Committee stage in the Lords
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- My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now resolve itself into Committee on this Bill. Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to. House in Committee accordingly. [The DEPUTY CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (Lord Tordoff) in the Chair.]
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Baroness Anelay of St JohnsConservative- Quote
- moved Amendment No. 1:
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Lord RamsbothamCrossbench- Quote
- moved, as an amendment to Amendment No. 1, Amendment No. 2:
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Lord BorrieLabour- Quote
- I have been most interested to listen to both of the previous speeches. I am bound to say that I am not convinced by either of them that there is any need for the new clause proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, or the amendment to it proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. I say that in part because not only, as the noble Baroness said, does the Probation Service abide by those principles at present, but Clause 2 repeats most of what is in her proposed additional clause. On the argument between the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, he will undoubtedly have noticed that Clause 2(4)(c) includes the phrase, “the proper punishment of offenders”. Is the Probation Service involved with punishment? The answer must be no. Is it concerned at any point with the proper punishment of offenders? The answer must be yes. It does not impose the punishment; it is not supposed to. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, may think this simple, but I think that the phrase “proper punishment” means a punishment awarded by those properly assigned the task of punishment; namely, the courts.
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- Baroness Anelay of St JohnsConservative
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- If I can help the right reverend Prelate at this point, it might assist the whole Committee before we go further with the debate. He is absolutely right to pick me up on this point. It was a slip of the tongue to use “appropriate” rather than “proper”, but it was probably a Freudian slip, because it goes to the root of what he is saying about the difficulty of knowing what a punishment is. I was trying to keep strictly to what I consider to be the proper way of defining “punishment” for the purposes of the clause, which is “proper punishment”. I emphasise that it is “proper punishment”. I am trying to convey the point that the Probation Service is not making up its own mind about how it should intensify punishment; it is carrying out clearly what the court has asked it to do. I hope that that has not muddied the waters further. I am aware from what other noble Lords have said that, rather like me, they feel that there is an awful lot of semantics in the Bill to make life difficult.
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Lord WaddingtonConservative- Quote
- To my mind, the purpose of probation has always been the rehabilitation of offenders and the reduction of reoffending. I well understand people finding the word “punishment” unattractive and inappropriate when used with regard to probation. However, there are reasons for saying that we should not get too excited about the matter. We are all agreed on the need to divert people from crime. We are agreed that in many circumstances sending people to prison is going to educate them in crime rather than divert them from it, and that whenever possible we should try to avoid sending to jail non-violent offenders who are not a danger to the public. I think that we are also agreed that we have to carry the public with us, if we are going to succeed in diverting more people from crime without sending them to prison. If we are to be successful in persuading the public that a prison sentence is not necessary, we have to show them that a community sentence is not a soft option or a let-off, but instead demands something of the customer. If, in persuading the public of that, one finds it necessary to talk of “punishment” in the community, that is nothing to get too fussed about. I understand the concerns of Napo that over the past 15 years the Probation Service’s purposes have been “eroded”—I think that that is its word—with the introduction of the concepts of punishment, enforcement and public protection. I doubt, however, whether so many people—including, incidentally, many who a few years ago would never for one moment have been thought candidates for probation—would have been diverted from prison if these changes had not been made and if we had not educated the public in the way that we have. I agree that one of the consequences of making probation and community service more taxing is the likelihood of more people being in breach and finding themselves in custody as a result. We have to be very wary of that danger. We must avoid systems that remove discretion and make custody an almost automatic consequence of breach. Community orders seem to work, though, in that the reoffending rate is much lower than is the case with, for instance, those on licence from prison. We should build on the success that has already occurred and we should try to make it plain to the public that this is a sensible approach and that it is not being soft on the offender. If to persuade the public of that we have to use the word “punishment”, I am all for using it, and using it often.
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Lord Low of DalstonCrossbench- Quote
- I support the amendment in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay of St Johns, and the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman. I also support the amendment to that amendment, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, as the statement of principles in the Bill that the amendment seeks would be better for probation without the inclusion of “punishment”. I am sorry that, on account of other commitments, I was not able to participate in the Second Reading debate, because many things needed to be said about a Bill that sets out to make such fundamental changes to a service—the Probation Service—that has served this country well over 100 years. But I am glad to be able to participate in Committee and at succeeding stages. However, having missed Second Reading, I then had to go to Australia for two weeks, so I have barely had the chance to get myself up to speed. When I arrived back and asked how I could most usefully contribute today, I was told to speak for as long as I could on the principles of probation. That is not the kind of advice that I am accustomed to receiving and, should anyone ever give it, they usually come to regret it. The advice that I usually receive tends in the opposite direction. I am sure that that advice was not intended to encourage me to filibuster but that it simply reflected the importance that many people attach to the principles of probation, the subject of the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay. All the same, I am mindful of the countervailing advice of an old mentor who used to say that there is little worth saying that cannot be said within a reasonable compass. I shall try to steer a middle course between the different sorts of advice that I have been receiving and keep my remarks as brief as I reasonably can. As the right reverend Prelate said, there is a good deal of confusion about the role of punishment in our system. I suggest that the best way to sort out that confusion is to look at the system as a whole and in its component parts and to try to allocate the different aims of the penal system to different parts of that system as far as one reasonably can. For the first half of my working life, I taught law in one of our major universities. I specialised in criminology and penology and it fell to me to teach students about the penal and sentencing system, which meant telling them about the different types of penal measure available to the courts, including prison and probation. Looked at as a whole, the penal system embodies a range of aims, from retribution, punishment and deterrence to reform and rehabilitation, protection and prevention. These are not divided up and parcelled out neatly among the different penal measures, with one measure representing one aim and another representing another. All penal measures have a mixture of aims and none represents a particular aim in pure form. However, most penal measures probably represent one aim more than others and most aims probably characterise some penal measures more than others. Thus, fines and imprisonment are associated with the aims of punishment and deterrence more than any others; community service is associated with reparation to society and making the offender aware of the effects of crime on the victim. But I repeat that none of those aims exists in pure form. It is hoped that making some reparation to society will have a beneficial effect in terms of rehabilitation. Even prison strives to deliver a rehabilitative effect, although most of the time it seems to be an unequal struggle. It went without saying in my day that probation exemplified the aims of reform and rehabilitation more than any others and that it was the penal system’s principal vehicle for pursuing these aims. From that point of view, probation was the custodian of all the most liberal elements in penal policy. It therefore came as quite a shock when I turned my attention to these matters again on my arrival in this House to discover how much things had changed in the intervening decades. It seems generally agreed that the historic values of probation have been progressively eroded over the past couple of decades, so I absolutely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, and her colleagues that we must not miss the opportunity presented by the Bill, which threatens to wreak so much damage on the Probation Service, to reassert the traditional values of that service. Let me illustrate what I mean about the progressive erosion of probation. The distinctive qualities of probation, which set it apart from more traditional penal measures, were emphasised right from the start, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has reminded us, in the Probation of Offenders Act 1907. That Act enabled the court to appoint probation officers so that certain offenders whom the court did not think it fit to imprison might be placed on probation under supervision. The duty of the officers, as is well known, was to advise, assist and befriend. Telescoping the process considerably but still very much in line with the development of the Probation Service throughout the 20th century as the liberal arm of the penal system, I should say that in 1962 the Morrison committee characterised a probation officer as a, “professional caseworker, employing in a specialised field, skills held in common with other social workers”. Rehabilitation, from the start and for most of its history thereafter, has been at the very heart of probation. But from the late 1980s onwards, underpinned by the Green Paper Supervision and Punishment in the Community, the process began to go into reverse and the Home Office started to move probation away from advising and assisting to community punishment. This was first formalised in the Criminal Justice Act 1991, which gave the Probation Service a central role in delivering punishment in the community. National standards first introduced in 1988 were substantially revised in 1995, 2000, 2002 and again in 2005, each time becoming increasingly focused on punishment, custody and enforcement. The Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000 changed the name of probation orders to community rehabilitation orders; community service orders became community punishment orders, and the combination order became the community punishment and rehabilitation order. By 2000, probation officers could for the first time recommend custody in court reports. This changed one of the fundamental values of a service historically geared to dealing with offenders in the community. The fact that the values of a service have changed over time, perhaps evolving with changing circumstances, does not prove that the clock should be turned back and traditional values reasserted; the values might have changed for good reason. But I do not think that this is so in the case of probation, and it is certainly not how those who staff and have to provide the service, whose morale has been considerably undermined by the changes, see things. Why do I say this? I do so for two reasons. First, although I have argued that none of the repertoire of measures available to the British penal system exists in pure form and all have a mixture of aims, nevertheless it is the case that all have a predominant character or ethos in which one aim by and large transcends the others and gives it that predominant character. Thus prison is principally associated with punishment, and probation with rehabilitation, reform and reintegration into society. It is right that there should