16:33 - Division on amendment to the Motion. - Ayes: 243 / Noes: 263 - Amendment to the Motion disagreed.
Lord Faulks
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendment 1.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Faulks) (Con)
My Lords, I start by expressing my regret that I did not have the benefit of being on the Front Bench when the Bill was last considered by your Lordships’ House. It was of course my noble friend Lord McNally, whom I am glad to see is in his place, who had the privilege of debating the Bill with noble Lords. I have, however, read the Official Report of those debates very carefully. I am struck by the expertise and passion displayed by all noble Lords who spoke. I have myself sat as a recorder so I have some experience of the issues that offenders face when trying to turn their lives around. However, my own experience pales in comparison with the experience and careers of many who have been involved in the justice system who have spoken during the passage of the Bill. I am sure that the collective experience of all those noble Lords will inform today’s debate, just as it has informed previous debates.
Commons Amendment 1 returns to the issue that dominated discussion when the Bill was last in your Lordships’ House: the Government’s reforms to probation under the Transforming Rehabilitation programme. It may help if I briefly summarise those reforms. Their aim is to reduce our current high reoffending rates. Almost half the offenders released from our prisons, and around one-third of those serving sentences in the community, offend again within a year, and of course prisoners released from short custodial sentences, who have the highest reoffending rates, receive no statutory supervision at all. I pay tribute to the excellent work that is already done by the probation staff with offenders subject to supervision in the community. They do important and difficult work. However, I am sure all noble Lords will agree that there is much more that we could do to address the causes of that reoffending, whether that is housing, physical and mental health issues, substance abuse or literacy, numeracy or employment skills.
It is unfortunately the case that we have to do so in the context of financial constraints on government spending. We spend around £800 million a year on probation services, a significant part of the Ministry of Justice’s budget and one that cannot be exempt from these pressures. We have a choice: either to make cuts to the current system, which of course does not provide supervision to the short-sentenced offenders who need it most, or reform the system so that our resources can provide support to all the offenders who need it. The current Lord Chief Justice put this challenge well last week when he said:
“The starting point is that we must be radical in our thinking”.
The Transforming Rehabilitation reforms rise to that challenge. We are seeking to draw on the experience and expertise of a wider range of organisations from across all sectors to support low-risk and medium-risk offenders in the community. We want to give probation staff working in those organisations much greater autonomy to support offenders as they see fit and to encourage innovation. We are creating a new National Probation Service—the NPS—directly to manage all offenders with a high risk of causing serious harm, together with any other sexual or violent offenders subject to multi-agency public protection arrangements—MAPPA.
The efficiency savings that these reforms will generate will be reinvested in two major prizes that many noble Lords have long argued in favour of. The first is a through-the-gate system of support for everyone released from prison, so that the same organisation is working before their release and afterwards. The second is the extension of supervision after release to short-sentenced prisoners, which is at the heart of the proposals in the Bill and which will allow us to support some of the most prolific offenders in our criminal justice system.
It was clear at Second Reading and beyond that many noble Lords wanted a greater chance to scrutinise these changes that the Government are making to probation services. That is what I understand to be the purpose of the amendment tabled on Report by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, which Commons Amendment 1 would remove. I remind noble Lords that the Secretary of State’s powers to commission services from a wide range of organisations already exist in the Offender Management Act 2007. Those powers, which both Houses approved, do not provide for parliamentary scrutiny of the services that the Secretary of State commissions. Nevertheless, I understand why the House might have taken the position that it did in June last year. At that stage, while the Government had announced their intention to commission probation services from a wider range of organisations, we were still developing the detail of how the new system would work. Nine months on, the position is different.
Lord Faulks
Before the noble Lord sits down, could he help the House with how he sees the form of the amendment? Does he interpret it as requiring almost any change, of any sort, in the probation service to come before Parliament?
Lord Beecham
That is not my interpretation of it. That could have been levied against the amendment originally moved by my noble friend, but this amendment makes it clear that we are talking about a national change to the structure of the service, not every individual detail. It is consistent with the description I have already read to the House—quoting Hansard—from the Home Secretary at the time, about the requirement for parliamentary approval for changes of the very kind that the Government are promoting without having sought such approval.
Lord Faulks
My Lords, this has been an excellent and important debate. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said that he wanted a debate on the probation service and he has got one. However, there have been a number of criticisms of the Government’s approach. Among other things, they are said to have delayed but then gone too fast. It is said they have not been sufficiently transparent and that the contract management is not sufficiently secure or not prospectively secure. I will deal with some of these criticisms without wearying the House too much. I have dealt with them in a number of meetings and documents sent to noble Lords but, for the convenience of those who may not have had those documents—or had a chance to read them—I will try and summarise some of our answers.
