Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Kate Green Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

The problems with the precautionary clause are twofold. First, it is worth saying that this House voted for the reforms by a substantial majority last week. Secondly, the precautionary provision would prevent any change whatever to the entire probation service from being made. The clause is completely flawed. It would prevent any kind of restructuring or reorganisation within an individual trust, let alone any other part of what is proposed. I am afraid that we will therefore seek to overturn that amendment in Committee because, as I say, it would make it impossible to run the probation service, even in its current form.

We are talking about people who have offended before, some of whom are often highly persistent offenders, and far too many of them go on to reoffend. In 2011, about 50,000 adult offenders were released from short prison sentences. Nearly 60% of that group went on to reoffend, committing a total of 85,000 crimes. That is 85,000 crimes too many—a depressing merry-go-round of offending, blighting the lives of men, women and children in all our constituencies.

Labour Members have talked about us taking risks with public safety, so let me tell them what really is taking risks with public safety. It is leaving the situation unchanged. Those 85,000 crimes include some of the most serious crimes that our society knows—thousands of them each year, including hundreds of serious sexual and violent offences. Yet we are leaving the people who commit those crimes to go on and on unsupervised.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

The probation service, of course, has never been asked or required to supervise that group of offenders before, so is there any reason why the Justice Secretary could not give the public probation service the opportunity to carry out this supervision when the legislation passes?

[Chris Grayling]

I refer to what Labour said in 2010—that it could not do that. The hon. Lady and her colleagues said very clearly that they could not afford to proceed with custody plus—the scheme that they brought forward that would enable the probation service to provide supervision for these offenders. We have come up with a way of doing that. Labour said that in 2010—just before the last election. That is the reality of what we are dealing with. We are talking about people who go on and on and on committing crimes, unsupervised. I see that as the real public safety scandal; it is a flaw in our system that I want to solve and Labour Members seem not to want to solve.

Sadly, it is no surprise that reoffending rates for this group are so high. The average time served in custody for that group is only nine weeks—not nearly long enough to tackle these issues while in prison. After that, they are released at the halfway point with £46 in their pocket and little or no support. Some engage with voluntary rehabilitation programmes after their release, but at the moment there is no mandatory period of supervision in the community. That is what this Bill changes. The core of the change in this Bill is the delivery of 12 months of supervision for those people.

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[Sadiq Khan]

If the Justice Secretary has his way, within the course of 12 months those who receive a sentence of less than 12 months will be supervised and we will have to wait and keep our fingers crossed that there will be no risk to public safety. If there is no such risk and the Justice Secretary finally oversees a rehabilitation revolution, of course we will not stop that supervision—that would be ridiculous. The Justice Secretary’s problem is that he cannot tell us how much it will cost, how much reoffending will go down by, or how many fewer crimes will be committed. That is the big flaw in his plan. It is not evidence-based. It has been worked out on the back of an envelope. The last time he tried to do that was the Work programme, which was not a huge success.

[Kate Green]

Of course, one of the problems is that whoever undertakes the supervision activity will have to meet the requirements imposed by a sentencing court, which will be predetermined and come with an element of unbreakable cost. Is it not, therefore, something of a distortion to suggest that these are payment-by-results contracts when a substantial proportion of the cost will, in effect, be determined by the sentence passed by the court? Surely the Justice Secretary could tell us now what costing he has made of that.

[Sadiq Khan]

My hon. Friend has more optimism in the Justice Secretary’s competence than I have. The Social Market Foundation showed recently that it is possible for private companies to still make a profit based on the fee for service, without relying on the PBR element. The Justice Secretary has not even worked out what percentage will be PBR. Will it be 5%, 7%, 10% or 15%? He has no idea. He is the most incompetent Justice Secretary in history.

While I am on the subject of extending supervision, I should say that I, unlike the Justice Secretary, have met probation trusts and they have said that they would be up for taking on those on sentences of less than 12 months if only the Government would let them. They were never asked to do so by this Justice Secretary. Instead, he would rather trust G4S, Serco and the like. In fact, some probation trusts already work with the most prolific offenders in this group, even though they do not get the money to do so. They just see it as the right thing to do.

