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As we have also heard, when conditional cautions were introduced, their objective was absolutely clear. They were an essentially non-punitive response to low-level offending which gave police the opportunity to press home the unacceptability of the behaviour and to attach conditions which were exclusively focused on reparation and rehabilitation. This approach is greatly to be encouraged as widely as possible, not least because those two objectives also have the best chances of giving satisfaction to the victim and reducing reoffending. We strongly support them.

We had some lengthy arguments during the passage of the Police and Justice Bill when the Government wanted to extend the conditions to include other sanctions, such as fines, which went beyond the original intentions and were essentially punitive. As I understood it, it was then agreed that there would be trials in a few areas to test out the wider approach. On the basis that this would be revisited before being more widely applied, we accepted that situation at the time.

The Bill already allows for probation services to be involved in determining whether conditional cautions should be given—and, if so, which conditions should be attached—and for the supervision of anybody to whom such a caution is given. In that sense, it seems entirely superfluous to include this sentence in the Bill, and raises the worry that it is another way of paving the way to the further extensions that we resisted during the passage of the Police and Justice Bill.

The extension of administrative justice, even to speed up the process of justice, which I know was an issue for the Government at the time, or in a limited form, is absolutely undesirable. It would be welcome if the Minister could categorically reassure the Committee that no such measures will be taken, or included in the Bill, until all the issues have been revisited, as we were last year assured they would be.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: The provision is very much seen as a tidying-up amendment. I remind the Committee that it will always be open to the individual to decline to accept a caution. If they do not wish to accept a conditional caution, it is therefore absolutely open to them to go to court and have it dealt with. The noble Baroness, Lady Linklater of Butterstone, is absolutely right when she says that conditional cautions are a useful way of narrowing, as opposed to widening, the number drawn into the criminal justice system. It is sometimes enough to arrest the behaviour by bringing it to the attention of the individual, considering how best to make reparation, which conditional cautions can enable us to do, and then, one hopes, stopping them from continuing to reoffend. The beauty of it is that a conditional caution is significantly different from a full-blown conviction. It can assist greatly in the long term.

We therefore considered the financial element when we last debated this matter. I hear what the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, says about the caution with which she approached those issues. However, I remind the Committee that Clause 1 is based on Section 1 of the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000, as amended by Section 26 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The 2003 Act added the probation purposes. Clause 1(1)(b) of the Bill provides for,

We will discuss shortly the regulation-making power in Clause 1(5). However, Amendment No. 13 would remove the power to extend the purposes relating to persons to whom conditional cautions are given. I understand the spirit in which it has been tabled because it enables us to clarify the purpose.

I commend what the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, said about the importance and utility of conditional cautions, which was echoed by all noble Lords who spoke. A conditional caution enables the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to offer a caution with conditions attached. It may be given to an adult when there is sufficient evidence to charge him with an offence that he has admitted. The offender must agree to that caution. If the conditions are not complied with, the offender can be prosecuted for the original offence. It is important to remember that if the offender breaches the conditions, he returns to square one and is then prosecuted. It is for the CPS to decide whether a conditional caution is suitable and to identify appropriate conditions.

Those conditions can include reparative work conditions. The National Offender Management Service is currently working with the respect task force, which is funding the project, and the Probation Service to increase the opportunities for unpaid reparative work conditions in a number of pilot sites. The role of the Probation Service in this project is to identify suitable schemes that can be used, drawing on its expertise from involvement in similar schemes. The pilots are expected to last a year, from January 2007 to December 2007, and will be evaluated to provide information regarding the costs and benefits involved in the use of such conditions. That will help us to make a proper judgment about how best to use them.

When the 2000 Act was amended by the 2003 Act, the amendments did not include conditional cautions in the power to extend probation purposes by means of regulation. However, there are certainly no plans to extend the probation purposes in relation to conditional cautions; nor is there any reason of principle to treat this aspect of provision differently from the others. This is simply a tidying-up provision, which I hope noble Lords will agree is sensible.

