(10 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
16:06 - The House divided: - Ayes: 247 / Noes: 313 - Question accordingly negatived.
17:56 - The House divided: - Ayes: 244 / Noes: 315 - Question accordingly negatived.
18:10 - The House divided: - Ayes: 239 / Noes: 318 - Question accordingly negatived.
Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
Mr Speaker
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
New clause 4—Piloting of probation reform—
‘The Secretary of State may not undertake a national restructure of the provision of probation services until the proposals have first been subject to an independently evaluated pilot scheme, and the results of that evaluation laid before both Houses of Parliament.’.
New clause 5—Provision of probation services: report to Parliament—
‘(1) The Secretary of State must lay before both Houses of Parliament a report on the performance of all providers contracted to provide officers to perform the duties of supervisor or responsible officer as described in this Act after one year of this Act coming into force.
(2) The report must include—
(a) an assessment of the information made available by each provider to the public, and their assistance to the Ministry of Justice in its performance of duties under the Freedom of Information Act 2000; and
(b) an update on what measures were included in each contract to allow the Secretary of State to penalise a provider that fails to perform to national standards or fulfil its contractual obligations, and on what occasions these measures have been brought into force.’.
New clause 6—Review of the effectiveness of prison services in delivering the Transforming Rehabilitation Strategy—
‘The Secretary of State may not undertake to introduce competitive tendering for the provision of probation services until a review of the prison service’s ability to implement the Transforming Rehabilitation Strategy has been conducted, and the results of that review laid before both Houses of Parliament.’.
New clause 9—Contracts—
‘Arrangements made by the Secretary of State resulting from this Act in accordance with which functions are conferred on officers of non-public sector providers of probation services, must include provisions requiring that—
(a) contracts for the provision of probation services from such providers be published;
(b) the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of such providers in discharging relevant functions be subject to National Audit Office assessment;
(c) companies under investigation for fraud may not bid for, nor be part of consortia bidding for, a contract for the provision of probation services; and
(d) companies with the status of prime contractor under the Work Programme may not bid for, nor be part of consortia bidding for, a contract for the provision of probation services.’.
New clause 10—Transparency—
‘Any contract for probation services shall be transparent and available for both public and parliamentary scrutiny, and be the subject of National Audit Office inspections.’.
New clause 11—Prohibition—
‘No company or other consortia shall be allowed to bid for Probation Service work if they are being investigated for fraud.’.
New clause 13—Annual reporting of reconviction rates—
‘The Secretary of State must publish an annual report which must include details of the impact of new supervision legislation for those offenders serving less than 12 months on the reconviction rates of offenders supervised by providers of probation services and as a consequence of participating in any programme or intervention.’.
Jenny Chapman
I would like to start with a few words on our friend and colleague, the former Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East, Paul Goggins. Paul served on the Public Bill Committee for this Bill, and I also served with him on two other Bill Committees. I have to say, and I am sure others Members agree and have said it already in this House, that he was the most thoughtful and supportive colleague anyone could ever have hoped to have sitting behind them on a Bill Committee. He advised me and gave me feedback, and he would definitely have been here today making a very strong contribution to our consideration on Report and on Third Reading. If he was here, our deliberations would be much improved.
I worked with Paul on amendments relating to looked-after children. He would have been very pleased to see the Government shift their position on the length of time that looked-after children can remain in foster care and be supported to do so. That is something he should have taken personal pride in. Although he was not the sort of person who would be arrogant enough to have personal pride, I think he should get the credit for this particular change. I know that he would have planned to speak today and that he would have tabled amendments. I am sure his name would have appeared many times on the amendment paper.
New clause 1 will look very familiar to those who have been following the passage of the Bill through both Houses. For a short and welcome period, it was included in the Bill. The Opposition, and I imagine a number of Government Back-Bench Members, would like to see it put back. I will point out from the start that the call for parliamentary scrutiny did not start life as an Opposition amendment. Although the Minister might sometimes think it, it was not cooked up on the Labour Benches just to make his life uncomfortable. The call for parliamentary approval before significant upheaval of the probation service was a Cross-Bench amendment tabled by the noble Lord Ramsbotham who, as colleagues will know, is a former chief inspector of prisons.