be a degree of specialisation in the aims pursued by different aspects of the penal system, and differentiation of function between them, otherwise there can be a deal of confusion and unclarity of purpose. Punishment and rehabilitation do not cohabit well or make comfortable bedfellows. It is therefore important to retain within the penal system an institution whose raison d’être is to serve the traditional aims of probation—rehabilitation and reform—differentiated from those elements of the system that are more oriented to supporting the aims of punishment, custody and deterrence. Secondly, if we look at prison, where there has often been greater confusion over its role, it is an understatement to say that we do not see there an institution that can claim a conspicuous record of success. As often as not, people are sent to prison not from any great sense of conviction—pardon the pun—that it is a particularly useful or constructive thing to do, but rather because there does not seem to be anything else to do. Half of young male prisoners are back inside within two years, while a third of the general prison population achieves the same distinction. In 2002, the Social Exclusion Unit estimated that former prisoners were responsible for 1 million recorded crimes each year. One does not have to seek far for the reasons. Around a third of prisoners lose their homes while in prison. Devastating in itself, this also makes the hope of reintegration into the community so much more of a lost cause. Two-thirds lose their jobs and two-fifths lose contact with their families. The outcome is the same. Thus it is absolutely vital that a specific arm of our penal system should be unequivocally concerned with the goals of rehabilitation and reform to offset as far as possible the failure of imprisonment, and that this core purpose should be up in lights on the face of the Bill at its head. When I taught criminology, figures for the comparative success rates of prison and probation were bandied about endlessly and were endlessly subjected to analysis, which was either sophisticated or casuistical and tendentious, depending on your point of view. But I always thought, even allowing for the differential characteristics of the clientele, that there was really no contest. Even if the success rates were no different, and I do not think that is the case—probation on most measures coming out considerably ahead of imprisonment, as the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, reminded us—probation would win hands down on grounds of cost, disruption and social harm caused. If you can get people into employment, the risk of reoffending is halved. If you can get them a home, it is cut by 20 per cent. Probation is obviously better placed to do this than prison. In parenthesis, I should say that for these reasons the parts of the Bill that promote partnership with community organisations are very much to be welcomed, although it has to be said that much partnership work of this kind takes place already and there is no impediment to more being done without changing the law. Members of the Committee will observe and possibly object to the fact that I have concentrated almost entirely on rehabilitation. That is because I believe that rehabilitation is really the core animating principle at the heart of probation. I accept the other principles mentioned in the amendment and do not wish to quarrel with any of them, except punishment, which I shall come to in a moment. All the same, I wonder whether the amendment has the different principles in the right order. The only way ultimately to ensure the protection of the public, a reduction of reoffending and an awareness of the effects of crime on the victim on the part of its perpetrators is to rehabilitate them effectively. If you put the protection of the public first and despairingly decide that offenders cannot ordinarily be reformed, you move towards an American-style regime of long, fixed jail terms and deterrent-based sentencing. As we have seen, this has not been conspicuously successful, although it has been the UK’s direction of travel for some time now. Such an approach leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the ever fuller jails can make ever less provision for individual prisoners to lay the foundations for life outside prison. The longer they stay, the more uprooted they are when finally released. By contrast, the purposes of probation and all the benefits that it can bring to society, the victims of crime, the criminal justice system and offenders themselves were well summed up in the original duty to advise, assist and befriend. I can give my reasons for supporting the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, quite briefly, because most of them are implied in what I have said already. The first is clearly that punishment does not sit comfortably with the rehabilitative role of probation. Too complex a mixture of aims leads to confusion and unclarity of purpose. Furthermore, too great an emphasis on punishment substantively undermines the rehabilitative work of probation, dependent as this crucially is on the development of a positive relationship between probation officer and prison officer. I absolutely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, that it is important for people to see that probation is not a soft option, but I assure the Committee that a challenging relationship with a probation officer is anything but a soft option. The Probation Service certainly believes that strongly. The second point is perhaps even more fundamental. It is true that the proper punishment of offenders is an appropriate and important aim of the criminal justice system, but there are questions about the balance in that system between punishment, restitution, retribution and other aims of criminal justice and how those are institutionally reflected. As I have argued, the Probation Service has a specific function within that system of acting as the principal vehicle through which the rehabilitative aims of the system are transmitted. Probation officers, no more than psychiatrists, are not particularly well placed professionally to say what constitutes the proper punishment for an offence or an offender. The judgment of what a person deserves is far removed from professional advice on the likely impact on an individual offender of one sentence as against another. What is a proper punishment is a matter for the criminal justice system as a whole. It is for the court, not the Probation Service or any other part of the criminal justice system, to arrive at and hand that judgment down. I therefore conclude that paragraph (c) should not remain in the amendment.
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Baroness Howarth of BrecklandCrossbench- Quote
- I did not manage to speak at Second Reading either, but I see that that is no impediment, having heard the previous speeches. I do not have a prepared speech, but I will ask one or two questions and make one or two points. If I am talking about the nature and principles of probation, I would want that to be in relation to looking at how we treat offenders rather than how we maintain a service. That is the fundamental discussion that we seem to be avoiding. The arguments that I have heard so far are all about preserving a service. I want to preserve some of the principles, but those principles might have a different emphasis from what they had previously. Society has moved on; the Probation Service, like many other services—I speak as an ex-social worker and as the deputy chair of CAFCASS—has had to move on to meet modern-day conditions. The kinds of relationships that probation officers have to have in this day and age are somewhat different from what they might have had before. If we are looking for evidence about whether the present day service succeeds, we have only to look at reoffending rates—the whole emphasis of the Bill—to see that something has to be done and something has to change to intervene in reoffending rates. If we look at helping offenders, we have to look at the whole system. I could have an esoteric debate about systems and services, but I am talking about those people who are working in that service and system together to try to ensure that those people who fall foul of the law to a lesser or greater degree have an appropriate service to help them to become part of the community once more. That is why, when I understood the nature of the service in the original debate, I was excited by it, because I could see the continuity of the service throughout. We have found ourselves in a discussion about punishment, but I call it the use of authority. When I was a social worker we were trained in the use of authority, which has rather gone by the board. That meant that the people who you worked with understood at the end of the day that you brought about sanctions. Again, esoterically, you may not be the one who gave the sanction; that may have been the court or some other body. But you are the vehicle by which that sanction happens, it is your responsibility, and you are the one who is actually going to take the person back to court. I do not much like the word “punishment” either, but that is because I am a social worker and we do not much like it. At the end of the day, it is about ensuring that people have proper outcomes for their behaviour. I am finding it rather difficult to engage in the debate and the amendment at the level and the point that we have reached. I do not have difficulty with the Government’s original statement. I have spent some time looking at the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, and I feel that she is probably trying to achieve the same end. We have to be clear about the aim and purpose of the Bill; otherwise we will spend the whole debate in Committee talking about phraseology, the use of words and interpretation. We will come to that in a number of other areas.
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Lord WarnerCrossbench- Quote
- I oppose Amendment No. 1 and suggest that some of the arguments made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, on Amendment No. 2 are misplaced. I, too, was unable to attend the Second Reading debate because I was abroad, but I shall spare the Committee the speech that I would have made. I am sceptical about putting principles at the top of a Bill. As I recall, we went through this argument on the Mental Health Bill and I am not sure that we much advanced the sum of human knowledge in that discussion. I am opposed to establishing such principles in this Bill when there are good definitions of the functions and aims of the Secretary of State in Clause 2 and, although we may have some differences on this, a perfectly reasonable shot seems to have been made in Clause 1 regarding the purposes of probation. We do not need to reiterate that. Having a multipurpose array of saying roughly the same thing in different parts of a Bill can confuse the people who have to implement legislation. I do not think that subsection (1)(b) of the amendment is an appropriate way of dealing with providers of services. Much of this Bill is about changing the way that we deliver public services in a range of areas. It is called a commissioning approach. The point about commissioning is that the commissioner specifies in a contract what the providers of services are expected to do. It is not the sort of thing that we need to put in legislation, particularly given that the Bill makes perfectly good arrangements for putting commissioners in place. The noble Baroness’s amendment is misplaced. I listened with fascination as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, took us back to 1907. Social circumstances have moved on a little for the Probation Service since then. I would briefly mention the time that I spent as a special adviser in the Home Office just after the 1997 election, when we finally got round to sitting down and trying to change the training of probation officers, which was, until then, pretty much identical to the training of social workers. We had to confront a situation whereby some parts of the Probation Service were uncomfortable with the idea of enforcement. Many officers preferred not to take offenders back to the courts and if you looked at their training, you could understand why they had that level of discomfort. That issue has been dealt with and the training is now fit for purpose in the role of the probation officer in the modern world. We can have a debate on whether probation officers are there to enforce punishment, but they are certainly there to enforce the will of the court that has handed out a sentence. That means that they have to report back to the court when that sentence is clearly and repeatedly being breached by an offender. That puts them in an enforcement role and, I suppose, if you are an offender, they could be seen as being in a punishment role, because they are enforcing that sentence. This amendment is not necessary and the attempt of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, at an amendment to the amendment is based on a false understanding of the true role of probation in this day and age.
