Probation Service

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

I shall make some progress first.

The Justice Secretary seems to come out in a rash at the mere suggestion that he should pilot the plans. Back in January, when I challenged him on that, he put his gut before hard facts and evidence when he said:

“Sometimes we just have to believe something is right and do it”.—[Official Report, 9 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 318.]

That from the man who brought us the Work programme. He will forgive me if I do not base my opinions on what we should do with a probation service employing thousands, supervising hundreds of thousands and serving millions on his hunch, because his hunch led to billions being spent on a Work programme that performed so badly that someone who was unemployed stood a better chance of being in work after six months if they had not been on it. The Public Accounts Committee’s verdict on the Work programme was that

“providers have seriously underperformed against their contracts and their success rates are worse than Jobcentre Plus”.

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sadiq Khan]

Fast forward two years and the same model has resurfaced in probation, but this time the fallout from failure is of an altogether different magnitude—[Hon. Members: “Give way!”] Madam Deputy Speaker, you know that I am extremely generous in giving way to colleagues on both sides of the House. It is just a shame that it took an Opposition day debate to drag the Justice Secretary here to discuss his plans, which we are quite keen to scrutinise. I will make some progress before giving way.

The Economist hit the nail on the head when it stated:

“If the work programme fails, the cost is higher unemployment; if rehabilitation of offenders fails, the cost is worse: more crime. Which is why those now-disregarded pilots were set up in the first place.”

As if that is not criticism enough, the article goes on to refer to the Justice Secretary’s plans as “half-baked”.

[Sadiq Khan]

The hon. Gentleman has some audacity. The Conservative party voted against the Offender Management Act 2007, in which we tried to change how probation works. Which voting Lobby did he go into? Was he with us? No, he was not, so I will take no lectures from him on our plans to reform probation.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

The right hon. Gentleman quoted rather selectively from the Public Accounts Committee report—I know because I am a member of the Committee. One of the points we were keen to make was that we were talking about people in a long-term relationship with providers. We had to take a very balanced decision on the success of the programme after two years of engagement with people who had been unemployed for a long time and needed a lot of help. He should look at the Committee’s full conclusions, in which we said that the direction of travel was positive.

[Sadiq Khan]

The hon. Lady is just wrong. I am happy for her to go and get the report and quote what it says, but I have a copy here and I have read it. I will refer to it again in a few moments, so she can correct me again if she thinks I am wrong, but I know that I am right, because I have the report here.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sadiq Khan]

The question that our constituents are asking is: why are the Government so keen to suck up to the big and powerful?

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sadiq Khan]

Let me make some progress.

The Justice Secretary would like us to believe that the companies will not be paid unless they deliver, as if payment by results means payment only by results. In fact, nearly the whole fee will be paid to the private companies regardless of the results. Private companies are intent on squeezing the fraction of the payment that is dependent on results as close to zero as possible. The Government are so keen to suck up to the big companies that they have caved in. So much for payment by results. No doubt the Justice Secretary will claim that he is doing only what the Offender Management Act 2007—which the Conservatives voted against—gave him power to do. In fact, that Act established local probation trusts, empowering them to commission services locally from whom they see fit. It was not about abolishing local probation trusts or commissioning services directly from Whitehall.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) was at the time the Minister responsible for the legislation, and he knows exactly what it was for. [Interruption.] I can hear some chuntering but do not worry, Madam Deputy Speaker, it is not putting me off. In 2007 my right hon. Friend said that

“there will also be a need for local probation trusts to act not just as service deliverers but as commissioners of services from the voluntary sector, or from others, providing a proper service to help prevent reoffending at local level.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

I have heard empty rhetoric from Opposition Members before, but this afternoon it is particularly poor. The hon. Member for Batley and Spen (Mike Wood) tried to position the debate as a public versus private one. The entirety of my career before becoming an MP was in the public sector. The ethos of public service flows through my veins. We are talking about having effective vehicles to deliver our policy objectives. Whether delivery is public or private is not important; the important thing is that we achieve the outcomes we intend. That is why the instinctive opposition to the proposals from Labour Members is disappointing. As all hon. Members recognise, the rate of reoffending remains stubbornly high, notwithstanding the efforts of Governments of all colours. Unless we show some imagination in tackling that, we will not win the fight against crime and we will continue to fail people who are trapped in the cycle of reoffending. I welcome the initiative and imagination shown by the Government. As we have heard, the National Audit Office has estimated that the cost of crime committed by offenders released from short prison sentences is up to £10 billion. For the sake of those offenders, their potential victims and the economy, we must not allow that to continue.

Let us focus on the outcome we are trying to achieve, not on the inputs or on maintaining a provider-led system that is failing to deliver. I was most motivated to speak in this debate by hearing the comments of the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), who desperately tried to pray in aid the Public Accounts Committee to back up his position. The role of the PAC is to assess proposals on the basis of value for money. It is getting increasingly tiresome to hear it being prayed in aid to attack Government policy, because that is not its role. We examine the effectiveness of the machine at delivering the policies.

The right hon. Gentleman was right to highlight the report by the PAC on contract management by the Ministry of Justice, and we never hold back on criticising poor contract management across the public sector. It is well known that Whitehall needs to learn a lot in that regard. One of the things that we did in our earlier report on the Work programme was praise the approach to that particular aspect of contract management, which was based on payment by results so that the private sector providers taking those contracts bore the risk. That is a principle that needs to be read across government, and it is an important principle for the proposals that we are talking about.

I bow to no one in my admiration for the Committee Chairman, the right hon. Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge), and the way that she is extremely inventive at spinning our reports to give maximum comfort to the Labour party. It says a lot about the lack of talent on the Opposition Front Bench that she is their most effective weapon.

As I have said, the risks will be borne by the providers. If they succeed in transforming the lives of people who are caught up in the cycle of reoffending, what is not to like? If they succeed, people are freed from the cycle of reoffending. If they do not, they do not get paid. What is wrong with that?

[Mike Wood]

I was delighted to hear about the nature of the blood flowing through the hon. Lady’s veins, but could she address the question of the percentages in the contracts? The latest figures suggest that private companies will get 90% of their money whether they succeed or not.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

If that were the case, I would consider it exactly the kind of poor contract management that I have been talking about. The important point is that we pay for results. Equally, we should reward those companies that are helping the most difficult.

[Richard Graham]

My hon. Friend is making some extremely good points, and I hope that the Opposition are listening carefully. The hon. Member for Batley and Spen (Mike Wood) keeps referring to private contracts, but the Lord Chancellor has confirmed twice today that probation trusts can bid for those contracts in conjunction with someone who can take the financial risk. Does she agree that the hon. Gentleman should stop slagging off the private sector?

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

My hon. Friend pre-empts my next point. We have been talking about private versus public, but it is not like that. We are not just talking about the Sercos and the G4Ss. We want public servants to come together and create mutuals. We are most effective when we all work in partnership. The “us and them” culture perpetuated by the Opposition does nothing to improve outcomes for anyone, whether in jobs, tackling reoffending or anything else. This stale thinking has had its day. We are in the 21st century, not the 20th.

Police and crime commissioners will have a massive role in bringing together successful partnerships to bid for contracts. I pay tribute to an imaginative approach in my constituency, spearheaded by the police and crime commissioner, working with the youth offending team. The team had to find a new home. One of our police stations had closed. The PCC brought together a partnership between the council and the youth offending team, which enabled the re-opening of the police station, with a front-facing desk, that also provided a secure working environment for the team and its clients. That is a great example of partnership working and of how police and crime commissioners can make a difference. I commend what the Government are doing on this agenda.