Lord Ramsbotham’s amendment was supported by every Cross-Bench peer who heard him speak to it. While the Bill focuses on one element of change to probation, it is flanked by a massive irreversible sell-off of a public service. It appears that the Government were hoping just to push that through under the radar and we think that that is very wrong. The former chief inspector of prisons was concerned enough by the proposals to try to stop that happening and enough noble Lords agreed with him to pass the original version of the amendment. New clause 1 concerns proper parliamentary scrutiny: MPs taking responsibility for a decision that will irreversibly alter the way in which offenders are supervised in the community, and for which there is no evidence and precious little support.
New clause 4 would provide a duty on the Minister to pilot his proposals for probation before rolling them out at what we think is breakneck speed across the whole country. They are conspicuously absent from the Bill. I will briefly remind the House of the Government’s proposals that are causing us such concern. They plan to abolish all local probation trusts; to sell off the majority of services to providers with no experience of probation or supervising offenders; to split up offenders according to risk categories, despite the fact that risk regularly changes; and to roll out an untested payment-by-results model to every region in one go. Probation services will be fundamentally unrecognisable after this upheaval.
Lorely Burt (Solihull) (LD)
On the pilot, some of us in the House expressed our concerns. I have now looked into the matter a bit further, and it seems that it would take three or four further years properly to conduct a pilot. Would that not be three or four years during which a continual problem would remain unaddressed?
Jenny Chapman
The hon. Lady might want to reflect that had the Secretary of State not cancelled the pilots already taking place, we might now have had a year’s worth—the pilots would not necessarily have to last three or four years—of evidence, information and lessons learned that might have proved invaluable to the Minister as he proceeded with his programme.
Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)
Would the hon. Lady accept, then, that there would be some delay to short-term prisoners getting the help they need, if we implemented the roll-out programme she is suggesting?
Jenny Chapman
I do not quite follow the hon. Gentleman’s logic. Had we kept the pilots running, we would be exactly where we are now, but with more information on which to base a decision. Also, we could conceivably deliver supervision to short-sentence prisoners without the sell-off and reform the Government seem hellbent on implementing.
John Pugh (Southport) (LD)
Does the hon. Lady not accept that my colleagues’ arguments are against pilots in general, not pilots in this specific case?
Jenny Chapman
We are in favour of piloting. We like to have evidence on which to base decisions, and we think it odd that the Government scrapped a pilot that was already set up and of which they spoke very highly when they set it up. That was a very strange decision, and we think the Government made a mistake when they cancelled the pilots.
Stephen Gilbert (St Austell and Newquay) (LD)
I have a lot of sympathy with the hon. Lady’s point about the need to pilot this significant change. She just criticised the Government for making a mistake in cancelling the pilots, but is it not also true that the Offender Management Act 2007, which Labour introduced and which allows Governments to make these changes, did not specify the need for a pilot? Does she accept that that was a mistake as well?
Jenny Chapman
I will come to the 2007 Act later, but since the hon. Gentleman has mentioned it now, I shall comment on it briefly. The 2007 Act created probation trusts, and they have now been in existence for several years and actually become quite good—I am sure even the Minister would concede that they are performing very well—but they could perform an awful lot better if challenged and supported to do so. We strongly believe, however, that the 2007 Act should not be being used to abolish the very entities it was set up to create.
On piloting, we have tabled new clause 4 to address the Government’s complete lack of evidence for their proposals. When we ask for evidence for how well the model might work, why it was picked and how much it will cost the taxpayer, we are told that the Secretary of State just believes it is the right way to go about things. The Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which I do not think he is a particular fan, reported its concern that the Government did not appear to consider any other policy options before alighting on this one. It seems that he has had his heart set on this from the very beginning.
Previous Ministers in this Government believed that the proposals should be piloted. In early 2012, the hon. Member for Reigate (Mr Blunt) announced two “ground-breaking” probation pilots to
“help develop…Payment by Results policy”
and to
“test how…public, private and voluntary…partnerships…could”—
“could”, he said—
“drive…reductions in reoffending”.
Had these pilots gone ahead, we would have had more than a year’s experience of this sort of model, but unfortunately the current Secretary of State cancelled them as soon as he took up his post. When we ask, as Opposition Members rightly do, how well these proposals work, there is no evidence with which to answer the question, because the Secretary of State has not tested them, and does not intend to do so, to see whether they work. If he were here, I hope the hon. Member for Reigate would be tempted to vote for new clause 4, because he seemed to support the principle when he was a Minister.
