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Humberside Probation Service

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley) for raising this issue. I am pleased to see a strong Humberside delegation in the Chamber tonight. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull, North (Ms Johnson) is on the Treasury Bench, and my hon. Friends the Members for Brigg and Goole (Mr. Cawsey) and for Cleethorpes (Shona McIsaac) and the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) are also present. I confess that, as a graduate of Hull university, I feel an affinity for Humberside, but I shall leave that for another day. The concerns that my right hon. Friend has expressed have also been raised with me by representatives of the National Association of Probation Officers—its chair, Tim Wilson, and its general secretary, Jonathan Ledger—and by Ben Priestley, the Unison organiser. They are serious issues, and I have taken care to look at them in detail. As my right hon. Friend has mentioned, there is excellent performance in the Humberside probation trust at the moment. It is consistently rated at level 4 in the latest NOMS agency probation performance ratings, which denotes exceptional performance. Humberside is one of the six probation areas that successfully passed a capability assessment to achieve trust status in April 2008. The trust was then successful in bidding for funding for an intensive alternatives to custody project. It is good at making links to prison and at community engagement on the reducing reoffending agenda, and particularly at developing an innovative approach to working with women offenders. Indeed, I visited the trust about this time last year to see at first hand the work that it does. I visited Hull prison at the same time. In the trust's offender management inspection report in March this year, all six criteria inspected were found to be well met or satisfactorily met, so it is an impressive organisation. It also passes what I regard as the acid test for the operation of criminal justice agencies, because in Humberside between 2006-07 and 2007-08, there was a 14 per cent. fall in overall crime, a 19 per cent. fall in domestic burglary and a 23 per cent. fall in thefts of a motor vehicle. That shows that, along with the police, the trust is doing something right. The national position on probation services is as follows. In response to higher expectations, the Government have invested significant resources in the probation service over a sustained period. Between 1997 and 2008, probation funding overall has increased from £540 million to £914 million—a 70 per cent. increase. The number of front-line staff has increased from more than 14,000 employees in 1997 to 21,000 to date. From that perspective, there has been strong and consistent investment by the Labour Government in the service. Indeed, only last year we put in place an additional one-off investment of £40 million to facilitate the use of community orders rather than short prison sentences and to improve offender compliance with community orders and licences. Again, there has been success, with the figure on frequency of reoffending falling 23 per cent. over the past six years. The service nationally receives more than £900 million of public money, but I know that my right hon. Friend would expect us to use that public money effectively. In these times, we have to look at how we use those moneys efficiently. As has been put to me by NAPO, and indeed by Unison, we need to ensure that probation officers spend time managing offenders and not in front of a computer but doing the job for which they are paid, using those facilities as back-up to that work. We have to accept that we have set challenging efficiency targets for probation areas and trusts. In doing so, we have been clear that the priority is public protection, and that will not be compromised. Resources must be targeted at high-risk offenders and those offenders most likely to reoffend. In 2009, we have had to make savings of about £20 million from our total budget for probation of £914 million. However, I can inform the House that although the figures have not yet been finalised, we are expecting an overall underspend of about £20 million—the same as the savings that we are asking be made this year. That demonstrates that overall the savings are not unrealistic for probation boards and trusts across the board. Indicative budgets have been set for each probation area and have been issued. However—this is important for my right hon. Friend to recognise—the director general of the National Offender Management Service has now made it clear that the indicative probation budgets were issued without the knowledge or approval of Ministers, and so have no authority, as there is no comprehensive spending review settlement for 2011-12 onwards. Therefore, there cannot be any accurate indicative budgets for any area of Government spending beyond that period. Although my right hon. Friend the Chancellor made it clear that the next spending round will be challenging for all Departments, it does not necessarily follow that all services will be affected equally in that spending period. Therefore, indicative budgets for 2011-12 and beyond, nationally and locally, are withdrawn. We will keep those under review. That will have an impact on what Humberside probation will look at for the future.