rose to call attention to the impact of the National Offender Management Service on the Criminal Justice System; and to move for Papers.

My Lords, I am very pleased to have instigated this debate at an important stage of discussions on the National Offender Management Service, otherwise known as NOMS. My main purpose is to air some of the more controversial issues that surround NOMS from the point of view of those who work within the criminal justice system, and in particular the views of the probation service, which will be greatly affected by the proposed changes. Other speakers far more experienced in this area than I will raise other matters.

The debate about the introduction of NOMS has been long and changing. The report by the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, produced in January 2004, proposed the establishment of NOMS. The aim was to bring the prison and probation services together under a single chief executive and to establish end-to-end offender management. The Government immediately produced their response, Reducing Crime—Changing Lives. Their proclaimed aims were to reduce re-offending by enhanced supervision of offenders, closer working between the prisons and probation services and a rebuilding of sentencing. Many would support those aims, but would not support the way that they have evolved since January 2004 and the confusion and lack of co-ordinated planning surrounding the establishment of NOMS.

The lack of overall planning was highlighted from the start of the debate in 2004, when the appointments of 10 regional offender managers, known as ROMs, were made. Those appointments took place despite the fact that there were no job descriptions for those managers and a mounting uncertainty about their role, what they were aiming to achieve or how NOMS would operate overall. Increasingly, those working in the probation and prison services raised many questions on these and other issues, but received no satisfactory answers. Then in May 2005 came the general election and yet more proposals for change.

The Labour Party manifesto committed the Government,

"to ensure that every offender is individually case-managed from beginning to end of their sentence, both in and out of custody", and to offer,

"voluntary organisations and the private sector . . . greater opportunities to deliver offender services".

In October 2005, the Government produced a consultation paper entitled, Restructuring Probation to Reduce Re-offending, which put meat on the bones of the manifesto commitment. At this stage, I must ask why we are changing the probation service yet again. After all, the current National Probation Service and its directorate only came into being in 2001 following a high quality debate in which all parties involved in the criminal justice system took part. Most bodies, including the unions representing those who work in the system, welcome the 2001 changes. They believe that the changes provided the service, for the first time, with a national voice and a clear focus, as well as maintaining local accountability through the establishment of 42 regional probation boards.

Those boards have brought a broad range of skills and experience to their work because they are part of the local community and of statutory services. They represent a wide and diverse conception of the local population and have an in-depth knowledge of the locality. Now, only five years later, such boards are to be abolished, which means the loss of all that local expertise. The regional probation boards are to be replaced by new bodies to be called probation trusts, which will focus on the business aspect of probation rather than the public service aspect. They will be contractor-only bodies and they will be expected to compete for work with the voluntary and private sectors. The powers to decide which local services should be commissioned will be handed over, I understand, to the regionally based ROMs via the Home Secretary. So the local groups established under the boards will be torn away from the local community.

In November last year, the Home Secretary spoke to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Penal Affairs, of which I am a member. He was open and frank with us, which was greatly appreciated. He explained that the central focus of the criminal justice system should be on preventing individuals re-offending. He said that what is needed is a clarity and coherence that has been missing so far. No one could object to such plans and I do not, but I do object to the piecemeal approach, which gives me no confidence that his aims will materialise.

I believe that probation service workers should be prized by us all. They are professional people with invaluable expertise in, and knowledge of, their local areas. We as a society rely on them to work with offenders to identify what each offender needs to rehabilitate him or her and reduce the chance of their re-offending. Since 2001, they have increased their expertise and enjoyed the increase in resources and support provided by the Government. They do not understand why they should face another period of change, and nor do many of us. But we know that they will have to do so when we examine what the new concept of contestability really means for the probation service.

Contestability was first mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Carter, in his 2004 report. However, it was not at the centre of his proposals; it is the Government who have placed it there. Contestability means that the probation service will be split into two sections: one to deal with providers and the other to deal with purchasers.

The Government insist on the term "contestability" but I, as an old-fashioned trade unionist and a former trade union official, prefer to describe it as "privatisation", or at least in large part privatisation. This is not even privatisation by the back door—in these proposals, the front door is wide open for the privatisation process. I am sure that I will be told that it is the definition of contestability that is all-important and that I am defining it incorrectly. I do not need a teach-in about contestability. I know what this contestability means, and probation officers and their managers know what it means. Contestability means that the probation service, which is and always has been a public service, will be opened up to competition. There are no limits or principles to contestability, and the inclusion of the voluntary and not-for-profit sectors does not remove the main threat: private business is becoming involved in a major public service in a muddled and badly thought-out way.

A worrying factor is that there has been no analysis of the way in which the changes introduced in 2001 have worked. The system is not being changed because it has been found wanting; rather, we are being asked to support untested and untried proposals and we do not know why.

One complaint about the system over the years is that it has been fragmented and departmentalised. The changes of 2001 were aimed at overcoming that and the probation service believes that they are working. The service has no faith in the new proposals, and both the probation boards and the probation officers—in other words, managers and staff—believe them to be unnecessary. Surely the voices of those working in the system should be listened to. Last November, the Home Secretary acknowledged that if the proposed changes were to lead to a more disjointed approach to an individual offender, that would be a total failure.

I believe that the Home Secretary's commitment is genuine, but morale in the probation service is low. Workers are bewildered and fearful. They do not know what is expected of them and, worse still, after all the chopping and changing and contradictory proposals, they do not believe that the Government do either.

The unions involved in the system do not consider that the business case for NOMS has been made. As the Home Secretary, when questioned in November, told us that the business case for NOMS is expected to be published only after the parliamentary timetable is known, they appear to be right. Not only do they fear that the multiplicity of independent contractors will cause confusion and place a wedge between the organisations which are already working well together, they also believe that this will create a position where "responsibility" cannot be pinpointed.

It must be recognised that skills which probation officers have developed over the years cannot be learnt overnight, no matter how keen or well intentioned the voluntary sector or charity worker may be. Their local knowledge and skills have been built up painstakingly. A trusting one-to-one relationship between probation officer and offender is vital. If re-offending is to be truly tackled, that is necessary for the future. Supervision of offenders is not, and should not become, a business. It should remain in the public service in support of, and accountable to, our citizens.

Privatisation of other parts of the criminal justice system cannot be said to have been a huge success. A report by the think tank, Catalyst, published 18 months ago, showed that high levels of labour turnover were a serious problem in many private prisons. Overall, turnover of prison officers is 25 per cent per year in private prisons—10 times greater than the turnover in state prisons. If that trend is translated to the probation service, it does not bode well.

In addition, there is concern among probation staff about the timing of these proposals when probation is performing so well. November 2004 figures show that "breach" targets were achieved in 87 per cent of cases, offender behaviour programmes were completed in 91 per cent of targeted cases, and eight out of 10 of those under supervision were still in contact with their probation officers after six months of supervision. Those statistics show a system that is succeeding, not failing. Why change it?

There is a further important factor relating to staff, which should not be dismissed lightly. Most staff joined the probation service because they wanted to work in a public service. A strong public service ethos exists. Enforced transfer to the voluntary or private sector does not appeal to many. I can understand that, as before I came to your Lordships' House many years ago, I used to work for the TUC. I chose to work for the TUC. Enforced transfer from the TUC to the CBI would not have been appreciated. I firmly believe that unless those working in the system accept and understand the reasoning behind the changes proposed, they are unlikely to succeed. It is obvious that both managers and staff are not persuaded.

I have tremendous respect and admiration for my noble friend. She is a listening Minister. I ask her to reconsider the route that is being taken, particularly in light of the views of those working in the service. They believe that much of what the Government want can be achieved by expanding and building on the current system. Please listen to their professional views.

Finally, I am led to believe that there have been approximately 750 responses to the Government's latest consultation document, and that only about 10 support the proposals. Can my noble friend clarify the position?

My Lords, I apologise for arriving a moment or two late. I overestimated the interest of the House in the Statement that preceded this debate. I am most grateful, as are other noble Lords, to the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson, for giving us the opportunity to air not only her concerns about the prospects under NOMS but also to show that her concerns are widely shared, as I am sure we shall shortly learn. I am glad to see the Minister in her familiar, almost permanent place on the Front Bench, and look forward to her reply, which I think will be quite a difficult task.

Plans for reorganisation have produced such widespread alarm, despondency and criticism that we should start by recognising the substantial advances that have been made by the Government in criminal justice matters. My concern is with young people, young offenders and potential young offenders. I recognise that, thanks to the Criminal Justice Board, YOTs, and so on, there have been changes, such that from 1997 the time from arrest to sentence of a young offender was 142 days, and in 2001 that had gone down to 71 days, which is a notable improvement. In 2001, 25 per cent of young people who were arrested by the police said that nothing happened afterwards. That dropped by 2003 to 10 per cent, which is good progress.

We must recognise, too, the resource that the Government are putting into the probation service, which has risen by more than 46 per cent since 1997. Probation staff numbers have increased by 30 per cent. Most important, the young offender custodial population has remained more or less static since 1997, for which we should be truly grateful, while the adult population has soared.

It should also be recognised that newly available sentences mean that almost one in three young offenders can make some amends for their misdeeds. That is good, and is a good message to offenders. But we should acknowledge the scale of the threat and the problem. There are now nearly 5.5 million 10 to 17 year-old children in England and Wales of whom roughly 25 per cent will have committed some sort of criminal offence in the past 12 months, if the level reported in 2004 is sustained. That is not good progress. I acknowledge the resources. The Youth Justice Board budget has gone up from £234 million in 2001 to £394 million in 2003. That is the cost of successful intervention, but what about the cost of failed intervention?

The Audit Commission report on youth justice in 2004 states on page 6:

"Many young people who end up in custody have a history of professionals failing to listen, assessments not being followed by action and nobody being in charge. If effective early intervention had been provided for just one in ten of those young offenders, annual savings in excess of £100 million could have been made".