Instead of abolishing probation trusts, why will the Government not give them the chance to prove their mettle with those on short sentences? Why has the Justice Secretary decided that the existing local structures, which have a proven track record in reducing reoffending, are to be ignored in favour of organisations with no track record in this area? Why have probation trusts been barred from bidding for the contracts to supervise low and medium-risk offenders?

Before I conclude, I need to address the issue of payment by results. The Justice Secretary is pretty good at briefing journalists that his reform of probation will mean that private companies will be paid only if they rehabilitate offenders. Who would not be in favour of a system that pays private companies only by result? However, the Justice Secretary does not brief journalists with the small print. We have absolutely no idea what percentage of the contract payment will be dependent on results—and neither does the Justice Secretary.

I want the House to be clear about what we do and do not support. We support attempts to reduce reoffending. We support extending supervision to those in custody for less than 12 months. We support attempts at through-the-gate support for those leaving prison. We will only support policies that are grounded in evidence of what works and that will not put the public at risk. We cannot afford to undermine public confidence in our criminal justice system with ideological leaps in the dark that could risk public safety.

It is mendacious of the Justice Secretary to attack those who do not subscribe to his particular approach as being in favour of the status quo. The “you’re either with me or against me” approach does not wash. We do not subscribe to the Justice Secretary being judge and jury about what works without waiting for any evidence. We do not support him ignoring experts whose knowledge in this area is at a level he will never be able to match. Placing tabloid headlines ahead of what really works is a dangerous game.

If our reasoned amendment fails, we will table amendments in Committee and on Report to try to address the very serious concerns of experts in the field. We believe it is possible to work with the public, private and voluntary sectors, and that it is possible to reduce offending without taking a risk with public safety.

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[John Healey]

That is absolute nonsense. Public bodies, like local authorities, have reserves to deal with uncertainties. Why does the Minister not take a look at the legislation passed by his Government on local authority funding, which is based increasingly on business rates and contains an element of risk? Good, prudent public authorities can manage those risks, and there is no reason why probation trusts should not be able to bid for this work and do it as well as they do the work with the offenders they are already responsible for supervising.

[Kate Green]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that what the Minister has just said is Kafkaesque? The Minister is saying that he would rather contract out, with risk, to unproven private companies than retain in-house quality services without risk.

[John Healey]

To which I might add that the probation trusts have a proven track record—certainly in south Yorkshire—of dealing with the group the Minister is rightly most concerned about: offenders who have served less than 12 months in custody. That work is already done in south Yorkshire by the probation trust, with multi-agency teams including the police, drug workers and housing officers. The Justice Secretary’s plans will split up those cases and break the relationships on which such excellent work is dependent and currently undertaken.

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[Gareth Johnson]

Central Government are trying to help probation officers to create mutuals. They are working with the Cabinet Office to ensure that they can bid for the contracts, so that they can continue to provide the assistance that they now give. What is missing from the Opposition’s argument is the fact that the changes will enable us to help 50,000 more people. Surely, we should all be proud of that.

[Kate Green]

The Greater Manchester probation trust has been highly innovative in developing programmes with the private and voluntary sectors, and it has developed a successful programme called Achieve, which involves getting offenders back into employment. It has scored much higher outcomes than the Work programme. Can the hon. Gentleman explain why the trust, having prepared to take that programme forward and to bid for one of the new contracts in a mutual, co-operative structure, was told that it would not be allowed to do so?

[Gareth Johnson]

It is above my pay grade to give information on why a probation trust has been refused a contract. I find it heartening, however, that so many of the examples given by Opposition Members involve charities and other organisations outside the probation service working successfully with offenders. I welcome the fact that the Bill will roll out that programme to ensure that more people get that kind of assistance.

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[Paul Goggins]

Indeed. It is regrettable, in a way, that the Government took custody plus off the statute book rather than trying to build it up, and even work on a cross-party basis.