Since my noble friend Lord McNally committed to placing documents in the House Library, we have deposited 12 sets of letters, papers and publications about the reforms, including most recently all the draft contracts for the new CRCs. The noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, raised the question of how CRCs will interact with statutory and non-statutory partnerships. We published a consultation paper about this and all his concerns are now reflected in the operating model.
Many Peers raised concerns about big private providers outmanoeuvring smaller charities. We have made changes to the number of contract areas to allow for smaller bidders; placed a cap of 25% on market share; engaged with potential tier 2 and tier 3 organisations so that 800 are now registered; and we have decided to accept the suggestion made by my noble friend Lord Marks to set up an independent institute.
It is said that the approach has lacked transparency and there was reference in debate to the risk register. Both this and the previous Government have agreed that there is a strong interest for the Government in having a safe place to formulate and develop policies for extensive reform. To remove that space and to challenge and manage risks internally would risk damaging confidence in the programme and could lead to a culture where risks are not even raised and properly managed through fear of the implications of doing so.
I should emphasise that the risk register is by no means a list of things that will happen, only of things that might conceivably happen if we take no action and we should therefore plan for and mitigate the possibility of happening. That is simply good management. The risks are given an inherent score: the score when the risk is first identified without any controls or mitigations in place, and a current score with controls in place. A target score is also agreed. Risks are reported weekly to the departmental board, and throughout the course of the programme Ministers have been kept closely informed of emerging risks and actions being taken to mitigate them. Programme officials regularly meet Ministers—on average twice weekly—on various aspects of the programme, as well as having close and regular informal contact with Ministers’ private offices.
It is said that there is a lack of clarity about the costing of these reforms. The Cabinet Office and Her Majesty’s Treasury are full members of the programme board before the reforms and attend regular monthly meetings. They have been closely involved with our decision regarding the launch and the invitation to negotiate. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury approved the payment mechanism, the launch of the invitation to negotiate and the outline business case. The programme has been given Treasury approval.
The question of scrutiny was raised. How, the question was effectively asked, will we make sure that the new system is open to public and parliamentary scrutiny? The reform system will be regulated and held to account through a combination of independent inspection, audit and commercial account management. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation will inspect services delivered by both the National Probation Service and contracted sectors. NOMS will have the right to audit CRC delivery, and the CRC contracts will also allow the National Audit Office access to CRCs’ financial systems where public reassurance is needed.
The audit schedule in the draft contracts, which the NAO approved and commented that it provides far-reaching audit powers, provides NOMS with wide powers of access to information, IT premises and personnel, including emergency audit. The NAO scrutinises public spending on behalf of Parliament and holds government departments to account for the way they use public money by reporting the results of its audits direct to Parliament.
There was a suggestion that staff were not being well managed and that some of them, at least, were reporting to individual noble Lords that they were unhappy with the process of transition which will inevitably happen. We have transition managers working with every probation trust, whose sole role is to be the link between the MoJ and trusts. There are weekly updates sent to probation chiefs; weekly teleconferences are held with senior leaders; testing and pilots of key elements of the programme have been and are taking place; and experts from probation have been seconded to the programme to add their valuable experience.
In addition, the new heads of CRCs have now been appointed and meet on the MoJ’s sounding board, which is helping to manage the transition process. The Secretary of State corresponds regularly with probation chiefs both through letters and via video message. Ministers and the programme management regularly visit trusts and maintain informal contact with probation chiefs throughout the programme.
Lord Faulks
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendments 2 to 17.
Lord Faulks
My Lords, in moving Amendment 2, I shall speak also to Amendments 3 to 17 and 19 to 25. Although this is a relatively large group of amendments, most make minor or technical changes to the Bill and I will try to deal with them as concisely as I can.
I will start with the most noteworthy amendments in this group. Amendment 15 focuses on restorative justice. As I said earlier, I know that there is support across the House for the important role that restorative justice can play both in helping victims to move on from crime and in rehabilitating offenders. The amendment makes explicit that rehabilitative activities carried out under a community order, suspended sentence order or post-sentence supervision can include restorative justice. Noble Lords may already have spotted that this amendment is very similar to one originally tabled by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. Having debated the issue once again in the other place, the Government have been persuaded that it would be helpful to make explicit in the Bill our intention that rehabilitative activities can include restorative justice activities. This reflects the Government’s desire to see much greater use of restorative justice in appropriate cases. I pay tribute to the noble and learned Lord for first raising this issue and I hope that your Lordships’ House will welcome this statutory foundation for the use of restorative justice as part of the rehabilitation offered to offenders.