Probation work, as the noble Baroness said, is face-to-face work with criminals. In my case, the interest is with young criminals. It has to rest on trust, respect and time. It is disturbing that in 1996 the contact time available on average to a young offender was only one hour a week, and more so, that by 2003, contact time had risen to only one hour and six minutes. That is not sufficient progress, and causes me to worry about contestability.

In 2004 the Audit Commission reported:

"We found that although investment in early intervention has increased substantially in the last five years, it is often undermined by pressures to deliver improved outcomes in the short term".

Those pressures exist now, but how enormously will they increase in organisations targeted on winning a competitive bid by producing good figures in time for the bid going in?

That brings me, as it did the noble Baroness, to the 750 responses to the consultation on the proposals, and the alleged 10 in favour—740 against. I hope that the Government will not follow Ken Livingstone in his celebrated "consultation" on the extension of the congestion zone, which I think showed that 89 per cent were against. Having consulted, which was his statutory duty, he went ahead and did it. I hope that the Government will not follow that model.

If their aim is to bring more of the voluntary sector into play, we should all remember that there are already 1,500 voluntary organisations in partnership with probation services throughout the country, which are doing extremely well. Why cannot that be extended instead of inventing an entirely new organisation? The aim is to have a seamless transition from conviction through treatment into ordinary life. For that we are all enthusiastic, but we must count the cost and see whether the right method is being used.

My next anxiety is about the proposal to amalgamate the inspectorates of the Prison Service and the probation services. I shall not say much because there is somebody much more suitable who will talk about the issue later. Something that he may be too modest to say is the enormously valuable part played by the Chief Inspector in having the ear of the Minister and, perhaps more important in the political world, the ear of the public. If each service is subordinated to a supremo—a new Her Majesty's chief inspector of prison and probation services, it will be a buffer between the Minister and the services, and, more importantly, a buffer between the inspectorates and the public. Will the Minister take note of the concern that is widely shared that the individuality, independence and articulateness of the two services should be preserved under whatever arrangements are made?

I said that the reward for a 10 per cent increase in early intervention would be the saving of more than £100 million a year. Early in this context means early in the offending career, but that is very late in the career of the offender. Almost all the characteristics predicative of criminality are formed well before the first crime is committed. The National Audit Office 2004 report on youth offending has a useful few paragraphs on the assessment scheme—ASSET—for young offenders. In figure 13 on page 31, they set out a hierarchy of the conditions predictive of criminal behaviour: "Thinking and behaviour" is at the top, followed by "Lifestyle", "Education", and "Family and personal relationships". I mention this, because it is easy to get it wrong. The first two lines, "Thinking and behaviour" and "Lifestyle", flow from the next two, "Education" and "Family". So family and education are actually the top predictors, which condition children to criminality. We must not lose sight of that. Intervention should be in the family and education at the earliest stage.

As a schoolmaster, I have seen frustration in children unable to get the just results of their efforts; largely, in my day, before dyslexia was recognised as anything except a non-specific learning difficulty. That frustration, that inability to make use of the powerhouse of energy, imagination and hunger within a child, is a prime driver to desperate activity, for going out of school and doing something more exciting, where you can see your results—which you can do if you smash a window, a telephone box or, indeed, a motor car.

We so often hear of children who simply have not got enough to do, perfectly respectable children who are bored to tears—they actually say so in their interviews. All of this is relevant to this debate, because we are talking about the volume of offenders going into NOMS, which is shaped to receive them. If only we spent a tithe of what we spend on catching and punishing offenders on preventing them becoming young offenders. If you want to harness the voluntary sector, look back into the dusty records of the Department of Health and Social Security, as it was, to a scheme, invented by the late Lord Ennals before he joined this House, called the Intermediate Treatment Fund. It is a prototype which should not have been shelved. It was shelved in the days of a government in which I had been a member, and I bitterly regret it. In that respect, at least, I hope I find myself closer to the Minister than I otherwise would.

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson of Market Rasen, for giving us an opportunity to debate the major changes now in train in our criminal justice system. These changes are the most far reaching in living memory and deserve careful consideration. I recognise that the creation of NOMS marks a bold attempt to move away from fragmentary and short-term measures to consistent and constructive ways of dealing with offenders. Although I have reservations about the terminology, the goal of "end-to-end offender management" is right, and long overdue.

What is less clear is whether the institutional means adopted will adequately serve that admirable goal. We are in the midst of a huge experiment, the outcome of which is highly uncertain. That is troubling for those who work within the system and, as the noble Baroness indicated, especially in the probation service, as it faces dismantling and reconfiguration after a somewhat hasty process of consultation.

The effectiveness of NOMS will depend on developing partnerships in local communities, and between prisons and local communities, to provide supervision for prisoners on release and appropriate programmes for offenders serving community sentences. As the noble Lord, Lord Elton, has reminded us, much valuable work is already done in the resettlement of offenders by voluntary organisations, including churches and faith-based groups. At their best, these are able to offer strong motivation, flexibility and innovation.

It is good that this has been recognised in the formation of the alliance to reduce re-offending, and in the extensive consultation and planning being undertaken by the NOMS voluntary sector unit. Reducing re-offending is not just the business of professionals but a shared task within civil society as a whole. Members of churches and faith communities will want to respond to the opportunities and challenges of NOMS by entering into partnership with others who share their aspirations.

Having said that, I must voice some anxieties. In the light of our experience of dealing with offenders, the goals of NOMS are not only admirable but highly ambitious. It is excellent that national and local strategies for resettlement follow the seven pathways derived from the report of the Social Exclusion Unit. However, responding to the multiple needs of offenders is difficult and costly. It is a fine principle that a single offender manager should be responsible for the whole programme of work with an offender, with better risk assessment and sharing of information, but will the organisation be equal to these demands? Above all, will the necessary resources of staffing and funding be forthcoming? What will be done to ensure continuity of expertise and high consistent standards?

The greatest uncertainties lie in the realm of commissioning and organising services. This may be unavoidable, but we are losing the overarching framework of expertise and accountability currently provided by the probation service without knowing what will emerge from the complex web of contestability between public, private and voluntary agencies. Like some others, I find in the structures of NOMS a potential conflict between the promotion of co-operation and the desire to control. I am not sure which tendency will prevail. I also fear that competition may lead to silo mentality and working, rather than genuine co-operation. There are great gains to be realised from the new partnerships which will be created and fresh energies which may be released. These will be negated, however, if the system of management does not allow them to flourish with independence and integrity, and within a culture of genuine co-operation.

However, sober realism about the challenges and the dangers does not entail being negative. I welcome the fact that NOMS is taking seriously the problems of capacity faced by voluntary organisations and is encouraging them to approach commissioning by building consortia, within which the stronger organisations can help and advise the weaker. In this way NOMS will be able to mobilise the commitment and local knowledge of such organisations, without subjecting them to intolerable administrative and financial strains. I particularly welcome the recent decision to appoint a faith-based development manager to develop a strategy, in partnership with NOMS and the voluntary and community sector, to underpin the work of faith-based organisations with offenders and their families.

I conclude by drawing attention to an area of work which, while not strictly speaking part of NOMS, is closely related and highly relevant to it. Community chaplaincy originated several decades ago in Canada, and has now taken firm root in this country. Like NOMS, community chaplaincy seeks to build bridges between prisons and the wider community. It aims to provide support to offenders on release and, to the extent that they wish, to help them on their journey of faith. It is not in the business of managing offenders, but it shares the concern of NOMS with resettlement needs. It recognises that one of the greatest points of vulnerability in the rehabilitation process comes at the point of release from a highly structured environment back into a community where support levels may be low, and pressures to re-offend high. Typically, community chaplains in prison work with those being released to assess their needs, and refer them as appropriate to a network of volunteers in the areas to which they are discharged.

At present, 10 such schemes have sprung up across the country in response to local needs and vision, and a similar number are being planned. At the heart of community chaplaincy is partnership, because, like NOMS, it depends upon integrated planning, and sharing of information and resources. It involves partnership between prisons and local organisations, between statutory and voluntary agencies, and between religious and secular groups. In many areas it is appropriately inter-faith. To date, both Muslim and Hindu communities have been involved with Christian ones. This is not a sectarian movement, but one which seeks to unite people in serving the common good.

As with any other work with offenders, it is legitimate to ask questions about the effectiveness of community chaplaincy. One of the earliest projects was set up in Swansea in 2001 and has been systematically evaluated over its first two years by Dr Joanne Portwood. She found that just over a quarter of prisoners released from Swansea prison requested some kind of support from the community chaplain, and that the reconviction rate of those who took part in the project was 22 per cent compared with the expected rate of 55 per cent. Although that figure must be treated with caution, and the influence of other resettlement work must be allowed for, it would suggest that the project may have helped to save £6 million of public money as a result of preventing reconvictions.

Therefore, I am pleased that in his lecture to the Prison Reform Trust last September the Home Secretary commended community chaplaincy as an excellent example of the contribution of churches, faith groups and the voluntary sector to reducing re-offending. However, developing community chaplaincy is not easy. It demands sustained and sensitive work to create and maintain partnerships and to plan work in an uncertain funding environment. It requires responsible management with attention to the training, supervision and support of volunteers and careful monitoring of standards, but the potential achievements and rewards are considerable.

If the difficulties are considerable within the relatively free structure of community chaplaincy, how much greater will they be within the colossus of NOMS? As we travel into the unknown, I cannot help thinking of the man in the parable told by Jesus who began to build a tower without calculating the cost and found himself unable to finish it. The seriousness of managing offenders requires that we get the details right at national, regional and local levels, for the price of failure would be high.

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Gibson for securing and introducing this debate. She got in early with a punchy start and reminded us that we must all follow the progress of NOMS very carefully. I agree that a key issue is how any process of change is managed. Taking along collaboratively managers and staff in any system is essential.

I want to focus on the issue of drug treatment within NOMS as part of the Government's national drugs strategy. I have to declare an interest as chair of the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse, which was set up in 2001 to increase the number of people in treatment and to reduce waiting times. That we have done, and we are now concentrating on the quality of treatment following our recommendations set out in "models of care", which I shall refer to later. I shall also refer to two documents, the National Reducing Re-offending Delivery Plan, and the NOMS Strategy for the Management and Treatment of Problematic Drug Users within the Correctional Services.