We are told repeatedly that the cost of supervising the 50,000 offenders who leave prison having served short sentences will be met from the savings generated by the competition that will take place for the rest of the work that has been allocated. I said two weeks ago that I did not believe that, and I say the same today. The maths itself tells the story. The Government propose that the private and voluntary sectors should be given 70% of the current probation work load: that is to be the deal. Some 220,000 offenders are currently being supervised by the probation service; 70% of 220,000 is roughly 150,000—and the private and voluntary sectors must find the resources to supervise another 50,000 on top of that.

When I go to the supermarket, I am used to seeing “Buy three, get one free”, but I am not used to seeing that when it comes to planning and paying for the supervision of some problematic offenders. It just will not wash. Ministers keep saying that they will not give us the figures because the information is commercially confidential and is all to do with competition, but they know that the figures will not add up, and they really ought to come clean about that.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) made an important point about the potential for an unintended consequence in the sentencing of offenders. There is a danger that, as a result of the Bill, more people will be subject to short-term prison sentences and the value of community sentences will be undermined. I am not saying that that is what Ministers intend, but there is a danger of it, and it is spelled out in the impact assessment: Ministers accept that there is a risk of so-called uptariffing—that people will get a more severe sentence than might otherwise have been the case.

We know that there will be 600 extra prison places as a result of the numbers of offenders who will be recalled to prison, but there is a risk of a change in the behaviour of sentencers, too. It is common sense that if a sentencer is being offered a choice between a package of community activity and supervision and, as an alternative, that package plus some prison beforehand, they will be tempted to go for the belt-and-braces approach. I would appreciate it if the Minister would tell us in his winding-up speech what discussions he has been having with the magistrates and the Sentencing Council to make sure that we do not see an overuse of short-term custody as a result of his changes, and an undermining of community sentences.

There is also a real risk that certain vulnerable groups will not be helped if the Bill’s provisions are interpreted in, as it were, an automatic way, because that will lead to more supervision and stronger sanctions. A higher proportion of female than male offenders receive a short custodial sentence, and many of them come out of prison to chaotic lives and with abusive relationships to deal with. If things break down, it may not be appropriate for them to go back to prison automatically. That worries me, and I would like the Minister to say more about the flexibility in the system he is introducing, so people do not too automatically go back to prison when their needs are rather different.

[Kate Green]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for mentioning women offenders. Does he agree that there is a problem with payment-by-results contracts in that, because there are fewer women offenders and unit costs are therefore higher, and because their needs are often more complex, they are often more expensive to supervise and therefore may be particularly unattractive to private providers?

[Paul Goggins]

That is a very real concern and I am glad that my hon. Friend has had the chance to put that point on the record and introduce it into the debate. Groups with specific and additional needs—vulnerable female offenders or mentally ill offenders, for instance—will not be an attractive proposition to people who are looking to do things at the lowest possible cost.

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[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Madam Deputy Speaker, it is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time. It is also a great pleasure to participate in such a well-informed debate.

I listened with great interest to a number of the contributions, particularly that of the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes), with whom I found myself in considerable agreement at many points. The difficulty is that he believes that we should take on trust the need to proceed with the terms of the Bill, and give the Bill a Second Reading, when so many questions have been raised and left unanswered in this debate and the debate that took place in the Chamber a week or so ago. That might not matter if we felt that there was time, during the passage and implementation of the legislation, to undertake careful scrutiny of those concerns, and time to research and implement the measures necessary to address them, but the proposals are being rushed through by the Government.

Already, shadow structures are being set up, the bidding process is under way, and local probation staff are being asked to begin to think about their future under the changed structures. There will be an incredibly rapid approach to trying to implement what a number of my colleagues have rightly described as rather half-baked legislation. If I believed that, if we gave the Bill a Second Reading tonight, the time would be taken to address all the concerns properly, I might be prepared to vote for it, but the problem is that we know that Second Reading will be followed rapidly by the final stages of the Bill and implementation, and a series of major concerns will be left unanswered. That is a real worry.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Has my hon. Friend observed that under the programme motion, we will complete the Committee stage by the beginning of December? It is highly unlikely that any further reports can be prepared by then, and that we can have an informed discussion on the issues, before the whole Bill is disposed of.

[Kate Green]

The timing is of serious concern, and is driven more by electoral imperatives than a desire to make sure that we devise a system that is effective and right.

