Clause 1
Offender Management Bill
9:30 am
Edward Garnier (Shadow Minister (Home Affairs), Home Affairs; Harborough, Conservative)
I am sure that that will be welcomed widely by those who work in the probation service, not least because I suspect that they feel rather put upon by this Government. I shall take the Home Secretary as an example, because he popped into my mind. It is interesting that he spends a lot of his time denigrating the people who are supposed to be performing public services for his Department, whether they work in the probation service or the Prison Service. As I said in front of him on Second Reading, it seems strange that in order to re-instil or create public confidence in the Prison Service, the Home Secretary should go to Wormwood Scrubs and give a speech to prisoners telling them how dysfunctional the Prison Service is and that it is failing them.
I accept that sometimes there are overblown public expectations of what the probation service can do to supervise ex-prisoners on licence and parole, defendants in bail hostels and those serving community sentences. We all know that, but it does not help if the Government, wittingly or unwittingly, go around spreading stories about the ineffectual nature of those who work in the probation service. If the Government want to encourage good standards of behaviour, good service morale and public confidence in the criminal justice system as a whole—I suggest that at present it is at an all-time low—one of the things that they should not do is go around beating up people who are working their guts out trying to perform a vital public service across the criminal justice system in very difficult circumstances.
One must bear it in mind, for example, that the people who the probation officers and staff look after on our behalf are criminals. They are largely drug addicts; they are largely dishonest, and they are largely disorganised. They do not get up in the morning for nine-to-five jobs or keep appointments. They think that it is more appropriate to hit someone on the head and steal their purse to feed their drug habit than to go out and earn an honest penny. Let us bear it in mind that the probation service looks after some very difficult people. In a proper analysis of what is needed to instil public confidence in the criminal justice system and this aspect of it, it does not help for the Home Secretary or his Ministers deliberately—perhaps not deliberately in this Minister’s case—to denigrate it. In so far as the Minister was able to praise it just now, that is welcome.
To return to the context of the amendment, the further probation purpose referred to in paragraph (f) is
“the giving of information to victims of persons charged with or convicted of offences.”
There are clearly occasions when those who provide probation services will need to speak directly to the victims of a crime. Police family liaison officers, lawyers and those who work in the court service itself also do that; none the less, it is one of the many functions that probation staff carry out.
Subsection (2) seeks to provide a little more detail by further defining some of the purposes that we have just discussed. It states:
“The purpose set out in subsection (1)(c)”,
which deals with the supervision and rehabilitation of persons charged with or convicted of offences,
“includes (in particular)—
(a) giving effect to community orders and suspended sentence orders”
and also
“(b) assisting in the rehabilitation of offenders who are being held in prison;
(c) supervising persons released from prison on licence;
(d) providing accommodation in approved premises.”
To some extent, that is a repetition of what is already stated or implied in subsection (1). In addition, it is what the probation services do already to some extent. Indeed, it is precisely the sort of thing that was envisaged under the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000 when Parliament last had a substantive opportunity to consider the issue.
Clause 1 goes on to state:
“That purpose also applies in relation to persons who...are convicted of an offence under the law of a country outside England and Wales”.
That is particularly relevant to yesterday’s shenanigans when we learned that thousands of files were sitting in the Home Office awaiting an opportunity to be loaded into the police national computer so that the relevant authorities, be it the police, those who can lawfully gain access to the police national computer, the Criminal Records Bureau, social services departments, education authorities and so on, could determine whether the person whom they wished to employ or had already employed was suitable to be used in respect of vulnerable adults, young persons in care or those who were being educated.
We could be forgiven for thinking that the impression that the Government wished to give was that it was the probation services that were letting down the country by failing to supervise when, as we know in relation to those who had been convicted of offences overseas, the Home Office itself was the cause of the problem. Ministers themselves were informed in October by the Association of Chief Police Officers that there was a problem and that the Home Secretary ought to be informed, yet they did nothing. They continue to spin out the message that the problem is everyone’s fault but theirs.
There is, and has been for at least a decade, a requirement under the multi-agency public protection arrangements for anyone who has been convicted of an offence overseas, especially a serious sexual offence, to be logged into the MAPPA system so that a programme of supervision or other activity can be put in place for them, at least so that those who are running the systems in this country know what it is that they have to cope with. In light of that existing requirement, yesterday’s announcements and leaks are all the more troubling and throw clause 1 into starker relief.
The additional purpose referred to under subsection (3) applies to persons who
“receive a sentence which is to any extent to be served or carried out in England and Wales”,
as it applies in relation to persons convicted of offences.”
Therefore, if someone were brought back from a foreign conviction in a foreign prison, for example, under a prisoner swap or another arrangement, that person would be entitled to or required to serve the remainder of his sentence in a British prison. All that must be understood and managed as a probation purpose.
I shall not go through subsection (4) in the same detail, but it sets out various matters in connection with the sentences that might be appropriate under clause 1. Subsection (5) deals with the requirement of the Secretary of State to extend by regulation the purposes that we have just been examining. They can include
“other purposes relating to persons charged with or convicted of offences or persons to whom conditional cautions are given.”
As usual, we have not seen the regulations. I do not imagine that they have even been drafted. I deplore the creeping habit of the Government—although the Conservative Government, while guilty of such action, were not quite as guilty as this Government—