| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Sutcliffe:
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who was at the conference. We are talking about opportunism of the worst kind. What we have heard in today’s debate and what we have heard from the Leader of the Opposition about his commitment to law and order demonstrates the range of options that are available: on one side, there is hug a hoodie, and, on the other, there is the hon. Member for Monmouth
(David T.C. Davies) saying that we should “lock ’em up” and throw away the key. That is the breadth of the opposition.
It is clear that we have to make choices and that will mean some of us moving outside our comfort zones and changing the way in which we work. We have to take that step if we are to increase our ability to work in partnership with the providers who are best available to deliver. The hon. Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd) said that many public servants, particularly in the probation service, want us to leave them alone and that we should not do anything; we should just stay where we are and accept the status quo. That is not acceptable. Members who have contributed to the debate have said that we need to tackle reoffending. I am sure that change is difficult for everybody, but it has to happen.
It is also clear to me that, for all the seeming divergence of opinion, most of us agree on the fundamentals of what needs to be done. We agree that we need to build partnerships between the public sector, the private sector and the voluntary sector. We agree that we need to maintain a professional service and that probation services are at their best when their focus is trained unremittingly on the offender. We need to protect the public and reduce offending. [ Interruption. ] The hon. Member for Cheadle (Mark Hunter), who I understand is going to lead for the Liberal Democrats in Committee, has consistently, from a sedentary position, said that that is all possible under the current legislation, but I notice that he did not take the opportunity in the winding-up speeches to say where the Liberal Democrats stood.
Mark Hunter: We did not have the opportunity to wind up.
Mr. Sutcliffe: The hon. Gentleman did have the opportunity to wind up, but he did not take it.
Mark Hunter: That is not true.
Mr. Sutcliffe: The hon. Gentleman should calm down. The Liberal Democrat position is clear. They oppose the Bill for the reasons that the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Clegg) gave, but their answer was to throw more money at the situation, when that clearly does not work.
David Howarth: It is unfair of the Minister to imply that the Liberal Democrats had an opportunity to reply to the debate and refused it. Under the rules of the House we are allowed only one Front-Bench speech, and we took it right at the start.
Mr. Sutcliffe: I am sure that you will give advice to the Liberal Democrats, Mr. Speaker. They had the opportunity to speak and did not do so.
Mr. Heath: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. You will be aware that you have frequently advised us that it is not possible for us to make a second speech from the Front Bench in these circumstances. Will you confirm that, or has there been a new ruling?
Mr. Speaker:
I do not like to intervene in a debate, but as I have been asked to do so, I can reliably inform the House that I do not allow the minority party—the
Liberal party—a winding-up speech. That privilege is given only to Her Majesty’s official Opposition.
Mr. Sutcliffe: If I have made a mistake, I am happy to withdraw my comments. It is clear that we need to hear two or three speeches from the Liberals to understand what position they are going to take.
We agree that the probation service does a wonderful job. I will take issue with anybody who suggests that the Home Secretary, I or any member of the Home Office team attacked the probation service individually. We recognise the hard work that needs to be done.
Many points were made in this fascinating debate, and I am looking forward to the combative debate that we will have in Committee, provided the House gives the Bill a Second Reading. Many people have said that the Bill is about the privatisation of the probation service, but that is completely wrong. What we are doing is ending the public sector monopoly, so that we can ensure that communities are served by the best possible probation sector. That is not the same as privatisation. We need to allow all those who have the right skills and expertise to be able to make a contribution to the management of offenders. It should not matter whether such people come from the public sector, the private sector or the voluntary or charitable sector to allow us to achieve what we want to achieve: public value partnership.
We remain fully committed to a strong public sector probation service. That remains one of our guiding principles in taking these proposals forward. However, it is clear that the public sector cannot do everything that needs to be done on its own. By removing the current statutory restrictions, we will give all sectors, whether public, private or voluntary, the freedom to innovate in partnership.
My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary spelled out clearly today that we will do this in a structured and timely way, without affecting the quality of the service that is provided. The same rigorous inspection regimes will be in place—the inspector of prisons and the inspector of probation.
My hon. Friends the Members for Batley and Spen (Mike Wood), and for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) said that the business case for change had not been made. The case seems to be very clear-cut. I fully recognise the improvements in performance that the probation service has achieved in recent years. Its success in meeting many of the targets that were set for it is undeniable, but it is also undeniable that reoffending rates remain too high and that we are seeing too many lapses in the supervision of offenders who pose a danger to the public. I do not think that more of the same is good enough.
I have seen a lot of excellent work and many examples of good practice during my visits throughout the country. For example, on community payback, in the north-west, the communities are identifying the projects that they want, the magistrates are sentencing in accordance with those projects and the work is being carried out. Such measures are not seen as soft sentences. They are also highly visible, and that restores public confidence in the criminal justice system.
