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Written Ministerial Statements
Friday 25 February 2005
DEFENCE
Offshore Patrol Vessel Contract
The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Mr. Adam Ingram): I am pleased to announce that the Ministry of Defence has approved the award of a contract with VT Maritime Affairs Ltd for the charter and logistic support of a new 1,854 tonne patrol vessel for use in the Falkland Islands.
The new ship will be a modification of the highly successful river class ships, also chartered from VT, currently employed for fishery protection. Like them, the new patrol vessel will also follow an innovative public-private partnership arrangement for the provision of maritime capability. While manned by the Royal Navy, the Department will pay a set monthly fee for the provision of the ship and a guaranteed level of availability, with an incentivised payment structure to ensure that any shortfalls are dealt with promptly and effectively.
The vessel will thus provide a significant increase in availability as compared with the old, and increasingly difficult to maintain, castle class ships that have provided the Falkland Islands patrol capability for the past two decades.
It is planned that the ship will enter service in 2007 and be chartered for an initial period up to 2012. Over this period, she will generate in excess of £2 million savings compared with continuing to run the old ships, while providing at least as good an overall capability at a much lower level of risk.
HOME DEPARTMENT
National Offender Management Service
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Paul Goggins): I am today announcing the National Offender Management Service's targets for England and Wales for 2005–06. These targets reflect the Government's commitment to protecting the public, reducing re-offending, and ensuring that sentences are enforced firmly and fairly.
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| Target/Measure | 2005–06 National Target |
|---|---|
| Basic skills (Offenders inthe community) | (a) 40,000 Basic Skills starts(b) 8,033 Basic Skills awards |
| (contributing, alongside the LSC-led partnership target of 1,967 awards, to a total of 10,000 awards for offenders in the community) 1 | |
| Basic Skills (Offendersin Custody) | 46,430 Basic skills awards(contributing alongside the LSC-led partnership target of 9,740 awards, to a total of 56,080 awards for offenders in the community) 1of which:42,520 basic skills awards are achieved by prisoners in public prisons (including 13,250 at Entry Level, 18,020 at Level 1 and 11,250 at Level 2)3,820 basic skills awards are achieved by prisoners in contracted prisons (including 1,575 at Entry Level, 1,195 at Level 1 and 1,050 at Level 2) |
| Prison Education | 94,400 Work Skills awards(contributing, alongside the LSC-led partnership target of 25,600 awards to a total of 120,000 awards)of which:90,000 Work Skills awards achieved by prisoners in public prisons.4,400 Work Skills awards achieved by prisoners in contracted prisons. |
| Drug Treatment andTesting Orders/DrugRehabilitation Requirements | 4,000 DTTO/DRR completions. |
| Intensive Change andControl Programmes | 350 ICCP completions. |
| Enhanced CommunityPunishment/Unpaid Work | 50,000 successful completions of ECP/unpaid work. |
| Accredited Programmes(Probation Service) | 15,000 programme completions |
1 With the transfer to the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) of lead responsibility for delivering offender learning skills, and introduction of the fully integrated service in three regions (North East, North West and South West) from August 2005, basic skills awards
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achieved by offenders in those regions will count towards operational targets for the LSC led partnerships and the NOMS targets have been adjusted accordingly.
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| Target/Measure | 2005–06 National Target |
|---|---|
| Staff sickness (Probation Service) | Staff sickness in the Probation service not to exceed an average of nine days/annum. |
| Staff sickness (publicprisons only) | Staff sickness in public prisons to be lower than 11.5 working days/person. |
| Race Equality(Probation Service) | The Probation Service to meet regionally set employment targets for minority ethnic staff.95 per cent. of Race and Ethnic Monitoring data on staff and offenders is returned on time and using the correct (Census 2001) classification. |
| Ethnic minority staff (public prisons only) | Ethnic minority staff in public prisons to represent at least 6 per cent. of the workforce by April 2006. |
2 The performance for 2004–05 will be published in a written ministerial statement following the end of the financial year.
