Offender Rehabilitation Bill [HL]

Lord Elystan-Morgan Excerpts

Tuesday 25th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

We are working within a very strict budget. Because we have other commitments as far as the overall expenditure of the department is concerned, we have also said that we will be spending a little less than the £1 billion that is spent on probation at present. We believe that with our experience of piloting other schemes we can bring that down. But that will unfold as we test against the market. One of the reasons why we cannot give the precise figures is that we will be going into negotiations with commercial operators who would very much like to know in advance what our baseline would be, along with our other financial operations. We know the figures in broad terms and, as we have said before, while this will make some savings, it is the flexibility, the hard bargains that we were able to drive with the private sector, and the efficiencies that we will introduce which will bring the costs down.

Yes, we all use the term “probation service” rather loosely. What my noble friend Lady Hamwee drew attention to was that there is no definition of it in statute, and therefore she was warning the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, of a possible defect in his amendment in calling it as such.

[Lord Elystan-Morgan]

My Lords, perhaps I may put a point to the Minister. No doubt he will recollect that at the end of 2010, the National Audit Office calculated that the cost of reoffending lies between the parameters of £9.5 billion and £13 billion per annum. Is it not therefore a reality that, even with the best will in the world and the most accurate attempt at analysis, it is impossible to arrive at any meaningful figure for what these new and revolutionary changes will bring about? It is not a question of not showing your hand in what might be a commercial negotiation that will have to follow, but that the figures are virtually unquantifiable and could mean massive public loss.

[Lord McNally]

I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord for that intervention, which probably was not intended to be helpful, but certainly was. That is because these are the stakes we are playing for. I do not doubt the figures he has given and indeed I have seen them. Reoffending costs this country between £9 billion and £14 billion, so let us not say that we are going to aim to prevent 50% of reoffending. If we could get it down to 40%, just think what that would mean in hard cash. That is the prize we are aiming for. Of course it takes some radical thinking and means taking risks that are outside the box—that is exactly what we are doing. When there is a new idea, it is a lot easier to throw spanners in the works or to say what is so often said about any new and radical idea, “Let’s have a bit more time to think about it and take it all a bit more slowly”. We have put a lot of work into this project and, as we develop and unfold it, we are willing to share information with Members of this House and others. However, the noble Lord is quite right that, as well as the impact on offenders who are taken out of the cycle of crime, and apart from the impact on victims who will avoid the crimes that the rehabilitated will not commit, there really is big money to be saved by carrying this through. I am as enthusiastic and confident about it now as I was when we started, and I hope that the House will feel the same as it did when it gave the Bill an overwhelming Second Reading.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Elystan-Morgan]

That, I think, is a very narrow and technical point. It may well be that, if Amendment 1 had referred not to the probation service but to the probation system, it would have been unexceptionable, and a very short, simple manuscript amendment would probably bring that result about.

As for the present amendment, I wholeheartedly support it, and it is all the more relevant now, on account of the earlier amendment being passed and incorporated in the Bill.

I was somewhat surprised by the Minister’s attitude to the amendment, and to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. If anyone has served the public interest with great, dispassionate and conscientious commitment in so many fields, it is he. It is entirely wrong that he should be listed with the “bad lad” wreckers such as me, who may sometimes be accused of having a somewhat subjective neutrality on the Cross Benches.

The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, referred to Punch and “Dropping the Pilot”, but I am thinking of another well known Punch cartoon, about the curate’s egg. The Bill is good in parts, but is thoroughly rotten in others. It is good and splendid in what it seeks to achieve, which is somehow or other to rid society of, or at least to ameliorate, the curse of reoffending. I have already cited, in an intervention on the noble Lord, Lord McNally, the National Audit Office’s figures, which he accepts. In 2010, the parameters were from £9.5 billion to £13 billion. The noble Lord now says that they are from £9.5 billion to £14 billion. That is apparently the point, in relation not only to the earlier amendment but to this one, too. He says that if there is a reduction of 5%, 10% or 20%, we will obviously achieve a massive public saving.

However, why must we assume that we shall make that saving? The probation service, which is now about 100 years old, is one of the most distinguished public services that this country has ever had. These changes are the greatest ever conceived for that service, and have the capacity to wreck it and emasculate it completely. If we get them wrong and they are failures, and if that, not unnaturally, results in more reoffending, we could be talking in terms not of saving millions but of the possible loss of millions, or even more. Why should we automatically assume that there will be a saving? The Minister may say, “I am assuming that because I believe the transfer of 70% of the probation service to private enterprise will succeed”. Why is anybody entitled automatically to come to that conclusion?

I have spent a great deal of my life in the courts, as a solicitor, a barrister, a recorder and a circuit judge, and I believe that the probation service is a Rolls-Royce service. Indeed, the evidence supports that. Of 35 units —I think it is 35—four were classed as “excellent” and all the others as “acceptable” and “good”. There could be no better bill of health, so there is no justification for the changes on that basis. This is a sortie into the dark—a voyage into uncharted waters. It may be successful; I will not argue that transferring those responsibilities to private entities carries an absolute guarantee of failure. What I am saying is that there is a huge danger, and there are huge question marks over exactly what could happen.

One problem that I foresee involves the probation service’s present quasi-judicial functions, in reporting to the court that there has been a breach. A decision has to be made on how to balance a number of factors against another set of factors—a decision that sets the machinery in the courts in motion. How can lay men, however well tutored in the short term, ever achieve that sort of expertise? How can there be confidence in the exercise of that quasi-judicial function?

Here we have the most massive upheaval that the probation service has ever seen in its 100 years’ existence. We are running massive risks, and everything must be done by this House to try to reduce those risks and to see to it that the laudable motivation behind the Bill, of reducing reconviction rates and all that emanates from that, is given the best chance possible. That is my plea. If I am to be labelled by the Minister as a wrecker on that account, I plead guilty and do so with pride.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, my noble friend the Minister will know that I have been concerned about a payments-by-results service, not least because of the threat, as I see it, to innovative, interesting, small-scale provision which is delivered so effectively by a number of organisations that are very often—because this is the way with the voluntary sector—working on something of a knife edge. I have had reassurances, which I have very much welcomed, about the financial arrangements being such as to support small organisations which—I do not want to be pejorative towards them—may feel that they are lurching from month to month not being entirely certain that their income is sufficiently stable. They are also at a disadvantage compared with bigger organisations when it comes to a bidding war. There are a lot of sectors where some sort of beauty parade is undertaken. Sometimes, the money gets spent on the beauty rather than the content, and that is what wins the contract. I say again that I have heard reassurances about support for small organisations for part of the bidding process.

I want to take this opportunity to ask my noble friend for reassurance about something that struck me only earlier today. It is entirely likely that large outsourcing companies—we know the various names—will bid for some of the contracts. We also know that the proposed changes to criminal legal aid are likely to mean that the same large organisations may, through different parts of their workforce, bid to undertake solicitors’ services under the new legal aid contracts. What occurred to me was the danger of a conflict of interest, whereby two parts of the same organisation are representing an offender and providing rehabilitative supervisory services. I am using this occasion to ask my noble friend for an assurance about the solidity of the Chinese walls that will be required to be put in place, and the monitoring of them, if these two parts of the Government’s proposals go ahead more or less at the same time and more or less hand in hand.