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Offender Management Bill

My hon. Friend is right. We know from other services that continual reorganisation and restructuring causes problems. It has happened often and it is a problem now. If people’s morale is undermined, good people go. They decide, ““I’m not going to do this any more. I’m going to find another job where I don’t have the same pressures.”” At one point, the Home Secretary said that the offender management work would be safe for several years. At another, he said that it would be safe for two or three years. The Bill means that none of it is safe for any guaranteed time. One cannot have it both ways. It is no good saying to probation officers, ““We value your work and want you to do the offender management work,”” yet simultaneously say, ““Ah but, at some point—maybe in two or three years—it’s going to be privatised and out to competition.”” Who are those people out there who are supposed to be trained and able to undertake offender management and the work that probation officers currently do? When I consider the privatisation that has happened elsewhere in the criminal justice system, it does not fill me with confidence. The inspector of prisons said that the report on Harmondsworth was undoubtedly the poorest that the inspectorate had issued on an immigration removal centre. It is privately run but, when the problems occurred a couple of weeks ago, who was brought in to retake the place and regain control? It was the Prison Service, not the private sector. The pattern in the prisons system means that the private sector gets the nice, new modern prisons to run, not the tough stuff. It does not get the old Victorian prisons.