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Offender Management Bill

I am extremely concerned by what the noble Baroness has just said. Just last week, a chief officer of probation told me that they had had to give up home visits because the bureaucratic demands on them were such that they simply could not afford to do them. That is the basis of much of the work that the Minister has been talking about. I respectfully say that the Probation Service as described by my noble friend Lady Stern is much more what you hear about on the ground than the Probation Service that we have just heard about from the Minister.