There is much to welcome in the intentions behind the Bill. Like many others who have spoken, I warmly welcome the wish to introduce post-release supervision for those serving short-term custodial sentences. As many have said, there has been a gap in our system up till now, and it is good to begin to explore ways in which it could be filled. I am also pleased to see a provision in the Bill on considering the needs and circumstances of women offenders. We have been pressing for that since Baroness Corston’s excellent report; it is approaching five years since it was published. It is welcome to see that making an appearance in the Bill.

However, those welcome objectives in no way justify a pell-mell destruction—a wholesale dismantling—of the public probation service that is not founded on logic, and does not appear to be founded on good or consistent evidence. That is why clause 1, with all its flaws—I accept some of the flaws that have been suggested—is important. We should not pursue these far-reaching changes without proper parliamentary scrutiny of the detail of what will be put in place. If the Minister would like to come forward with ways to improve the clause, and suggest to what degree that parliamentary scrutiny is appropriate, I would be happy to hear what he has to say, but it seems quite wrong to continue down the track of implementing the proposals when such serious concerns are being expressed.

[Jeremy Wright]

This is probably an unfair intervention, as I see that the hon. Lady does not have a copy of the Offender Management Act 2007 with her, but does she know where in that Act anything comparable to clause 1 appears?

[Kate Green]

No, that is not my point. My point is that we are going into a wholesale rearrangement of the public probation service—a service that has existed to manage the totality of risk, and take overall responsibility for it. That is what is being broken up. It is extremely important that we do not go down that track without proper parliamentary scrutiny of the implications and consequences, and that scrutiny is what clause 1 seeks to achieve.

[Jenny Chapman]

The Minister was being rather cheeky, because we had a whole Act to reorganise the probation service and establish trusts. The Government are attempting to dismantle the probation service without any parliamentary scrutiny whatever.

[Kate Green]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend.

There are concerns about the contracting structure that will be introduced as a result of the Bill. I want to repeat some of the concerns that have been expressed about the way in which the contracts will be priced. It has been presented by the Lord Chancellor this afternoon and more generally as predominantly a payment-by-results model which will seek to introduce new private funding into a marketplace where, within the public sector, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) pointed out, it would be difficult to find those levels of additional funding, particularly in these times of public spending constraint.

The point is that a very small proportion of these contracts, it seems, will genuinely be payment-by-results contracts. Substantial elements of these contracts will be subject to meeting court requirements, which means that there will have to be enough money in those contracts to ensure that those court requirements can be adequately met by the contractors. That, for a start, will leave relatively little room for manoeuvre in pricing a more discretionary element and an element that is about payment by results.

It is also the case, as my right hon. Friend pointed out, that within the existing spending envelope not only are these providers to manage about 150,000 existing offenders subject to supervision, but to take on board a further perhaps 50,000 within the context of the same funding envelope. That is not credible. It means either that we will have a very poor quality of intervention and/or cherry-picking, with a substantial number of those offenders receiving no support of any value at all.

I am also concerned about the way in which the pricing structures will respond to what a number of hon. Members have talked about—the changing risk profiles that we see when offenders are subject to supervision. As others have said, offender risk profiles are not static. Risk profiles can vary. Offenders can be beset by a range of external pressures and circumstances—bereavement, loss of a job, ending of a relationship, becoming homeless and so on—all of which can take a relatively stable low to medium-risk offender and suddenly catapult them into being high risk. At that point, we understand that the low or medium-risk offender would switch from being supervised by a non-statutory provider into the public probation supervision system. They would be supervised within the statutory sector.

But I do not think we have been told—perhaps the Minister will intervene on me if he has information to share about this—how that would be reflected in the pricing and the reward for the private contractor, and what additional resources would be made available to the public probation service if the risk profiles that had been assumed in the initial pricing of the contract turn out not to be what is experienced in practice.

[Jeremy Wright]

rose—

[Kate Green]

I sense that the Minister is going to offer me some information.

