Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons in the Lords
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Lord FaulksNon-affiliated- Quote
- That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendment 1.
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- 15:09
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- The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Faulks) (Con)Non-affiliated
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- 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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- 15:19
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Lord RamsbothamCrossbench- Quote
- As an Amendment to the Motion on Amendment 1, at end insert “, and do propose Amendment 1B in lieu of the words so left out of the Bill”.
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- 15:23
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- Lord Ramsbotham (CB)Crossbench
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- 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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- 15:26
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Baroness Browning (Con)Conservative- Quote
- My Lords, at this stage in the Bill, I shall be brief. I feel strongly about the probation reforms being proposed by my noble friend, but particularly those for offenders who have served less than 12 months. I say this having served in the Home Office and having spent some time looking at some of the rehabilitation programmes needed for problems such as drugs and alcohol. Many people suffering from these problems had been in custody and—particularly those with drug addictions—had contributed to the figures that we cite in this House. I quote only one: 58% of adult offenders released from sentences of less than 12 months reoffend. Governments in the past have not addressed this. There is rightly a lot of focus on those who have served longer sentences for more serious crimes. However, if my noble friend now wants to address reoffending after shorter sentences, we have learnt in both the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office that if you can find the methodology to address something at the beginning, when it is low level, you can prevent it becoming something much worse. Although in this House we often talk in terms of statistics, we are talking about lives. We are talking about the lives of victims, and in this case about the life of someone after discharge from prison. Finding a way in which we can bring people from short prison sentences to taking their place in society and reducing the recidivism that often goes with such offenders is worth while. I listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, whose experience we all respect. It seemed from what he said that a lot of information unavailable when this legislation was introduced is now available. However, he has concerns about government contracts. He particularly mentioned those issued by the Ministry of Justice, but I think that over many years people in both Houses would put a question mark over their confidence in government contracts of many kinds. We have all seen that they do not always deliver as promised. As somebody who has served on the Public Accounts Committee for six years, I am only too well aware, having dug into many government contracts, just how badly some of them have turned out. That applies to Governments of all political persuasions. I wonder if there is some way, in responding to the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and to the House, in which my noble friend can make sure that a light shines on those contracts that can be followed by Members of this House after the legislation is passed. Clearly, payment by results is built into these reforms, which in itself will give a very factual account of how successful they are. However, if I have understood the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, correctly, he is looking for something that happens earlier than that, before we get to the end of the process. He is looking for reassurance that the process itself is as robust as it can be. I say respectfully to the noble Lord that preventing the legislation progressing as it should is not perhaps the only option that the Minister could consider in making sure that those in this House who are interested in not only the outcome but the process have an opportunity to have much more information available to them. That is not to say that any process will be perfect from start to finish, but I think the noble Lord is trying to say to the Minister that we should pick up any problems earlier rather than later. If that is what he is saying, it is a very valid point to make. Could my noble friend find a way to look at this so that, if the legislation progresses as my noble friend has outlined, we could be particularly careful that the process that is followed is transparent, notwithstanding the fact that, as we all understand, commercial confidentiality is in place when contracts are initially awarded? I hope that my noble friend will accept from me that I believe that this is a very worthwhile reform for the probation service. Many years ago, long before I came into politics, I undertook a course with the probation service and worked with it in a voluntary capacity. As a Member of Parliament, I had a great respect for, and often had to call on, the probation service on behalf of constituents. So I am somebody who values its work greatly, and I would hate to see the proposals for reform that my noble friend is bringing to the House today in any way undermined by a delay in their implementation. I am sure that he will have heard what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said, and I hope that he will find a way through this so that the House can proceed. I believe that these reforms are much needed and that the sooner they can start, the better.