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Baroness Howe of IdlicoteCrossbench- Quote
- I shall speak for a considerably shorter period than I had intended to. However, one of my reasons for wanting this debate was that there was a long gap between the stated intention of bringing a Bill to this House and the way that the change was already being implemented without any form of legal framework. The position was just developing. My second reason was that if that were possible, why on Earth did we need a law in any case? If the intended change was being implemented, surely there was no need to look at these things further. Like my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham, I certainly support the amendment because it would give us and the Minister the opportunity to spend time discussing how it is intended that the purposes will be rolled out. That would be our starting point. The objection to the proper punishment of offenders is exactly as spelt out by my noble friend and others. The sentence is the punishment. Again, following what my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham said, if there is a breach within the sentence handed out, of course that is a reason for bringing the offender back to court. However, I also have a great deal of sympathy for the position of probation officers. The Probation Service has been messed about and changed a number of times over the past 10 years. It has been given a new framework and should be allowed time to settle into that. I have not yet heard any justification whatever for the changes which have already been made and which will continue to be made. The history of the Probation Service and the whole penal system, almost from its beginnings, has been spelt out magically by the academic experts, and so we can be in no doubt about that side of things. So far as I am concerned, protecting the public, reducing the level of offending, ensuring that offenders are aware of the effect of their crimes on victims and, above all, the rehabilitation of offenders are all crucial objectives. Of course, we will never be able to stamp out reoffending completely, but here—in this, I agree with some of the other points that have been made by noble Lords—we need to think of rather more effective ways in which the rehabilitation of offenders can take effect. I was going to spend some time talking about where I would start. I shall not now do that but will come back to it later. I would start with the whole throughput—the end-to-end management—relating to young offenders, which I hope I will be told is exactly what is intended. We can see how young offenders have been failed again and again before they have even reached prison. We have heard plenty about that in recent years. My final point is the one that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, mentioned concerning training. The Home Office has been totally involved in the training of probation officers—indeed, I gather that it set the entire framework for it. It also commissions certain universities to provide that training. However, the commissioning does not seem to have been very satisfactory because the universities have been given only about five or seven years—a very narrow amount of time—in which to get the right people to give the training necessary to reach the top level. I shall certainly come back with an amendment at a later stage and will support the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Judd, to ensure that any form of probation work of the level that we are talking about is undertaken only by those who are trained to the top of their ability, as is currently the case with probation officers. I hope that that is understood. I do not think that that exists at the moment. I understand that the Ministry of Justice has been thinking about this and considering an equivalent form of highly professional degree training on the same level as others at the top of their professions in social work.
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Lord NorthbourneCrossbench- Quote
- I want to make one or two substantive points but I shall be very brief. I am prepared to support the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness in whichever form—with or without the addition proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham—because there are deficiencies in the Bill. It is not clear on a number of issues. Either we shall have to establish several over-riding principles or go into a lot more detail in some of the wording. Inparticular, the Bill does not mention the issues of holistic end-to-end support in reducing crime, rehabilitation and reintegration. I was going to talk on the question of proper punishment as the right reverend Prelate and others have done. Having listened to the debate, the entire problem could be solved if the noble Baroness was prepared to reword her amendment to say, “The supervision and enforcement of the proper punishment of offenders”.
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Lord DholakiaLiberal Democrat- Quote
- For the record, I spoke in the Second Reading debate, but I am delighted about this debate on Amendment No. 1, proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, and supported by the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman. I am also delighted that it is grouped with Amendment No. 2, which relates to punishment. I am glad because I hope that this debate will permanently put to rest any indication that the Probation Service is involved in, “the proper punishment of offenders”. I am surprised that as the Bill is all about management, we are getting entangled in the issue of punishment at this stage. I shall speak later to Amendment No. 5, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, in support of the principle set out by him. We on this side of the Committee cannot support Amendment No.1. I have sat as a magistrate for more than 17 years and have been involved with local probation liaison committees and probation officers in that time. It is one of the most difficult tasks performed by the Probation Service. Probation officers are not there to enforce the law. If there is a breach of a decision made by the court, the Probation Service reports it to the court, and it is for the court to decide what action to take. I have come across many cases of minor breaches of probation orders, and the Probation Service has taken no action. In many cases, the courts have been obliged to ignore certain breaches because they were not relevant to a particular individual. Punishment is not a matter for the Probation Service; it is for the court to decide what punishment is appropriate. That is reflected in sentencing decisions, and is very much at the heart of our system of prisons and the Probation Service, which are there to protect the public and, as has often been said, to reduce reoffending. Over the years we have changed the culture of our Probation Service. Despite the 100 years of its existence, its core purpose must be the rehabilitation of offenders and the reduction of reoffending. It should remain so. Any change would damage the role of the Probation Service and the reintegration of offenders would be made that much more difficult. Probation staff have to motivate and change behaviour. This process helps reduce criminality. If offenders feel that the Probation Service is simply an extension of the judge’s power to sentence, the ethos of the service will be damaged or destroyed. Over the years, we have put much emphasis and focus on being tough on crime. We use punishment at the expense of rehabilitation. My own experience is that many offenders see a member of the probation staff as someone who understands their problems and why they have offended. The Probation Service has had considerable success in building the confidence of offenders towards leading a purposeful life. We change that at our peril. I very much hope that we will think again about the inclusion of punishment as an objective. We should always remember that the carrot and stick approach is not appropriate for the Probation Service. The courts have a role to perform, but that is quite different from the role of the Probation Service.
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Baroness SternCrossbench- Quote
- I support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, that there should be principles applicable to the Bill at the beginning, for the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, has just given. I also support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, to delete the words, “the proper punishment of offenders”. Since the government plan to abolish the Probation Service first appeared, and the proposal to create instead a set of probation functions that could be put on the market, I have received messages about it from different parts of the world. I have had three, in particular, from people in reasonably highly placed policy positions in justice ministries in their countries. “What on Earth is going on?” they wanted to know, asking “Why would the Government want to do this? You in England and Wales have something that we are struggling to build, without which there is an enormous gap in our criminal justice system”. They have asked, “Is this service, a model for the world, to be fragmented and reduced to a set of functions?”. I therefore crave the indulgence of the House to talk about what a probation service is. It is a lot more than a set of functions. I am glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, made it clear that we should talk about what probation is for before we talk about the rest of the Bill. What we say about this will structure what we want to say about the rest. Probation is a lot more than a set of functions. A probation service is a part of a necessary balance in a penal system. It is usually seen that there must be a balance between punishing the criminal act and dealing with the problem that led to the act—a balance between actions that protect society by taking people out of it and actions that protect society by keeping people in it, supervising and encouraging them to live law-abiding lives. Almost every country has this balance in its penal system to some extent. Any major penal reform activity taking place in a country often looks for the creation of some body that rehabilitates, reintegrates and works in communities as a visible reassurance to the public that people who commit crime are dealt and worked with so that they change. In England and Wales, that body is the Probation Service. We are not talking about a set of functions that can be reallocated and loosely held together in a “probation trust”. We are talking about an organisation with a name that is recognised and understood, and which is there to protect and rehabilitate. It must have officers with a trusted professionalism and a standing in their area, so that their authority is accepted. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, for the way in which she expressed that. Those officers need to be respected, and their organisation must be respected a great deal by the courts, other local agencies and the public. There needs to be a chief officer representing the service and known in the locality. There should be a strong organisation of chief officers, able to speak up in the public debate about probation and its work, the value of community sentences and the negative impact of short prison sentences. I agree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, on the importance of public education and reassurance about the Probation Service. Chief officers should be able to speak about the huge contribution that rehabilitation and supervision can make to public safety and peaceful neighbourhoods. An organisation of chief officers should be able to brief Members of Parliament, and there should be a strong probation presence in the Ministry of Justice to advise the Minister. It is sad that probation does not appear anywhere on the Ministry of Justice website. The principles of what probation is should be at the beginning of the Bill but they should not include punishment, whether proper or any other sort. I raised objections to that at the Second Reading of the Criminal Justice and Court Services Bill in 2000, when I said: “I am very surprised to see such an aim set out in a statute … I thought that it was the court which punished. The order of the court … is the punishment. To suggest that those supervising the court order, whether in prison or in the community, should themselves be doing the punishing seems to me to run contrary to all the international requirements on the treatment of offenders as well as causing strong offence to probation officers who carry out their work on a strong ethical basis”.—[Official Report, 3/7/00; col. 1299.] I can see why those drafting the 2000 Bill felt that it might give the impression that probation had been toughened up in some way, although I doubt whether anyone who would get that impression reads the small print of legislation. Now that probation is the responsibility of the Ministry of Justice, we can hope that a more appropriate term, more in line with the human rights framework, might be substituted; for example, “enforcement” would certainly meet the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay. We are talking about enforcement. Words are important; we should try to use the right ones, and finding the right words in this Bill is particularly problematic. The inclusion of a purpose such as punishment would—in so far as the working probation officer or the person being supervised has the faintest idea that there is a Bill, that there are principles and that they include punishment—confuse and make it difficult to establish the trusting relationships that are the basis of successful rehabilitation. I end with a brief anecdote. Someone I know was talking to the Probation Service about the idea of bringing the services in a very deprived, crime-ridden area together with the Probation Service under one roof, on the lines of the excellent community court in Liverpool. The Probation Service listened to the proposal and responded, “That is a very bad idea. You have to understand that probation officers are not welcome in deprived areas because their only contact with those areas is when they go looking for someone in breach to send back to prison”. I submit that this provision would not protect the public or make anyone safer.