Amendments 2, 3, 4, 9 and 22 also pick up on an issue first raised in your Lordships’ House, this time by my noble friend Lady Linklater. Together the amendments deal with young offenders who are imprisoned for serious offences as a juvenile but are then released after they have turned 18. The Bill provides that this group of offenders, like others released from short sentences, will receive 12 months of supervision after release. The amendments make it clear that this supervision can be delivered either by an adult probation provider or by a youth offending team—YOT—as the Bill already provides for detention and training orders. There will be circumstances where a YOT may be better placed to deal with the needs of a young adult offender and it is absolutely right that the Bill should give flexibility to allow for this. In that way we can avoid the cliff edge of a sudden transition from youth to adult services. Again, I pay tribute to my noble friend for having championed this issue during the Bill’s original passage through the House.
Amendments 11, 12, 19 and 20 focus on drug testing requirements imposed as part of licence or the new post-release supervision period. Currently, an offender released on licence can be required to submit to compulsory testing in cases where the offender’s conviction offence is on a trigger list. The trigger offences are those crimes that are most likely to be linked to misuse of drugs. They include theft and fraud offences as well as drug offences.
Since the introduction of the Bill, we have looked in more detail at the evidence on drug use by prisoners in the Government’s Surveying Prisoner Crime Reduction survey. It suggests, as one might expect, that there is a strong correlation between prisoners who report use of class A or class B drugs before sentence and those who go on to reoffend. However, it also suggests that using the trigger offence as a filter omits around half of all prisoners who are class A drug users and the majority of those who are class B drug users. In short, where an offence is not on the trigger list but is linked to the offender’s use of illegal drugs, there is no power to require the offender to take drug tests where that would support their rehabilitation. Similarly, in a scenario where a persistent offender who is abusing drugs commits an offence that this time happens not to be on the trigger list, there is no testing power either after they are released from custody.
These amendments replace the trigger offence threshold with a new, two-limbed test: first, the offender has a propensity to misuse specified class A or B drugs; and, secondly, the misuse by the offender of any specified class A or B drug caused or contributed to any offence of which he has been convicted, or is likely to cause or contribute to the commission of further offences. That mirrors the threshold in place for the drug appointment requirement also contained within the current Bill. It continues to provide safeguards to ensure that testing requirements are not imposed in inappropriate cases.
Amendments 14, 16, 17, 21, 24 and 25 collectively allow for the transfer of the post-sentence supervision period created by the Bill to Scotland, Northern Ireland and other UK jurisdictions. Currently, terms of imprisonment and associated licence periods after release can be transferred to and from UK jurisdictions under provisions in the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997. That can happen on a restricted basis, where the sentencing provisions of the exporting jurisdiction apply in the receiving jurisdiction, or it can happen on an unrestricted basis, where the offender transfers on to an equivalent sentence in the receiving jurisdiction’s legislation. This gives flexibility for both the exporting and receiving jurisdiction to agree a transfer in the way that is most appropriate for an individual case.
These amendments make the necessary changes to the law to allow for post-sentence supervision, the supervision default order that is available as a sanction for breach of that supervision and the new drug appointment requirement to be transferred to other UK jurisdictions. The Government have worked very closely with the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive to agree the detail of these amendments. We have agreed with both Administrations that we will work with them in advance of commencement to review the existing operational guidance that exists on transfer of sentences. The existing position, where all transfers are agreed between the relevant jurisdictions, and where jurisdictions retain the right to refuse transfers, will continue.
Finally, Amendments 5 to 8, 10, 13 and 23 are technical changes to the clauses of the Bill that deal with consecutive sentences, drug appointments and fixed-term recall. They simply make clarifications to the way in which the clauses are drafted rather than any changes of substance. I can provide further details if any noble Lord has a particular question about them. However, to keep our proceedings concise, at this point I beg to move.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, I am happy to confirm the Opposition’s support for these amendments and I am grateful to the Minister for his explanation of them.
Lord Faulks
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendment 18.
Lord Faulks
My Lords, Amendment 18 removes the privilege amendment that your Lordships’ House added to the Bill before sending it to the other place. I beg to move.
Lord Faulks
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendments 19 to 25.