[Jeremy Wright]

I accept the invitation. On the first of the two points that the hon. Lady raised, in relation to what happens to the income for the provider if someone moves out of the medium and low-risk category and into the high-risk category, the answer is that that individual will stay within the cohort for payment-by-results purposes, so there is no financial incentive—that is the purpose of this—for the provider to move someone on to the public sector. On the second issue that she raised—how the public sector attracts the money to do the extra work with the extra people—the money should follow the individual.

[Kate Green]

I am not sure that I have totally understood this. It seemed that the private provider would retain any income attached to the result—the outcome—although we do not know what proportion of that overall payment to the private provider will be for the result and what will be a fixed payment for having to carry out the basics of supervision. It is welcome that the Minister says that resources will follow the offender, and therefore that if there is extra activity to be carried out in the public sector, the public sector will receive the necessary resources to carry out that work, but I am not quite clear where that funding will come from if the private provider is also to be remunerated in full for the work that it has carried out and for any ultimate outcome that may be achieved. Perhaps the Minister will be able to provide more detail as the Bill proceeds on its parliamentary passage. It would be useful to understand the cash flow and funding models in more detail.

Concerns have been expressed about the way in which prisoner risk categorisation will be undertaken. We have quite a long established system—OASys, or the offender assesment system—for determining levels of risk. It is being suggested that one of the things that the Ministry of Justice may wish to do is to revisit that risk assessment system to try to change the profile of the offender base so that more offenders can be deemed to be low or medium risk and supervised in the private or non-profit sector rather than, as would be suggested on current risk assessment tools, within the public probation service.

[Jenny Chapman]

My hon. Friend is right to draw the House’s attention to this issue. As I understand it, a new risk assessment tool will be introduced at the same time as these reforms take place. Is she concerned, as I am, that this would be the worst possible time to introduce that change?

[Kate Green]

We have clearly heard the same rumours. It is important that we understand what the new risk assessment tool will look like, what the implications will be for the overall risk profile of this cohort of offenders, and whether we can expect to see some significant shifts in the way that the level of risk is identified and assessed.

[John McDonnell]

This is getting barmier by the minute. The transaction costs need to be assessed. The transaction costs of the reassessment of offenders with the new risk assessment tool will be massive. In addition, there will be the transaction costs of monitoring the flow of money as offenders move between the risk categories.

[Kate Green]

Perhaps I am overcomplicating what is being proposed by the Government, but it seems to me that the whole financial structure and the way in which that relates to risk assessment is very unclear to Members—certainly to Opposition Members. It would be helpful, during the passage of the Bill, for the Government to make that clear to us so that we can understand the true financial as well as the risk consequences of what is proposed.

[Jenny Chapman]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Kate Green]

I will give way one more time, then I want to move on to another issue.

[Jenny Chapman]

My hon. Friend is very generous in giving way and I am grateful. The problem is that we will not have the opportunity to go into these issues in more detail as the Bill progresses because none of the concerns being raised is in the Bill. That is the point of our amendment.

[Kate Green]

It is clear that we need much more time to scrutinise these proposals properly and, sadly, that is not what we are being offered by the Government tonight.

I turn to an issue that has been raised by a number of hon. Members, mostly Government Members, about the opportunities that exist for probation trusts in some form to bid for the new contracts. It is pretty clearly understood in my area that they will not have that opportunity to bid. It is baffling to me that, when they are doing such good work already, we would not want to give them the opportunity at least to compete for those contracts. They might not be successful, but surely where we have good models of provision in the public sector, we would want to enable them to put themselves forward in competition with other potential providers.

It has been said, rightly, by a number of hon. Members that there will be the opportunity for probation trusts to set up different kinds of legal structures—co-operatives, mutuals, shadow structures and so on. I am not sure why we think there is any particular advantage to the public in forcing them to go down that route. Again, I cannot help but believe that it will create extra cost and extra complexity. Nor is it clear to me that we know what these mutuals and co-operatives will and will not be allowed to bid for.

It would be helpful if the Minister commented on that in his response and told the House how he envisages these entities coming into a system when the contracting is beginning to take place already, before many of them have had any chance to get off the ground.

[Paul Maynard]

rose—

[Kate Green]

I know that the hon. Gentleman is interested in this issue so I am pleased to take his intervention.