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The Earl of ListowelCrossbench- Quote
- I seek from the Minister the assurance that nothing in the Bill may unintentionally undermine the professional framework within which probation officers operate. For instance, it should not overburden the service with targets, procedures, regulations, inspection or data collection; rather, it should develop those working on the front line, increase the quality of their supervision and create greater opportunities for continuing professional development. The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, was so right to talk about the authority of the person working on the front line, building a relationship with these often damaged adults and young people. Child protection workers are in this position. They go in to families where the children are at risk from their parents, who are very inadequate. In that situation, the social worker has to tread a careful line between setting the right sanctions and protecting the child and supporting the parents to make a good job of parenting so that the child can develop successfully. That is similar to the role of the probation officer, who must not only protect the public but also help to develop people who are often quite inadequate or have had poor developmental experiences. We have discussed the purposes, but they will all fall to nothing if we do not get right the way in which we support probation officers in what they do and provide them with a framework in which they can operate effectively. I would appreciate an assurance from the Minister that that is not put into question by the Bill.
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Baroness Linklater of ButterstoneLiberal Democrat- Quote
- I rise to speak to the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, and to the amendment to that amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. The first amendment offers the opportunity to focus on what the Bill stands for and what our National Probation Service essentially represents. It is about the provision and the nature of the service as well as about supporting people who are in need of such a service. It is about what the National Probation Service stands for in terms of values and principles and therefore what we want or need from such a service. It underpins the debates that we will have on the detail of the Bill because it addresses the extent to which the Probation Service will remain central to the business of offender management and explores the nature of the role that the service should play in the way we configure future offender management and community safety functions. The principles laid out by Amendment No. 1 at the very outset of the Bill assert their overarching relevance to all its aspects, rather than the narrower function of the aims, as they are referred to in Clause 2. They are then expanded and articulated in the detail of the probation purposes set out in Clause 1, which can be seen as the logical development from these overarching principles. They refer to the purposes of advising the courts on appropriate sentences and conditional cautions, supervision and rehabilitation, assistance to those on bail and working with victims, all of which must reflect and be embedded in those principles. One major omission is the purpose of tackling the underlying causes of offending, without which the goal of reducing reoffending is meaningless. We will return to this. There is a real problem in the language of the Bill, in which “probation functions”, “probation purposes” and “probation services” seem to be used interchangeably, which is very confusing. Clarity is of the essence, and we should start with a clear statement of principles. The essence of offender management, which is at the heart of all probation services, is the fundamental belief in the capacity of people, including offenders, to change. It is the key. How we protect the public and reduce incarceration and reoffending is predicated on the belief that people can be helped to move from being an offender to being a citizen. That is the core of the value of the Probation Service and must be understood by all those who presume to reconfigure it. The principles of probation emanate from that belief. Deeply unfashionable as it is seems to have become, the phrase “to advise, assist and befriend”, which has been referred to, encapsulates that humanity and the essential, personal quality of the nature of probation work, which we reject at our peril. I briefly raise one point that has not been discussed. It concerns the role and potential loss of the post of national director of probation. That post was created in 2001. With it came a significant move towards the coherent national framework that we have today. He is the accountable officer, answerable to the Secretary of State, dealing with issues of probity and due governance, carrying central responsibility for commissioning and being the point of reference for all chief officers of probation. He is the pivotal figurehead, spanning all aspects of probation work. He, I believe, is another detail absent from the Bill. Without debate that post has been downgraded in the new NOMS hierarchy, below that of both the chief executive of NOMS and the director of commissioning and performance. It is not a mere detail. There is the real possibility that, as the commissioning of interventions goes out to contestability, this move will undermine the coherence so carefully nurtured and make the fragmentation of the service more likely. Coherence is a real and general concern; it is part of the very fundamentals of the probation provision that we are discussing. I would be grateful if the Minister could illuminate the Government’s thinking on that issue. The second amendment, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, represents another of those fundamental principles that I have been talking about. The role of the Probation Service, or any other provider of probation services, is to carry out the instructions of the court; it is not to punish. The court will already have been advised through reports drawn up by the probation officer of the circumstances of the offender before sentence, but it is the sentencer’s role and responsibility to punish. The sentence is the punishment under any of the multiplicity of options open to the court. The court will of course have in mind the principles and objectives that underlie the sentence, as will the probation officer; namely, the protection of the public, the reduction of reoffending, the needs of the victim, the awareness of what the offender has done and, of course, rehabilitation. It then falls to the probation officer to supervise the execution of the sentence to ensure that the conditions are met and, if they have not been met, to return the offender to court if necessary. It is greatly to be regretted that the service has been under growing pressure of the new “tough” enforcing ethos in the past few years. That has made its role more coercive and has resulted, inter alia, in a fourfold increase in automatic recall to prison for breach, which the Lord Chief Justice has described as a “trapdoor to prison”. It has turned community service into community punishment. It has undermined the constructive role of the service and highlighted the primacy of punishment over rehabilitation. Like many of your Lordships, I have been a magistrate in the past and know what the process is about. It is left to the skill of the probation officer to enable the offender to comply through the process of the advice, assistance and befriending, through local knowledge of his circumstances, available resources locally and appropriate interventions. If things fail, the officer is expected to return the client to court for a further decision on what the next appropriate punishment might be. That is well understood by all parties. It is a contradiction to expect the probation officer to be both punitive and rehabilitative at the same time. Given the sanction of the return to court, the officer will do all he can to enable the offender to comply with the conditions of the sentence, and then to move forward, using all the interpersonal skills at his disposal, the development of a relationship of trust, a firm guiding hand and, very importantly, judgment. The process of changing lives or facilitating change is subtle and often slow, and it can often mean two steps forward and one step back, or possibly the reverse. It requires trust and commitment to move forward. I have never met a probation officer who sees himself as an inflictor of punishment. He has to choreograph carrying out the court’s instructions. The indicator of his success is that his client fulfils whatever the court has required and completes and discharges his probation. I suspect that the press and politicians have contradictory expectations of punishment. They want retribution, so that punishment involves real unpleasantness for the offender and suffering to, in some way, mirror the suffering of the victim. But they also want an end to the offending. The chances are that those goals are mutually exclusive. Few people go straight because of suffering or fear. Indeed, those are likely to have the reverse effect. As anyone working in prison, as I do, knows, the most difficult prisoners to manage are those on indeterminate sentences or a whole-life tariff, because they have no hope and nothing to lose any more. Hope and the possibility of change are two very important drivers in prison. All the other elements in the first five principles in the new clause are constructive and positive. We do not need to include the paragraph on punishment.
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Baroness Scotland of AsthalLabour- Quote
- As we have now discussed the amendments for one hour and 32 minutes, I reassure Members who may be forgiven for having thought that they had wandered into a Second Reading debate that we are still in Committee. Much has been said on which we all agree. I say straight away how much I agreed with what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, and the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth. As we heard in every speech, we all seek to be able accurately to identify risk and need—in relation to the offender but also in what the offender will need to rehabilitate them—and, thereby, to restrict and diminish the likelihood that that individual will reoffend. I very much agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, in her statement that this is not about the service, it is about the offender and offender management and what we need to do to assist the offender to leave offending behind. I do not believe that the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, and I disagree—or indeed that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and I disagree—much about the end result that we want. There seems to be a degree of dissonance about how we get there. I say with the utmost clarity that I can that this is not about the destruction of the Probation Service. This is not about change for change's sake. It is about creating a system that will help us better to deliver the change that we all seek. The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, is absolutely right when she says that we could do better on reducing reoffending. We want to do better. My noble friend Lord Warner is right to make clear that we are talking about two different systems: the system of commissioning services and that of the provision of services. I agree with the analysis of my noble friend Lord Borrie about what is in Clause 1 and Clause 2. To the right reverend Prelate, I say that I absolutely understand the dichotomy to which he refers. It is suggested that if one takes an aggressive approach to enforcing community penalties, saying that they are the best way forward and that we should use them on all occasions unless and until prison is unavoidable, that is presented as somehow soft. It is not soft, as the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, made absolutely clear. So there is much on which we agree. We do, however, want to be able to commission services from the best provider available, and to use organisations such as the NSPCC, Turning Point and NACRO, all of which bring valuable additional support to this effort, to supplement and partner public sector provision. Reducing reoffending is not a task for one sector or organisation in isolation. We want to be able to commission those services across geographical and organisational boundaries—spanning, for example, custody and the community, or very differently sized probation areas that do not always have the capacity to meet what sentencers want or what offenders need—where appropriate.
