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Offender Management Bill

I was grateful for the opportunity to hear the Home Secretary introduce the Bill. I am concerned that we still have far too many people committing serious criminal offences for the first time. Incidentally—this is what my wife calls the MLM or ““me lovely me”” bit—I challenge the claim that crime has been reduced under the present Government but was not under the previous Government. If the Home Office bothers to include car crime, including over-the-limit drink driving, which used to kill many more people than homicides, it can be seen that the number of criminal offences committed each week by young men under 30 decreased by probably more than 1 million a week in the late 1980s. No reduction in other crime has matched that. I would argue that there are good reasons to use the same sort of cultural attack on crime and its causes that worked so successfully in reducing the number of drink-drive deaths from 1,200 a year to 300 to 350 a year now—but that is not the point of the Bill. Jeffrey Archer spent time in jail, and in his books on jail, which I commend to everyone who is seriously interested in crime and punishment, he makes a number of points, one of which is that it is perverse to pay people in prison £12 a week to push a broom around as a cleaner, but only £6 to £8 a week for receiving education. It would be useful to the Government, in what they are trying to do to improve education for people who are interned, to try to provide incentives for education. The best incentive for education is not, of course, the money that people get for undertaking it while they are in prison; its real purpose is different. However, the money is a signal, in a way, and no one should be paid less for receiving an education than for doing physical labour in prison. Jeffrey Archer points out the way in which people who are sentenced to jail, especially for the first time, spend the early weeks of their term in a secure prison, where there are many people who are inured to prison discipline, and who use a system of putting pressure on new incomers to get them involved in the use of illegal drugs, and to arrange payments outside. To those who may laugh at the quotation of Jeffrey Archer, I say that he and all those who have experience of prisons, including prison officers, prison visitors and prisoners themselves, would reckon that he has got it right. I hope that Ministers will go on encouraging people in the Prison Service to find effective ways of making sure that young, new prisoners are not influenced by old, bad prisoners, because I fear that many people who are not on drugs when they enter prison are on drugs when they come out. That brings me to a matter on which the Home Office might have a partnership influence: the national scheme for dealing with people who are on drugs. I have had an incredibly bad experience in Worthing, in my current constituency. I shall not go into detail, as a passing reference is sufficient, but one really good doctor who was dealing with chaotic drug users had got a high proportion of them off drugs straight away—and most of them have stayed off drugs, too. However, the official or more authorised service had a delay of at least 10 days for triage, and a delay of 10 days after triage for getting people on to a substitute for street drugs. If street drug users need a fix four times a day, that delay means 20 extra days, or 80 more occasions, on which they have to find money and supplies. That helps to keep the market going, and has other effects with which I need not trouble the House this evening. I want to discuss the subject in a non-partisan way, and I am willing to believe that Ministers and those working with them think that the Bill will allow an advance to be made. I was a sceptic about the previous changes to the probation service. If I manage to be selected to serve on the Committee considering the Bill, I am not sure that I will always be mild, obedient, good and kind to my party managers, because in some clauses we should consider the arguments on their merits, as well as with reference to the significant leadership that the Conservative Front-Bench team will provide to the Committee. However, the Government will have to illustrate why they think that they have got things right in this new part of their constant revolution. I hope that, in Committee, the Government can explain matters in more detail than Ministers may want to provide in their winding-up speeches today, because there are a number of anomalies, one of which is the issue of how various clauses match together. For example, clauses 12 and 13 both have to do with the use of force, but people are authorised to use force in one clause and not in the other. I do not quite understand what the significant difference of principle is between the two, but the Minister may be able to explain, either now or in Committee. I am not sure about Crown immunity, either, as it seems that it does not apply to the property of non-Government-owned trusts, but that it does apply to the people working in the new probation service who are not Government employees. However, that, too, may be explained later. This weekend, I took part in a 24-hour vigil outside our local hospital. At about 10 o’clock in the morning, after a busy day for the staff in the hospital, a youth came out of accident and emergency, asking for cigarette papers. I think that he wanted to go on smoking what he had been smoking the evening before. He then went back in, but he and two of his friends came out of the hospital escorted by an employee of a firm called Global Security, who handled them with immense effectiveness and great courtesy. They were sent off the hospital premises, not drinking or smoking, and they went without causing further trouble. At any moment, the whole situation could have blown up. I have no doubt that the employee’s colleagues would have dealt with the matter similarly. I do not know his name, otherwise I would name him, but his actions showed that the private sector can do sensitive work effectively, and I praise those who do that work—not just the voluntary organisations, but people in commercial companies who take on some of the responsibilities that would otherwise have been undertaken by uniformed staff employed by the state. Lastly, I echo what has been said about mental illness, which causes a great deal of trouble and upset to individuals. Those individuals can be troublesome to themselves and others, so we need to get the issue of resources right. I hope that the Minister will explain, either now or in Committee, what is meant by the requirement on Ministers, in clause 2, to ““ensure…sufficient provision””. If that is provision of resources, I shall be interested to know how he intends to monitor how long a person who is subject to a supervision order, or a person whose case is referred to probation for a report, will have to wait until the relevant action is taken. That is a field in which time delays must be abolished, one way or another. If a probation report is needed, it must be provided, and if a supervision order is made, it needs to start. I am not referring to 24-hour supervision of everybody, but the system needs to be made to work. There are too many delays in the health service; let us hope that the probation service does not join it.