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I have a further concern about the approach of new public sector management. It tends to be a one-size-fits-all approach. Mistrust of professionals, especially in the public sector, as the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, made clear—
Lord Filkin: My Lords, I made it explicitly clear that we had great confidence and belief in the public sector professionals in the Probation Service but that they needed to be liberated from a system that was not harnessing their talents.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, we will discuss that further—perhaps outside the session—but the question of how one restores the confidence of the public service and of local officials is very much part of what some of us wish to pursue. I refer to the purchaser/provider split and contracts based on contestability. All those underlying assumptions run through this Bill. There are limited timescales for contracts and the assumption that mistrust is built in between the principal and the agent. Accountability is through markets and targets rather than through democratic scrutiny.
If the initial reforms do not succeed, we have to change the structure again. After all, in the Government’s
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At the briefing on the voluntary sector we were told that the level of commissioning from the private sector had gone down sharply since 2001. That is partly the result of the previous reorganisation. Now we are having another reorganisation to reverse what went wrong last time. Leaving things more at the local level where relations between the voluntary sector and the public sector are often good and close, as I have seen, should perhaps be allowed rather more.
One size does not fit all. Patterns of contracting modelled on the oil sector were applied to the rail sector with disastrous results. This sector has a number of special conditions. There is the unavoidable and highly desirable and necessary engagement of many agencies in dealing with offenders, including prisons, courts, police, probation officers, social services, learning and skills councils, hostel providers and voluntary organisations of many types. Interventions have to take account of local conditions and individual needs. There is a limit to how far they can be squeezed into a single national model. When I hear the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, talking about imposing the same rigorous national standards on all concerned, I am a little worried that we shall impose one single national model on the diverse conditions of local crime and local offending across the country.
Then there is the need for trust among those who work together. Long-term relationships are required for trust, and I am not sure how compatible that is with contestability. The briefing talked of building a more joined-up management process at the regional level, in which regional offices of central departments, such as the Department for Education and Skills, the departments dealing with social security matters, and so on came out of their silos—a good new public management term. But what we need is more joined-up government at the local level. If the regional agencies increase fragmentation at the local level, we will have lost more than we have gained.
From these Benches, we want to probe the relationship between the public sector and the voluntary sector. From those to whom I have listened and from what I have read, I get a more mixed picture than that suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland. There are some within the third sector who are enthusiastic about the Bill. They see themselves as contractors to government on a much larger scale. Others see their role as being complementary to the role of the state and as having distinctive and different functions. They are worried that the new style of regional contracting will force them into a role with which they will not be happy. Quoted in the Social Market Foundation and Rainer pamphlet I found so helpful, Patricia Hewitt talks about the National Health Service—but the same applies here—saying
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There are diverse views within the voluntary sector, in which local voluntary organisations, which see themselves as befrienders of the alienated and confused ex-offender—the traditional role of the Probation Service, which it has now sadly lost to become more of an agent of the state—would be threatened by a more remote regional offender management contracting system. In his excellent piece in the SMF/Rainer pamphlet, Julian Corner says that he is concerned,
- “that the state will almost invariably incline towards solutions that can be delivered en masse through target-driven performance systems and that it is fully capable of doing so in the face of common sense ... Unless there is seriously intelligent commissioning behind it, efficient delivery can often be the enemy of effective delivery”.
In the same pamphlet, Rod Morgan goes on to say that he worries that,
- “the new breed of correctional technicists ... developing the promised land of cognitive behavioural offender programmes and electronic surveillance”,
will squeeze out those concerned with the particular problems of confused and alienated ex-offenders.
On the ground in Yorkshire, I found close co-operation between the third sector and the public service. There is a Shelter office inside HMP Leeds. That sort of thing should be encouraged. I know that there are mixed views about that sort of relationship, but it is highly desirable. There are three probation hostels in west Yorkshire, run by church agencies; again, that is highly desirable. I was told more than once that a local Muslim charity played an immensely helpful role in helping to re-establish trust between the Kashmiri community and the rest after the riots in Bradford. I also heard people saying that they were not at all sure that a regional offender manager would even be aware that there was a local Muslim charity in Bradford.
We on these Benches are concerned to protect the voluntary sector from too close an embrace by the state, to preserve local links, and to resist the replacement of the assumption that what drives the voluntary sector is a large dose of altruism combined with some expectation of economic recompense with one which implies, as the new public management theory does, that only economic incentives count. I have discovered no great enthusiasm for greater private sector involvement, and an active concern that it would threaten further fragmentation. I discovered that the concept of offender management is already fully grasped and works through close co-operation between agencies, prison officers and those outside but that those on the ground are struggling to cope with overcrowded prisons, the consequent overload on rehabilitation, education, training and so on, and with pockets of poverty, unemployment and social dislocation—from which flow so many of the offenders with whom they work. We must deal with that underlying problem, and that is not served by constant restructuring. From these Benches, we shall therefore be probing the rationale for so many of the proposed changes in the Bill.