We are left, then, without any evidence and without a pilot, and we have lost the opportunity to test the details of these plans on a much smaller scale and with a manageable level of risk. Inevitably, there will be teething problems and inexperienced providers, there will be failures in communication and there will be glitches in the new IT system. We have just had an hour’s urgent question on the difficulties of introducing a new IT system, yet here we are implementing one at the same time as a wholesale upheaval and sell-off of the service. All this will have to be contended with all at once and on a national scale.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
My hon. Friend is no doubt aware of the fiasco of the IT service for interpreters in courts, which, dare I say it—ironically—is another Ministry of Justice success story. Does that not underline her point?
Jenny Chapman
My hon. Friend is completely right. Serving on the Public Accounts Committee, she will be familiar with the manifold problems that the MOJ has with commissioning and procurement. I will refer later particularly to the court interpreters contract and the inclusion of small mammals, which hon. Members might find surprising.
We have recent experience of the fallout from a botched implementation. At the end of last year, universal credit was slowed down, for its own good, after being poorly managed and heavily criticised and after wasting what was predicted to be millions of pounds of taxpayer money. The Work and Pensions Secretary assured Members that the programme would eventually work because under the timetable they were
“testing the system and learning first, and then finally implementing it.”
When I asked him, he said that I needed
“to understand the difference between an approach that rolls something out at every stage and learns from it”—[Official Report, 10 December 2013; Vol. 572, c. 139-144.]
and an approach that rushes something in and sees it fail. Well, I think he is right, but I am well aware of the difference. It is just a pity that he has not had the same discussion with the Justice Secretary.
After the recent track record of the Ministry of Justice in mismanaging procurement processes, the PAC recommended that the Ministry
“should draft and implement future contracts so as to minimise transitional problems, for example through piloting and rolling-out new systems gradually.”
The NAO agreed and reported that steady regional roll-outs would allow the Ministry to limit the effect of poor performance. But rather than learning from past mistakes and introducing his reforms at a sensible pace, the Secretary of State is instead opting for a national roll-out at breakneck speed. The operating model for the reforms was published only in September, yet if it all goes to plan trusts are supposed to be abolished by April. Lord Ramsbotham described the timetable as a party political time frame
“that pays no attention to practical reality.”
Alison Seabeck (Plymouth, Moor View) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is certainly reinforcing concerns raised by officers in Devon and Cornwall about the way in which this is being handled. Although they are unhappy about the whole process, they would be prepared to consider operating within a pilot to see whether it had legs, to put it crudely. Does she agree with that?
Jenny Chapman
It will not surprise my hon. Friend to know that I do agree. I visited the pilots when they commenced and was impressed with the entrepreneurial attitude taken by trust chief execs and the desire to make them work. For all that the professionals involved had misgivings, the desire in the probation service to make whatever it is dealt work for the benefit of victims of crime and the offenders it works with is quite overwhelming. It is such a shame that those very organisations that have developed to become quite outstanding are going to be abolished.
Lord Ramsbotham said that the time scale paid no attention to practical reality and he is absolutely right. The Chair of the Justice Committee has said that there are
“significant risks in the pace at which the government intend to implement the programme.”
The Minister’s own officials describe the timetable as “aggressive” and a number of probation trust chairs have written publicly to the Secretary of State to advise that he must delay his plans or risk inevitable public protection failures. The chairs of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Warwickshire probation trusts have, in turn, warned that the timetable is risky and unrealistic and has serious implications for service delivery.
The Ministry of Justice’s own assessment of the implications for service delivery are bleak. A leaked copy of the Department’s risk register reported an over 80 per cent. chance of an
“unacceptable drop in operational performance.”
We have been over this—I have lost count of the number of times that the Minister and I have had this conversation —so I know he will reply that it is not the Government’s practice to publish departmental risk registers. But as the information is already out there, does he not think that it would be beneficial for the Secretary of State to come to the House to discuss the possible risks with Members? I would like to know what an
“unacceptable drop in operational performance”
might look like when we are talking about the supervision of dangerous offenders in the community.
The area of the proposals that has raised the most professional concern is the issue of risk management itself. These are people who are in the risk management business. The Government’s plans will fragment the service and split up offenders based on their category of risk, with low and medium-risk offenders being managed by new providers while those deemed to be high risk stay with the public sector. The problem with that split is that risk is not static and regularly shifts. Around a quarter of offenders change risk category during their order and they do not just change it once or in incremental steps. Low risk can become high risk almost instantaneously if an offender’s circumstances change. The Government are institutionalising into this system a break, which we think is dangerous, where offenders whose risk escalates will have to be handed over to a different provider at the moment they are most volatile, with all the risk that that brings in terms of time delays and communication failures, which we know from other areas cause real problems. That is an unnecessary and, worse, a dangerous layer of bureaucracy that the Government should be doing all they can to avoid. The chief inspector of probation has warned that
“any lack of contractual or operational clarity between the public and private sector will, in our view, lead to systemic failure and an increased risk to the public.”