Let me first give a brief background to drug use and offending and then post some issues that I think are important, including a couple of questions for the Minister. There are approximately 250,000 to 280,000 problematic drug users in the UK. There is, as we know, a strong link between drugs, crime and social exclusion. Many people commit crimes to fund their drug use and for many offenders mental health problems are associated with misuse. Drug treatment is not easy to deal with. There is no one solution and users frequently lapse. We need to be sure that any changes make things better.

The correctional services have a good opportunity to intervene and to treat drug and alcohol use as part of the offending behaviour. Until recently, such interventions have been haphazard and incomplete. There is still a long way to go, but at least we now have extra funding and government strategies to tackle these challenging issues. For example, funding for drug interventions in prisons and probation amounted to more than £152 million in 2004–05.

I was pleased to see that the National Reducing Re-offending Delivery Plan is owned by five government departments. That sends a signal that drug and alcohol misuse have to be tackled not just through punishment for crime or health intervention, but across other supportive measures, such as housing, education, employment and social care. Indeed, the first chapter of the delivery plan is all about partnerships and subsequent chapters discuss the various pathways to help and support. Chapter 7 discusses the drug and alcohol pathway. The NOMS drugs strategy and the government drug interventions programme should work closely together and through a forum consisting of relevant government departments and my agency, the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse.

At a local level, drug action teams lead the work by delivering interventions through the criminal justice integrated teams. The case management of drug-misusing offenders may begin before, and continue after, a period of treatment as part of supervision under NOMS. This encourages problematic drug users to access treatment and should provide continuity of support. The key issues are early intervention and the uptake of treatment. Once treatment is taken up, the key issues then are to retain people in treatment, so that they can fully benefit from it, and to build in community support. The proportion of people completing drug treatment and testing orders has risen from 28 per cent in 2003 to 36 per cent in 2004–05. Such orders are challenging and last from six months to three years. I hope that such progress will be maintained.

The integrated drug treatment system is due to be in place in prisons nationally by 2008 and should offer a wide range of treatment options, including stabilisation and maintenance prescribing for dependency, not just detoxification. All clinical services will be commissioned by primary care trusts by April 2006. Many of us have serious concerns about the quality of prison healthcare generally and it is something that we should be watchful about. We should welcome the options that will be available for drug-using prisoners. Sudden detoxification in prison can be disastrous, often resulting in a return to using or, worse, death from overdose.

I understand that there will be a unit or some other means of monitoring the drugs strategy within NOMS. The function of such a service will be to analyse information, set standards, liaise with stakeholders from the National Drugs Strategy, report to Ministers, sponsor innovation in drug programmes, commission evaluations and bid for resources to support the strategy. Again, I look forward to the detail of this; how it will work; and how these functions will be encompassed within the new arrangements.

There are now also regional offender managers, referred to by my noble friend Lady Gibson, whose role includes ensuring that drug services available to offenders in their region comply with the National Treatment Agency's models of care so that good standards are set and offenders receive continuity of care when they move from custody to the community. A single offender manager will be responsible for each adult offender from beginning to end of sentence, developing with the offender a sentence plan and motivating the offender to complete the plan. I have a question about that shortly.

The needs of young people who offend and use drugs are different from those of adults. It is vital to use different approaches. Others have talked and I know others will talk about the needs of young people. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, has raised many concerns which I share, particularly those about the issue of prevention. Many of us feel deeply that appropriate alternatives to custody must be found. Certainly, young people who are drug using need creative alternatives to punishment. Their lives are frequently chaotic and strategies need to be put into place to address their complex needs. I am aware that the Youth Justice Board is taking this issue extremely seriously, and I hope that, within NOMS, these concerns will be addressed and not neglected.

I have a few final points and then a question. The concept of case management is fundamental to both NOMS and drug intervention programmes. Given that the same clients will often be involved with both services, it is crucial that key arrangements are agreed to manage individuals between both agencies. The introduction of Custody Plus next year will effectively mean that every drug user who receives a prison sentence will be released on licence and, given that the majority of these are likely to be referred to a drug intervention programme, it will become even more important to achieve a seamless working relationship. Is the Minister confident that such relationships and other inter-agency relationships will be developed effectively?

The role of regional offender managers in relation to the commissioning of drug services still seems unclear. NOMS has confirmed that it does not have any immediate plans to withdraw its contribution to the pooled treatment budget to fund the treatment element of drug rehabilitation requirements. As its commissioning role develops, it will be important to ensure that it is integrated into existing joint drug action team commissioning structures. If that does not happen, there is a danger that much of the work to integrate criminal justice based drug services with mainstream provision will be undermined. Does the Minister have any comments on the role of regional offender managers in this context?

I look forward, as chair of the National Treatment Agency, to working on improving drug treatment systems for offenders in conjunction with other agencies and government departments. It remains to be seen how NOMS will function. Many challenges lie ahead, not least those of partnership working and workforce morale. I know that the Minister is deeply concerned about these issues, and I look forward to her response.

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson of Market Rasen, for calling this important and timely debate. I also thank my noble friend Lady Stern for providing us with a very helpful briefing yesterday afternoon.

My theme will be the need to balance the restructuring of the criminal justice system with the need to enthuse and engage those officers providing direct care to ex-offenders and those who immediately manage those officers. The Government have set an ambitious target for reducing re-offending and protecting the public. It is acknowledged that a solid relationship of trust and consistency with an interested adult is a key part of the rehabilitative process. Relationships of trust are vital to success. That has already been stated in the debate. Part of that is due to the sad histories of many of these offenders, their family backgrounds and the lack of trusting relationships.

Perhaps I may praise the Government, through the Minister, for all the important steps they have been taking to increase support for families and thereby address the roots of criminality. I think particularly of the children's trusts that the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, has been so involved with. Indeed, I very much welcome the Written Statement on Tuesday entitled "Anti-social Behaviour: Respect Action Plan". It stated:

"The cross-government drive to address problem families and support good parenting is at the heart of our strategy to build a code of respect for the 21st century".—[Hansard, 10/01/06; col. WS 4]

I very much welcome that Statement. I also pay tribute to the work that the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, has done to protect children from the fall-out of domestic violence and on the special court which she has been involved in setting up.

There is widespread support for the principle of end-to-end case management. The question of private provision is more contested. In foster care there are private providers who provide a very good service and that has been acknowledged. In children's homes there are some catastrophic and appalling private providers, but there have also been good ones. It is a means of obtaining capital to provide more children's homes.

I will therefore listen with interest to the Minister's response to the concerns raised. I note particularly what the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson, said about the turnover rates in private prisons. Given what I said about the importance of trusting relationships, that rate of turnover worries me very much. It seems to make matters difficult to manage.

In principle, however, I would support what the Government were proposing if I had a sense that there was significant enthusiasm among those working directly in the field for that project. If I had the sense that the Government were carrying with them probation officers working in the field, I would be much less concerned about the matter.

Several of your Lordships were good enough to take part in a debate that I held in October last year on safeguarding children. In my mind, the most significant risk for children in this country arises from a lack of social workers and a continuing crisis in social work provision. There has been a revolution in the structure of services since the death of Victoria Climbié and I welcome many of the changes. I mentioned the children's trusts. I recently visited a pilot children's trust in Stevenage. The head teacher and childcare workers to whom I spoke were enthusiastic about the new opportunities of co-operation that arise from that children's trust. The social worker to whom I spoke could think only about the heavy burden of work that she was trying to manage and the new burden placed on her by the restructuring within the local authority. It caused me great concern to see her state of mind.

When we, at the centre, propose changes—perhaps particularly in the area of social care and associated areas—we need to think carefully about the implications of such changes for those working at the front line with vulnerable people. I remember the history of the Child and Family Court Advisory and Support Service—which was formed with the very laudable and sensible aim of restructuring the private and public law provision in the area, but which was, sadly, poorly thought through and managed. It was desperately sad to meet so many former social workers and guardians ad litem—people at the top of their profession—leaving prematurely because they had become so disillusioned with management. CAFCASS is now under new management and I understand that things are improving, but I am sure that the Minister will know better than I that children will have suffered because of their lack of timely access to guardians as a result of the badly managed change and restructuring.

The Government have taken important steps to improve the quality of experience of children who are taken into public care. I very much welcome that. Still, one in seven children in care has more than three placements in one year and the most problematic children have many more. The more difficult that children are to manage, the more placements they are likely to have. The more placements that they have, the more damaged they become. When young people leave care, it becomes more difficult to redress their past experience, which has left them marked. One should seize every occasion to give them the experience of a trusting, stable relationship with an adult who is interested in them and in their good. When those young people arrive in prison, one must make the most of that experience—and for other children who do not enter care but have experienced abuse or neglect or family breakdown.

Those relationships of trust and confidence with a particular person are so important in rehabilitating offenders and to the Government's achievement of their target of reducing the rate of offending. It is extremely important that the hearts and minds of those working at the front line should be won over by the Government, which would persuade me to give my support. I am concerned about a possible haemorrhaging of experienced probation officers, as we have seen in social work. There are new young social workers whose senior social workers are either so overstretched with their case load or have left for administration or other work that those green newcomers do not get the support that they need to be effective in their professional role and to sustain continued involvement in such a difficult environment. That may be one reason for some of the difficulties that we have now. I would be loath to see changes that led to such disillusionment in the professionals working in this area. What steps will the Government undertake to win over the hearts and minds of people working at the front line?

My Lords, I join all those who have congratulated and thanked the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson, for obtaining this timely and important debate. I use both of those words very deliberately. Two years after the introduction of the National Offender Management Service seems a very appropriate time to do something that I would like to achieve if I could change the lighting in this House. I am sure that we have all driven along the motorway and noticed the signs that pass you messages. I would like to change the small clock in the Chamber so that, instead of saying "0:00", it said: "Stop. Think.". However, only out of all the respect and admiration that we have for the Minister, I would put "Please" in front of it.

