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Offender Management Bill

Yes, I do. In early 2005, the Government introduced in another place a Bill that bore many similarities to this Bill. Mercifully, the general election intervened before the then Home Secretary could do more damage to the supervisory service than he and his predecessors had already achieved through their constant fidgeting with the probation service, the parole system and the community sentencing regime. Most of us who wish to keep some hold on our sanity have stopped trying to count the times that the Government have uprooted the management and organisation of the probation service since they came into office. They have had no positive effect on morale, on performance or on recruitment and retention of probation staff; indeed, quite the opposite. In April 2001, the probation service was restructured to create a national probation service with 42 local probation boards. Less than three years later, in January 2004, the Home Secretary announced the merger of the Prison Service and the probation service to form the still uncompleted National Offender Management Service, or NOMS—now more commonly known as ““Nightmare on Marsham Street””. In October 2005, the Home Office published its consultation document, ““Restructuring Probation to Reduce Reoffending””. I appreciate that the expression, ““Government consultation””, is now an oxymoron, but this proves it beyond all reasonable doubt: they received 748 submissions but only 10 were in favour of the Government’s restructuring plan. Further disruption will do nothing to drive up standards and to improve operation. On the contrary, reforms to any organisation need time to bed in. The probation service is still reeling from the Government’s last shake up. It is surprising to no one except the Government that the London probation service, for example, is 150 staff below establishment and that the service nationally is 1,000 staff short. The Government are setting up the probation service to fail. They need to justify their shift of policy, which was done for intellectually and politically dishonest reasons and which is contrary to the Labour party’s long-held opinion on the contracting out or privatisation of aspects of the justice system. They want to shed responsibility for their own failure to lead and to manage, and they want to get the cost of offender supervision off the Treasury’s books. By making it increasingly difficult for the probation service to operate as an agency of justice, by reorganising it to death, by imposing on it and, for that matter, on the Prison Service, an expensive and pointless bureaucracy—NOMS—whose own staff have little idea of what they are employed to do, the Government are making it dysfunctional. They are blaming it for failures to supervise repeat offenders and to prevent the crimes that have led to such terrible tragedies for many families throughout the country, when it is the Government who have put their boot—or is it their clunking fist?—on to the probation service’s windpipe. So keen is the Home Secretary to denigrate the probation service before the very people who are most in need of supervision that in November he went to Wormwood Scrubs to make a speech about its inadequacies to an audience of inmates. For this Home Secretary, leadership means trashing the people who are doing their best in difficult circumstances in front of the very people—criminals—whom he expects those people to supervise. Lions and donkeys come to mind. The Home Secretary is the latest manifestation of the Ratner school of management. The Government are also trying to hide their blushes behind invented new Labour words such as ““contestability””. Some, like the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard), who is in his place and with whom I shared a platform, together with the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Clegg), at the National Association of Probation Officers annual conference in Eastbourne this October, have maintained their allegiance to the tenets of the Labour party, which opposed, as a matter of principle, contracting out the supervisory work of the probation service at any time, but even more vehemently in the service’s centenary year.