Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Anne Main Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hanson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning that case. Given the nature of probation service business, mistakes will be made. My contention is that mistakes that might currently be made could very much be exacerbated by the fragmentation of the service and the potential downgrading of its quality, as well as by the fact that the existing public accountability will not be as clear cut.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a very interesting speech. I am sorry that I missed its beginning, but I was at the Backbench Business Committee. Has he dealt with the sifting process? Some of my constituents have expressed concern that it is done at a snapshot in time, as they have been allocated to two different services based on the window of 11 November. Has he tackled that?

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Wright]

The pilots that we cancelled were not sufficiently close to the proposals that we are making for us to learn as much as Opposition Members would like us to have learned from their conclusion. That does not mean that we learned nothing from their period of operation. The point has been made from the Opposition Benches that it is possible to learn from pilots even if they are not allowed to run to full term. We certainly have learned from those pilots and from other experiences of payment by results. I will return to that point in a moment.

The Government essentially had two options. We had to decide how to approach the task of tackling reoffending rates within our means. The hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) is right that reoffending rates are too high. We could not allow that situation to continue without a response. We could simply have imposed further significant cuts on the 35 probation trusts without targeting our efforts on those with the highest reoffending rates, or we could have brought in innovative approaches to supporting offenders that would also be more efficient and that would allow us to reinvest some of the savings to target support through the gate on the under 12-month group. We chose the latter option. At the heart of our proposals is the aim of opening up the supervision of low and medium-risk offenders to a diverse range of new rehabilitation providers to bring in the best of all sectors to tackle reoffending.

The right hon. Member for Delyn discussed the Offender Management Act 2007. He was here at the time and witnessed the passage of the Act at first hand. He knows that what I have described was the policy of the Government at that time. The Opposition want to forget it now, but they have to be reminded that the powers for which they legislated and to which Parliament agreed in 2007 entirely underpin the reforms that this Government are making. I have explained what Lord Reid said when he was Home Secretary. He made the matter perfectly clear when he said:

“The Secretary of State…will be responsible for ensuring service provision by entering into contracts with the public, private or voluntary sectors. With that burden lifted, the public sector can play to its strengths while others play to theirs.”—[Official Report, 11 December 2006; Vol. 454, c. 593.]

[Mrs Main]

The Minister is making a powerful case for why there needs to be reorganisation. However, will he help the staff who will be involved in the transition process by saying what the new organisations will look like? My constituents have told me that there is uncertainty about the new bodies that they will be obliged to work with and concern about what they will look like. Perhaps that would help to make the transition a little easier.

[Jeremy Wright]

I agree with my hon. Friend that it is important to keep existing staff informed about what is going on. We are trying very hard to do that. If there are specific issues in her area, I am happy to look at them. We are keen to ensure that staff are informed. If she will forgive me, I will come back a little later to the pace of the changes that we are making, which has been a substantial issue this afternoon.

Before I do that, I want to make a couple more points about the background to this point, and the issue of further parliamentary approval for what we are suggesting. I have already made the point that section 3(2) of the Offender Management Act 2007 states:

“The Secretary of State may make contractual or other arrangements with any other person for the making of the probation provision.”

In Committee, the Opposition were unable to dispute that the power that they legislated for is clear and unambiguous. The phrase

“contractual or other arrangements with any other person”

does not mean solely with probation trusts or trusts commissioning other providers, or solely with the public sector.