I am extremely glad that at the beginning of this debate the noble Baroness reminded us very pointedly that at the heart of the National Offender Management Service are people who have to manage offenders. You could be forgiven for thinking that, so far, NOMS has been all about the management of the management of offenders and not about offenders themselves.

I should like to open with a quotation:

"It was a fundamental mistake to ridicule the worth of the enemy, as [our] papers made a chief point of doing in their propaganda. The very principle here is a mistaken one; for when they came face to face with the enemy, our soldiers had quite a different impression. The mistake had disastrous results. Once [our] soldiers realised what a tough enemy he had to fight he felt that he had been deceived by the manufacturers of the information which had been given him. Instead of strengthening and stimulating his fighting spirit, this information had quite the contrary effect. Finally he lost heart".

For the word "our", the word "German" should be inserted. Those are the words of Adolf Hitler in chapter 6, part 1—entitled "War Propaganda"—in Mein Kampf.

It is very cautionary to realise that putting out false information and making false claims about things that you are doing has a terrible effect on people who know because they can see that that is not actually the truth. That is why I worry when I hear statements made by the previous Minister with responsibility for prisons that the establishment of NOMS now provides clear leadership and accountability for the performance of all the correctional services and for reducing re-offending. That is not how it seems. On looking at the impact of what NOMS has achieved so far, cynically, you could say that the re-offending rate has gone up from 53 per cent when new Labour took office to 60 per cent now. The Prison Service and Youth Justice Board budgets have effectively had to be frozen in order to accommodate the NOMS budget, and last night I learnt that the size of the NOMS bureaucracy is already up to 1,694 people on top of the bureaucracy that existed before.

That is the negative side, but I do not want to be negative, as I am sure that none of the Members of this House wants to be, about this hugely important subject: protecting the public. That is what the National Offender Management Service aims to do. Therefore I want to concentrate instead on my plea—"Stop. Think."—so as to remind us of what this is all about and what we hope will come out of it. The speech of the Home Secretary on 19 September last year has already been mentioned. I was pleased with what he had to say and in answer to a subsequent question of his, "Do you think my vision can be realised?", the answer is "Yes, provided that the changes are made to support its implementation". I shall remind noble Lords of what the Home Secretary said about that vision at the heart of his statement:

"We have to make preventing re-offending the centre of the organisation of our correctional services. We have to make reducing the number of re-offenders the central focus of our policy and practice. We have to create a package of support and interventions for each and every offender, and we have to do this in a totally methodical way. While I acknowledge that the practical problems are real and require care and caution in implementation, I also believe that much of this is about common sense. It is about forming the right partnerships, developing the skills of those who work within the system, making sure that the structure of our prisons estate supports those goals and getting the right organisational structures in place to support all this".

Hear, hear, but many of them are already in place and they do not need replacement, they need refashioning. My concern about so much of what we hear about NOMS is that instead of taking that line, there has been too much emphasis on replacing.

Ministers rightly speak very highly of the work of the existing Criminal Justice Board and the associated local criminal justice boards that include representatives of the courts, police, prisons, probation services, local government, health, education, social services, the voluntary sector and so on. They are all there now. They do not need replacing but strengthening, and the great thing is that they involve local people and therefore are more likely to be in touch with those who actually have to manage offenders. Given that, what is the role and purpose of these people called regional offender managers, all of whom are now in position, all of whom are functioning differently, none of whom has any kind of budget, but all of whom have staffs?

I move on to prisons because I probably know more about them than the other bits. I do not have the time to go into detail, but taking the line of the Home Secretary is entirely what I believe is the aim of the Prison Service: it is to help prisoners to live useful and law-abiding lives by enabling them to challenge the offending behaviour and problems that have put them there. But the Prison Service cannot do that alone. Such work has to be continued in the community in the form of aftercare, which is where the probation service comes in. To do that a structure is needed, but the service does not have one. For 10 years now I have been repeating this over and over again. The two words, "responsibility" and "accountability", do not appear in the Prison Service structure. No one is responsible for women, juveniles, young offenders, local prisoners, training prisoners, resettlement prisoners, lifers or sex offenders. Therefore it is impossible for the Minister to give an instruction for something to happen with women, shall we say, and it would be done everywhere because someone is responsible and accountable for doing it.

Population management is not delegated down to areas. This means that far too many prisoners are nominated prisons centrally so that we find people from south London in Northumberland. That is a nonsense. Population management should be handled locally so that all offenders, if they are to be given such end-to-end management, are in the area where it can be given to them. But if prisoners are to receive these full, purposeful and active programmes that will occupy them all day, it will require resources. No one has yet costed imprisonment. No one has asked how much it will cost to provide all these programmes for everyone—why I do not know. But the fact that we have so many prisoners sitting doing nothing perhaps distorts the fact that we do not have enough money to do so. If we do not have enough money, we should ask whether it can be done in another way—for instance, by employing prisoners to help work with other prisoners and so on. This is where the voluntary sector comes in.

In all of this, the overcrowding is complicated by the Government's demand that, for example, prisoners out in the hands of the probation service should be sent straight back when they breach. Our local prisons are now struggling with an additional 10 per cent of their population being returned for breach, many of whom do not know why they are there. So the whole system is complicated by the fact that it is not being co-ordinated.

The probation service has been well covered and I shall not attempt to add more except to say that I find the responses to the consultation paper Restructuring Probation to Reduce Re-offending—the number of which has already been mentioned—extraordinary. Included in the 750 responses against its proposals are those from judges, magistrates, the police, the local government associations and others and not only from the probation service.

The voluntary sector, which has an important role to play, is both confused and, dare I say it, alienated by the word "contestability". The voluntary sector does not compete for contracts and the public does not donate money to enable it to do so. There is a great danger that the smaller organisations which cannot compete will not be able to play their part, and that the larger ones may dissipate some of their funding in order to seek competition.

So what should happen? I go back to what I said at the start: Stop and Think. Perhaps I may dare to suggest to the Minister that he has got time to do so. The chief executive of NOMS has resigned and the Government are looking for a new one. They therefore have the chance for a new start. The plan to privatise all the prisons on the Isle of Sheppey has been stalled, so there is a pause in the way in which privatisation is being tackled in the Prison Service. The Home Secretary has indicated in a letter to me that he is considering the responses to the probation paper this month, so the Government have a pause in which to stop and think. I hope that when they have heard all the contributions from noble Lords in this debate, they will consider doing so. We all feel so strongly that this should not be allowed to go by default.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for initiating the debate, even though I am not going to agree with her.

The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has set out clearly the central question and the Home Secretary has articulated that we have to make preventing re-offending the central aim of NOMS and the central focus of policy and practice. That clarity of political statement is enormously valuable and there is not much disagreement about it. The debate therefore is how we are going to bring that about.

First, I hope that the House agrees that change is self-evidently necessary. If one looks at what we are currently getting from the system, where 60 per cent of offenders are reconvicted within two years and for each reconviction it is estimated that five crimes are committed; and where re-offenders commit half of all crime—and, therefore, in a Utopian world, where we have stopped re-offending we would have cut crime by half—one sees that it could hardly matter more.

We know that the costs of re-offending to the criminal justice system—let alone to society—are well over £11 billion a year. This is a description of a system which, despite the excellent efforts of many of its participants, is not delivering adequately. It is not for want of money—or, rather, it is not simply an issue that has been starved of resources—because since 1977, in real terms, we have invested 25 per cent more in prisons and nearly 50 per cent more in the probation service.

There are two fundamental reasons why the system is not working. The SEU report in 2002 made the shattering statement that no one is ultimately responsible for the rehabilitation process. In other words, there was ambiguity of leadership across the system. Secondly, the system, like Topsy, has grown over time. It has not been designed from principle to seek to reduce re-offending as one of its central goals.

I trust, therefore, that we agree that change is necessary. If so, the question is what the template should be for that change. We are grateful to the Home Secretary for that September speech; when I read it, my heart was lifted up by it. Before going further, I should make declarations that I forgot to make initially. I have a daughter who works for the Prison Service and I am in discussion with Serco, a company which produces some offender management services. I make this speech at the behest or in the interest of neither of them, but because I have a passion for the subject.

In his speech, the Home Secretary set out a template for change. The key elements were that there should be a contract between the individual offender and the state. Offenders committed to reform and change their lives and the state committed to put in the intervention, support and motivations to enable them to do so. A package of support and interventions tailored to the individual would focus on that clear goal. It required, as he said, a thorough assessment of what in the individual's life, skills and experience was leading them into a pattern of criminality. Therefore, the package of support would be focused around the five clearly necessary areas of health, education, employment, social and family links, and housing.

The Home Secretary also set out, even more challengingly but necessarily, the need for a change in the way that the prisons are used better to make the interventions that would be provided to offenders more likely to work. As has been mentioned, NOMS has a challenging target to reduce re-offending by 10 per cent in only four years.

I trust that in broad terms we are agreed that these are the key elements of the template for an agenda of change to reduce re-offending in our society. If we are agreed, how do we implement such a system? I suggest that it is a debate about means, not about ends. The debate should therefore be informed by rationality and by a passion by all of us to find how best to reduce re-offending rather than investing futile energy in trying to defend a very imperfect status quo.

We know what some of the process of change should be. End-to-end offender management, maximising employment, actively promoting innovation and diversity in the way services are supplied. We should also seek to motivate the totality of the system and its participants—the state and the individual—to achieve the goal of reducing re-offending. You do not get much in life without motivation. Lastly—and this is where the contention focuses—we should actively develop other supply options over a period of time better to harness expertise wherever it may be available and better to achieve the goal of re-offending rather than starting from the assumption that only one form of delivery, one form of practice, one form of service approach, will necessarily achieve it.

