Clause 2
Offender Management Bill
3:00 pm
David Kidney (PPS (Rt Hon David Miliband, Secretary of State), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Stafford, Labour)
I am nervous about regional consultation because my constituency, Stafford, is quite a long way from Birmingham, the centre of the universe for the west midlands, and we often feel that we are left out of debates about regional issues, so I understand that danger. I am sure the Minister will have something to say about how he will ensure that does not happen, but our job is to say who we think should be consulted.
There is one more glaring omission. People will remember from this morning that I did not exactly promote the private provision of services and mentioned some of the dangers of it. Given that the intention behind the policy is that there will be private providers as well as public and voluntary sector providers, it does seem odd to me to produce a list that does not allow for consultation with people who might become providers in the future, unless of course the list’s promoter hopes not to allow it. That is a fair enough point. The providers are the people who won the contract, and I am thinking more widely about including the private sector as a consultee as it wants to win the contract. That is an obvious point to make.
We need to ask ourselves how we square the circle. Do we leave the Minister to decide entirely for himself who he consults for ever into the future, or tie his hands with a list that is set in stone and cannot be diverted from or changed in the future? How can we do things differently? This is not an original idea, it is in the briefing from Rainer that I mentioned, but perhaps there should be a formal arrangement for an advisory group drawn from among those at national and local level, the trusts, if they are set up, and the probation service that exists today. We should provide for a pool of organisations and people from whom the members of the advisory group can be drawn, and then we should legislate to say that we expect consultation to be with that pool. I suggest that that is how we might move from where we are to where I think we ought to be.
On amendment No. 6, although I agree, as I said in an intervention, that it is entirely right that if there has to be consultation there should be an account of who was consulted and what they said, I would not like that consultation to be the engine driving the future direction of probation or offender management services. The idea that I mentioned this morning of taking a coherent, strategic approach to where the service is going is different from using the results of consultation. Clearly, the results of consultation should inform future decisions, but I would not want anybody to think that the service would lurch between plans from year to year, depending on the outcome of consultations in the 12 months beforehand.