bereavement to leave probation behind, but both the new National Probation Service and community rehabilitation companies look so bleak, so awful in prospect, and neither constitute that to which I committed my career and loyalty”.
I am most grateful to the Minister for two long meetings with him and the Prisons Minister, and for the amount of paperwork that he has given to me and placed in the Library. However, I must say that while long in aspiration, it is short on proof that the proposed revolution is achievable without damaging the provision of probation. For example, quality assurance arrangements are still missing from the draft services agreement, as is ICT and data management from the latest version of the target operating model. However, far more serious is the total lack of any evaluation of how long it would take to implement all these reforms were they not under the cosh of the admittedly aggressive timetable imposed by the Justice Secretary.
Surely someone, somewhere was told to work out such details? Before taking and announcing decisions, responsible Ministers, convinced that their changes are for the better, must know how long it will take to bring about sustainable change. The facts that there are so many questions about the achievability of the published timings, and that the Justice Secretary has already been forced to impose one two-month delay, suggest that this essential process was ignored.
I end with another quotation from the late Paul Goggins, who on 26 November said:
“Surely it would be sensible for the Minister to unite this Committee and unite the House by running a pilot, with the support of the Opposition, to prove whether or not he is right. If the Justice Secretary is right, and the result is that the pilot works, we would all have to hold up our hands and accept that”.—[Official Report, Commons, Offender Rehabilitation Bill Committee, 26/11/13; col. 33.]
Hear, hear to that. However, because public protection is as stake, not only would it be sensible, but it is essential that the Government’s proposed changes to the structure and provision of probation services are united with confirmation of their achievability by allowing them to be scrutinised and approved by both Houses. I accept that that will entail delay, which could have been avoided had the agenda been debated at the start. However, surely measured evolution is a more responsible approach to a duty to protect the public than the avoidable upheaval of an enforced unproven revolution. I beg to move.