Let us focus on the last bit, where the rows happen, about commissioning and competition. I speak, I am afraid, as someone who has spent far too many years of his life trying to reform public services, most of that time as a senior manager. In many situations—not all—there are benefits in having a clear commissioning function. The benefit of doing so is that it encourages the commissioner to think clearly and intellectually about what they are trying to achieve and what might be the best means of doing so, unfettered by the vested interests that any of us who are actually providers always bring to that agenda to try to moderate the pace of change or moderate the ambition of what is being sought. I speak as a former provider as well as a former commissioner. In principle, there is benefit in the commissioning model if it is well done and in principle this is an area where commissioning could be beneficial.

Secondly, I think that competition is important. That is unfashionable, but again, going back to my harrowing years of managing services in local government, one looked for years and years to find ways that would bring about improvement in performance and productivity and better outcomes. Many things do that—it is not a simple elixir—but I saw nothing that brought about the speed of change, for those local authorities that were prepared to approach it intelligently and positively, than compulsory competitive tendering. We all spoke in exactly the same terms as my noble friend mentioned—that this was a wicked Thatcherite policy, the end of civilisation and would destroy public services. We all enjoyed using that language 20 years ago and believed every word of it. But for those authorities that went into it seriously, the achievements of improvement in performance were quite remarkable. Sometimes new suppliers were brought in, but much more was achieved by shaking up a system that had no self-evident right to exist and had to look at much more radical means of improving its performance. We should not throw away competition lightly as a mechanism for improving performance.

If that is right—and I believe strongly that it is—it comes to how we do that, which is extremely complicated and difficult. It needs a lot of thought about how the commissioner develops a market, engages suppliers and treats the existing workforce in a way that does not make them so negative that they spend their time defending change rather than going positively about how to seize the advantages that this new environment offers them. Therefore, I urge my noble friend and the Home Secretary that they are broadly right in the direction of travel that they are going in, but enormous thoughtfulness is needed in terms of how we move forward to develop the model that was so brilliantly set out by the Home Secretary in his September speech, which, I believe, if we do well, this House will applaud, because we recognise the need for change and for radical change.

My Lords, I welcome this debate on NOMS and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson of Market Rasen, for securing it. I also look forward to the Minister's reply because there are clearly a number of aspects of government policy in this area which are causing considerable anxiety.

First, like others, I have no difficulty in sharing the Government's objective. Secondly, I am glad to agree that change is necessary and that recent years have seen the beginning of some real improvements in offender management. The recent government document, Reducing Re-offending through Skills and Employment, gave some good examples of that. But, my third point is again concern—which is shared by many others—at the scale of upheaval which is now in prospect. So few stakeholders and independent commentators have been persuaded that the case has been made for such drastic change in some of these areas.

I certainly can agree that the Government's determination to cut the appallingly high rate of re-offending by those with previous criminal offences is clearly a vital priority. More than 50 per cent currently re-offend and, for prisoners under 18, 82 per cent are reconvicted within two years of release. The cost of all that re-offending to the criminal justice system alone, without taking account of the cost to victims, the community, or the offenders themselves, is no less than £11 billion. That is an appalling figure if it is true.

There are many causes for this. Diverting potential offender behaviour early must always be a government priority. Deprived backgrounds and poor parenting, combined with toleration of truancy, are well known breeding grounds. Shamefully, truancy and school exclusion are in the background for 72 per cent of young offenders; but, alas, in addition, mental health and alcohol and drug abuse are playing an increasingly worrying role, and services in this area remain in need of urgent extra funding and attention—and, above all, adequate specialist resources.

If reconviction rates are to drop then, along with tough measures against anti-social behaviour, about which we have heard quite a lot in the past couple of days, we clearly need to prioritise education and skills training and essentially to work to provide work opportunities in prison and community sentences. It is in that regard that business and the private sector could be enormously more helpful than they are currently. So, too, will be needed better support, including adequate accommodation, for those leaving custody. The closer that that can be arranged to the offender's natural roots, the more likely it is to succeed. More reliable and locally based community provision is quite essential if productive non-custodial alternative sentences are ever to become a reality.

Two striking features stand out from that catalogue of requirements. First, they all depend on partnership between public services, voluntary organisations and businesses. Secondly, those partnerships just have to be local, and often very informal in nature. The latest proposals appear to push responsibility in exactly the opposite direction to the regions—the ROMs—and, ultimately, to the Secretary of State.

In my days as chairman of a London juvenile court, although I admit it was some time ago, those objectives were pursued above all by extensive partnerships between all the agencies working with young offenders, including social services, education, police, probation and magistrates and the judiciary. They all worked together, thereby improving each group's awareness of what was and was not effective. Interestingly, that kind of local partnership has begun to emerge again under, and as a result of, the 2001 reorganisation of the Probation Service; but, one gathers, it will clearly disappear if the latest proposal for the so-called restructuring of the Probation Service is pursued.

Like other noble Lords, I am increasingly concerned by some of the consequences that flow from the review done by the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles. The Westminster Hall debate in the other place on 17 December focused interestingly on those anxieties, but made disturbing reading. Four words appeared to me to illustrate those anxieties: contestability—and, okay, we all agree that we do not much care for it; continuity; implementation; and evidence. Contestability may have some merits, even if the experience that we have had so far with private prisons, as we have heard today, has not always delivered the results or the value for money anticipated. But to impose that rigid and often rushed application on all aspects of the NOMS remit is surely unnecessary and unwise.

As was pointed out in the Adjournment debate, some core competences are not ever outsourced, yet it is clear from restructuring probation to reduce re-offending that if adopted the probation service—a core competency if ever there was one—would inevitably disappear. Yet since the last restructuring and with the help of much-needed extra resources, which the Government themselves provided, considerable successes have been achieved. It surely cannot be the Government's wish to destroy an organisation whose 100 years as a key component of offenders' rehabilitation has earned universal respect.

I simply have to ask: what kind of institutional continuity is that? How can that enhance the continuity of management of individual offenders that this so-called reorganisation is intended to achieve? One would not expect the probation service to be in favour of these changes, and indeed they are not—but neither, it seems, are any of the other partners involved in offender management enthusiastically backing these reforms. Are the judiciary, the magistrates, local or educational authorities, social services or indeed that all-important voluntary sector backing the Government's approach? Others have referred to this, and I hope the Minister will answer these questions.

The voluntary sector, like others, believes the newly formed Probation Board is being increasingly successful in encouraging communities to work in partnerships at local level for the benefit of offenders and the community as a whole. Clinks, which represents the many voluntary organisations working in the criminal justice system, is concerned that introducing contestability will seriously damage voluntary organisations' independence and their ability to compete. Many, too, as your Lordships will know, have remits that are strictly limited to local areas. How, they wonder, as we all do, will the change to probation trusts be implemented? How many appointments will have to be made? Are they all by the Secretary of State? With what qualification? Will it be under Nolan-type surveillance, or will the yet-to-be-named successor to Dame Rennie Fritchie—now the noble Baroness, Lady Fritchie—who set such an important example as a vigorously independent Commissioner for Public Appointments, be involved? And at what cost; for example, by way of compensation to chief executives who lose their jobs? To what extent, if at all, will proposed new probation trust members be required to have local connections? Will potential new providers of probation services have the same high degree of professional training and accountability? And so on.

Who, for example, will have the responsibility for lifers' reintegration into the community? I see from the Minister's recent reply to my noble friend Lady Stern that the Lifer Management Unit no longer exists. Of the approximately 6,000 lifers, all but a handful—some 29, I believe—will be leaving prison at some stage. Quite apart from their own obvious need for support and guidance, their local community is surely entitled to know that their supervision is in the hands of professional, highly trained people.

Finally, I turn to evidence. The Probation Board Association focused most clearly on this point. Evidence that these changes are likely to produce positive results for society is, it says; with commendable understatement, "not apparent". There is "no detailed financial analysis" to show how the suggested annual savings of £1.7 billion will be produced. They say:

"We have seen no evidence that the . . . changes will command the widespread level of support that will be needed".

Both Scotland and Wales have considered and rejected the Government's approach. Where is the evidence that they are wrong?

I like to think I do not often harry Ministers with such a long catalogue of questions, but when the Government are proposing such sudden and fundamental changes in a service for which I have almost lifelong respect, one is entitled to argue that it is for the Government to prove their case.

My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson, for calling this important debate, and for setting out her case so clearly, fearlessly and honourably. The Government's proposals for the National Probation Service have aroused considerable interest and controversy. In preparing for this debate, we have been able to drawn on the excellent session of the Home Affairs Committee on 6 December, when the Minister appeared before the committee. We are all looking forward to the publication of that committee of the further information the Minister promised on why the Home Office changed its mind so dramatically between the announcement of the decision to keep the probation boards and that of the decision not to keep them. Yesterday a book of essays by very experienced academics was published. They do not come from ivory towers but have between them more than 70 years of experience of working in the Home Office at senior levels. They pointed out the strong possibility that the Government's plans for the probation and prison services would not work.

The idea of the National Offender Management Service in marrying the prison and probation services is based on the idea that imprisonment should be drawn closer to local communities and carried out within a framework of awareness that almost all prisoners leave prison and therefore need to reintegrate themselves into their local areas. This idea has considerable merit. The Home Secretary articulated it impeccably in his speech to the Prison Reform Trust last September when he said:

"The way forward in tackling re-offending is to draw in resources from the wider community. I see these prisons"— that is, local prisons—

"becoming far more engaged with their local communities, and better at building relationships with a wide variety of other organisations. I attach particular importance to . . . [local] prisons becoming a vital part of the civic fabric of every locality".

As the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, said, that was, indeed, a speech that made one's heart leap.

As far as I can see there is considerable, if not universal, agreement that this approach makes sense, is supported by the evidence on what helps people to desist from crime, and is achievable by policy change. However, there is no such agreement on the best way of achieving it. In Scotland, for instance—here I declare an interest as the convenor of the Scottish Consortium on Crime and Criminal Justice—the method of achieving it has been to bring in new legislation which will integrate the prisons as far as possible into the local arrangements for dealing with defendants and offenders—local arrangements which are broadly accountable to local government.

