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Lord Ramsbotham: 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
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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 want 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 have 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
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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
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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 is something which should not be allowed to go by default.
3.43 pm
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