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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply because this is a point on which he should give particularly serious consideration. Let me make two observations. First, if we are not doing this job thoroughly and well—the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has suggested that we are not—we are wasting all the money because considerable public expenditure is going into a task which is not doing what is needed. Therefore, if we want to get a proper return for the taxpayer, we should be certain that what we are doing is appropriate and effective. Secondly, this age extension covers a crucial part of the young person’s life. It is the threshold from being young to joining the adult community. We should think of the amount of discussion and debate that we have in this House about higher education, further education, universities and all that. We are certain that we want to prepare our young people for the most productive and effective future possible. As things stand, we may be denying that possibility to people on this threshold and, through an inadequate response to what they really need, may be setting them off on a course which will result in one failure after another and, all too likely, reoffending and the rest. From that standpoint, this makes eminent good sense. It will be a challenge to the probation service but it relates to issues that we have been discussing on other amendments when we have alluded to the probation service. I am really worried that its culture is changing so that, in effect, it has a kind of custodial role without the person actually being institutionalised, as distinct from playing a sensitive, imaginative and engaged role in dealing with young individuals, doing what is necessary to get them on a positive and constructive course and working out how that should be done. In asking the probation service to do this—and I think the amendment is correct in that sense—we must realise that there is an issue to be tackled in terms of the prevailing culture in the service itself.