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Offender Management Bill

No, that is not the case. What happened was that the inspectors reached an understanding and an acceptance of the fact that they had to have a joint working arrangement. That was negotiated by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary. I am pleased that that issue has been resolved and that we still have the independent inspectors, who have agreed to collaborate on how they can work jointly across the piece. I was talking about the number of voluntary organisations that support what we are trying to do in the Bill. In interventions, I referred to what the Local Government Association has done. It has published a pamphlet called, ““Neighbourhood by neighbourhood””, in which for the first time local government acknowledges that it has a role to play in offender management. In the past, the difficulty has been that local government bodies have wanted to push offenders away into a silo of the criminal justice system. If we are to tackle reoffending, we have to tackle issues such as resettlement and unpaid work. We have to consider how to bring people back into society so that they do not reoffend. My hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Mr. Hendrick) talked about how organised crime offers a better resettlement programme than we do now. Organised crime meets people as they come out of prison, usually houses them and provides money and resources, and grooms them to reoffend. We have to stop that cycle, and we have to make sure that there is good resettlement, given what we are trying to achieve. The Bill gives us a framework in which to make sure that we have the opportunity to cut reoffending. We were asked about cherry-picking. The contracts will be set out in such a way that potential providers cannot cherry-pick the more attractive areas of business. If necessary, the Secretary of State can create a trust to bid for services when no alternative provider has registered an interest. Great play was made on the issue of the morale of staff. My hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen said that we were attacking the professionalism of the probation service and its dedication to the difficult and often dangerous work that it does on behalf of the wider community. I fully recognise the real improvements in performance that staff have delivered in recent years. I understand that staff are anxious about their future, but I reassure the House that nothing that we are proposing undermines the value that we place on probation as a profession. We will reinforce those values through rigorous national standards and training. If a new provider takes over an aspect of probation business, staff who transfer to that provider will have their terms and conditions protected by law. New providers will have to take account of the two-tier work force regulations, which means that they will have to recruit new staff on terms and conditions that are, overall, no less favourable than those of employees transferring from the public sector. We remain committed to working with the trade unions, and we envisage that the current arrangements for national collective pay bargaining in the public sector will continue for the time being. Points were made about the increase in the number of staff. Overall, staffing in the probation service has risen by the equivalent of about 5,000 full-time staff since 1997, and the rise has been most rapid since 2001. The creation of National Offender Management Service headquarters has largely been achieved, with staff having been transferred from organisations such as Her Majesty’s Prison Service headquarters and the national probation directorate, as well as the core Home Office. NOMS HQ is subject to the same head-count reduction targets as other parts of the Home Office, so it is not true to say that the people that we are talking about are all bureaucrats; they are people on the front line. My hon. Friends asked how we will make sure that staff are properly trained. We will ensure that all providers are capable of providing appropriate, high-quality services, so there will be an assurance and accreditation process appropriate to the type of service and the contract value. The process will include assurances about staff training in cases in which it is necessary to ensure appropriately skilled staff. We expect every organisation that employs staff who work with offenders to invest in skills and professional development for its staff. We are working with Skills for Justice, the sector skills council, on the learning and development needs of staff. We were accused of destroying probation’s traditional links with the local community. Our proposals will not remove probation from its local roots. At the moment, the 42 probation boards, though statutorily independent, also form part of a single national probation service. The chair of the board and the chief officer are both appointed by the Secretary of State, and the chief officer is, in effect, line-managed by the director of probation, who is based in London. Under our proposals, trusts will have greater independence from the centre. Although the Secretary of State will appoint the members of the trust, the trust will appoint its own chief executive. It will be accountable to the Secretary of State, through the regional commissioners, only for what it delivers, and it will be freed from interference from the centre in how it runs its internal affairs. In practice, we anticipate that members of trusts will continue to be drawn largely from the local community. The Bill is not about moving probation boards out of the way. What we are saying is that membership of the boards is too tight, and we want wider local involvement. Commissioners will be placed under a statutory duty to consult on how they deliver services. That will enhance the ability of probation services to meet specific needs in their local communities. We are developing partnership and co-commissioning arrangements, so that regional commissioners can work effectively with key agencies, such as learning and skills councils, primary care trusts, drug and alcohol action teams and local criminal justice boards, as well as their Welsh equivalents. We will ensure that commissioners work closely with those bodies and other local partners involved in delivering local area agreement outcomes locally. We have included reduced reoffending as a mandatory indicator in local area agreements from 2007. The process has been strengthened by the roll-out of action and delivery plans on the regional reduction of reoffending, enabling commissioners to achieve a better understanding of diverse local needs and priorities and, where possible, to align local commissioning priorities and plans. Regional commissioners will consult local stakeholders on their commissioning priorities through the publication of regional and national commissioning plans. We expect regional commissioners to contract with the main large providers, who will sub-contract and enter partnership arrangements with local providers. A great deal was made of the statistics on reoffending. I glad that we all recognise that there is a genuine problem, as just under 60 per cent. of offenders reoffend. We all agree that that is not good enough. Offenders starting a community sentence reoffend at lower rates— 53 per cent.—but that, too, is not good enough. Delivering change is a major challenge, as many of those offenders have long-established cycles of behaviour that are rooted in multiple social problems. We must fundamentally alter that behaviour. While acknowledging the scale of the challenge, our aim is to work toward a 10 per cent. reduction in reoffending by the end of the decade. Offenders on community orders are less likely to offend. Very simply, the more an offender has offended the more likely it is that they will offend in future. Offenders who are given a community sentence have an average of eight previous convictions, while offenders sentenced to custody have 13 previous convictions. We have set a target that compares our performance with a predicted rate to account for those variations.