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- Lord RamsbothamCrossbench
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- I thank the Minister for the thoroughness and care of her reply. Having listened to what has been said, I think these amendments have had the purpose of setting the tone for the remainder of the Committee by the depth and seriousness with which the issues have been explored. That is entirely appropriate in view of what is at stake. I agree with the Minister that punishment is at the heart of the sentence that is awarded. That is absolutely right; I have no argument with that. It is right that the punishment includes liberty; that is what is imposed, and then the time is available to do something about it on behalf of society as a whole. The purpose is to execute the sentences of the court. That is what the Probation Service and the Prison Service are all about. There is no argument with that. As I hinted when I made my point, there is a better way to express what it is that the Probation Service is all about, using the words “executing the sentences of the court”, “supervising offenders” and so on, rather than including the word “punishment”. It is therefore appropriate that I take account of everything that has been said, reconsider what I have suggested in my amendment and withdraw it at this stage while I consider what I might do on Report. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment No. 2, as an amendment to Amendment No. 1, by leave, withdrawn.
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- Baroness Anelay of St JohnsConservative
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- I think the mood of the Committee is that I should be fairly brief in trying to respond to this serious and important debate. It may not only assist us in later debates but enable some of them to be more concise. As is often the case, the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, encapsulated the two questions that had to be addressed in my amendment and that of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. Should the new clause come before Clause 1, when Clause 2 is serving that purpose, and is my definition “proper punishment” the right one? The noble Lord, Lord Warner, prayed strongly against the idea of having a new clause. Perhaps he will forgive me if I say that I heard the strains of an old tune played on a ministerial violin in his opposition to principles clauses. He went on to say that this is a different, market-based, commissioning system and he will hear me say later, as I have said before, that I support contestability. It is a new system, but I will try to make sure that it is more locally accountable. That is why I believe that the drafting of my new clause is correct and that it is appropriate for it to come before Clause 1. It not only applies to the Secretary of State—whose aims are covered in Clause 2—but addresses the issue of the providers. Some noble Lords, such as the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, will say that we should really be debating the services that are provided rather than the providers. However, I am stuck with what the Government have given me. This is the Bill as it is; as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has said, it is about the management of the managers of the offenders. I am stuck with that; I am trying to make the best of it and to make it work. A principles clause is of value, as the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, has said, in providing clarity in preparation for our later debates. I was asked a specific question by the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, about whether the principles in my new clause are in the right order. I do not attach any order of priority or special significance to the way in which they fall. If I had, I would have made it clear in the drafting. I am glad that he raised that point because we will have to address it in a later amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Judd, where some significance may be allotted to part of the functions of the probation services. But in this amendment all the matters listed have equal significance. I considered very carefully the words “proper punishment”. Could I or should I come up with another definition? As the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, said, I have borrowed heavily from the amendment that was agreed to by my right honourable friends in another place. I said in my opening remarks that we welcomed it—we still do—but within the context of Clause 2. In the context of my new clause, I felt that it had to be looked at again. I considered this extremely carefully. The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, provided some very helpful attempts to look at something different. I considered the wording that he suggested, but the more I considered it, the more difficulty I found in seeking any other definition that might serve. We are trying to convey the fact that the probation providers are carrying out the orders of the court; the court has determined the sentence, which has to be human rights-compliant. I felt that if I tried to change the words “proper punishment” to anything else, I would find myself in difficulty. Overall, I agree with my noble friend Lord Waddington that we have to consider that the public must have confidence in what the service is providing. I am therefore stuck with “proper punishment”. I began by saying that I hoped that the amendment would bring clarity, but it may not have brought quite the clarity I hoped for. I also said that I hoped it might be conclusive. In that spirit, I do not wish to bring it back at Report because I wish to put an end to this matter today. I feel that I know what that will be, given the weight of the opinions that have been expressed, but I wish to test the opinion of the Committee.
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Lord JuddLabour- Quote
- moved Amendment No. 3:
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- Baroness Linklater of ButterstoneLiberal Democrat
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- I support this amendment and endorse every word of what the noble Lord, Lord Judd, has just said. I shall speak also to other amendments in the group. It is important that we have in the Bill, at the very beginning of the first clause, this principal function for probation purposes as the reduction of reoffending and the rehabilitation of offenders. Everything else flows from it as we have already discussed at some length this evening. That, of course, includes the reduction of crime, as the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, states in his amendment. It is equally clear that the best chances of reducing reoffending lie in the community, and increasingly so as the figures demonstrate. There is a perception that community-based penalties involving unpaid work and a whole range of options in a community order mean that somehow the offender is getting off lightly or “walking free from the court”. This is the perception of the tabloid press in particular and seems to have a powerful effect on the perceptions of others such as politicians, sentencers and the like. Nothing is further from the truth. Indeed, as all the recent studies and polls show, the public have no appetite for prison as punishment or believe that it achieves what is really wanted; namely, that it does not happen—that there is no reoffending—and that the offender makes good his offence against the community and the victim. Interestingly, this was even true of the attitudes of victims, as a recent poll carried out by Victim Support demonstrated. More often incarceration is the easy option. It is probably more unpleasant and definitely more likely to keep the offender on the offending path, but it is not easier. The really difficult thing is to change; habits, relationships, attitudes of mind, drug or alcohol misuse, habitual violence in the home or even in the school, or besetting mental health problems. Those are huge issues that have to be addressed in the context of a person’s life in the community—and involve the community, particularly in unpaid work—and are the context in which the probation officer has to ensure that the conditions of the court sentence are fulfilled.
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- Baroness Anelay of St JohnsConservative
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- I wonder whether, since the amendments proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, are in this group, he is going to speak to them, or whether he had degrouped them to speak to them separately.
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- Lord NorthbourneCrossbench
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- I am certainly going to speak to them; I was waiting for the promoters of the lead amendment to speak. I most strongly support everything that the noble Lord, Lord Judd, and the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, have said. Had I known that the amendment had been tabled, I would probably have spoken to it rather than tabling my amendments. If, at the next round, the noble Lord will let me come and play in his yard, I will be happy to join his team. I have some rather different points to make on Amendment No. 8. Clause 2 lists functions that will define the probation services that are available. Anything left out of that list presumably, as the Bill stands and unless the Secretary of State changes it, will be ultra vires for probation services. Is that correct? If it is correct, the Bill ought to be expanded to ensure that important services are not excluded. Amendment No. 8 suggests the inclusion of certain more specific functions that seem to me to have been left out. I will mention three of them. First, there is the end-to-end supervision and management of each offender, which was recommended by the noble Lord, Lord Carter, in his report: “Prison and probation need to be focused on the management of offenders throughout the whole of their sentence, driven by information on what works to reduce re-offending”. I have marked three places in his report in which he makes exactly that important statement. Secondly, there is the provision of guidance, help and support, where needed, to each prisoner, which is not specifically mentioned. Thirdly, there is the resettlement of offenders back into the community. It may be that the noble Baroness will tell me that all those things are included in “rehabilitation”. If that is what the Government mean by rehabilitation, that is perfectly satisfactory to me, but we should say so; otherwise it will be a question for the courts to decide. It might be very much better to say so in the first place, because we need to encourage all those things, and it is desirable that they should be in the Bill. I have another quote here from the noble Lord, Lord Carter: “Prison and probation need to be focused on the management of offenders throughout the whole of their sentence, driven by information on what works to reduce re-offending”. I apologise if that is the same quote as before. Why do those things matter so much? The seamless end-to-end management of each prisoner is surely the key to success in persuading prisoners to reform. Reform, especially from drugs and alcohol, needs a lot of courage, and it needs consistent personal support and encouragement over a period of time by someone who you trust and who you like to think cares about you. Resettlement in the community will often be extraordinarily difficult and will need a lot of intensive support. I remember when the noble Viscount, Lord Tenby, arranged a visit to the Medway young offender centre. The noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, was also a member of the group. They told us that their main problem was that, having had the difficulty of persuading the young offender to have a stab at education, to get him back into the system and into employment, the young offender went back to his home town, and the school said, “Not on your nelly; we are not going to have him back”. He would then be touted around all the schools in the district and none would have him, and he would end up on the streets with two or three hours tutoring a week, and as quick as you can say “knife” he would be back in prison. The Government are right that there is a huge need for co-ordination between the services. I liked what the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said about, “victims of the inadequacy of our society”. I will not waste the time of the Committee enlarging on that; I am sure that we all understand what he meant. That is all I need to say about my amendments, which are additional to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Judd.
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- Lord RamsbothamCrossbench
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- I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, for what he said. My reason for not rising immediately to support the noble Lord, Lord Judd, is that both his amendments, to which I have added my name, lead perfectly into my Amendment No. 5, which is coming, and I was going to delay my comments until then. I am glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, and the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, mentioned end-to-end offender management. Throughout the lead-up to this Bill and previously, this has been an area where we have tried to tease out of the Government and officials in the National Offender Management Service what they actually mean. How many people are involved? How many offenders will each manager deal with? What is the implication for serving probation officers of putting this additional task on them? How will the management be conducted over long periods and short periods when people are rapidly moving within the system? What we have never heard about is what is popularly referred to in government circles as a regulatory impact assessment. Has there been an assessment of the introduction of end-to-end offender management to work out the practical implications for the Probation Service in terms of numbers, time, cost and so on? As my noble friend Lord Northbourne said, everyone agrees with the principle. Absolutely—it is a self-evident requirement, but the devil is in the detail. We have heard the rhetoric, but we have not heard the detail. I am extremely glad that the noble Lord has tabled his amendment, because I hope that the Government will then have to carry out a regulatory impact assessment to ensure that we understand what is implied.