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4.29 pm
Lord Birt: My Lords, I have fewer conflicts of interest to declare than the noble Lord, Lord Filkin. My wife was the founding director-general of the National Probation Service and I was the Prime Minister’s strategy adviser for some years, involved, inter alia, in crime policy.
The Bill should be supported by all those who believe that addressing offending behaviour is by far the most effective means of reducing crime. I think that almost all noble Lords who have spoken implied that they do. As a country, we have significantly reduced crime over the past 10 years or so. We have much to be proud of, but nothing whatever to be complacent about because crime in the UK is still high by international standards. This is a critical point to fasten on. One example of that is that, as yet, we have failed to contain the epidemic of acquisitive crime, which is sometimes violent, that is committed by problem drug users to fund their habits.
There is an enormous amount of work still to be done in the criminal justice system. The system is far more effective than it was, but it must become far more effective still. My view is that NOMS is the most profound and progressive change in the architecture of the criminal justice system in recent times and offers the best hope of a step-change in system performance. NOMS introduces the radical notion of a single offender manager supervising offenders throughout their sentences, whether they are in prison or in the community. It marks the end of “pass the parcel” which has characterised the criminal justice system for ever. For the first time, it makes possible a single point of accountability. Thus, NOMS offers a powerful opportunity to address, tackle and, ultimately, change offending behaviour.
As a reform, it cannot reasonably be characterised—as some noble Lords have done—as unnecessary meddling, zealous perpetual reform or yet another scheme disconnected from what has gone before. It is not; it is a natural progression from what has gone before. It is important to be clear that NOMS does not displace the historic probation ethic, let alone emasculate it; rather, it places the offender manager at the epicentre of the criminal justice system. Moreover, the Bill arms the offender manager with the means to deploy the most effective interventions and to tailor to need. It will encourage and reward effective innovation and social enterprise in the voluntary sector, the private sector and, I stress, the public sector because competition is a stimulus and a spur. No one doing good work as a service provider in any part of the existing system has any reason to be fearful.
There is much common ground between me and other noble Lords who have spoken, including the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, but I was perplexed by the emphasis she placed on centralism, which other noble Lords also mentioned, as if the only notion characterising offender management should be localism. Almost all day-to-day decision-making in this system must, of course, be devolved and local, but one reason why the system has worked so imperfectly for long periods of time is that it has not
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I have a final point: NOMS needs to be properly funded. If you take a strategic overview of the criminal justice system as a whole and look at the relationship between investment and outcome, it is clear that if we want—as we should—to achieve a further substantial reduction in crime, we need over time to shift the balance of resources away from policing towards effective offender management. Even in advance of that shift, the Bill is a critical step forward in building a modern and progressive criminal justice system. It has my wholehearted support and I commend it strongly to your Lordships.
4.35 pm
Lord Carter of Coles: My Lords, we all seem to be able to agree about the main objectives of any offender management system—the wish to protect the public, to punish, to reduce reoffending and, of course, to deter. However, we seem to be having a great deal more difficulty in agreeing how we are going to do this.
It is interesting today to hear the paradox of people talking on the one hand about fragmentation and on the other about centralisation. There are many challenges in this. We need to examine them. Most societies struggle to find a balance between how they operate fines, community sentences and custodial sentences. Always we seek to maintain the integrity of the justice system. The integrity and credibility of the justice system is the rock on which this is all built. We have to balance that with quality and cost.
The issue today is not so much about that balance but about how we deploy the resources we have allocated for the care of all offenders. It is worth reflecting for a moment that each year in this country we spend about £3.2 billion on looking after offenders. Contrast that with the fact that we spend only—I say “only”—£4.5 billion per year on oncology; that is, caring for everybody in this country needing cancer care.
One of the key roles for government must be to set priorities between the different calls on resources. One of the very difficult things in this area has been to provide government with evidence of what works. I have never been active in any area which was so strong on assertion and so short on facts. It is really interesting if you look around worldwide. Billions of pounds a year are spent on incarcerating people and trying to stop reoffending, yet the absence of credible
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Any offender management system needs the confidence of the public and sentencers; it needs the support and belief of those who work in the service and, in particular, of the professionals. We have had a strange situation—other speakers have referred to this. We have had a very fragmented system with fragmented responsibility. The DCA was responsible for fines, and prison and probation were—in what somebody called modern jargon—the silos in the Home Office. Of course, that led to the well rehearsed gaps as offenders moved from one silo to another, and to the realisation that we needed to do something about end-to-end management to get this to work. The recent announcement of the creation of the Ministry of Justice puts the offender experience, as perhaps one should call it, under one roof. That is to be welcomed. I should say to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, that I quite see his point. I know it will be difficult, but it is very nice when we talk of things being joined up to get everything in one place.
Lord Hurd of Westwell: My Lords, does the noble Lord agree that if you close one division, you open up others? You are now going to separate the police from the rest of the criminal justice system. You may close one thing, but you open up another, with all the costs of disruption to which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, referred.
Lord Carter of Coles: My Lords, that is a point, but if you look at the rest of Europe, those separations have proved to be strong and well established. On balance, that move across will be beneficial.
