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Offender Management Bill

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. I only wish I had been able to include a list of services while writing my speech during the fast and gabbled contribution from the Conservative Front-Bench spokesman. It is wrong to create, as we have been doing, a climate of fear by suggesting that we are releasing psychologically disturbed people who then go out and kill other people, and that offenders are not being properly looked after and sustained by the probation service and that the result is that they will reoffend yet again. That implies that the streets are thronging with people who are intent on murder, burglary and reoffending and that the redemption services, the reform services and the probation service are not achieving anything. We are in a sense attacking the probation service by creating a climate of fear. That is wrong, because the service is working well. It is a service that was reformed only four years ago—in 2001, when we developed the national probation service. It is meeting all its targets; I will not go through the long list of them, but it has 30 targets and they are all being achieved in substantial part. That case has been made by the relevant trade union. If there are failures in the service, they are because the service is still undermanned despite the increase in numbers that there has been, and underpaid, and because it has had too much pressure put on it, and too many duties given to it, it has been unable to cope in the fully effective fashion—the 100 per cent.-effective fashion—that we would want. Therefore, the failures are problems to do with strain and limited resources. In view of that record, the attitude should be if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I do not think that Ministers are saying that it is broke—I hope that they are not saying that. They are certainly not saying that any improvement can be effected by bringing in the private sector or the voluntary sector. I agree that we can all learn from the voluntary sector. It has been said that we can learn from the Prince’s Trust, and that is absolutely right; it might have a contribution to make. We can learn from the boy scouts as well. As has been suggested, we can learn by bringing in ex-Army men. We can even learn by bringing in mercenaries returned from Africa to run the probation service. There are many organisations we can learn from and many things we can learn, but if the organisation is working well, we do not have to learn those lessons—we do not have to invoke such new experiences. So, to repeat, my point is if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It is also a local service that works by local co-operation. We will weaken that local co-operation if we replace the management board by a trust dominated by businessmen that does not include—at least not in the same way as is currently the case—the magistrates, the judges, the local authorities, the police and the voluntary sector. They are included in the existing structures and that is a valuable feature of them. It has been very important that all such sectors co-operate. The local authorities and the voluntary sector have got a vital role to play, but we are about to centralise, regionalise, bring in the private sector and create not a vibrant mixed economy, but a patchwork quilt. That will make it difficult to provide career structures and career development, and it will provide a baptism of fear for existing services that they do not deserve. At a time when the Government are preaching in one Department a new localism and the transfer of power down to local people, which I think is absolutely the right thing to do, we are in this crucial service transferring power upwards to regional and national structures, and taking it away from local sectors in co-operation with each other. That is wrong in principle—and it is even more wrong to bring profit into this.