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Offender Management Bill

What the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, has said about when contestability can take place is important. He will appreciate that the commitments given by the Home Secretary in another place at Third Reading were not as clear as the statement he has just made. For example, on 28 February, the Home Secretary said that, "““the core offender management tasks of the probation service—for example, offender report writing, offender supervision and breach proceedings—will remain in the public sector for the next three years””.—[Official Report, Commons, 28/2/07; col. 1023.]" He went on to talk about the statutory instrument in Clause 12 being some time in the future. That has led to a great deal of confusion about when contestability will take place and what it will cover. I understood from the Minister that the Government’s intention now is that no contestability can take place until after 2010 in any format whatever—perhaps, at the Dispatch Box, he would now confirm that none can take place—and that the core services that are protected in Clause 4, however they are defined, do not have a time limit on them. In other words, if this Government are still in power in three years’ time, at the end of those three years, they would feel that they could seek, by statutory instrument, to withdraw that protection. If those two assurances are given, that may assist us in later deliberations on the Bill.