We find that deeply concerning.
Lorely Burt
My understanding is that within the CRCs there will be skilled professional people whose job it will be continually to asses the risk factor of low and medium-term prisoners. Would that not indicate that those issues are being covered?
Jenny Chapman
I would hope that there will be someone working in a CRC who could assess risk. The point is that whenever we have a transition between organisations, there will be different systems. The relationships will not be so strong and there will be scope for communication failures and for information not to be passed on. That gets to the nub of the concern felt by us and by those working in the sector about where the problems will arise with what the Government are proposing.
The Government have made much of the fact that new and inexperienced providers will only manage those who are low and medium risk. But the Minister knows that low and medium risk includes offenders who have committed sexual assault, burglary, violence against the person, domestic violence and other quite serious offences. All of them will now be under the supervision of companies that have no experience of managing this kind of risk. Alarm over this lack of experience of providers is part of a wider concern not only that the proposal is not fit for purpose, but that some of these potential providers are not properly fit to deliver it either.
The Government are, I know, painfully aware of the MOJ’s record on procuring services and managing contracts. After the somewhat infamous saga—here is the mammal bit—of the language services contract, the PAC concluded that the Ministry of Justice
“was not an intelligent customer”
and the Chair of the Justice Committee reported that “serious flaws” were exposed in the Ministry’s procedures and policies and that the process was a “shambles”. The NAO concluded that the Ministry
“underestimated the project risks when it decided to switch from a regional to a national rollout”
and allowed the contract to be operational before it was ready. I do not need to spell out the extent of the risk to public safety if these sorts of failures are allowed to occur in this exercise.
Perhaps because of all these problems, Ministers have pinned all their hopes on the payment mechanism. They assure us that success is guaranteed because providers will be paid by results. But Members will recall similar claims being made about the Work programme, in which every provider started by failing to meet its targets. Ministers have also so far been unable to tell Members exactly how much of a fee will be paid by results and how much the provider will get up front, regardless of their performance. My hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) made an excellent point in Committee, when she said that when universal credit had been bailed out the original structures were still in place to provide services that the reforms could not. There was at least some sort of continuity. Given that the Secretary of State is planning to abolish every probation trust in a matter of months, what will be in place to protect the public? Should a provider fail or the entire roll-out have to be halted because of poor performance, nothing would be in place.
The performance of providers and the very real concern about failure brings me to new clause 5, which deals with contract management. It is designed to ensure better performance from providers and much better management of contracts by the Ministry of Justice than we have seen in recent years. I know the Minister will accept that this is needed. Now we come to the bit about the rabbit! The MOJ paid for a rabbit to be licensed as a court interpreter—the commissioning car crash, as it was called, meaning the language service’s contract. The Chairman of the Justice Select Committee concluded that the Ministry’s naivety at the start of the process appeared to have been matched, once the new arrangements came into operation, by its indulgence towards underperformance against the contract.
We will disagree today on how well the Secretary of State and his Department can manage this kind of process, but I am sure that the Minister would agree with the Opposition Front-Bench team at least on the fact that we must not tolerate underperformance if and when these contracts come into force. We cannot allow these problems to happen again in the future. Neither the Ministry’s nor the Government’s records are particularly encouraging on this front. The Justice Select Committee in its review of the budgeting structure of the MOJ reported—astutely, I think—that the Department has a tendency to focus on policy creation rather than implementation. The recent independent review of MOJ contracting reported in December that there were long-standing and significant weaknesses in contract management at the Department. It found that the focus on contracts lessened significantly after the initial procurement and, in some cases, there appeared to be a lack of appetite for continuous improvement. The review concluded that opportunities to mitigate risks and optimise services were being missed.
We have seen first hand the damage done when the Ministry’s attention span fails to keep track of a contract. Our new clause 5 attempts to support the Government to get a bit better on that. Contracts for two major providers and potential failures in probation bidding are currently under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office, after the taxpayer was overcharged by millions for the tagging of offenders who were dead, had been released or, in some cases, had left the country. The prisoner escort contract with Serco has been referred for investigation by the Metropolitan police, and the Ministry’s own review of contracts has led to two more G4S contracts being referred to the SFO. It should not be necessary to mention how unhappy Members on both sides of the House would be if a company under investigation for fraud were to be permitted to bid to manage public protection, so I am sure the Minister will want to assure us that that will not be the case. So far, the Government have not done so.
