Extract from House of Commons Hansard    Debates for 18th July 2007

Offender Management Bill    Lords Amendments

Mr. Neil Gerrard (Walthamstow):

I want to speak to Lords amendment No. 6, on the key issue of who does the commissioning, and at what level commissioning takes place. Throughout our consideration of the Bill, I have been concerned to ensure that we do not destroy the good work done by the probation service and the probation boards. The key probation tasks should still be carried out locally, and should be determined at that level through local partnerships. In the early part of our debates on the Bill, much of the focus was on the issue of contestability and where that was taking us. Some of my colleagues on the Labour Benches and I were extremely concerned that there appeared to be an agenda of privatisation, which was driving the Bill.

In addition, there is the idea of allowing much more commissioning that involves the voluntary sector. I want to make it clear—I have had to make it clear several times—that I do not oppose the involvement of the voluntary sector in probation work, where appropriate, but when people pray in aid bodies such as the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations and the CBI we have to take it with a pinch of salt. The issue is not just one of convenience, which the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) talked about; a not-for-profit organisation is not above empire building, and I am sure that we have all seen plenty of examples of that. Organisations do not approach the issue as outsiders with a neutral, objective point of view. They have considerable vested interests in what happens—a financial interest if it is a private company, or empire building in the case of a voluntary organisation.

I accept that, as the Minister said, some commissioning is best done at national or regional level. I see examples where that is clearly the case, such as hostel provision, which is performed at a national level now. If the hostel is to accommodate sex offenders, it should not be in the locality where the sex offenders come from and where they may bump into their victims in the street. I can see other examples where economies of scale suggest commissioning at national or regional level. Electronic tagging is an obvious case where that makes sense, as only one or two companies provide the service. We do not want 40 probation areas to end up with 40 different contracts.

I entirely understand the Minister’s argument. I accept what has been said in the past few days. In the letter that he knows was sent by his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to me and other hon. Members, there has been a significant shift in the Government’s approach. The Secretary of State writes that he sees commissioning at national level of some very specialist low volume, high cost services—hostels would be an example—and that the regional commissioners will take strategic overviews for their areas but will work in partnership with local authorities, the National Treatment Agency, learning and skills councils and so on.

The most important thing that the Secretary of State said was about local provision. The lead provider, which in general will be the probation board or trust, certainly to start with, will act as both provider and commissioner and will concentrate on delivering the core offender management work. An equally important assurance that he gave in the letter, which my right hon. Friend the Minister repeated, was that provided its performance meets requirements, the lead provider in a probation area will be the probation trust. The lead provider will engage with other partners in the local strategic partnership to agree and implement local area agreements.

Mr. Garnier:

But is the hon. Gentleman as concerned as I am that that arrangement is not on the face of the Bill?

Mr. Gerrard:

I am coming to that. The letter is significant. It represents real movement from the Government’s position some time ago. On Third Reading the then Home Secretary said of local area agreements and partnerships:

“At the moment, one of those partners is the present probation board, which is both a commissioner and a provider. That will change and the commissioner element of that will go to the regional commissioner.”—[ Official Report, 28 February 2007; Vol. 457, c. 1023.]

Clearly, on Third Reading it was intended that the local probation trust would not be a commissioner. I accept that there has been a significant shift, and that the present Secretary of State says that the local probation trust will be both provider and commissioner and will take the lead in local commissioning.

My concern, which others raised earlier, is that that is not on the face of the Bill. Will the Minister think again? The Bill, with amendments, will obviously go back to the other place. Will he consider putting on the face of the Bill what has been said—that the lead provider and commissioner will be the local probation trust, and that the Secretary of State will, rightly, have the power to step in when what is done locally is not satisfactory. Poor quality service should not be allowed to continue, so the power for the Secretary of State to step in is needed. If that was in the Bill, someone could, if necessary, challenge that intervention, perhaps by judicial review.

I very much welcome the Secretary of State’s letter, because it gets us, if not to where we want to be—there are still elements of the Bill that cause me considerable concern—much closer to where we want to be than where we were, certainly on Second Reading. I am still worried about the bureaucracy that will be involved in the regional structures. I am still not clear about who makes the decisions on commissioning. The Bill originally said that it would be the Secretary of State, the amendment suggests probation trusts, and Ministers are saying that we will have to have both. In fact, there are three possibilities—the Secretary of State, the regional offender manager, or the local trust working at different levels, with the focus on the local, which is where it should be. The question is who decides what is commissioned at the regional level and at the local level. I want the emphasis to be with the local—with the probation trust—not with the regional offender manager.

Patrick Hall:

My hon. Friend is talking about one of my key concerns. What we have heard from the Minister today has taken us a lot further forward. I think that the Government have now accepted that some of the very good local, finely tuned work, which often deals with only small groups of people but is none the less an essential part of effective probation and offender management, is secure and will continue. Does he agree that that is an extremely important advance?

Mr. Gerrard:

That is right. It very much fits in with what was being said last week in the annual report from the chief inspector of probation services, who said that incremental improvements had been made and that we need to continue that process instead of throwing the whole structure up in the air. What Ministers have said in the last day or so is moving in the right direction. The current situation is not perfect, but there has been an important shift in what is being said, which is very different from what was said on Third Reading. I wish that we had been in the position of having this productive discussion around the time of Report and Third Reading, when we could have been much nearer to getting to where we should be.

Given what the Minister said, I am not going to oppose what the Government are doing, although that does not mean to say that I will necessarily vote for it. I hope that if this is discussed again in the other place we will get into the Bill exactly the sort of things that Ministers have been saying and that the Secretary of State said to me in his letter.

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