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- 15:38
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Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)Labour- Quote
- My Lords, I, too, wanted to concentrate, like the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, on what has changed since a very similar amendment was debated on 25 June last year, having been moved by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. It is worth recalling that, as the noble Lord, Lord McNally, pointed out, on that vote not a single Cross-Bencher supported the Government’s position. Since then, the Bill has been through the House of Commons, the vote has been reversed and the Government have done a lot of work, as I acknowledge. In the debate on 25 June, the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, concentrated his remarks on a leaked government risk register. Since then, a second risk register has been published by the probation service in November 2013, which spoke of the likelihood that the government programme would fail to be, “delivered either in scope or within the timescale set by ministers”. It should be noted by noble Lords that, if it were not for the work of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and my noble friend Lord Beecham, there would be no debate at all on the timetable for the privatisation of the probation service. It is through their initiative that we are having this series of debates in the first place. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, quoted the Justice Committee chairman, Sir Alan Beith, so I shall not repeat that. We have also seen the Government slit the timetable, which was alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. What I really want to say is that, although we have heard about the changes that the Government have made and about some reports, what we have seen is a sense of increasing alarm in the probation service and among probation officers themselves. The noble Lord, Lord Faulks, is shaking his head, but I, like many noble Lords, have an 18-page document from the National Association of Probation Officers which goes through the concerns that it has in detail. These concerns are now more specific than they were, as it has been able to respond to the Government putting more flesh on the bones. There is no doubting the sense of alarm among probation officers. I believe, as I am sure do all noble Lords, that the probation service deals with some of the most dangerous people in our country and some of the most vulnerable people in our society, and that everyone who joins the probation service does so with the best of motives. We have heard about the concerns that they have about their careers changing course and being asked to take on responsibilities that they did not expect. This House owes it to the probation service to review the timetable and to follow the recommendations of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, so that we can be satisfied that we are not wrecking a probation service that has served us so well over many years.
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- 15:43
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Baroness Linklater of Butterstone (LD)Liberal Democrat- Quote
- My Lords, I, too, will say a brief word in support and admiration of the probation service, with which I have worked for most of my professional life. I know how important that infrastructure has been, across the country, to the provision that has been given to people who have been at risk of, and have come out of, offending. It will still exist in a minute way, as 20% of the staff will be left to deal with the most challenging offenders. Thank God for that. The 80% who will no longer be part of this organisation will be reborn through the CRCs, which I hope will be able to do as constructive a job as has been done in the past. This is a moment to recognise that we are seeing the passing of an organisation that has served this country well for the past 100 years, with a breadth and depth of experience that only time can give. I am sad about that and I want to pay tribute to the service that it has given. I hope that in the brave new world it will still have enough of a voice to allow it to serve us as well as it has in the past.
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- 15:47
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Lord McNally (LD)Liberal Democrat- Quote
- My Lords, first I declare an interest as chairman designate of the Youth Justice Board. I am breaking a promise that I made to myself not to intervene in MoJ legislation after leaving the Front Bench. However, I do so here because of unfinished business. When I spoke last, I warned the House that the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, was defective, and so it proved to be. I also promised to keep the House fully informed about developments. I was mightily impressed by the amount of documentation that was provided in both Houses. I congratulate my successors Simon Hughes and the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, on the progress that has been made, as outlined in great detail by the noble Lord in his opening remarks. The truth is, as the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, said, there have been many hours of parliamentary debate on these matters, and the idea that somehow they have been smuggled past Parliament is plainly absurd. Hours of ministerial time have been afforded to the critics. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, acknowledged that in written submissions and meetings Ministers have been willing to discuss his concerns in detail. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, that it is not about our admiration or otherwise for the probation service. I am in awe of the work that probation officers do, and will continue to be so. However, we face a situation in which we could stay where we are, with the probation service as it is but probably facing increased pressures on expenditure and capacity to deliver—the same old same old—or we could embark on radical reforms that would release the resources to carry through proper reforms. The progress we have made is truly remarkable—30 bidders covering some 50 organisations, including 10 probation-based mutuals. This really is the dawn of a new era. I disagree with the noble Baroness; this is not the passing of the probation service. I remember in the early part of this century following the debates about the probation service. What happened to it? It was turned into the poor relation of NOMS. In these reforms we are going to have a national probation service for the first time: the head of probation will have direct access to the Secretary of State, whereas NOMS does not even have a probation officer on its senior board. That is real progress for the probation service. We are going to have, as initiated by my noble friend Lord Marks, what I hope will become a chartered institute for probation, which will promote professional standards and best practices, not just in the National Probation Service but across the sector. As has been said several times—and each time everyone says how much they agree with it—we are going to have for the first time through-the-gate supervision and treatment for those sentenced to less than 12 months, a group populated mainly by young offenders and women offenders. That is another bonus. I understand the concerns; it is very easy, when opposing things, to roll out the risks. We are dealing with a risk business. There are risks at the moment in the way in which we deal with very difficult, violent and vulnerable people but I do not believe that those risks are such that we should throw aside the opportunity radically to reform this sector to achieve the supervision we want for those with sentences of less than 12 months, which goes to the heart of reoffending. It may be embarrassing to remember, but this legislation is being carried through under Labour’s 1997 Act. I followed the reports as the legislation went through: Labour carefully never guaranteed to the probation service that there would be no further reforms after 2010. I suspect that it was because Labour Ministers then realised that to open the door to reform of the under-12-months sector, get those crucial reforms and provide through-the-gate treatment, they also had to reform the probation system itself. That is why, when Labour proposed treatment for those with sentences of less than 12 months, the proposal had to be abandoned because it could not be afforded under the system at the time. That is the reality. I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, that the delay that he wants offers no way forward. It would deliver an unreformed service exposed to further cuts with, as I said, no supervision for those with sentences of less than 12 months and no through-the-gate service. The Government have put forward a package. Since the Second Reading of this Bill, I have presented it to this House as a package of probation reform where a whole range of voluntary and charitable organisations, as well as private sector providers, have brought forward these new ideas and initiatives into the sector to tackle reoffending and to promote rehabilitation. It is a reform of which I am proud. It is an honourable package offering protection for the staff and a chance to enhance the influence and professional standing of probation. It takes into account the protection of the public, and I have seen the testing of the various structures in that regard. I agree entirely about the problem of government contracts but it is a problem that is not new to this Government or to the MoJ. A lot more work needs to be done and I believe it is already under way in the Cabinet Office, which is looking at upskilling public services to manage public contracts. However, that is not a reason for delay. These reforms open the door to new ideas, new methods and new technologies from the charitable, voluntary and private sectors, while preserving what is best in our probation service. I will vote against the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and I will vote with the Government because I am willing to vote for the means as well as the ends. I urge all noble Lords who support those ends to join me in the Lobby today.