Opposition Members have proposed a number of safeguards in new clause 5, which we believe should be included to improve the quality of the Government’s reforms. If the Government are hellbent on going ahead, new clause 5 would provide at least some kind of oversight and scrutiny for this House. We want them to pilot the proposals and seek parliamentary approval, which we have discussed. We tabled in Committee a number of measures to help improve the quality of contracts. These included ensuring that all providers of this key public service would be subject to freedom of information requests, that contracts would last for a maximum of five years so that a Government were not able to make decisions binding the entire Parliament that follows them, and that taxpayers’ money should be protected by the inclusion of break and clawback clauses in all contracts.
Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)
I am listening intently to the hon. Lady’s argument, but how can it have real force if she dismisses the experience of contractual arrangements gained over a significant period of time with organisations such as Turning Point, the St Giles Trust and Catch 22? The argument cannot have force if she dismisses out of hand the quality provision of rehabilitation by these and other organisations. Is she saying that these organisations cannot be trusted with the management of rehabilitation?
Jenny Chapman
I do not have a problem with any of the organisations to which the hon. Gentleman refers. The fact that organisations are third sector does not of itself make them good, responsible and right in every case. If organisations are to take on these contracts, they will do so almost entirely in conjunction with other large companies, and it is reasonable to expect them to be open to scrutiny; my experience suggests that they will be.
Mr Burrowes
I am trying to get to the point of the characteristics of the organisations that are fit for the purposes involved. One cannot label an organisation as acceptable simply because it is third sector if it is inappropriate. Does the hon. Lady recognise the principle that there is a role for private sector involvement in rehabilitation?
Jenny Chapman
Yes, I do. All I am asking for is parity. A public sector provider of these services is subject to a certain level of scrutiny, not least in respect of freedom of information, and when we are spending increasingly vast sums on a small number of private sector providers it is not unreasonable to expect them to be subject to similar oversight. The hon. Gentleman will not be surprised to learn that the Government voted against all these measures in Committee, saying that the current arrangements offer enough protection and assuring us that any necessary safeguards would be included in the contracts.
I am afraid to tell the Minister, who is well respected in this House, that it is a little difficult simply to accept even his word on such important issues, particularly given that the Government’s record on outsourcing is so awful. We have already discussed the compelling example of the court translation services contract, and another example fresh in our minds is the running of Oakwood prison.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way and, as ever, for her kind words. I suggest, however, that I am not asking her to take only my word about the safeguards in the contracts. We will publish the contracts in draft so that the House can see for itself.
Jenny Chapman
Perhaps, then, if that is the Minister’s attitude, he will be minded to support our new clause 5. It is reasonably worded and if he reads it carefully he might find that he can support it.
Returning to HMP Oakwood, the Government have somehow managed to build a brand new, state-of-the-art prison that seems to be failing on every imaginable front. A surprise prison inspection last year found inmates reporting that it was easier to get drugs than soap on the wings, while the inspectorate report revealed that the inexperience of staff was visible everywhere, with staff unwilling to challenge bad behaviour and many being
“passive almost to the point of collusion”.
As the report continued, indicators of levels of violence were high, there were not enough activity places and the control and supply of medication was “chaotic”. The chief inspector of prisons called the state of the prison “unquestionably concerning”. The Secretary of State was disappointingly somewhat less firm in his criticism, largely dismissing these as “teething problems”. A couple of months later, inmates managed to stage not one, but two rooftop protests. As late as last week, six months after the inspectorate visited the prison, West Staffordshire police were notified of an incident lasting through the night, apparently involving an entire wing being barricaded by inmates.
Sir Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)
I am sure it is entirely my fault for being obtuse, but could the hon. Lady try to weave her remarks about the prison into her arguments in support of the new clause because I do not see a connection?
Jenny Chapman
I will attempt to assist the hon. and learned Gentleman. The point is that Oakwood prison is run by one of the would-be providers of probation services.
Jenny Chapman
Perhaps the Minister knows more than I do—I hope he does—but nothing we have read suggests that G4S will not take part in any way in the provision of these services. A statement made on 19 December informed us that it would not be a lead bidder, but also indicated that it might be part of a consortium.
Jeremy Wright
Perhaps I can help. The list of prime bidders has now been published, and Members may well find it worth their while to have a look at it. It is true that neither G4S nor Serco appears on the list, but a number of others organisations do, including 10 probation mutuals.