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
Equalities Review
The Deputy Minister for Women and Equality (Jacqui Smith): The Minister for the Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mr. Miliband), and I are today announcing a review of the persistent social, economic and cultural factors that combine to deny individuals the opportunity to make the best of their abilities and contribute to society fully.
The equalities review, which will report to the Prime Minister by the summer of 2006, will look at barriers to opportunity and will make practical recommendations on key policy priorities for: the Government and public sector; employers and trades unions; civic society and the voluntary sector. Its findings will inform the modernisation of equality legislation and the development of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR).
In the Queen's Speech, the Government announced that they intend to bring forward a Bill to establish the CEHR as soon as parliamentary time allows. The CEHR will bring together existing expertise from the current equality commissions on gender, disability and race and make provision for the new equality strands on sexual orientation, religion and belief and age, as well as promoting human rights. The Bill will also introduce provisions to outlaw discrimination on grounds of religion or belief in the provision of goods, facilities, services and public functions; and a general framework
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to introduce a duty on public bodies to promote equality of opportunity between women and men and; prohibit sex discrimination in the exercise of public functions.
The creation of the CEHR underlines the Government's commitment to equality and human rights as the foundations of a fair and prosperous society. A just society is one in which life chances are not determined at birth and everyone has the chance to achieve their full potential. A dynamic economy relies on using the talents of all.
It was to address inequality and prejudice that the first Race Relations Act was introduced in 1965. Since then, Governments have legislated to protect people from discrimination on the basis of gender, race and disability and most recently sexual orientation, age, and religion. Since 1997 new legislation has also created the duty to promote race equality, following the Lawrence Inquiry; the Human Rights Act and most recently the civil partnership scheme for lesbian and gay couples.
But despite this progress there is still evidence of deep-seated patterns of disadvantage. For example, disabled people are at far greater risk of poverty than non-disabled people. The unemployment rate of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis is 2.5 times greater than that of the white population. Educational attainment for black Afro-Caribbean boys consistently falls below that of their female and white peers. The pay gap between men's and women's earnings remains. And hate crimes threaten the security of many different minority groups.
Much work has already been done, and is ongoing, within and outside government, to understand specific barriers faced by particular groups, but much of this excellent work focuses on particular groups or sectors. The equalities review will build on this existing work, such as the Government's recently published Community Cohesion and Race Equality Strategy, the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit's report on the life chances of disabled people and the current Women and Work Commission to develop a better understanding of the long term and underlying barriers to opportunity that can be addressed by public policy. This will allow us to better to assess the relative impact of legislation and other action in transforming people's life chances, based on evidence of what works at home and abroad.
It is widely recognised that in many cases the root causes of disadvantage go beyond discrimination and cannot therefore be rectified by anti-discrimination legislation alone. Earlier consultation on the CEHR also demonstrated considerable support for modernising equality legislation and creating a simpler, fairer, legal framework.
In response to this and in conjunction with the Equalities Review, the Government will also now begin a review of discrimination legislation, led by the Department of Trade and Industry, which will benefit from the background and analysis that will be provided by the Equalities Review. This will assess how the equality legislative framework can be modernised to fit the needs of Britain in the 21st Century. Specifically, proposals will aim to minimise the burdens on business and on public services while leading to demonstrably
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better outcomes for minority groups. This work will be the foundation for the development of a clearer and more streamlined legislative framework.
The Prime Minister has asked Trevor Phillips to Chair the Equalities Review in a personal capacity. He will be joined by a small panel of leaders from the fields of business, the public sector and the social policy arena. The review panel will draw advice from a Reference Group co-Chaired by Bert Massie (Chair, Disability Rights Commission) and Julie Mellor (Chair, Equal Opportunities Commission) whose members will include key equality, human rights, business and trade union stakeholders and other experts. The Equalities Review will be supported by a Secretariat based in the Cabinet Office and will be overseen jointly by DTI and Cabinet Office Ministers.
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