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- 15:50
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Lord Beecham (Lab)Labour- Quote
- My Lords, “the Government claim that the aim of the Bill is to reduce reoffending ... Its real objective is to secure more centralised … control over the commissioning of offender management services. It centralises everything on the Home Office and removes responsibility from local people who govern the Probation Service”.—[Official Report, 17/4/07; col. 126.] Those words were uttered from the Opposition Front Bench by no less a person than the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, in a previous incarnation, when the House was debating the Offender Management Bill. Nor was she the only opposition spokesman to criticise that measure on similar grounds. David Davis, who in the words of a famous movie character was “once a contender”, said that that Bill was, “about more centralised Government control over offender management … a recipe for disaster”.—[Official Report, Commons, 28/2/07; col. 1027.] A second reason for opposing that Bill was that it focused on “yet another organisational restructuring”. Those are interesting observations because, in a characteristically cavalier and disingenuous way, Ministers—until now not yet including the noble Lord, Lord Faulks—are now seeking to rely on provisions which they opposed and which they now deliberately misrepresent. The Government chose to undertake this massive and highly controversial reorganisation of the award-winning probation service without seeking any degree of parliamentary approval. If it had not been, as my noble friend Lord Ponsonby remarked, for the efforts of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and, if I may say so, my efforts, there would have been no debate about the issue before the noble Lord, Lord McNally, who is continuing to promote the cause from the Back Benches in his new capacity. The whole House will join me in wishing him well in his new role, and I have every confidence that he will carry out that role very satisfactorily. The Government pretend that the Labour Government’s intention—and the noble Lord, Lord McNally, has hinted as much today—was quite consistent with what the present Government are doing. Yet the then Home Secretary, who is now my noble friend Lord Reid, said explicitly: “If, at some future point, any Government were to decide that the time was right to open up that area of work”— that is, offender management— “they would have to make the case to Parliament, and Parliament would have the final say”. He went on to describe it as a, “double lock meaning that any movement after that will require a vote of both Houses”—[Official Report, Commons, 28/2/07; col. 1024.] That is something that the present Government have been at pains to avoid.
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- 15:57
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- Lord FaulksNon-affiliated
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- Before the noble Lord sits down, could he help the House with how he sees the form of the amendment? Does he interpret it as requiring almost any change, of any sort, in the probation service to come before Parliament?
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- 16:07
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- Lord BeechamLabour
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- That is not my interpretation of it. That could have been levied against the amendment originally moved by my noble friend, but this amendment makes it clear that we are talking about a national change to the structure of the service, not every individual detail. It is consistent with the description I have already read to the House—quoting Hansard—from the Home Secretary at the time, about the requirement for parliamentary approval for changes of the very kind that the Government are promoting without having sought such approval.