Jenny Chapman
But those are lead bidders, and I understand that none of the contracts will be taken on by one organisation alone. There is nothing to prevent G4S and others from being involved in the provision of probation services when the contracts are awarded. The other reason this information is relevant to probation is that it reveals that the quality of the supervision and enforcement of contracts by the Ministry of Justice is not quite what we would like it to be.
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
The statement that was made to the House a couple of weeks ago was explicit about the possibility that G4S and Serco would form parts of consortia. I think that the Minister should make the position absolutely clear.
Jenny Chapman
That is certainly my understanding, and nothing that the Minister has said so far contradicts it. Unless we hear something more definitive from G4S, the Ministry of Justice or the Minister today, I think that that must remain our assumption.
The MOJ tends to take its eye off the ball as soon as a contract has been signed, so new clause 5 helpfully provides for a longer-term regular check on the performance of probation service providers. Its scope is really quite limited: it merely requires the Secretary of State to report to both Houses of Parliament on the performance of all providers that are contracted to manage offenders. In particular, the report must include an assessment of the transparency of each provider, and must specify what information it is making available to the public and how reliably it is responding to freedom of information requests submitted to the MOJ. It must also update both Houses on what measures were included in the contracts to ensure that poor performance could be penalised, and on whether any have been invoked.
Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)
In the past, the Justice Committee has suggested not that private companies should be subject to freedom of information requirements, which would be contrary to any working commercial system, but that when writing contracts, public bodies should ensure that they have access—and thus create freedom of information access—to any information that would have been public if the work was still being done in the public sector.
Jenny Chapman
We would probably go a little further, but I accept what the right hon. Gentleman says. The new clause merely requires companies to respond in a way that helps the MOJ to meet its own freedom of information requirements.
Opposition Members are becoming increasingly concerned about the blind spot that seems to be developing in relation to outsourced contracts. Given the rate at which the Secretary of State is issuing invitations to the likes of Eddie Stobart to take over justice contracts, more and more information is being put out of the taxpayer’s reach.
Responding to amendments tabled in Committee, the Government argued that the status quo, whereby a contractor is considered to hold information on behalf of a public body, was working well enough. We disagree, and the Minister knows that, in practice, there is information that private contracts choose to keep to themselves while public providers are rightly held to account. That is not a level playing field, and it does not give us, our constituents or, indeed, the press enough power to scrutinise those who are wielding large public budgets and providing front-line public services.
Meg Hillier
The heads of some of the big private sector providers recently appeared before the Public Accounts Committee. They expressed a wish for more openness, and some of them told us that they were being constrained in that regard by their contracts with the Government rather than by their own desires.
Jenny Chapman
I was not aware of that, but I am very pleased that some of the big providers are taking that attitude.
We have pledged to expand the scope of freedom of information requirements if we win the next election. We should have liked the Government to make a start with probation providers, but, unfortunately, it seems that so far they are unpersuaded. We hope that, as a compromise, they will agree to monitor the extent to which providers respond to their duty to release information to assist the Ministry of Justice with its FOI duties. That will allow us to establish whether the current provisions are indeed sufficient, or whether more needs to be done to make companies accountable to the public.
Finally, new clause 5 requires an update on what measures were included in contracts to ensure that poor performance can be dealt with properly. We are very concerned about that. The Government refused to assure us that break clauses, which allow the taxpayer to walk away if a provider consistently fails to perform to national standards, would be included in all contracts. Instead, the Minister has given his word that underperformance will not be tolerated, and that contracts will include a number of safeguards to protect the quality of the service and the cost to the taxpayer. The new clause would simply allow Members to hold the Minister to that welcome assurance.
The Government’s proposed reforms are ill thought through, risky and, in our view, reckless. We believe that the Government should slow down the process and take the time to get it right. In fact, they may well be right, and if they organised pilots and obtained some evidence, we would be the first to support them. However, if they press ahead with their gamble with public safety, the bare minimum that our constituents must be assured of is that providers will be expected to perform exceptionally well.
New clauses 1, 4 and 5 are intended to build safeguards into the process. They would allow plans to be properly scrutinised, tested, and made fit for purpose. The Secretary of State is taking a gamble with public safety. He is rolling out an untested model in the hands of unqualified providers, and he expects us to be reassured by his inner belief. It is a great pity that the Government are not willing to proceed slowly, to do things properly, and to work with the professionals, and even the Opposition, to arrive at a result on which we could possibly all agree.