The respect agenda is an opportunity to look at how others may be able to assist us in this regard. A number of voluntary sector agencies are keen to assist in some of this lighter intervention to help people to get over some of their difficulties. We see this as a helpful opportunity to move forward. With that, I hope that the noble Baroness will be content to withdraw the amendment.

Lord Dholakia: I accept that this is a tidying-up process, but has the Minister considered the cost implications for the Probation Service? The noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, asked about this. This is the lower end of the sentencing tariff. Why do we want to involve the Probation Service to that extent, bearing in mind that its biggest problems are resources and the financial implications of its work?

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: I reassure the noble Lord that we are taking cost into consideration. The Bill is an opportunity better to allocate resources and expertise. There are areas in which we need the acuity, skill and experience of the Probation Service, particularly with more difficult offenders, for whose management we will need the greatest period of care. But there is an opportunity for us to develop a lighter-touch intervention with some of the reparative and other work which may enable us to divert people in a way that is quick, effective and successful.

We have talked several times in this House about the importance of intervening early and undertaking a needs-based assessment of what we might best be able to do quickly. I know that the noble Lord has a lot of experience of the work of NACRO, the NSPCC, Turning Point and other charities and organisations. They can assist with some of that lighter work—some at the more difficult end, but especially at the lighter end. We may be able to develop that. That is why we think that it is very important to look at the pilots and the outcomes. The respect agenda is important. Those organisations can assist us with some of the resources involved, and we will be looking very carefully to see what works. That is our template. It is on that basis that we make these proposals.

5 pm

Baroness Anelay of St Johns: I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken. The noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, was right to pick up the issue of cost. It is an issue that concerns me. I still do not have a feel for how the budgets are working, and how they are being transferred from the Home Office to what was the DCA. As a lot of what the Government are trying to do in the Bill is predicated on trying to use more effectively the money that is available, that worries me.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, picked up another issue that worries me as it runs through the Bill. It is why I tabled my amendment that kicked off our first day in Committee last week. That is the future role of probation services with regard to punishment and what we consider punishment to be. Conditional cautions which require punishment will obviously involve probation services, by whomsoever they are provided, in punishing the offender.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for the way in which she tried to give better clarification. She took us further forward. I am grateful to her for saying that there are no plans at present to extend the purposes of conditional cautions. She will not be surprised if I watch as carefully as I can, given that it is just me, to see that there are no changes. I appreciate what she says about the tidying-up nature in the reference to the 2000 Act. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment, which I will not bring back on Report.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Lord Ramsbotham moved Amendment No. 14:

The noble Lord said: The amendment stands in my name, as well as that of the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay. I shall speak in particular to the regulatory powers sought for the Secretary of State in relation to the provision of probation services.

Before speaking to the amendment, I thank the Minister for the large package of information which was transmitted to us at 5.42 pm on Friday. I was grateful for it, although I must admit to her that I was enormously disappointed when I saw what the corporate allowance was all about—of the 26 organisations, several were charities, two were hotels and one a garden centre. I had rather hoped for more than that.

I freely admit that the basis for the amendment is the concern that a number of us have about an action taken last September, when a statutory instrument was introduced that changed the composition of probation boards and removed magistrates and members of local government from them by stealth, to be honest, because we were given no warning. We did not have time to go through it before it was introduced. Therefore, we are seriously concerned that that might happen again in relation to probation services. I am particularly concerned at the moment about the introduction of probation trusts, about which I wish to conclude.

I spent considerable time over the weekend going through in great detail what was said last Wednesday, particularly by the Minister. I shall, if I may, replay some of her words to her. I think that we are absolutely at one on the intention behind so much of the Bill; it is the method and the detail that cause concern. First, she said that,

I think we all agree that we would like the figures to be better, but we will talk about what reoffending means later in our consideration of the Bill, so I do not propose to do so here.

