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Lord Filkin: 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
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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 of 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
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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.
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Baroness Howe of Idlicote: 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
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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.
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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
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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, they say, 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.
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