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- 16:08
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- Lord FaulksNon-affiliated
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- My Lords, this has been an excellent and important debate. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said that he wanted a debate on the probation service and he has got one. However, there have been a number of criticisms of the Government’s approach. Among other things, they are said to have delayed but then gone too fast. It is said they have not been sufficiently transparent and that the contract management is not sufficiently secure or not prospectively secure. I will deal with some of these criticisms without wearying the House too much. I have dealt with them in a number of meetings and documents sent to noble Lords but, for the convenience of those who may not have had those documents—or had a chance to read them—I will try and summarise some of our answers. Since my noble friend Lord McNally committed to placing documents in the House Library, we have deposited 12 sets of letters, papers and publications about the reforms, including most recently all the draft contracts for the new CRCs. The noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, raised the question of how CRCs will interact with statutory and non-statutory partnerships. We published a consultation paper about this and all his concerns are now reflected in the operating model. Many Peers raised concerns about big private providers outmanoeuvring smaller charities. We have made changes to the number of contract areas to allow for smaller bidders; placed a cap of 25% on market share; engaged with potential tier 2 and tier 3 organisations so that 800 are now registered; and we have decided to accept the suggestion made by my noble friend Lord Marks to set up an independent institute. It is said that the approach has lacked transparency and there was reference in debate to the risk register. Both this and the previous Government have agreed that there is a strong interest for the Government in having a safe place to formulate and develop policies for extensive reform. To remove that space and to challenge and manage risks internally would risk damaging confidence in the programme and could lead to a culture where risks are not even raised and properly managed through fear of the implications of doing so. I should emphasise that the risk register is by no means a list of things that will happen, only of things that might conceivably happen if we take no action and we should therefore plan for and mitigate the possibility of happening. That is simply good management. The risks are given an inherent score: the score when the risk is first identified without any controls or mitigations in place, and a current score with controls in place. A target score is also agreed. Risks are reported weekly to the departmental board, and throughout the course of the programme Ministers have been kept closely informed of emerging risks and actions being taken to mitigate them. Programme officials regularly meet Ministers—on average twice weekly—on various aspects of the programme, as well as having close and regular informal contact with Ministers’ private offices. It is said that there is a lack of clarity about the costing of these reforms. The Cabinet Office and Her Majesty’s Treasury are full members of the programme board before the reforms and attend regular monthly meetings. They have been closely involved with our decision regarding the launch and the invitation to negotiate. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury approved the payment mechanism, the launch of the invitation to negotiate and the outline business case. The programme has been given Treasury approval. The question of scrutiny was raised. How, the question was effectively asked, will we make sure that the new system is open to public and parliamentary scrutiny? The reform system will be regulated and held to account through a combination of independent inspection, audit and commercial account management. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation will inspect services delivered by both the National Probation Service and contracted sectors. NOMS will have the right to audit CRC delivery, and the CRC contracts will also allow the National Audit Office access to CRCs’ financial systems where public reassurance is needed. The audit schedule in the draft contracts, which the NAO approved and commented that it provides far-reaching audit powers, provides NOMS with wide powers of access to information, IT premises and personnel, including emergency audit. The NAO scrutinises public spending on behalf of Parliament and holds government departments to account for the way they use public money by reporting the results of its audits direct to Parliament. There was a suggestion that staff were not being well managed and that some of them, at least, were reporting to individual noble Lords that they were unhappy with the process of transition which will inevitably happen. We have transition managers working with every probation trust, whose sole role is to be the link between the MoJ and trusts. There are weekly updates sent to probation chiefs; weekly teleconferences are held with senior leaders; testing and pilots of key elements of the programme have been and are taking place; and experts from probation have been seconded to the programme to add their valuable experience. In addition, the new heads of CRCs have now been appointed and meet on the MoJ’s sounding board, which is helping to manage the transition process. The Secretary of State corresponds regularly with probation chiefs both through letters and via video message. Ministers and the programme management regularly visit trusts and maintain informal contact with probation chiefs throughout the programme.
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- 16:10
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- Lord RamsbothamCrossbench
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- 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 cite 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 cite 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 good will 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.
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- 16:27
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- Speaker
- Lord FaulksNon-affiliated
- Quote
- That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendments 2 to 17.