Secondly, the Minister said that,

However, commissioning enables provision, so we are talking not so much about two different systems but about two complementary systems. The Minister went on to say that,

Anyone reading that could be forgiven for thinking that commissioning was brand new, but of course commissioning has been in place ever since 1907. The commissioning of services, whether by a probation service or the voluntary sector, has actually happened. The Minister says that the Government are introducing a “process of commissioning”, which is not the same thing at all: we are talking about a different process, not about commissioning itself. It is the process of commissioning being introduced that is causing concern. There is more stealth in this, as I shall outline. That is what causes us concern, because it is what the Government say they want to do rather than what may be necessary.

Here I come to the necessary bits. I was very interested in what the Minister said about what the Probation Service was already doing. She said:

in my amendment about the principles—

Noble Lords will remember that that included the partnership between the private, the voluntary and the public sectors in the provision of probation, working in conjunction with local organisations. The Minister went on to say that the Probation Service,

If the Probation Service is already at the heart of the criminal justice system, what else do we need from it? The Minister continued:

If the Probation Service is already at the heart of the system and is welding it together, what change are we talking about that justifies such an upheaval in the method of commissioning?

The Minister then said that,

If I had a 90 per cent success rate in what I was doing, I would be extremely pleased. We talked so much about the need to improve enforcement and about compliance with court orders being at the heart of what the probation services are doing, but, according to the Minister, a great amount of it is already being done, so what are we actually talking about? Of course we must improve performance. It seems to me that the Bill is not so much about improving performance but about changing the method by which some of that performance is commissioned. That is not necessarily terribly wise, if everything is working as well as the Minister tells us it is.

Having said that, I have three questions for the Minister. The Minister has said:

How does the Minister propose to collocate private and voluntary sector services on a regional basis when there is no way for the Government to direct the deployment of such services in that way. I think that the Minister means that you need to have local services working together on a regional basis, but that is not the same as collocating them.

At col. 270 on 16 May, the Minister referred to the duty of the Probation Service to provide courts with details of the sentence plan to help them to come to the sentence. With respect, I do not think that that is correct. Until the sentence has been passed, the assessment on which the sentence plan is made cannot happen. The sentence plan cannot be provided before the sentence. Advice is needed by the courts, but a sentence plan cannot be provided as part of the pre-sentence report.

My final concern is that the Minister mentioned that there would have to be personal officers in prisons who would be contacted by offender managers over the supervision of prisoners. I know that there are personal officers in prisons and that that system is under huge stress from overcrowding. Not many prisoners have personal officers, whose job is nothing to do with offender management or sentence planning. I merely question those matters.

This Bill is about a very serious matter—the proper management of offenders and the protection of the public. I am deeply concerned that too much in this Bill is not sufficiently detailed and thought-through in order to enable it to happen. You cannot just let it go. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, put it extremely well when he said:

I entirely agree.

We also need detail—by that, I mean not just this House but also probation boards and probation staffs. My concern is that those probation boards which wish to be considered trusts have to apply by 4 June. We are told that they will be identified by the end of July and the first trusts will be formed on 1 April 2008. But I have also consulted the probation boards to find out what they think about this, which I have done in the spirit of what I reported at Second Reading; namely, that 638 of the 648 dissenting—or at least critical—verdicts on the so-called consultation paper about probation were against or had some alternative view, and they have been airbrushed. In addition, a very disturbing comment was made by a senior official in the Home Office to the effect that it did not consult senior probation officers on this matter because they were too junior.

The probation boards were asked about this consultation because they are the people who have to put themselves forward. They replied to the Home Office on 17 April 2007. They said:

They went on to talk about integrated assessment, on which they were invited to comment.

5.15 pm

Lord Filkin: I have paid close attention to the noble Lord’s words during the 11 minutes that he has been speaking, which have gone back to what he said on our first day in Committee. Is he speaking to his amendment, because I am struggling to understand the relevance of what he is saying to the amendment before us?

