Probation Services

Lord Woolf Excerpts

Monday 15th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Woolf (CB) [V]]

I am pleased that I am able to join in the general welcome given to the Statement. We want to focus on the future and not the past, but I must take issue with the Minister talking about a journey, because the journey that took place was in the wrong direction and has damaged a very well-established service in the most unfortunate way. In future, it will be critical that the probation service is given a substantial period of time during which it can be allowed, without interference, to rebuild its confidence and morale so that it is once more capable of playing the central and positive role in the criminal justice system that it did in the past, as I remember well when I was primarily a criminal practitioner on the then Oxford circuit—which I accept was not recently.

[Lord Keen of Elie [V]]

The noble and learned Lord and I differ on the journey taken by the probation service, but we both acknowledge its central importance in our criminal justice system. I am pleased and relieved that he believes we are, if only now, travelling in the correct direction. We plan to bring these reforms into place by June 2021, by which time we hope we will be in a position to ensure that the model we have now refined will deliver the sort of probation service our criminal justice system requires and very properly demands.