In England and Wales the approach has been to diminish the importance of the local level and to bring decision-making up to regional level. These are very large regions—only 10 for the whole of England and Wales. As we saw in the latest set of proposals set out in the consultation paper Restructuring Probation to Reduce Reoffending the plan is to remove the element of local accountability for the probation service. It is on this set of proposals in particular that I wish to concentrate. I want to look at them from the perspective of the evidence on which they are based and how far they will achieve what they set out to achieve.

I want to look first at one piece of evidence used in the paper to support the proposal that all probation service functions should in principle be able to be put out to contract. I understand from what the Minister said to the Home Affairs Committee—though this is from the uncorrected proof—that there are no limits on which probation functions can be marketed—court reports, contribution to the youth offending teams and working in the multi-agency public protection panels. The Home Office document says that,

"we have already seen the benefits of competition in the provision of prison services".

I should be grateful if the Minister could give me a little more information on the basis for that view about the benefits of competition. The latest independent report I can find on the performance of private prisons in England and Wales is the National Audit Office report of 2003. These are the conclusions of that report. First, the performance of private prisons in delivering what is in the contract "has been mixed". Some private prisons have delivered and others have not. Secondly, private prisons,

"span the range of prison performance".

The best are better than most of the public prisons; the worst are at the bottom among the least well performing public prisons. Thirdly, private prisons have brought some innovation in the use of technology and in the way they recruit and use their employees, but,

"little difference in terms of the daily routine of prisons".

The report concludes that the use of private prisons,

"is neither a guarantee of success nor the cause of inevitable failure".

I can only assume that the evidence used for these proposals relates to a different independent evaluation. Is there such an evaluation, and if so what did it say?

I also notice that on 15 December the Commission for Social Care Inspection published its report on Oakhill Secure Training Centre, which is a privately run secure centre, a sort of children's prison, where children aged 12 to 17 are sent by courts to serve custodial sentences. The centre opened on 19 August 2004 and the inspectors went in in May 2005. They said:

"We were very concerned at the low numbers of staff on duty at the STC. Between 28 March and 24 April there was not a single day when the STC was anywhere near reaching the minimum staffing levels set by the Youth Justice Board for 80 places . . . The numbers of staff deployed on shifts meant those on duty were stretched to capacity to provide care and safety".

I must ask the Minister for some clarification. Presumably this centre was commissioned, if that is the right word, by a commissioner. When commissioning of commercial contracts is being done, is it not a requirement to see that the contractor can fulfil the contract? Having enough staff working for the company, or having a chance of recruiting enough staff, seems a very basic requirement. I would really appreciate an explanation of how this process of commissioning works, since it is so fundamental to the whole concept and structure of the plans for probation.

I shall briefly cover the responses to the Home Office consultation on the proposals. I am interested, as other noble Lords have been, in two responses in particular; that of the judiciary and that of local authorities, because they both seem to be crucial. The judiciary, the judges and the magistrates have to have confidence in the arrangements, otherwise they will not pass community sentences, more people will go to prison, and that will cost a lot more. Have the judges and magistrates responded to the consultation, and if so what was their view? The second crucial partner is the local authorities. They have access to many services that are needed for the successful social reintegration of offenders. They co-ordinate many local partnership arrangements, which are concerned with the reduction and prevention of crime. Many convicted people will live in local authority houses and their children will be known to local authority social workers.

I understand that the Local Government Association has responded to the consultation and has expressed three main concerns. First, it notes the,

"lack of meaningful local accountability for offender management services".

Secondly, it states that the proposed commissioning model with its central and regionalised structure runs counter to current policy development to localise responsibility in decision-making. Thirdly, it states that the contracting model of service delivery may hamper partnership working and goes against the plans for all other public services. Does the Minister think that the Local Government Association comments have any validity? How does she propose to respond to them?

My Lords, I join the catalogue of those who have already thanked the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson, for the chance to offer our views on NOMS, in my case in favour. I start by declaring an interest as until recently the Prime Minister's strategy adviser involved inter alia in criminal justice policy. In addition, my partner is the former director general of the National Probation Service.

The criminal justice system has a number of different objectives. It aims to achieve justice in respect of victims, offenders and the wrongfully accused. It ensures appropriate punishment for the guilty. It seeks to rehabilitate offenders and, most importantly for society as a whole, its key purpose is to reduce offending.

The overall level of offending in the UK has been dropping for a decade, but there is no scope whatever for complacency, as the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, reminded us. Offending still remains unacceptably high by international standards. The high-volume crimes that cause immense trauma to millions of victims each year and which exact a high economic toll—robbery, burglary and theft—are committed by a cohort of persistent offenders many hundreds of thousands strong, a hard core of which each typically commits many hundreds of serious crimes per year. Almost all persistent offenders become known to the system as they are tried and convicted for one of the many crimes they commit, and as they move through the system's revolving doors, often over and over again.

Many offenders are victims themselves of poor parenting or of broken or dysfunctional families. Often they have been taken into care. Generally they lack skill or qualification. As the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, reminded us, some offenders are heroin and crack addicts, responsible for the bulk of acquisitive crime. Invariably, they offend many times a day to fund their habits. Continually relapsing, tragically most will retain their habit for a lifetime. Beyond those involved in high-volume crime, there are a number of other important categories of offender, including those involved in ingenious frauds, increasingly over the Internet, people who use violence, especially within close relationships, or dangerous offenders, including those capable of heinous sexual offences.

The establishment of NOMS is a critical reform, because by far the most significant way of reducing crime further is to grip those different offender populations—most importantly, the persistent offender. NOMS should see the end of the historic "pass the parcel" system of managing offenders. Contrary to the sincere fears expressed by staff, fairly articulated by the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson, NOMS will not reduce, but greatly extend and strengthen, the classic probation function of managing offenders. For the first time, it should enable a single-minded, end-to-end focus on offending behaviour during the whole of the sentence, both in custody and in the community. It should allow the development of different stratagems for different categories of offending behaviour. It should enable us to hold a single individual, the chief executive of NOMS, personally responsible for reducing re-offending over time.

As we have been reminded more than once this afternoon, NOMS represents a bold and radical reform in other ways. The introduction of a purchaser/provider split, with the offender management line holding the funds and acquiring offender services at arm's length from public, private or voluntary providers, will reward effectiveness, innovation and efficiency. Unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson, I have no doubt about that, not least because of the benign impact of similar arrangements, rightly imposed by a Conservative government on both the public and private sector in broadcasting, in which I spent much of my career. The introduction of an independent production sector in particular transformed broadcasting for the better. I entirely concur with the eloquent advocacy given by the noble Lord, Lord Filkin.

Henceforth, with NOMS, institutional funds will be won only through competition. New business disciplines will be needed in prisons and probation. Widespread cultural change will be necessary. New organisation-wide systems and processes will have to be introduced.

None of this is easy. Organisational reform on this scale is presenting daunting challenges to all the dedicated people who manage and work in the component parts of the old, directly funded, historically monopolistic, correctional system.

So far, sad to say, the implementation of the blueprint for NOMS proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Carter, has had a sticky and uncertain start. NOMS does not in any meaningful sense yet exist. But, as the Civil Service increasingly aims for excellence in business skills, including finance, technology, human resources and project management, and as it increasingly draws in expertise and experience from outside its ranks, I anticipate that the service will rise to the task of making this challenging institutional reform the success that it needs to be.

We must not give up on NOMS. We should pause and consider by all means, but certainly not stop. However difficult the challenge, we must hold true to the vision. NOMS is the right reform and offers an enormous prize. We could be the first country in the world really to grip offenders and thereby to intensify our attack on crime and all its dreadful consequences.

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson, for introducing this debate. It is timely because the probation service has had a rollercoaster ride for the past few years and there is an urgent need to ensure stability, in terms of both the objectives and resources of NOMS.

The success of NOMS will be judged on one key and overriding measure: whether it can reduce reoffending. In particular, NOMS will be judged on whether it achieves its stated targets of reducing reoffending by 5 per cent by 2008 and 10 per cent by 2010.

I welcome the contribution of many noble Lords. I do not disagree with much of the criticism about NOMS and I could certainly add to it but I shall avoid the temptation. If we are where we are, then we need to ask ourselves what should happen. In principle, combining the prison and probation services into the single National Offender Management Service should increase the prospect for achieving what I commonly call "reduction in reoffending"—a subject that I have addressed repeatedly in your Lordships' House.

Bringing the two services together in this way has the potential—I repeat: the potential—to improve joint working between those involved in working with offenders in custody and those doing so in the community. It has the potential to improve the resettlement of offenders by developing co-ordinated resettlement plans as prisoners move through the prison gate from custody into the community. It has the potential to increase the effectiveness of the way in which individual sentences are planned and managed from the pre-sentence report stage right through to the end of the sentence. It also has the potential to improve accountability for reducing reoffending. Whereas previously this responsibility was divided between the two services, accountability now lies squarely with NOMS. I welcome this because no longer can we pass the buck from one service to the other—the buck stops at NOMS.

If NOMS's aim of reducing reoffending is to be achieved, it will require prison regimes to provide a more comprehensive range of educational courses and opportunities to ensure that prisoners of all levels of educational ability can receive opportunities appropriate to their needs. It will also require far greater attention to be paid to the practical resettlement of offenders in areas such as employment, accommodation and family support. We must never underestimate the importance of those factors for offenders in and out of our penal institutions. Research showing the importance of resettlement in the reduction of reoffending is well known. Ex-prisoners who get and keep a job have their likelihood of reoffending cut by one-third and one-half, depending on which study is considered. Getting ex-offenders into stable accommodation reduces their reoffending rate by at least one-fifth. Ex-offenders who have family support are reconvicted at a rate between one-half and one-sixth, compared with similar offenders without family support.

Moreover, those effects are related. For example, it is harder to get a job without basic skills and harder to keep one if you are homeless. Practical help with resettlement also increases an offender's ability to make a success of drug rehabilitation programmes, which was raised by the noble Baroness earlier, and programmes to change offending behaviour.