I should declare an interest as the author of the 2003 report, Managing Offenders, Reducing Crime, which led to the call for the creation of the National Offender Management Service. Three key points emerged from that report. First, resources should be taken into account when sentencing. Secondly, as everyone has noted, offender management should be joined up. Thirdly, and probably most importantly for this debate, each of the key components, such as fines, community punishment and prisons, should be made effective. The issue was what role contestability should play, because it is an important driver. I shall come back to that point later.
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I have always been absolutely clear that probation, with a good IT system, is the glue—others have used that word—that holds the offender management process together. I am also clear that although I favour contestability, I never envisaged, or indeed believed, that we would see the wholesale privatisation of probation. I have sometimes thought in the last couple of years as I have watched the debate that there are many similarities, at least in some quarters, with the dog watching television—he can see it but he does not get it. Whether by design or misunderstanding, some people have sought to conflate the issues of marketisation—that is, contestability and privatisation—while seeking to ignore outcomes. After all, positive outcomes are what we are trying to achieve. This is not about inputs, as others have said.
Like others, I have gone around the country in recent weeks, talking and listening, and I see widespread support for the mixed provision of many aspects of probation from the voluntary sector, the private sector and parts of the public sector where alternative providers have already come to play a valued role. However, genuine concerns have been expressed—I subscribe to some of them—about the courts and offender management being dealt with separately. The Government have responded to those concerns by setting a three-year period, which should give a breather to let the right assessment be made.
The idea that the proposed reforms to probation would damage the ethos of the service and would threaten and fragment it is, frankly, unreal. Indeed, if I have read the 1907 Act correctly, it suggested even then that, in addition to publicly salaried probation officers, others could do the work. It is a long established tradition. Some of the things that have been said diminish probation officers, who after all are professionals. We know what defines a profession. A profession is defined by training, qualifications and standards. It is certainly not defined by who the employer is. If we were to start down the road of a profession being defined by who employs the staff, that would lead us logically to taking the legal and accountancy professions into public ownership, which I personally would not favour.
The real benefit that we should expect to see from these reforms is innovation, as others have said. We are looking for other solutions. We have not made the progress that we should have made, despite enormous endeavours, and are looking particularly at interventions. One of the things that shocked me when I conducted the original review was to be told repeatedly that the voluntary sector did not have the capacity to do this work. It simply was not there, the problem was too big, and people would not come forward. Yet when an advertisement was placed locally in a certain part of the country, seven organisations came forward, three of which locally people had not experienced before, and five of which demonstrated that they were able to do the work. As noble Lords have said today, around the country the voluntary sector is prepared to step up to the plate and, I believe, can form a key ingredient to going forwards.
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Noble Lords have also referred to contestability in terms of the standards and, I believe, tensioning which will come from a competitive process. There is no doubt in my view—we have seen it in other sectors, particularly the Prison Service—that contestability was not the process of getting new people in; it was the effect on the existing service. People, when shown the way, behave brilliantly. It has been suggested that the marketisation process in the Prison Service was a simpler model than that proposed for probation, but that was not so. Although 8 per cent of the Prison Service was privatised, there was a sea change in the way in which the whole service was run. The result was to free up hundreds of millions of pounds which has been spent on rehabilitation. It has not been sucked out of the service and spent by the Chancellor elsewhere. It has been taken from guarding measures and put into proactive programmes which, if one looks at the results, are beginning to bear fruit.
I have got the sense from many people that probation should focus on building its progress since the formation of the National Probation Service. Its biggest task is to convince the public that community punishment has validity and bite. It was best summed up the other day when one of the few criminal defence solicitors still speaking to me said, “I’ll know you’ve got it right when my clients, on receiving a community sentence, don’t thank me for getting them off”. We have a problem, which it would be silly to ignore. If we want to get our prison population to the right level, we have to get community sentences right as well.
However, I encourage probation to have confidence in its achievements and new measurement tools, and be ready to move on from what I hear is a defensive position to a position where it can play its full part, which is its due, in the reforms going forward. After all, it is a growth business. In 10 years, the number of people employed in the Probation Service has increased from 14,000 to 21,000. There is a commitment to the Probation Service, so it can move on and can play the key part.
Those of us who were involved in probation prior to the 2000 Act know that the local nature of probation services was not good. We did not get 1,000 blooms of light; we tended to get inconsistencies and not a very good service. The NPS has helped us to move forward on that. The fact remains that what happens to offenders is so critical that often the issue comes to Parliament and the Secretary of State. Therefore, I am very sure that there should be clear accountability, which should flow. Very good points have been made about local representation. I am looking forward to studying the detail to see what we can do, but I do not want to see gestures. I want to see real local involvement in how this is conducted.
The proposals, particularly on concessions, represent a measured way forward. Above all, we need to get out and do something. We have tarried a long time and do not need to debate and tinker with it. We need to make it clear to the people who need help that programmes are there, and make it clear to all those who work in probation services where their future stands. I commend the Bill.
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