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- The Earl of ListowelCrossbench
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- I was grateful for the Minister’s assurance that whatever the Bill does, it will ensure that the professional framework for those who work on the front line will be strengthened. My noble friend Lord Northbourne’s amendment gives me the opportunity to check on a matter of concern as regards end-to-end support. One needs officers to stay in post long enough to supervise an offender through their course, if that is to be the case. We have heard repeatedly today that for probation to be effective, the relationship between the probation officer and the offender is fundamental. It follows that there is a need for stability in having a low rate of staff turnover for the probation officers involved. If possible, we want them to stay in post for long periods. In other areas, particularly when private contractors are involved, it has been found that while there are many benefits from the involvement of competition in contracting, one difficulty is the significantly higher turnover of staff. Despite all the benefits of private prisons, for example, the turnover of prison officers is significantly higher there than in other prisons. When we debated the Childcare Bill, it was pointed out that research indicated a higher turnover of staff in private nurseries. There is a similar situation in residential care homes. In part, that may be because there is a fairly invisible cut to make in terms of giving staff time for supervision and training; one can make a cut there without apparently making much difference to the quality of the service—although that deeply misunderstands what the service is about. I am sure the Minister recognises that concern. Can she give some assurance on how she will commission the contract to ensure that that problem, which has occurred elsewhere, does not happen here? It does not happen all the time. For example, the people who run Foster Care Associates, which has a good reputation in the foster care field, are former foster carers or social workers. A key requirement is to get the governance right, so that the people at the very top have operational experience or are well connected to those who have it.
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- Baroness Howe of IdlicoteCrossbench
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- I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Judd, and all the other amendments that have been spoken to. I am worried about the issue of end-to-end management because there will be a huge range of years over which sentences will be served. There needs to be a picture of how the individual will be managed during that time and who will be responsible for them and so on. We have tried to tease that out of the Government, but we have not been successful in getting answers. I assume that we will have to target resources on, for example, deprived areas. However, another aspect is the rehabilitation of young offenders. The results of their continual churn of reoffending are appalling, but where will those people serve their sentences? Whether that is in the community, in prison or in both, a strong educational component will be essential. Last week in the House, the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, initiated an impressive debate on the education of young people in custody—which, alas, I missed, because I was in Scotland. In that debate, the noble Lord, Lord Judd, in particular, made it clear that to achieve successful rehabilitation and to prevent reoffending, a strong, continuing educational component must be included. Statistics given by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, showed that of the 150,000 children and young people under 18 who enter the youth justice system each year, 70,000 are of compulsory school age. That is a staggering statistic. Almost all have multiple problems, including bad school attendance records—83 per cent of boys have been excluded from school—and, most worrying of all, 41 per cent were aged 14 or under when they last attended school. What does that say about the education system that has failed them up to the point where they enter prison? What do we do about that? That is an illustration of why we should concentrate resources there. The Government are doing a great deal to improve education in deprived areas outside prison, but there will be a need for extremely well trained professional people. That certainly includes teachers, but also probation officers with excellent communication skills to get over to the individuals what the benefits will be for them and the whole community. The recently published and excellent Corston report highlighted the benefits for all when offenders participate in voluntary work in the local community as part of their period of probation. That was mentioned by the noble Baroness. Evidence suggests that that experience helps offenders to realise the difficult conditions in which not just they, but many other people, have to live their lives and helps them to realise that they, too, are an important part of the fabric of the community to which they belong and to which they have responsibilities. Without going into the detail, restorative justice programmes—not necessarily with the specific victims but with victims of a similar crime—have proved to be highly successful. I mention that by way of illustration, but I hope very much that the Minister will be able to reassure us on all the points raised. The question of resource to achieve the aims will be very important.
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Lord HyltonCrossbench- Quote
- I support as strongly as I can Amendment No. 3 moved by the noble Lord, Lord Judd. He pointed to the importance of preventing offending before it ever happens. I argue that that cannot be done just by multiplying security cameras or even by policing in an effective way, including on foot. As my noble friend Lady Howe indicated, a large section of the population are young and may go either way: either in the criminal direction or in the honest and sober direction. They are the kind of people who have been in the care of local authorities or have been excluded from school, or, for some other reason, have not been able to get the full benefit of the education provided. On those grounds, I very much hope that the Government will see their way to accepting something in the nature of Amendment No. 3. As to Amendment No. 8 in the name of my noble friend Lord Northbourne, no doubt the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, and the other experts understand the meaning of “end-to-end”, but I do not and nor, I think, do the general public. If something is to be done in that respect, I hope that a better term will be found.
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- Baroness SternCrossbench
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- I wish to speak to the amendments in my name and to support my noble friend on the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the noble Lord, Lord Judd—in that context, a friend—and my noble friend Lord Northbourne. I shall spend a few moments saying something about rehabilitation and what might be required for it to be a reality. Over the past seven years, probation has been subjected to a series of experiments. We call them changes—my noble friend Lord Low was very helpful in taking us through them—but, in a sense, they have been experiments. The responsibility of the Probation Service to the locality in which it is placed has been reduced. It has been mechanised, with more of its work involving filling in forms about people. Those forms take several hours to complete and lead to a process being done mechanically. The results of the form are fed in and out comes an answer that tells you how risky the person whose form you are filling in is on a level of one to four. As a result, the discretion of probation officers has been hugely reduced. They have also been required to work to national targets—another experiment. The last set of targets that I saw included a national requirement for 50,000 orders of unpaid work, 48,000 skills-for-life courses and 17,500 accredited programmes to be completed. These are then broken down by area and the probation officers have to carry them out; otherwise, I understand, they lose money the following year. The probation officers obviously have to find a certain number of people whom they can fit into their skills-for-life course quota, however relevant, or not, that course may be. That is but one example. So even the best probation officers, who are trying to use their professional skills to get to know a person, get to the bottom of their problems and build a relationship with them that could lead to change, must have at the back of their minds the question, “Could I manipulate this one into one of these courses, tick the box and help to reach our targets?” Is that what local communities want? I do not think so. We want the people in our Probation Service to use their training, discretion, patience and empathy to sort out troubled people from troubled families living in troubled neighbourhoods. Last week, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies published the Community Sentences Digest, which showed that offenders on community sentences experience severe social exclusion. No one will be surprised at this but I should like to get it on the record: nearly two-thirds of those on community sentences are below the literacy and numeracy levels expected of an 11 year-old; more than half are unemployed; just under a third have a problem finding somewhere to live; nearly half have mental health problems; close to a quarter have a drug problem; and almost half have an alcohol problem. To deal with that sort of population, I suggest that those in the Probation Service should not spend so much time on their computers, dividing human beings into tiers of riskiness; they need to do what is set out in the amendment of my noble friend Lord Judd. Fergus McNeill, a distinguished academic from the Glasgow School of Social Work, has produced a very accessible summary of what all the research tells us about how people desist from crime. It is sometimes called “reducing reoffending”—an expression that I do not like because it is imprecise and does not really mean anything. Rather than plagiarise, I shall tell the Committee what Mr McNeill said. He makes eight points but tonight I shall give only two. However, if noble Lords come to further sittings of this Committee, they might get the rest. The first is the need to build positive relationships. All the research shows that we need to recognise that the quality of a person’s relationships, both personal and professional, is central to the process of giving up crime. Mr McNeill says: “Like everyone else, offenders are most influenced to change (and not to change) by those closest to them and those whose advice they respect and whose support they value. Approaches to ‘offender management’ that fail to recognise the significance of the relational aspects of penal practice are unlikely to work”. The second point is the need to recognise the significance of social contexts. Fergus McNeill says that, in supporting people to give up crime, “we need to look beyond the individual because achieving desistance involves and requires much more than changes within the individual. Trying only to ‘fix’ offenders can’t and won’t fix reoffending”. Giving up crime requires, “new networks of support and opportunity in local communities and a new attitude”, in those communities, “towards the reintegration of ex-offenders”. I submit that we need to get probation officers away from their computers and out of their city-centre offices, where they sit and wait for people who have had to take three different buses and travel for some hours to get there to undertake a course that is of dubious value and does not in any way address their problems at home or their lack of a job. Perhaps the approach outlined in these amendments will set us on the road of understanding how narrow the Government’s concept of offender management is, as presented to the Committee, whether it is end to end or beginning to end or wherever it begins and wherever it ends. The functions involved in rehabilitation are much wider and deeper than those summarised by offender management. It means very much more: it means doing deals with housing associations, getting good press coverage, going out to meet the public, getting the public involved and strengthening families so that they can give support. Offender management, as it is so expressed, would not enable people to get involved with the younger brothers of somebody who was in trouble to try to stop them taking that route. It means playing a part in strengthening a community so that the community can cope with its released ex-prisoners. The amendments are a plea to broaden the concept of the Bill in those directions, and I wholeheartedly support them.