The development by NOMS of targets to get more offenders into employment and sustainable accommodation is therefore welcome. If the targets are to be achieved, the involvement of voluntary and community organisations is crucial. The voluntary sector has particular strengths in areas such as housing, employment, mentoring, addiction, mental health, family services and community engagement. Yet disappointingly, the past few years have seen a fall in the proportion of probation service budgets devoted to partnership programmes with the voluntary sector. The proportion has declined noticeably since the removal of the requirement of the probation service to devote 7 per cent of its budget to partnership work with the voluntary sector in 2001. Since then the proportion of probation budgets devoted to working with the voluntary and private sector combined has plummeted to 2.4 per cent. NOMS should reinstate the previous target, and it should develop a specified target for partnership working by prisons.

I am pleased to see that the probation service is working on plans to increase the volume of its work with the voluntary sector by 20 per cent over the next year. That is a welcome step in the right direction. I understand that the probation service also proposes to ensure that future contracts with the voluntary sector are for at least three years, and that they provide full cost recovery for voluntary organisations, including overhead costs. That is important because too often voluntary organisations are expected to subsidise funding that does not take into account core services.

Will the Minister assure us that those will be permanent future requirements for all voluntary sector contracts with NOMS, the Prison Service and the probation service? The increased commissioning of voluntary sector organisations to provide resettlement services for offenders should be carried out in a carefully planned and co-ordinated way. Many people working in the Prison Service, the probation service and the voluntary sector have expressed concern about the possible impact of contestability on the delivery of services.

The Minister will be well aware of the fears that have been expressed about that issue. Prison and probation staff are concerned that their livelihood could be threatened by competition from the private sector. Voluntary organisations are concerned that they could be eclipsed by glossy and well resourced private sector bids to carry out work in areas where they believe they have expertise. Smaller voluntary organisations are concerned that they may lose out to larger national organisations in a competitive bidding process.

I am pleased that the NOMS voluntary sector unit has been working closely with voluntary sector organisations, and consulting them on their views on these issues. However, it would be to everyone's benefit if the provision of services and the future increased involvement of the voluntary sector were commissioned on a carefully planned basis rather than on the basis of a competitive free-for-all.

On a related point, services should be planned in a way which has input from, and is sensitive to the needs of, local communities. The Minister will know that many concerns have been expressed about the proposed abolition of local probation boards, and their replacement by more business-oriented probation trusts. Probation boards include many people who have strong roots in local communities and community organisations. If they are disbanded, I hope that the Government will ensure that other mechanisms are set up at local level to ensure community consultation on, and input to, the development of services.

The disproportionate representation of black and minority ethnic offenders in the prison populations and probation caseloads is well known. It is crucial that NOMS should integrate targets for the achievement of race equality into all its service delivery targets. Although the NOMS business plan for 2005–06 included targets for minority ethnic staff, I was disappointed to see that it contained no race equality targets for service delivery. This is quite the opposite of what the Commission for Racial Equality recommends. Can the Minister assure us that this will be remedied in future business plans?

Whereas the Prison Service has a substantial race and diversity unit, the equivalent unit which previously existed in the National Probation Directorate has been reduced in size and fragmented over the past two years. If NOMS is to achieve racial equality targets as an integrated service across its whole operation, it should consider four specific steps—first, establishing a joint central equality and diversity unit; secondly, establishing an advisory group on race, of the kind which until recently existed in the Prison Service; thirdly, developing joint positive action for training initiatives; and finally, if NOMS is to have a reasonable chance of achieving its rehabilitation objectives, it is important that prisons are not swamped.

The Government can set the direction, but the professionals and volunteers will provide the results. Many of them feel bruised. It is time to bring them into a partnership that will provide the rehabilitation of our inmates which is at the heart of our criminal justice system.

My Lords, following, as I so often do, the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, I do not wish to be too negative in my comments. In thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson of Market Rasen, for setting the scene when she asked why the system should be changed yet again, one must recall that it was only two years after the creation of the National Probation Service that we had the Carter report. The late Lord Fitt was very frank in acknowledging the shortcomings of NOMS, which have been referred to by other speakers. In the words of the Howard League for Penal Reform, it was marked by,

"confusion, waste of public money, lack of consultation and secrecy".

The Howard League said that no proper case for the establishment of NOMS had been made, and that it was therefore no surprise that the latest proposals were a reversal of the position previously adopted at the time of its institution.

Several speakers have mentioned the new probation trusts. The proposed transfer of the statutory bodies placed on local boards to the regional offender manager—a civil servant—would not further this aim, and would sever the existing statutory requirement for a member of the probation board to have links with the local area. It certainly flies in the face of the Government's declared policy of devolving power back to local communities. It was interesting to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, talk about the plans for the Scottish arrangements for offender management—local bodies, locally accountable.

The Howard League for Penal Reform has drawn my attention to the omission in the consultation paper of the word "magistrates". This is an extraordinary omission, given their central role in imposing short prison sentences and the bulk of community penalties. The experience of the National Probation Service is that the more remote a court feels from its local probation service, the less likely the court is to trust its views. If this means an increase in short prison sentences at the expense of community penalties, not only does it fly in the face of the whole ethos of the probation service, but it undermines further the purpose of NOMS—to reduce reoffending.

In all this, we must not ignore the effect on staff morale in the existing service. Small things so often tell us so much. A briefing from Napo reminds me that in the consultative paper all references to the Prison Service are in upper case while references to the probation service are in lower case. It is not difficult to share the feeling of the staff concerned that that service is being phased out. Having said that, I find the remarks on this made by the noble Lord, Lord Birt, reassuring as he was part of the creation of NOMS.

If these remarks are all negative, I should say that there have been many criticisms of NOMS in the course of this debate, not least from me. But the debate has been marked by many constructive contributions which, with the expertise available among your Lordships, are so valuable a feature of this House. I was particularly impressed by the window of opportunity in the present staffing arrangements of NOMS outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and by the visionary speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Filkin. I know he will be welcomed by my noble friend Lady Thatcher as a late convert.

The Management of Offenders and Sentencing Bill, which passed through your Lordships' House in February 2005, never saw the light of day in another place. Since then there has been much discussion, and this debate will be an important feature of that. We also await the findings of the inquiry into the apparent failure of the service in the light of the murder of John Monckton. My party awaits those findings with considerable interest before formulating its final approach to the present proposals. In the light of all this, I look forward to the Minister's reply.

My Lords, I also thank my noble friend for giving us this opportunity for an excellent debate. All the speeches have been powerful and showed real commitment and deep interest. I particularly thank my noble friend Lord Filkin and the noble Lord, Lord Birt, for setting out so graphically some of the history, philosophy and vision because that will enable me to concentrate on some of the other issues. I also particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, for outlining so clearly why the aspiration to create a national offender management system which will reduce re-offending is so important and the role that the voluntary sector should properly play in it. I take this opportunity to reassure him that the policy which the Government have adopted on supporting the voluntary sector will remain. The three-year provision is critical. I also thank the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman, for indicating that his party is not at the moment at least implacably hostile to the proposals and will await with interest how they develop.

It is true that we are at a critical point in our plans for transforming how we manage offenders. We will shortly be publishing our reducing re-offending five-year strategy and our Bill that will include proposals to enable us to implement the necessary structural changes in the way that probation services are run. That will be after the most careful consideration of the results of our consultation on the future of the probation service. I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, that with every day that passes I do nothing other than think, think and think again. He does not have to exhort me to do it; it is a constant state of being.

We have had a large number of responses to that consultation and I think that it would be wrong for me to pick out any individual. What I can say to noble Lords is that there has been a wide spectrum of views and all those views need to be considered and fed into the response that we will make in relation to them.

We have made enormous progress in recent years to raise standards in our management of offenders. I particularly thank, therefore, the noble Lord, Lord Elton, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for so generously acknowledging the chances that have been made. But I would also emphasise that although the Government have provided the resources and the structure for that change, that change has been delivered by the professionals on the ground, working with great energy and great commitment with the offenders themselves. So credit must be shared in that regard. Both the Prison Service and the probation service deserve great credit for that. But we need to do much more. That is the real answer that I give to my noble friend Lady Gibson in relation to how far there is to go. We need to do more because the figures on re-offending cannot give us any comfort at all. My noble friend Lady Massey is right in saying that we still have a long way to go.

Our challenge is simple. It is to reshape the system to make sure that time in the criminal justice system is as effective as possible at turning lives around and stopping people offending again rather than acting as a brief interlude in a criminal career. The focus of the new offender management services should be on tackling the linked factors that make offenders more likely to commit crime. Many noble Lords have outlined those and made reference to them—not least my noble friend Lord Filkin, the noble Lord, Lord Birt, and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia.

We should have a system that does not just provide a set of services based on what has always been provided before. Our system needs to start with an excellent assessment of the offender—the risks that they pose and the factors that have influenced their offending and may again in the future. We also need to introduce more flexibility about who provides what, making the system work better to target individual offender's needs and reduce their offending. It will allow us to focus on the particular needs of groups within the offender population. That will allow us to play to the strengths which different providers can bring—and history has told us that we need the contribution of all if we are to succeed in making the changes we must make if we are to reduce re-offending.

The key part of our proposals is that the national offender manager and the 10 regional offender managers will be commissioners of services for offenders and will be accountable through the chief executive to Ministers for reducing their re-offending. That is why it was correct that the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, my noble friend Lord Filkin and others emphasised this need for accountability. They will be responsible for mapping out the services that are needed for the offender in order to divert them away from offending, and for putting together contracts with a wide range of different partners who can best meet those needs. Often, contracts will be with the Prison Service or the probation service; but where others can do the job better, they will get an opportunity so to do.

Regional commissioning will marry the benefits of flexibility with good planning and the ability to contract for services that cross boundaries—for example, a programme of drug treatment that can be provided to an offender both while he is in prison and once he is released. That sort of continuity is something which the service may find difficult but which the offender may find a necessity.

