My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for the care that he has taken to sum up. I am very grateful to all those noble Lords who have contributed to this short debate. If I may start at the very end of the Minister’s comments, the last thing that we want is to bring the probation service to an end. Probation is far too important a public service to be risked in that way. The very last thing that any ex-Chief Inspector of Prisons would want is a failure to continue to improve the provision of proper services to offenders that
enable their rehabilitation into the community and the prevention of reoffending, whether that involves the Prison Service or the probation service.
I listened with great care to all the points the Minister made. If there is just one point I would like to make—because it comes up over and over again and it is inaccurate—it is that to quote the Peterborough experiment in this situation is false. It is not a probation experiment: it is a prison and it is not funded by the companies that are taking the risk. It is funded by social impact bonds. Therefore, it is entirely false to quote it. I wish that that would stop because it distorts arguments.
I accept that there are all sorts of processes that the Minister has described: meetings, papers, discussions and so on. However, that has not been the same from the start. Those who were concerned about the morale and the worry of members of the probation service should think back. The loss of trust and goodwill in the Government—those were two of the saddest words I heard used by the probation service as to what had happened—was because, in the early stages, and from June onwards, they were not kept informed. Indeed, there were several complaints, when members of staff were allocated either to the National Probation Service or community rehabilitation companies, that they had not been told why they had been allocated. As a soldier, I find that man management is something that has been drummed into me, and I do not regard that as man management. It is extremely unfortunate if you lose the support of those whom you are seeking to lead.
I agree that it is essential that we do something about the reoffending rate, but I am afraid that what the Minister has outlined to the House is, as I said at the beginning, long on aspiration but short on confirmation that this is achievable. I remember a definition of “affordable” that I was taught a long time ago by a former head of the Army for whom I worked. He said, “There are two definitions of affordable: can you afford it, and can you afford to give up what you’ve got to give up in order to afford it?”. I submit that a whole raft of structures dealing with offenders has enabled the probation service to reduce the reoffending rate among the people for whom it is currently responsible, who are being put at risk by what is happening now. I do not believe that the victims and the others to whom the Minister referred can afford to have the degree of public protection reduced.
As the Minister said, the Bill is not really about the subject that we have been discussing. He mentioned the 20 hours in this House and the 26 hours in the Commons on the subject, but in fact those debates were not about this subject; virtually every one of those hours was filled with amendments and questions put down by Members seeking information. They were not deliberate discussions introduced by the Government to explain what was going on. That is why, as I say, the purpose of my amendment is to try to ensure that this particular measure, which has such important public protection involvement, should be given true scrutiny by all the people who feel so passionately about what could and should be done for both offenders and their victims.
I fear that, despite all that has been said, I do not believe that this House could responsibly allow the Bill to go forward at this stage, because too much is still unknown about its actual delivery possibilities. Therefore I wish to test the opinion of the House.