[Paul Maynard]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way. She is being most generous. Does she agree that Greater Manchester is one of the more innovative probation trusts and has had a number of very successful schemes and should perhaps be seen as a litmus test of whether the condition for mutuals is going to occur in practice.

[Kate Green]

I agree that Greater Manchester has been innovative. As I say, in my discussions with Greater Manchester, the trust was preparing for exactly this approach, at least a year ago, and had the brakes put on. It was told that it would not be able to bid in the process in the way that it had planned, so I would be interested to understand, as I think the hon. Gentleman would, what Greater Manchester and other such trusts will and will not be able to bid for, what sort of entities they will have to establish to enable them to bid and potentially to take a leading role in that bidding process, and whether there will be time for them to create those entities and put in bids, given that, as I understand it, the preliminaries of the process are already under way this month. He and I look forward to some reassurances from the Minister.

A number of my colleagues have pointed out that the Lord Chancellor’s proposals mirror the structure and approach of the Work programme, which he introduced as Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions. Leaving aside the pretty poor performance of the Work programme to date—I am prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt; it may achieve improved outcomes over time, although it is getting off to a depressingly slow start—in the light of everything that has been said in the Chamber this evening about what we have seen from the Work programme and what seems to be being replicated in these contracts, I am concerned that we will have a national top-down driven system, when what we have heard from both sides of the House, about innovative experiments in different parts of the country, is that a localised, bottom-up, partnership approach across a range of local agencies has been what has worked best.

I am concerned that the track record of some of the large multinational providers, who are likely to bid for these contracts—indeed may be the only people qualified and able to take the risk inherent in bidding for these contracts—is that they are not good at developing supply chains down the local agencies. As hon. Members may know, many voluntary and charitable organisations have complained bitterly about their experiences with the Work programme. They complain that they have been used as so-called bid candy, but have not been given any opportunity to deliver activity. They complain that they have had very few referrals, having been included on bids by the large prime contractors. There are real concerns that we are seeing a model that looks very like the Work programme in terms of top-down, Department-led contracting. There are also concerns about whether we can be confident that those problems and pitfalls will not occur in these contracts in the way that they did in the Work programme.

[Mr Burrowes]

Are not the hon. Lady’s fears somewhat allayed when she looks beyond some of the headlines and at some of the private companies? The ones that are delivering results and are effective in reducing offending, which would be paid in the system, are only those that are properly engaged at a local level with small organisations and the voluntary and public sectors. It is only when all that comes together at a local level that they will deliver results and be paid, so their every incentive is to do what the hon. Lady fears will not happen.

[Kate Green]

The same claims were made for the Work programme, but the experience has been entirely different. At the very least we must expect the Minister to give us some reassurances as to why this will be different when the model looks so very similar.

Hon. Members have talked about some of the innovative programmes in their own probation trusts. As has been said, Greater Manchester has had a number of particularly innovative programmes. One in particular speaks directly to the Government’s proposals for post-release supervision for those serving short custodial sentences. I am sure the Minister will be familiar with the Choose Change programme that was developed in Greater Manchester. It has been running for a number of years and we await its final evaluation. I hope that the Government are drawing some interesting and important lessons from that experience, on which I would like to hear the Minister’s comments tonight.

It is clear when we look at Choose Change—a through-the-gate programme, working with offenders in prison, as they left prison and on release—that it depended heavily on being a multi-agency programme in which private, public and voluntary providers were all comprehensively engaged. That included the prison and probation services, corporate partners, the voluntary and community sector, and, crucially, local authorities. I am very unclear how local authorities will fit into the model of provision in this Bill.

It was instructive from Choose Change that the range of interventions needed was extensive. They included interventions in relation to employment, education and training. Many offenders, as the Minister will be well aware, have exceptionally poor levels of literacy and numeracy, so investing in routing them to the right educational opportunities and continuing their education commenced inside prison consistently on release is an important element that will need to be designed into any provision. Income and access to financial services have been a key element of what the Choose Change programme has identified as being important for offenders on release. Housing needs are an exceptionally urgent priority for many on release, as are health needs, particularly mental health needs. It often transpires that offenders have no registered GP to whom they can turn for health care, and their engagement with the health service has been sporadic.