Lord Ramsbotham: It is important to explain why the Secretary of State should be required to use the affirmative resolution procedure rather than what has happened before. That is what I explained when I set out what I proposed to do. I have used the example of what is happening with trusts because it is an area in which something is happening by stealth before being properly thought through. That is precisely what we want to avoid in the better delivery of probation services, which is the whole purpose of this.

I shall not repeat all that is said in the letter, but it is clear that the probation boards are extremely concerned because they do not know who is going to make the judgments on who the trusts should be, what will be the criteria for assessing the quality of leadership, what form will the stakeholder surveys take and so on. In other words, this is not a properly thought-through process. Given that, how do the boards know what they are applying to be on 4 June, who will make the selection and so forth in July, and how something appropriate for the system is going to be put forward next April? I have also consulted the chief probation officers, who are very concerned that budgets have been frozen for three years, which means that they are facing extreme problems given the vast numbers of additional offenders they have to deal with. For example, the chief probation officer of London has had to warn 60 per cent of his staff that they risk redundancy as a result of the cuts that may have to be made. That is not to say that it will happen, but he has given a warning about the impact of the cuts. The Probation Service has lost its headquarters and its national director in all but name, so there is no one now to lead it and be the focal point for chief officers of probation. They are concerned about the fragmentation resulting from that.

I submit that all this is avoidable. However, it should not just be avoided now, it has to be avoidable in the future. That is the purpose of my amendment: to make certain that we discuss these provisions in both Houses before any changes are made which might well impact seriously on the protection of the public, which is of course the major responsibility of the Government. I beg to move.

Baroness Linklater of Butterstone: I want to ask a brief question arising out of my understanding of this amendment, which I see as a probing amendment. As I understand it, the Committee on Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform gave a cautious report on the delegated powers in Clause 1(5). Under it, the Secretary of State will be enabled to extend probation purposes by order, subject to the negative procedure. Clause 2 requires him to make sufficient provision for probation purposes. The committee observed that the power in Clause 1(5) was similar to that conferred in Clause 1(3) of the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000. But—I emphasise this—without that precedent, the committee would have been inclined to consider that this power should be subject to the affirmative procedure. Can the Minister explain why the negative procedure should apply in this case?

Lord Northbourne: I support the amendment. It is extraordinarily strange that the Secretary of State should be given what is, as it were, an uncontrolled power to change the Bill. We spent the whole of the first day in Committee discussing the first clause, but apparently we were wasting our time because the Secretary of State can change it at any point he chooses.

Baroness Howe of Idlicote: I thank the Minister for sending the details of the process that has been under way for some time to us over the weekend. Indeed, a second copy arrived this morning. They certainly gave a clearer view of what has been happening. However, they reinforced my concern that there was a need for a Bill of this kind to enable what has been going on perfectly satisfactorily for some time, on more and more of a partnership basis, with recognition that the Probation Service was doing an extremely good job. Some of the details about the cuts in its resources are very concerning indeed. I, too, have heard comments expressed and they should be seriously considered. I look forward to hearing what the Minister can say to justify the need for the Bill.

Lord Dholakia: My noble friend Lady Linklater is right to say that we see this as a probing amendment. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee report states that the department will allow the definition to be extended but not reduced. It further states that the view of the Minister’s department is that this is the appropriate level of parliamentary scrutiny for this provision. Can the Minister give examples of how it came to this conclusion?

The Earl of Listowel: When listening to my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham, I was reminded of the reforms undertaken by the Government in establishing the Child and Family Court Advisory and Support Service. They were very well intentioned and it is now going well. But, at the time, many guardians ad litem left the service because the transition was very poorly considered. I think that is accepted by all. The result was that children’s cases were delayed, and delay is critical in the outcomes for children in these matters.

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