Clause 9
Offender Management Bill
2:00 pm
Edward Garnier (Shadow Minister (Home Affairs), Home Affairs; Harborough, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 29, in clause 9, page 6, line 6, leave out ‘approved premises’ and insert ‘probation and bail hostels.’.
Subsection (2) states that
“The Secretary of State may make regulations for the regulation, management and inspection of approved premises.”
And subsection (3) states that
“The Secretary of State may make payments to any person in connection with...the operation of approved premises”.
Although I broadly understand the intention behind clause 9, the provision is dangerously vague. Subsection (1)(b) states, in a rather Alice in Wonderland fashion, that
“‘approved premises’ means premises which are for the time being approved”.
Subsection (2) states that
“The Secretary of State may make regulations”.
We have not seen those regulations and do not know what arrangements the Secretary of State has in mind for the carrying out of probation purposes or for the running of approved premises, which is implied by the Bill, by operators other than the probation service.
After having seen the “Panorama” programme before Christmas 2006, it strikes me that there is a degree of public concern about the way in which probation premises and bail hostels are managed. Substituting the words “probation and bail hostels” for “approved premises” in subsection (3)(a) will allow us to extract from the Government better information about what or rather who they think will be running these premises.
On the face of it, the matter should not be surrounded by controversy, but we all know that the sort of people who are housed in bail hostels and probation hostels are often difficult to look after. They could be people who have been released from prison after a lengthy prison sentence, in which case they will have come out of the secure prisoner state and gone through the category D prisoner state—in parenthesis, the use of the expression “open prison” is perhaps misleading, which does not do any of us any good; as Lord Ramsbotham has suggested, we should call them “resettlement prisons”. When people come out of those prisons, they are sometimes housed in what will be called “approved premises”, and probation staff are supposed to look after them. We want to know precisely what sort of places “approved premises” will be. Will they be any different from the existing arrangements?
The “Panorama” programme highlighted controversial areas of public concern about bail hostels. Where will bail hostels be located? Can we be assured that the people who run them, who will be paid by the Secretary of State to carry out those functions on the Government’s behalf, will be adequately trained, resourced and able to control and direct the people in their care, so that those people receive the necessary treatment and supervision, which will allow the public to feel safe in their houses, streets and towns? It is a short point, but it is one that is worthy of a response from the Government. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.