To reduce re-offending we need effective, targeted and consistent offender management so that offenders are managed in a consistent, constructive and coherent way during their entire sentence. A single named offender manager will be appointed for each offender, working with them throughout their sentence both in custody and in the community to assess accurately their needs. That will improve the selection, sequencing and targeting of interventions for each offender.

Advancements in IT will underpin and support the work of offender managers and help us better to share information about offenders wherever it is needed across the whole of the criminal justice system. In addition, we expect the operational efficiency gained by their introduction to allow us to reinvest savings in front-line service delivery.

Our plans for the reform of offender services are about delivering better services to achieve a reduction in re-offending and are incentivised by a more flexible, reactive and locally appropriate approach. There is nothing in our plans that would undermine the essential nature of local delivery.

So, hand in hand with establishing a commissioning regime, we want to make services more contestable, to check which supplier offers best value and drive up performance all round to encourage innovation and to make sure that we are engaging the best providers at a time when there are more demands than ever on those managing offenders in the community.

We need to be frank. We do not currently have the number of interventions that we need to make the necessary difference. That is an area that must be grown. We need legal change to set up a full commissioning regime across prisons and probation under the regional offender managers so that they can directly commission joined-up offender management services. We have consulted on proposals to give the Secretary of State the statutory duty to make arrangements with others to provide probation services; and to create new bodies, replacing local probation boards, with whom he may contract. We will be introducing legislation shortly.

I should make it clear that, contrary to the fear of my noble friend, this is not privatisation. We want to get the best possible service and the best possible value for money. Contestability should not be seen as a threat. Probation has the greatest opportunity that it has ever had to make a contribution in that regard. I should also say something about the pace of change. It will not be sudden. It will be measured and carefully thought out, and there is a lot of preparatory work to be done before we can begin the process.

Our proposals will enable a new form of partnership. It is not true that competition will destroy partnership. On the contrary, it will create the climate in which a variety of different bodies from the public, private and voluntary sector collaborate to provide different but complementary services to offenders. That approach will play to the strengths of the different sectors. Our proposals should therefore not be seen as a threat to the National Probation Directorate staff who will continue to be the valued backbone of our staff. We take very seriously the comments made by my noble friend about morale and our aspiration is to ensure that staff remain in good heart, because they should have confidence about what they are about to achieve.

Between 1997-98 and 2005–06, the probation budget has risen by 45 per cent in real terms. The number of staff now employed has risen to 20,000 from 14,000 over the same period, which is a rise of 44 per cent. Those figures continue to rise. Our commitment to the probation service should therefore not be underestimated. We value the skills and professionalism of those working in the probation services and encourage others to join.

On the point raised by my noble friend Lady Massey, drug treatment will be provided alongside the national framework of care involving the Drug Intervention Programme, the National Treatment Agency, the prison and probation services and the National Offender Management Service. That framework aims to deliver an end-to-end approach for the continuity of care of the drug-misusing offender, including addressing individual needs for education, training, treatment, employment and health—including mental health and housing.

Meeting the healthcare needs of offenders remains the responsibility of the Department of Health, and drug services for offenders are not commissioned by the regional offender managers. They will, however, be working with partner agencies to ensure effective commissioning that reduces re-offending by meeting offender needs.

The National Probation Directorate will continue to be the principal deliverer of offender management services in the community, especially for the most dangerous offenders. I say that in the hope that I can reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, that her concerns in that regard need not be as soundly based as she fears that they are.

The National Probation Directorate is leading a robust programme to improve the management of risk of harm issues. A project board is overseeing a detailed improvement plan that has been agreed with Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Probation. This includes a focus on achieving the new target that 90 per cent of risk of harm assessments, risk management plans and OASys sentence plans on high-risk offenders are completed within five working days of the commencement of the order or release into the community. A revised version of the risk of harm manual is being prepared for circulation before April 2006. So the National Probation Directorate is providing strong leadership to ensure that chief officers prioritise work with high-risk offenders. Areas will be expected to give full support to local MAPPA.

Partnership to reduce re-offending is at the centre of our plans. In November, I announced a package of new initiatives designed to increase the involvement of a wider cross-section of society in reducing re-offending. Therefore, I was pleased to hear the emphasis that the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, put on the role and involvement of business and what was said by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Exeter who expressed such warm support for the alliance and the important role being played by community chaplaincies. As noble Lords will know, the corporate alliance will work with employers from the private, voluntary and public sectors, to encourage more employers to take on offenders.

The civic society alliance is about building on our relationships at a local level with local authorities, organisations and people who can help us to find homes, jobs and support for ex-offenders. The faith, voluntary and community sector alliance will build on the good work already under way, such as the many volunteers and mentors working with offenders in prison and local communities. The local focus will be very much there.

We need to make sure that we move forward together with our key stakeholders. The alliances give us a framework to mobilise a whole range of people and will be taken forward as an integral part of reducing re-offending strategies at a national, regional and local level. I have seen many inspirational examples of excellent partnership working across the country. We understand the benefits that we have derived from coterminosity in the local criminal justice boards. We understand that that must be preserved. Noble Lords will know that we will have to change in part because of the new arrangements that will take place for the police.

In November I also set out the way forward over the next 18 months for the cross-government National Reducing Re-offending Delivery Plan, which defines seven pathways out of re-offending. Much has been achieved since the 2004 action plan was published: a third fewer prisoners are discharged without accommodation arranged; more than 10 per cent of adults now gaining basic skills qualifications do so from prison; and 40 per cent more offenders leave prison with a job to go to. With the launch of community payback, communities have the opportunity to have some input into the type of work that offenders carry out in their neighbourhoods. Its aim is to make unpaid work performed by offenders more visible and more representative of the communities' needs. As well as carrying out the work, offenders acquire skills which are useful in the job market. The local flavour will thereby be retained.

Partnership also means the National Offender Management Service working in collaboration with the rest of the criminal justice system. Examples of recent progress are that more victims are seeing their offender brought to justice, with 14.9 per cent more offences being brought to justice compared with two years ago, and declining public confidence in the criminal justice system has been reversed and has improved by four percentage points in the past two years.

The NOMS and Youth Justice Board approach to communities and the civil renewal initiative was also launched in November—an issue which I know the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, the noble Lord, Lord Elton, and others have very much welcomed. NOMS and the Youth Justice Board will aim to promote effective use of community engagement throughout adult offender management and youth offender teams, building on the many examples of good practice that already exist.

I know that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said that we need accountability for the different sectorial elements. In particular, he mentioned women. We are determined to ensure that in delivering interventions and services for offenders we respond to the needs and characteristics of women in the criminal justice system. We have done that over the past 10 years in a fairly clear and dramatic way. To tackle women's offending specifically, we are taking forward the Women's Offending Reduction Programme. It focuses on improving community-based responses to the factors which affect why women offend and encourages greater use of community sentences for women offenders rather than short prison sentences. All this gives us an opportunity to focus on the issues.

Our plans, which will be outlined in the forthcoming Bill and in the five-year plan, will allow us to commission services according to need and from the most effective provider. They will make a reality of end-to-end offender management by commissioning services across geographical boundaries—

My Lords, I wonder if the Minister will be able to respond to the question put by my noble friend Lady Howe and I about whether judges and magistrates are favourably disposed towards these reforms.

My Lords, I answered that by saying that we have had a large number of responses and that those will be considered. They have come from judges, magistrates, individuals and the unions, thus covering a very broad spectrum. In our response to the consultation we will of course refer to those in full. I hope that I have now spoken sufficiently clearly and that the noble Baroness can hear me.

We have heard real agreement in this debate on what is needed. We all agree that the national offender management approach would be the right one, and the question is how do we do that and what about the detail: why the change? I have to say to noble Lords that because we have listened to what has been said by practitioners and others, we have moderated the ways in which these matters are being brought forward. I can assure noble Lords that we will take very seriously indeed the consultation process in which we have been engaged. However, we have found ways to deliver services and we need to continue to find better means so that we can interrupt offending patterns of behaviour.

My right honourable friend the Home Secretary recently stated that his purpose is to put the reduction of re-offending at the centre of correctional services. I am much encouraged by the fact that all speakers who referred to his Prison Reform Trust speech have done so in warm terms. I was extremely proud that we were able to express our joint vision for the future in a way that has connected so powerfully with those who have had the opportunity either to listen to or read that speech. It encapsulates the aspirations that Ministers jointly hold in relation to the future.

I thank all noble Lords who have engaged in the debate, one which has rightly drawn attention to the importance of the National Offender Management Service and its impact on the criminal justice system. I hope that we have demonstrated not only that we are attentive to these issues, but also that we have in place key programmes of activity, each of which will produce far-reaching change to alter things for the better as part of the drive to reduce the scourge of repeat offending.

I know that my time is up. A number of very specific questions have been put to me which I undertake to respond to in writing.

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, which has been interesting and stimulating. As always in your Lordships' House when we hold a good debate, I have learnt a lot.

I want to respond briefly to two speeches, both made on my side of the House. To my noble and good friend Lord Filkin, I accept the need for change, a point I made in my speech, but it is the way in which the change is being implemented that I have difficulty with. My noble friend comes from his background and I come from mine. I admit to being an old-fashioned trade unionist and I make no apology for that. However, I do not think that I am a Thatcherite, which I believe my noble friend accused me of being. I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, would agree with me. I really do not think that the noble Baroness would have agreed with my remarks had she been in her place.

In response to the noble Lord, Lord Birt, I say merely that I am sorry, but I do not accept that broadcasting can be equated with the criminal justice system, and I shall leave it at that.

I sincerely thank my noble friend. As always, she has given a very full response. I listened carefully and I shall read it in Hansard later. I reaffirm that I agree with the aims of the Government in regard to re-offending but it is the way in which NOMS is being applied that gives me fears. I heard again her pledge that the Government have listened and will continue to listen to the voices raised. I hope, therefore, that they will consider further the fact that the probation service—both its managers and its staff—believe quite genuinely that most of what the Government want can be achieved by expanding and building upon what is already happening. With those few words, I beg leave to withdraw my Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.