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- Baroness Anelay of St JohnsConservative
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- When the noble Lord, Lord Judd, moved Amendment No. 3, he gave a characteristically thoughtful analysis of the whole issue of probation purposes, which has driven this debate very well. The amendment puts the reduction of offending and rehabilitation at the heart of the definition of “probation purposes”. While I wholeheartedly agree with the principle of the noble Lord’s amendment that rehabilitation should be at the heart of probation purposes—he knows what is coming here; he can feel it from afar—I do not believe that it should have priority over the other matters listed in Clause 1. I shall not tire the Committee by repeating those, as I hinted when I dealt with my Amendment No. 1 that they ought to be treated equally. However, the noble Lord is right to direct the attention of the Committee to the importance of rehabilitation, as he did in our debate on Amendment No. 1. Amendment No. 4, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, is similar to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Judd. Perhaps I can be cheeky and say that if the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, had been minded to press ahead with it, I might have to question whether his amendment was placed in the right part of the Bill. I suppose that that really is cheeky, given that I have been accused of putting my amendment in the wrong place. My concern is that the inclusion of the reduction of crime as part of the meaning of probation purposes may not exactly achieve what the noble Lord intends. The advantage of Amendment No. 4 is that it would effectively place a duty on the Secretary of State to reduce crime. That is an entirely proper and admirable aim, but I do not think that the Secretary of State needs any inducement to do that. I feel sure that any Home Secretary has that as his aim. The difficulty here, of course, is that we are talking about different Secretaries of State. We need to recall that, throughout the Bill, we are thinking either of the Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice—the Lord Chancellor—or of the Home Secretary, who as Secretary of State has direction of the police forces and other forces that try to reduce crime. Here we see a well intentioned amendment serving very well to highlight the difficulty with the Bill.
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- Lord NorthbourneCrossbench
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- I should make the point that I have tabled virtually the same amendment to Clause 2 on page 3.
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- Baroness Anelay of St JohnsConservative
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- The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, by tabling his amendment, has helped to focus my mind even more carefully on the difficulties that we shall face in dealing with a Bill that started in the Home Office and ends up in the Ministry of Justice. The noble Lord’s Amendment No. 4 has an entirely proper aim. If the Minister could, I think she would accept it, but she will be in difficulty because it perhaps relates to the role of the Home Secretary and not now the Ministry of Justice. However, perhaps she will tell me differently and will surprise and enchant us all by accepting the amendment. Amendment No. 8 is a sensible probing amendment, which correctly seeks to tease out the Government’s plans for the provision of end-to-end offender management. I shall not repeat anything that was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, or the noble Baroness, Lady Stern. I shall say simply that I agree entirely with every word that they both said.
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- Baroness Howarth of BrecklandCrossbench
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- A couple of questions are now in my mind because of the debate. I was going to speak to the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and say that I could not see how any of us could disagree with its aspirations; the issue might well be where it is and how it will be achieved. The question of end-to-end offender management has been raised a number of times. I presume that one is using the phrase to define a service in which someone comes in at the early stage of the life of an offender, sticks with them in the best way that they can throughout the life of whatever sentence or probation period that offender might serve, and sees them through to the other end through supervision or other services. I recognise, along with my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham, that that is a truly high aspiration, which has resource implications. I suppose that my first question to the Minister should be: how has that been thought through in terms of the future, and how will it be achieved? The speech made by my noble friend Lady Stern illustrated markedly the need to reform the Probation Service if it is as she described it. I have colleagues in the field who would not necessarily recognise themselves as sitting at a computer filling in a form, but I am aware that that does happen in some areas. I have inherited staff who have had difficulty in changing certain behaviours in relation to report writing rather than actively intervening. I suppose that my second question is: do the Government intend that the Probation Service should change into a service that is active in rehabilitation, as the noble Lord, Lord Judd, so ably outlined? If those two things are met, how do the Government intend to develop services in terms of education that will lead to better rehabilitation and employment, in particular for young people, a group that is close to my heart?
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- The Earl of ListowelCrossbench
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- I will speak as briefly as I can to support strongly two of the important three points made by my noble friend Lady Stern and referred to by my noble friend Lady Howarth. There is an understandable anxiety on the part of the Government to safeguard the public and to reassure them that public money is being well spent. There is a general unhappiness that the extent of the attention to measuring how effectively money is spent and how effectively outcomes have been reached in the public services can sometimes be counterproductive. The Minister may have heard about targets for police on the “Today” programme this morning. Some estimates for social workers say that only 33 per cent of their time can be spent with their clients, with the rest taken up with administration of various kinds. The Government’s Green Paper on children in public care, Care Matters, showed that social workers wanted to spend more time with the children with whom they were working, to see them back into their families and to support them afterwards, but were prevented from doing so in part by the level of reporting that they had to do. Medical professionals report very much the same problem and are disheartened because they have less time to spend with their patients than they would wish. It is a general problem and one can see how it arises. If one has the confidence to build the professionalism of those at the front line and the culture around them, including immediate, first-line managers and leadership, one can begin to move away from those difficulties. Building positive relationships has been referred to several times this evening, including by my noble friend. The well respected 21st Century Social Work Review in Scotland, set up by the Scottish Parliament, reported the case clearly. It states: “Identifying needs and risks through assessment and developing and implementing action plans to address these will achieve nothing without an effective therapeutic relationship between worker and client”. The report goes on to say that in recent years that relationship has been impeded and barriers have been created for various reasons. I strongly support what my noble friend said.
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- Baroness Scotland of AsthalLabour
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- The amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Judd and the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, rightly seek to highlight in the Bill the crucial role that probation plays in reducing reoffending and crime. There has been a lot of concentration in the debate on the reduction of reoffending and the rehabilitation of offenders, which are of course central to probation work. Indeed, the whole of the National Offender Management Service has made an unprecedented commitment to reducing reoffending. The latest results show that we have reduced adult reoffending by 6.9 per cent, comparing 2004 to 1997, thus exceeding our 5 per cent target in the 2000 spending review. However, my noble friend made plain, and I agree, that it is important to make the distinction between the probation purposes set out in Clause 1 and the probation aims set out in Clause 2(4). The probation purposes describe the activities, or services, to be provided under the rest of Part 1 of the Bill. These are essentially the same as the current ones, as set out in Section 1 of the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000, which contains the current legislative framework governing the delivery of probation services. The reduction of reoffending and the rehabilitation of offenders, on the other hand, are desired outcomes and, as such, are properly provided for in the probation aims to which the Secretary of State must have regard in carrying out his functions under Clause 2(1) and (2). The aims are accurately and clearly set out in Clause 2(4). The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, seeks to expand on the description of supervision in Clause 1(1)(c), by reference to end-to-end and other support services. The noble Baroness was quite right to highlight this issue, but the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, is right in saying that he does it again in Clause 2. I say immediately that I agree with the description by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, of end-to-end management and what it means. The management model that we have developed is intended to provide a consistent and coherent approach to the management of an offender’s sentence from start to finish. Before offender management was introduced, we did not have that. It was like a guttural stop. You have preparation before the matter goes to the courts, which then impose a sentence, but continuity is difficult to guarantee. The whole purpose of the offender management model is to provide that consistency and coherence from the moment the person comes into the system to the moment they leave it, enhancing, one hopes, the opportunity of their not coming back. The key elements of the model are, first, that there is a single sentence plan for the whole of the sentence, including the period in the community. The second is that, at any point in time, a single person—the offender manager—is responsible for managing the offender. We generally call that “end-to-end offender management”—right through the offender’s sentence. We have focused on what offenders have indicated is the most meaningful for them. One of the biggest problems for them is being passed from pillar to post, telling the same story again and again to people who may not know them, do not understand them and must learn lessons that they have already learnt. End-to-end offender management is therefore an extremely important component. It is also why we put in place a first-rate system for assessing the risk posed by offenders and identifying the work that prison and probation staff must do with them to tackle their offending. The offender assessment system—OASys—has been rolled out across prisons and probation, and is a vital tool in our work to improve public protection. It gives us a good handle on the risks that offenders pose. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, that I do not recognise her description of modern probation officers. If that is what they are doing, they are failing in their duty. Some in the profession would argue that they would not be fit to call themselves offender managers, and certainly not fit to call themselves professional probation officers. A probation officer’s duty is to use the tools given to them with skill and judgment to make the right decisions. It is not an excuse to say that they are simply ticking a box. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, that that is not the position.
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- Lord RamsbothamCrossbench
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- I am extremely concerned by what the noble Baroness has just said. Just last week, a chief officer of probation told me that they had had to give up home visits because the bureaucratic demands on them were such that they simply could not afford to do them. That is the basis of much of the work that the Minister has been talking about. I respectfully say that the Probation Service as described by my noble friend Lady Stern is much more what you hear about on the ground than the Probation Service that we have just heard about from the Minister.
