Baroness Chakrabarti
Main Page: Baroness Chakrabarti (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for repeating that Answer. I admire her for doing it so well; it is not an easy gig. There has been cross-party authorship and ancestry to privatisation of probation and, indeed, other vital services at the core of the state’s principal duty to protect people. So I do not want to make partisan points but to say what we have learned and what we want to do differently in future. It seems to me that there is a constitutional problem with privatising services at the very core of keeping people safe, whether it is the military, policing, prisons or—if we are serious about reducing offending in the future, as we heard so eloquently from the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove—probation, too.
In that spirit, I ask the Minister, and all noble Lords here, to consider whether it is time to say that probation should not be for profit, so that we can have the greater ministerial accountability that our people deserve and we can put this at the core of everything we are about, in Parliament and in government—not contract it out or do it on the cheap, but take responsibility. Do the Minister and other noble Lords agree that we should do this? I say this to put private contractors, whether they are succeeding or failing, on notice that this is something that we on this side of the House are very concerned about.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton
The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, is correct that this is not an easy gig, but I believe that probation can have a positive future. In the past we have opened up probation to a diverse range of providers. This was supported by Labour when it was in government; clearly, no longer. We need to learn lessons from the first generation of these contracts and we certainly have. We believe that public, private and voluntary providers all have an important role to play and we would like to see better integration, under new arrangements, so that they can all work together to protect the public and tackle reoffending.