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Offender Management Bill

I had not intended speaking on this amendment, but some of the remarks sound rather professionally protective. The Probation Service has to look outside at other public services which have used sub-professional people to bring in and do a lot of work. They then provide a pool of people who can move on and upwards, as the Government propose with PSOs, to generate more high-level professional qualifications. We can look at the police service with its community support officers; we can look at ambulance services with their emergency care practitioners; we can look at social work, where some of us were involved from the 1980s onwards with care managers who do not all need to be professionally qualified social workers; we can look at healthcare assistants in the NHS and at surgical practitioners doing some of the work of surgeons. I could go on in this vein. The Probation Service has to recognise that part of a modern public service is to have groups of people at the sub-professional level feeding into the professional qualifications, doing the jobs which do not need higher level skills. That is not to say that we should not back good professional training and qualifications, but some of the debate so far on this amendment has sounded professionally protective.