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- Baroness Scotland of AsthalLabour
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- If that were the case, it would simply highlight why we need to change. I would be very much with the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, in saying that the concentration must be on the offender. We must get much better at delivering services. If there are those capable of delivering those services, we would invite them to join arms with us to deliver a service that would make the changes that we need. Currently, each offender in the community has a named offender manager for the relevant probation area, responsible for assessing the risk of reoffending and potential harm to the public, formulating a sentence plan accordingly and overseeing its implementation. Last November, this approach was extended to cover over 10,000 offenders in custody—prolific offenders serving determinate custodial sentences of 12 months or more and other priority offenders from whom the risk of serious harm is either high or very high. That is the direction in which we propose to go. I fully accept—
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- Baroness Howe of IdlicoteCrossbench
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- I hope that the noble Baroness will forgive me. I am glad to have some of the details rolled out, so that one can begin to understand the situation, but I do not understand what will happen if an offender manager is no longer there and has moved on. Who is going to take over the role of seeing how that particular offender is developing and so on? It cannot be the same person, so what are the plans for when nobody is there to take on the role of the previous offender manager?
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- Lord NorthbourneCrossbench
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- To supplement that, perhaps the Minister could also explain what will happen when prisoners are moved from one prison to the north, south, east or west of England? How do they keep in touch with the offender manager?
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- Baroness Howe of IdlicoteCrossbench
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- Exactly!
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- Baroness SternCrossbench
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- To add a brief question, is there an estimate anywhere of the additional costs of visiting people who are moved to prisons up and down the country when they are in court in one town? What other, more beneficial purposes could that money have been used for? Has any study been done of that?
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- Baroness Scotland of AsthalLabour
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- I gently remind the Committee that we are in Committee and we do our business in a certain way. Members usually give each other the courtesy of having their question answered before they ask another. I know that this is a matter of great excitement, and I will answer each question, but I would be grateful if the Committee—which always disciplines itself—would obey the usual conventions. There is continuity of care in offender management because a manager, once appointed, will retain management of a case throughout. Offenders who move to another prison will retain the same manager. If the manager leaves the service, another offender manager will be allocated that case, having been given appropriate briefing. The whole point of offender management is that offenders do not go from pillar to post; if there are three prison moves, the offender manager will remain the same.
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Baroness Gibson of Market RasenLabour- Quote
- My Lords—
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- Baroness Scotland of AsthalLabour
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- Can I answer the questions of the two other noble Lords before responding to my noble friend, whose question I will then be delighted to answer? One of the difficulties when this happens is that I forget the order in which questions have been asked. The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, also asked about retaining continuity when prisoners move. I hope that I have now described that. I was asked about the cost of retaining continuity. It has already been demonstrated to us that continuity provides significant opportunities to consolidate what has been done with offenders because they have been able to build up a relationship with their manager and do not have to repeat that process again and again.
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- Baroness Gibson of Market RasenLabour
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- I thank my noble friend for allowing my intervention. As she will know, prisoners are often moved between prisons, which are sometimes a great distance apart. Does that mean that offender managers will have to travel quite a lot to retain contact with the prisoners they manage?
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- Baroness Scotland of AsthalLabour
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- It means that the offender manager will be responsible for arranging how the offender is managed. Although we are in Committee, I crave noble Lords’ indulgence to allow me to explain how that works, as it may help us in the long term. If, for example, an offender moves to a prison and is allocated an identified officer—noble Lords will know that often a personal officer will be responsible for an offender—the offender manager will liaise with that officer, receive information and be able to make the plan. Others may be asked to do certain work, but the offender manager will be the co-ordinator responsible for holding the reins and ensuring that the plan responds appropriately to the offender’s needs. There would have to be arrangements as to the most efficacious way of doing that, how long the person will be in one prison and, if it will be for a very short period, which is the best way to manage the case. It is important that one person provides continuity and a link. The noble Baroness, Lady Stern, is quite wrong if she thinks that offender management has a single focus. In 2005 I set up three new alliances to reduce reoffending. The first is a corporate alliance, which seeks to engage the corporate community in understanding better that offenders can provide hugely important and effective work if appropriately trained. It also enables the wider community to become better engaged and to better understand that people can be rehabilitated. We have had huge success in setting up the corporate alliance, and many businesses have come forward. We have a business reference group of big companies that are very interested in this. National Grid has been among those that have led the way. Secondly, we have created a civic-based alliance to include local authorities and other groups.
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- Lord RamsbothamCrossbench
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- My Lords—
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- Baroness Scotland of AsthalLabour
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- I am answering a question, and I wish to show this Committee the courtesy that I believe it deserves. The third is a faith-based alliance. People of faith are doing a huge amount of work in the community, and we wish to see a synergy. In addition to the corporate, civic and faith-based alliances, we have set up a reducing reoffending board in every area. We have also set up the Inter-Ministerial Group on Reducing Reoffending, in which 11 departments participate. It is about education, health, housing and all the other issues critical to the pathways out of crime and into a secure future. That holistic approach is essential. I hope that my noble friend Lord Judd has never found me timorous about being clear on what we need to do to change the paradigm in which we have sat for a long time. The Government are committed to ensuring that offenders have the best possible opportunity to change, with all their needs incorporated. I assure my noble friend that I will continue to make my voice heard loudly to ensure that that happens. When the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, rose to speak earlier, I did not give way, so I do so now to enable him to raise whatever succinct point he wishes to make.
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- Lord RamsbothamCrossbench
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- I would be enormously grateful if the Minister could write to let us know exactly what firms are members of the corporate alliance, about which we have heard so much, and what are its activities.
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- Baroness Scotland of AsthalLabour
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- That information is available, and I would be delighted to provide it to every Member of the Committee who has any connection with a business. I would also be greatly encouraged if all noble Lords could encourage others to join the alliance. Although I sympathise entirely with the sentiments behind the amendments, they are adequately covered by the Bill and are therefore unnecessary. The commissioning approach that we have advocated will help to ensure that the right intervention is available to address each of the issues raised. We will discuss under later amendments how we want to work in partnership with other agencies to ensure that partners not involved in criminal justice also contribute to reducing reoffending. With the hugest amount of humility, I invite the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.
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- Lord JuddLabour
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- I wish to express my real appreciation to everyone who has spoken to this amendment. It is good to have so much professional, front-line experience at our disposal in these deliberations. Two of the things that I admire and appreciate in my noble friend are the thoroughness with which she invariably replies to debates and the sincerity of her intentions. I have no doubt about her sincerity in what she wishes to see in the new paradigm, as she described it, or about the vigour with which she pursues that aim. However, I must draw her attention to something that I cannot help finding significant. Clause 2 and the clause proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, in her earlier amendment have something in common: in each clause’s list of purposes, the rehabilitation of offenders comes last. I am not for a moment suggesting that the intention is to attach any priorities, but I am suggesting that under the pressures of work and limited resources, if something comes last in a list that was not intended to have priorities, there is a way in which that begins to become last in the attention which is allocated to the purpose. That is unfortunate, and this is a missed opportunity. The other purposes and aims matter. Rehabilitation should be first, not in priority, but to establish the framework in which all the others that matter are listed. The rehabilitation of offenders should be there. I support the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. At Second Reading I referred to my experience as president of the YMCA, and I must not refer to it in detail again. Our experience was that if we were to succeed in this sort of work, we had to take somebody’s hand and walk with him through the whole process back into society. There had to be an identifiable person with that objective. To give another example, I referred at Second Reading to a policeman, a former chief constable. However, I remember a vivid conversation with a tough, experienced superintendent of police in the YMCA. He was no sentimentalist. He was just retiring, and he said: “You know, Frank, one of the conclusions I’ve come to is that if we are to succeed in what we are trying to do, then the moment the person is sentenced by the judge or the magistrate there should be a strong man or woman at his elbow saying, ‘Now, come on. How are we going to sort this all out and get it right?’, so that, in the context of the punishment, there is someone dedicated to a successful outcome”. I listened carefully to the full and courteous response of my noble friend and, because I like and admire her, I do not want to indulge in hypocrisy. I am disappointed, but I hope that she will go away and reflect on what we have been saying in the past two hours and see whether some adjustments can be made to the Bill to send a clearer signal about its strategic purpose. At the same time, it must recognise all the essential imperatives—if those words satisfy the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay—that must go with that. It should spell out to all concerned that the challenge to which we are determined to respond is to make a success of enabling men and women who have fallen into unfortunate circumstances and crime to come out of that and make a success of their lives. If there is no stronger case for that, then think of the economic cost to society of failing to do it. That is why it is crucial. I beg my noble friend to think about what we have been saying. In the mean time, at this stage, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. [Amendment No. 4 not moved.]
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Lord Bassam of BrightonLabour- Quote
- I beg to move that the House be resumed. In moving this Motion, I suggest that the Committee begin again not before 8.35 pm. Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to. House resumed.
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