The need for a package of interventions, bringing together a number of agencies and players, and beginning that work inside the prison and continuing it as part of a continuing process—not a broken process whereby the prison services does this inside prison and someone else does it post-release—will be an incredibly important feature of what the Government seek to achieve. I am pleased to see the Minister nodding as I say that. I hope that he will be able to reassure us this evening that there will be a continuum of support, not a form of support that begins only as someone leaves the prison gate. There has been a lot of encouraging discussion this evening about through-the-gate models, but we need to understand how those will work within the prison as well as after release.

We also need to understand that the interventions will be made in the right sequence. Some things can only happen easily post-release. It is quite difficult to do much, for example, about housing until someone is near the point of release. But other things, such as education and preparing for employment, can be started much earlier. The sequencing of interventions inside prison and post-release will be very important, and I would be grateful if the Minister said something about how he sees that working in these new contracts.

It will also be important to know how the programme that will be put in place through the contracted provision will work with other programmes already running in the community in relation to criminal justice. That includes how it will work with prolific offender programmes, integrated offender management programmes and programmes such as Spotlight in Greater Manchester, which enables the police and other criminal justice agencies and social services to keep close tabs on those in the community, perhaps not serving sentences but known to the system. How does the Minister envisage those different community-based initiatives will be linked into what is being proposed?

The Minister will also want to look carefully at the learning from Choose Change, which shows that intervening with offenders who have long histories of offending behaviour is particularly challenging. Some offenders who are serving their eighth, 10th, 15th or even their 20th short custodial sentence will be particularly difficult to work with on release. Therefore, it would be useful to understand how the Minister envisages these contracts being able to cope with, on the one hand, those who may have had one experience of custody, where it is to be hoped that with good post-release supervision they could be quickly taken off the track of offending behaviour and we could see some effective rehabilitation, and on the other hand, those who may have 10, 15 or 20 years of offending history. The lessons from Choose Change are that that is a very challenging group of offenders to work with, and simply wrapping some fairly basic post-release supervision around them is unlikely to be sufficient to change the course of their offending behaviour.

How does the Minister envisage the contracts being structured to incentivise inter-agency working and in particular how working with women offenders will be made financially attractive to providers, which has been mentioned by a number of hon. Members?

I agree with the Chair of the Select Committee—I will return his compliment by saying that I rarely disagree with him—that there are many good examples of women’s organisations and centres producing extremely strong support programmes for women offenders. In Greater Manchester we have the extremely successful Women MATTA—Manchester and Trafford Taking Action—initiative, which has worked with the Pankhurst Centre, the local authority, the probation service and so on. However, many of those women’s projects are now under severe funding pressure. They are not cheap to run. I hope that the Chair of the Select Committee agrees that women’s special needs and circumstances mean that cut pricing will not necessarily be very effective for women offenders. I am therefore keen to hear whether the Minister is confident that the structure of the contracts will reward providers for working with the especially challenging circumstances faced by women offenders and how they will be incentivised to make use of the very good practice and experience of the women’s centres across the country that have been delivering such programmes in recent years.

In conclusion, I must say on behalf of the Greater Manchester probation trust and a number of Opposition colleagues that our opposition to giving the Bill a Second Reading is not the result of wholesale opposition to introducing a mix of private and voluntary providers, which has been a feature of the effective working we have seen in Greater Manchester and across the country in recent years. We are concerned that there is little evidence that that particular approach to wholesale contracting out with an arbitrary cut-off point at the level of medium to high-risk offenders is the right way to structure the participation of private and non-statutory providers. There seems to be little opportunity for the very good programmes that have been run by the public probation service to compete effectively in a rapid time scale and continue to be major players in the provision of the services that the Government are now seeking to introduce. There are real concerns that strong local relationships and structures will be disrupted by the bidding process. Finally, as my right hon. Friend the shadow Justice Secretary said, there are real concerns about the risk consequences for the public. I hope that the Minister can offer more reassurances in that regard than we have had so far this evening.