I was grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, East (Kerry McCarthy), who talked about the
launch of Believe that took place in the House some weeks ago. She stressed, as it has done, the importance of the alliances that we need to put in place to tackle reoffending. We need the business community, the faith community and local government to recognise that they all have a role to play in offender management.
Mr. Michael Clapham (Barnsley, West and Penistone) (Lab): Has the Minister examined the structure that has been applied in Scotland? What is his view on it? Does he believe that it could be used in England?
Mr. Sutcliffe: As my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary pointed out, there is a different legal structure in Scotland and the Scottish Executive see this issue in a different way. They do not see it as we do in our proposals.
The Bill is not new. NOMS has been in existence since 2004, and the regional offender managers are in place and working hard in conjunction with local communities, making sure that we are establishing the framework we need to deliver services.
Many people said that the Bill is totally opposed by everybody, but that is not true. Today, hon. Members will have received a briefing from Turning Point. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary talked about the Prince’s Trust and we have heard about Rainer, NACRO and a number of other organisations.
Mr. Austin Mitchell: Much has been made of bringing in voluntary organisations such as the Prince’s Trust to take over probation work. That is a leap in the dark. Imagine that the Prince’s Trust had a big probation contract in Grimsby. Imagine that things went disastrously wrong, as they can in any organisation, and that people on probation or supervised by the probation service went out on an orgy of looting, raping and pillaging. Imagine that one of them came down to London, got a machine gun and killed the Queen’s geese, as Roy Hattersley’s dog once did. Would a private sector organisation, especially the Prince’s Trust, be ready to incur the sort of odium that can arise in such situations?
Mr. Sutcliffe: I have a lot of respect for my hon. Friend, but on this occasion I think that he is way off the mark. He is saying that everything in the public sector is good and everything in the private or voluntary sectors is bad. That is not the case. If we are serious about tackling reoffending, we need to ensure that we harness the best of all that is available. That is at the heart of the Bill. Yes, we have to protect the people who work in the probation service; that is the role of a trade union and I understand the trade union position. However, we have to tackle reoffending and we are not doing so to the extent that we should be. That is why we should look at innovations and at what the public sector, the private sector and the voluntary sector can offer.
David Taylor:
Of course, the Minister is right. The whole House is united in the desire to see reoffending rates reduced. Will he confirm that, built into the
contracts that will be doled out by the Home Secretary, will be a requirement on private sector and voluntary sector organisations to drive down reoffending rates, and that that will be used as a performance indicator which, if the organisation fails to meet it, will eventually lead to a withdrawal of the contract?
Mr. Sutcliffe: My hon. Friend makes a good point. What is important is success in driving down reoffending rates. The framework is in place. When contracts are being let, we will discuss how people will achieve the aims. The backdrop will always be the inspection regimes, so that organisations will know that if they do not provide services appropriately and properly, they will be criticised in independent public reports. That backdrop will be in place.
Mr. Heath: Several times earlier in the debate, the Minister reassured his hon. Friends by saying that the Government, in their wisdom, had decided to maintain the separate inspectorates. Will he confirm what we all know—that the reason the separate inspectorates were retained is that the Government lost the vote in another place, by a margin of 2:1, on a motion proposed by Lord Ramsbotham?
Mr. Sutcliffe: No, that is not the case. What happened was that the inspectors reached an understanding and an acceptance of the fact that they had to have a joint working arrangement. That was negotiated by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary. I am pleased that that issue has been resolved and that we still have the independent inspectors, who have agreed to collaborate on how they can work jointly across the piece.
I was talking about the number of voluntary organisations that support what we are trying to do in the Bill. In interventions, I referred to what the Local Government Association has done. It has published a pamphlet called, “Neighbourhood by neighbourhood”, in which for the first time local government acknowledges that it has a role to play in offender management. In the past, the difficulty has been that local government bodies have wanted to push offenders away into a silo of the criminal justice system. If we are to tackle reoffending, we have to tackle issues such as resettlement and unpaid work. We have to consider how to bring people back into society so that they do not reoffend.
My hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Mr. Hendrick) talked about how organised crime offers a better resettlement programme than we do now. Organised crime meets people as they come out of prison, usually houses them and provides money and resources, and grooms them to reoffend. We have to stop that cycle, and we have to make sure that there is good resettlement, given what we are trying to achieve. The Bill gives us a framework in which to make sure that we have the opportunity to cut reoffending.
