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Offender Management Bill

I was not aware of those points, but the hon. and learned Gentleman makes an extremely helpful intervention that serves to underline the point I was making: if bureaucracies are provided at the centre, especially when, as in the case of NOMS, the bureaucracy has been provided in a legislative vacuum without meaningful debate in the House, the danger, which many people predicted, is that they grow and grow for no obvious purpose. They are not hemmed in by a clear political mandate. I want to speak about the all-important and controversial issue of contestability. I understand that the Home Secretary is a busy man, but it is a pity that he is no longer in the Chamber. I am not making a debating point about his presence here or elsewhere, but he made a barbed remark about whether it was possible for Liberals to oppose something that he thinks is an act of de-monopolisation. The principle at stake is not whether there should be private or voluntary sector participation in the provision of probation services, particularly non-core services. That happens already. As I said earlier, local probation boards already contract out to private and voluntary sector operators. On Thursday, I visited an excellent drug rehabilitation project in Newport, under a contract from the local probation board, which provided outstanding services. That already happens, although there is then an argument about whether it is happening enough. The Home Secretary is already putting considerable pressure on probation boards, as I said, to raise the amount contracted out in the next financial year from less than 3 per cent. of the total budget to somewhere near 10 per cent. The problem with the Bill is the artificial enforcement of greater contracting out and privatisation from the top. In my view, privatisation can work and has worked when private sector operators compete with each other in the pursuit of consumers who are free to choose in a commercial environment. In that case, most private sector operators are accountable to the custom given to them by those consumers. The Bill, however, would erect a totally distorted, rigged market in which contracts are dished out to private contractors at the behest of the Home Secretary via the new quangos—the so-called trusts. Even if one is an advocate of privatisation, this is daft and monopolistic privatisation, because it is the worst combination of administrative monopoly and centralisation in Whitehall and unaccountable, fragmented, private sector activity at local level. Far from being a blow for a liberal vision of a de-monopolised probation service, it is arrogating new powers to the centre and increasing the monopoly of decision-making power given to the Home Secretary to chop and change the probation service at will. Why has the Home Office not produced any data or study empirically to prove the virtues of open-ended contestability? In particular, what calculations have been made of the transition costs of such disruptive change? We have discovered over and over again in the past nine or 10 years that, under the so-called rubric of reform in the public services, Ministers tend to forget that the very act of introducing such reforms creates enormous costs that prevent those public services from accruing all the benefits that the reforms are purported to bring to them. How do we know that the transition costs will not outweigh the so-called benefits? There are alternatives. The Scottish example was alluded to earlier and it is close to our heart because it was the Liberal Democrats in the Scottish Executive who pushed for plans for a centralised single probation agency in Scotland to be dropped, adopting instead through legislation introduced in November last year a model of community justice authorities. That legislation imposes a statutory obligation on the community justice authorities to co-operate with all agencies on an localised, area-by-area basis to provide that elusive goal of a seamless probation service. That model combines the statutory compulsion to co-operate—to create that seamless service—with the freedom to innovate according to local conditions. Importantly, it allows—in fact, it actively encourages—the further expansion of the voluntary sector, but it does so according to clear, locally driven demand, not top-down diktat from the centre. Surely it would make more sense to advocate that approach, based on collaboration, but with a mixed economy of public probation officers and the voluntary sector and, most importantly, driven by local demand meeting local circumstances in the context of what is best for offenders as they reintegrate into their own local communities. I am not advocating a total standstill in the arrangements. For instance, I strongly believe that the present distribution of responsibilities for the oversight and implementation of the unpaid work of community sentences needs to be looked at again. We need to be as radical as we can to boost public confidence in visible, credible and rigorous community sentences, which most observers accept is absolutely essential if we are to build up a stable of alternatives to custodial sentences and ever more overcrowded prisons. The Bill seems to us a missed opportunity, which is why we will vote against Second Reading. I urge Opposition Members not to chivvy and chase but, having articulated such profound objections to the Bill, simply to do the right thing: not to score debating points about whether one is for or against the private sector, but to recognise that this is a flawed Bill, which does not deserve a Second Reading, and to join us in voting against it. The Bill risks creating disruption to a service that needs clear, steady direction, not endless managerial instability. It risks diverting attention away from the bigger issues that affect reoffending rates. It risk overlooking the more pragmatic approaches that are being developed elsewhere, notably in Scotland. It certainly risks imposing target-driven centralisation, exactly when the national debate on the organisation of all public services is increasingly suggesting that what we need in the future is less, not more, centralisation. In short, it risks exacerbating, not curing, the problems of chronic reoffending that we all seem to agree must be tackled urgently.