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- 16:45
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- Speaker
- Lord FaulksNon-affiliated
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- My Lords, in moving Amendment 2, I shall speak also to Amendments 3 to 17 and 19 to 25. Although this is a relatively large group of amendments, most make minor or technical changes to the Bill and I will try to deal with them as concisely as I can. I will start with the most noteworthy amendments in this group. Amendment 15 focuses on restorative justice. As I said earlier, I know that there is support across the House for the important role that restorative justice can play both in helping victims to move on from crime and in rehabilitating offenders. The amendment makes explicit that rehabilitative activities carried out under a community order, suspended sentence order or post-sentence supervision can include restorative justice. Noble Lords may already have spotted that this amendment is very similar to one originally tabled by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. Having debated the issue once again in the other place, the Government have been persuaded that it would be helpful to make explicit in the Bill our intention that rehabilitative activities can include restorative justice activities. This reflects the Government’s desire to see much greater use of restorative justice in appropriate cases. I pay tribute to the noble and learned Lord for first raising this issue and I hope that your Lordships’ House will welcome this statutory foundation for the use of restorative justice as part of the rehabilitation offered to offenders. Amendments 2, 3, 4, 9 and 22 also pick up on an issue first raised in your Lordships’ House, this time by my noble friend Lady Linklater. Together the amendments deal with young offenders who are imprisoned for serious offences as a juvenile but are then released after they have turned 18. The Bill provides that this group of offenders, like others released from short sentences, will receive 12 months of supervision after release. The amendments make it clear that this supervision can be delivered either by an adult probation provider or by a youth offending team—YOT—as the Bill already provides for detention and training orders. There will be circumstances where a YOT may be better placed to deal with the needs of a young adult offender and it is absolutely right that the Bill should give flexibility to allow for this. In that way we can avoid the cliff edge of a sudden transition from youth to adult services. Again, I pay tribute to my noble friend for having championed this issue during the Bill’s original passage through the House. Amendments 11, 12, 19 and 20 focus on drug testing requirements imposed as part of licence or the new post-release supervision period. Currently, an offender released on licence can be required to submit to compulsory testing in cases where the offender’s conviction offence is on a trigger list. The trigger offences are those crimes that are most likely to be linked to misuse of drugs. They include theft and fraud offences as well as drug offences. Since the introduction of the Bill, we have looked in more detail at the evidence on drug use by prisoners in the Government’s Surveying Prisoner Crime Reduction survey. It suggests, as one might expect, that there is a strong correlation between prisoners who report use of class A or class B drugs before sentence and those who go on to reoffend. However, it also suggests that using the trigger offence as a filter omits around half of all prisoners who are class A drug users and the majority of those who are class B drug users. In short, where an offence is not on the trigger list but is linked to the offender’s use of illegal drugs, there is no power to require the offender to take drug tests where that would support their rehabilitation. Similarly, in a scenario where a persistent offender who is abusing drugs commits an offence that this time happens not to be on the trigger list, there is no testing power either after they are released from custody. These amendments replace the trigger offence threshold with a new, two-limbed test: first, the offender has a propensity to misuse specified class A or B drugs; and, secondly, the misuse by the offender of any specified class A or B drug caused or contributed to any offence of which he has been convicted, or is likely to cause or contribute to the commission of further offences. That mirrors the threshold in place for the drug appointment requirement also contained within the current Bill. It continues to provide safeguards to ensure that testing requirements are not imposed in inappropriate cases. Amendments 14, 16, 17, 21, 24 and 25 collectively allow for the transfer of the post-sentence supervision period created by the Bill to Scotland, Northern Ireland and other UK jurisdictions. Currently, terms of imprisonment and associated licence periods after release can be transferred to and from UK jurisdictions under provisions in the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997. That can happen on a restricted basis, where the sentencing provisions of the exporting jurisdiction apply in the receiving jurisdiction, or it can happen on an unrestricted basis, where the offender transfers on to an equivalent sentence in the receiving jurisdiction’s legislation. This gives flexibility for both the exporting and receiving jurisdiction to agree a transfer in the way that is most appropriate for an individual case. These amendments make the necessary changes to the law to allow for post-sentence supervision, the supervision default order that is available as a sanction for breach of that supervision and the new drug appointment requirement to be transferred to other UK jurisdictions. The Government have worked very closely with the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive to agree the detail of these amendments. We have agreed with both Administrations that we will work with them in advance of commencement to review the existing operational guidance that exists on transfer of sentences. The existing position, where all transfers are agreed between the relevant jurisdictions, and where jurisdictions retain the right to refuse transfers, will continue. Finally, Amendments 5 to 8, 10, 13 and 23 are technical changes to the clauses of the Bill that deal with consecutive sentences, drug appointments and fixed-term recall. They simply make clarifications to the way in which the clauses are drafted rather than any changes of substance. I can provide further details if any noble Lord has a particular question about them. However, to keep our proceedings concise, at this point I beg to move.
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- 16:45
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- Speaker
- Lord BeechamLabour
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- My Lords, I am happy to confirm the Opposition’s support for these amendments and I am grateful to the Minister for his explanation of them.
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- 16:45
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- Speaker
- Lord FaulksNon-affiliated
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- That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendment 18.
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- 16:45
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- Speaker
- Lord FaulksNon-affiliated
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- My Lords, Amendment 18 removes the privilege amendment that your Lordships’ House added to the Bill before sending it to the other place. I beg to move.
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- 16:45
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- Speaker
- Lord FaulksNon-affiliated
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- That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendments 19 to 25.
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- 16:45
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