We were asked about cherry-picking. The contracts will be set out in such a way that potential providers cannot cherry-pick the more attractive areas of business. If necessary, the Secretary of State can create a trust to bid for services when no alternative provider has registered an interest. Great play was made on the issue of the morale of staff. My hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen said that we were
attacking the professionalism of the probation service and its dedication to the difficult and often dangerous work that it does on behalf of the wider community. I fully recognise the real improvements in performance that staff have delivered in recent years. I understand that staff are anxious about their future, but I reassure the House that nothing that we are proposing undermines the value that we place on probation as a profession. We will reinforce those values through rigorous national standards and training.
If a new provider takes over an aspect of probation business, staff who transfer to that provider will have their terms and conditions protected by law. New providers will have to take account of the two-tier work force regulations, which means that they will have to recruit new staff on terms and conditions that are, overall, no less favourable than those of employees transferring from the public sector. We remain committed to working with the trade unions, and we envisage that the current arrangements for national collective pay bargaining in the public sector will continue for the time being.
Points were made about the increase in the number of staff. Overall, staffing in the probation service has risen by the equivalent of about 5,000 full-time staff since 1997, and the rise has been most rapid since 2001. The creation of National Offender Management Service headquarters has largely been achieved, with staff having been transferred from organisations such as Her Majesty’s Prison Service headquarters and the national probation directorate, as well as the core Home Office. NOMS HQ is subject to the same head-count reduction targets as other parts of the Home Office, so it is not true to say that the people that we are talking about are all bureaucrats; they are people on the front line.
My hon. Friends asked how we will make sure that staff are properly trained. We will ensure that all providers are capable of providing appropriate, high-quality services, so there will be an assurance and accreditation process appropriate to the type of service and the contract value. The process will include assurances about staff training in cases in which it is necessary to ensure appropriately skilled staff. We expect every organisation that employs staff who work with offenders to invest in skills and professional development for its staff. We are working with Skills for Justice, the sector skills council, on the learning and development needs of staff.
We were accused of destroying probation’s traditional links with the local community. Our proposals will not remove probation from its local roots. At the moment, the 42 probation boards, though statutorily independent, also form part of a single national probation service. The chair of the board and the chief officer are both appointed by the Secretary of State, and the chief officer is, in effect, line-managed by the director of probation, who is based in London. Under our proposals, trusts will have greater independence from the centre. Although the Secretary of State will appoint the members of the trust, the trust will appoint its own chief executive. It will be accountable to the Secretary of State, through the regional commissioners, only for what it delivers, and it will be freed from interference from the centre in how it runs its internal affairs.
In practice, we anticipate that members of trusts will continue to be drawn largely from the local community. The Bill is not about moving probation boards out of the way. What we are saying is that membership of the boards is too tight, and we want wider local involvement. Commissioners will be placed under a statutory duty to consult on how they deliver services. That will enhance the ability of probation services to meet specific needs in their local communities. We are developing partnership and co-commissioning arrangements, so that regional commissioners can work effectively with key agencies, such as learning and skills councils, primary care trusts, drug and alcohol action teams and local criminal justice boards, as well as their Welsh equivalents. We will ensure that commissioners work closely with those bodies and other local partners involved in delivering local area agreement outcomes locally.
We have included reduced reoffending as a mandatory indicator in local area agreements from 2007. The process has been strengthened by the roll-out of action and delivery plans on the regional reduction of reoffending, enabling commissioners to achieve a better understanding of diverse local needs and priorities and, where possible, to align local commissioning priorities and plans. Regional commissioners will consult local stakeholders on their commissioning priorities through the publication of regional and national commissioning plans. We expect regional commissioners to contract with the main large providers, who will sub-contract and enter partnership arrangements with local providers.
A great deal was made of the statistics on reoffending. I glad that we all recognise that there is a genuine problem, as just under 60 per cent. of offenders reoffend. We all agree that that is not good enough. Offenders starting a community sentence reoffend at lower rates—53 per cent.—but that, too, is not good enough. Delivering change is a major challenge, as many of those offenders have long-established cycles of behaviour that are rooted in multiple social problems. We must fundamentally alter that behaviour. While acknowledging the scale of the challenge, our aim is to work toward a 10 per cent. reduction in reoffending by the end of the decade.
Offenders on community orders are less likely to offend. Very simply, the more an offender has offended the more likely it is that they will offend in future. Offenders who are given a community sentence have an average of eight previous convictions, while offenders sentenced to custody have 13 previous convictions. We have set a target that compares our performance with a predicted rate to account for those variations.
Paul Farrelly: I have listened carefully to my hon. Friend and to everyone who contributed to the debate. Will he explain to the House how the imposition of arbitrary levels of contracting-out—20 or 30 per cent.—will help to achieve those targets? What is the mechanism?
| Next Section | Index | Home Page |