Clause 3
Offender Management Bill
12:00 pm
Gerry Sutcliffe (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Home Office; Bradford South, Labour)
I thank the hon. Members for Hornchurch and for Cheadle and my hon. Friends the Members for Stafford and for Walthamstow for their contributions. They have clearly put a great deal of thought into considering what the Government are trying to do and expressing their concerns. They have asked detailed questions and I shall try to address the issues that they have raised. It is important to set out at the start the context of our discussion on clause 3. I agree that it is fundamental to the direction of the Bill, but I do not accept that it proposes a top-down structure.
It is useful to try to outline the position of each party. The official Opposition agree with the principle of opening up the sector to various providers, but are not happy about the proposed way of doing it and have questions about that. My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow, whose stance on such issues I have admired greatly over the years, has no problem. I think that his message is that he sees no role for the private sector in any area of probation work. I am not sure what the position of the hon. Member for Cheadle is, which I suppose is not surprising in the case of the Liberal Democrats. I tried to elicit his views on the involvement of the private sector.
We all agree that the status quo is not good enough in relation to reoffending rates, however we measure them. Something needs to change—that has been the tenor of all the representations that we have received, apart from one. The one organisation that says that the status quo can continue is NAPO, the probation officers’ union. As a former full-time trade union officer myself, I fully respect and understand its position: it wants to protect its members and believes that the change will be detrimental to their opportunities. However, I do not accept the scaremongering about what we are trying to achieve. Our aim is not wholesale privatisation, which was the fear mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow. It is to ensure that we have the best providers of offender management, whether they come from the voluntary, the private or the public sector.
The Government did not pluck the issue of offender management out of the air. It was carefully considered, which was why in December 2003 we had the Carter report, “Managing Offenders, Reducing Crime”. That is where the recommendation to establish the National Offender Management Service came from, with the intention of introducing end-to-end offender management, on which we all agree. It also recommended the introduction of commissioning and contestability. We have had almost four years of discussion about where we need to be. I agree with my hon. Friend that it is time that probation officers—when we say “probation officers” we include probation support officers, who have different roles and responsibilities—are given certainty about what the future holds. It is important that we consider the issues that have been raised and give them that certainty.
The Government’s fundamental position is that the probation service does not have to do everything that it does now. In fact, it is not consistently achieving what needs to be achieved across the 42 board areas. That is not an attack on the credibility of probation officers: I, perhaps more than most because of how close I have been to the issue in the past six months, have seen at first hand the tremendous work that probation officers do in the extremely difficult circumstances to which my hon. Friend and others have referred. In some cases, they deal with very difficult people who live troubled lives and are dangerous, from whom the public need to be protected.
The hon. and learned Member for Harborough and the hon. Member for Hornchurch keep mentioning the Home Secretary’s speech at Wormwood Scrubs. They do not believe that that environment was appropriate, but they should put that to one side and examine what my right hon. Friend said in subsequent speeches. Nobody would take issue with the fact that we must move forward and that the probation service should not do everything.