Clause 4
Offender Management Bill
4:45 pm
David Kidney (PPS (Rt Hon David Miliband, Secretary of State), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Stafford, Labour)
As in this morning’s sitting, I would like to ask the Minister two questions, each of which takes slightly longer than an intervention would permit.
First, I remind the Minister of the debate about consultation that we had on Thursday. I asked whether NOMS and the local management trust ought not to be required to make arrangement for an advisory board of some sort, which could be drawn from a pool of organisations provided by the Bill. Will the Minister consider whether clause 4 would be the place to make the requirement for an advisory board? It could just about be suggested that schedule 1 is the place for that, but this is a bigger issue for the main body of the Bill, rather than a schedule. I ask the Minister for clarification on that point.
Secondly, probation trusts may be set up by an order under clause 4. What role does the Minister see for Parliament in the scrutiny of an order that might be made to set up a trust? My reading of the Bill is that three kinds of order are contemplated. The first, with which we are all familiar, is the affirmative procedure order, whereby a draft is produced and both Houses have to vote positively for the order. The second type, with which we are also familiar, is the negative procedure, whereby the order must be published and Members can pray against it—there may or may not be a debate and a vote on it later. The third kind is a purely administrative order made by the Minister. In clause 28, in which the orders are explained, the order that is crucial to the whole Bill falls into the third, administrative, category, which I have just described. It is on a par with a commencement order in that the Minister has only to make it for it to take effect. Given the concerns that hon. Members have expressed about the lack of detail in the Bill on the big changes thatare being made, and the desire of hon. Members to scrutinise the Executive, should the order not be subject to an affirmative procedure, rather than an administrative process?