Mr Burrowes
I am, in some ways, trying to help the hon. Lady’s case. She has referred to “unqualified providers”. I know that she does not want to pick and choose between different sectors, but is she saying that those 10 probation mutuals are unqualified?
Jenny Chapman
Absolutely not. I welcome the involvement of probation mutuals. I think that it would have been a great deal easier, less time-consuming, less expensive and less traumatic if some of those organisations had been allowed simply to get on with it without having to form themselves into new organisations. Had the Government’s initial proposal been for all trusts to be able to re-form as mutuals, using the skills, experience, knowledge and relationships that they already have, we would not have needed to engage in this debate today.
We will press new clauses 1, 4 and 5 to a vote. If the Government are so confident about what they are doing, why should they not submit their plans to proper parliamentary scrutiny?
Sir Edward Garnier
I will be brief because we enjoyed the speech of the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) for some little while. Essentially the point of difference between her and me, certainly in relation to new clause 1 and the new clauses that mirror it, is that she would like to delay the progress of the implementation of the Government’s proposals and I would like them to be implemented as soon as possible.
There has been a considerable amount of to-ing and fro-ing both across the Dispatch Box and between Members of Parliament and their constituents who work within what I loosely term the probation services, by which I mean not specifically the Government agency, but those who carry out rehabilitation services. I have recently met members of staff of the Leicestershire probation service and when I was a shadow Justice Minister I made a point of visiting a huge number of probation offices, meeting both probation staff and those who work not in the Government agencies but in the charitable sector, such as the organisations my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) mentioned in his intervention. It struck me that, by and large, there was a big hole in the way we look after short-term prisoners and repeat offenders. They were released from prison unsupervised, and the sooner we start supervising these under-12-month prisoners the better for them and for their victims and society as a whole.
I can appreciate the political arguments the hon. Member for Darlington advanced. I appreciate that from her pre-parliamentary background she has an affiliation with the GMB and therefore has an interest in—
Sir Edward Garnier
Well, I hope I have read the hon. Lady’s entry correctly. Perhaps she had better come and see me later and we can get it corrected. In any case, her party has a closer affiliation to the trade union movement than I personally have and my party has. I can therefore understand why she is advancing these arguments requesting pilots and other forms of delay mechanisms, because she does not want these measures to come to pass. I think that argument has been had and the situation now needs to be resolved, however, and I therefore urge her not to press her amendment to a Division. I am far more interested in the results we can achieve for our constituents and those offenders who desperately need the supervision they are currently not getting than I am in the political arguments.
Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)
Might not another reason for our pressing these amendments be accountability and wanting to see evidence?
Sir Edward Garnier
No doubt that might be one of the collateral reasons, but that does not undermine the point I am making, which is that we need to help these under 12-monthers as soon as possible. If we are to have further statutory brakes on the introduction of supervision, either through the national probation service or through the non-Government organisations—
Sir Edward Garnier
I seem to have provoked all sorts of charming people. I give way.
Jenny Chapman
I really did not want to intervene and was trying very hard not to do so, but I just want the hon. and learned Gentleman to understand that we are not opposed in any way whatever to the introduction of supervision for prisoners who serve short sentences, but we believe there are other ways in which that could have been implemented without going through this ridiculous process that the Government are hell-bent on pursuing.
Sir Edward Garnier
Is it St Francis I am reminded of: “Oh Lord make me pure, but not yet”?
Sir Edward Garnier
St Augustine. I am so glad for that correction. The Minister is multi-talented.
I do not think I need to pursue my argument. I have made the point I want to make, and I understand the points the hon. Member for Darlington has made and I disagree with them. I suggest we get on and permit the arrangements to be advanced as soon as possible. I say that not out of party political animus; I say it out of a desire to see something done, having spent five years in opposition between 2005 and just short of 2010 taking an intense interest in the way in which we ran our prison system, our criminal justice system and our rehabilitation system. I also say it as someone who has sat for 12 or so years as a Crown court recorder and who had to deal quite regularly with the results of failure, and I think the time has come to stop that.
Sarah Champion
May I begin by apologising as I will not be able to be present for the final winding-up speeches? I mean no disrespect, but I have an outstanding parliamentary engagement I just cannot get rid of. [Interruption.] Sorry; an engagement I cannot be excused from.
Every time I have been involved in proceedings on this Bill it is as though I have stepped into the twilight zone. I was on the Bill Committee and in the Opposition debate on this issue, and from what I am hearing today, the same thing keeps on happening and I do not understand why.
I support new clause 5 and the other new clauses to which I have added my name. We are asking for a full debate in Parliament about a major overhaul of the judicial system. The safeguard of new clause 1 was previously inserted in the Bill in the other place but was removed by the Government in Committee. I do not understand the logic for doing that.
The nub of this Bill—which is not actually included in its provisions—is that 70% of the probation service will be privatised. I do not understand the motivation for doing that. I hear the arguments and I hear a lot of myths about what Labour is saying and is not saying, but the two do not stack up and I am just not hearing the evidence for making the change.
Gareth Johnson
Does the hon. Lady not accept that a tendering-out process is vital if we are to assist short-term prisoners and that that cannot be achieved within existing budgets?
Sarah Champion
I hear that point and I have heard it made for months now, but I do not agree that that is the only way forward and I am yet to hear the evidence that tells me that it is the best way forward. I would like to develop that point.
As we are not being presented with evidence, the only conclusion I can reach is that the policy is driven by ideology rather than facts. This is not a subject we should be playing with. We need to have evidence and proof. Even a pilot would give us time—that breathing space and that evidence. That is why I support new clause 4. The proposal is being rushed through. The system is over 100 years old and it has served us well in that time; we have been debating the proposal for only the past six months.
I would like to set the record straight once again on Labour’s position. We are not in any way opposed to supporting offenders who have had sentences of under 12 months. We actually tried to bring that support through but were unable to do so. We are very supportive of that, but we question the one way that has been presented to us in which it should be done.
Jeremy Wright
The hon. Lady is right that the previous Labour Government set out exactly such an aspiration and she is right, too, that they came to the conclusion that they could not achieve it, but does she not accept that they came to that conclusion because they could not find a way of affording it? That is precisely why we have put forward these proposals—it is the only way we can see of affording that extra cost. So far, I have heard nothing to suggest that there is an alternative.
Sarah Champion
I support what the Minister says, but there are two points to make. First, we have not been presented with the costs, so we do not know whether it can be afforded. Secondly, I do not agree with the premise that that is the only way to go forward.
Although I would not choose it, we are not fundamentally opposed to commercial companies tendering for and running Government contracts, as long as they are proved to be the best provider. We are also not at any level against voluntary organisations being involved. Indeed, a number of such organisations are providing specialist services in Rotherham, and we want that to continue. I am sure that that is happening across the country. This is not an either/or situation.
I want to use this debate to challenge some of the Government’s reasons for this massive overhaul of our judicial system, in the hope that even just one person in the Chamber will listen to some of the evidence that we are putting forward and question the assumptions that are being made. The underlying assumption is that the existing system is not fit for purpose, yet the National Offender Management Service published a report in July 2012 that demonstrated that the quality of the probation service was either good or exceptional in every single probation trust. After the probation service as a whole won an award for excellence in 2011, the hon. Member for Reigate (Mr Blunt), who was Minister for prisons and probation at the time, said—
Mr Burrowes
The hon. Lady has attended the debates on this subject. She was here for the Opposition day debate and she served on the Bill Committee. Plainly, the focus of the Bill is the provision of rehabilitation for short-term offenders. Will she provide statistics on who is looking after those short-term offenders and on their reoffending rates? Is it really acceptable to defend the status quo?
Sarah Champion
I agree that it is unacceptable that those people are not getting support now. I would like to go further and start their rehabilitation in prison. I would like there to be a complete system, so that when people come out they will be able to engage much better in society and will not reoffend.
Sarah Champion
I should just like to tell the House what the hon. Member for Reigate said. After the probation service as a whole won an award for excellence in 2011, he stated:
“This prestigious award recognises the professionalism of probation staff and the excellence of their work. This very public recognition of not just what they do but, perhaps more importantly, how well they do it, will be a source of pride for probation staff.”
The existing probation trusts are doing an excellent job, and that is being recognised. They are not broken.
Lorely Burt
I do not think that anyone in the House would dispute the fact that the probation service does an excellent job. However, during the last 10 years of the previous Government, the cost of running the service rose by 70%. The hon. Lady says that she does not disagree with the use of private providers or with the aims of the Bill. Can she explain how on earth it would be possible to realise those aims without taking these steps?
Sarah Champion
Unfortunately, I cannot explain that, because the plans have not been put before us. I am therefore unable to scrutinise them or to change them to the degree that I would like. I am supporting new clause 1 because I would like the House to be able to debate those matters, but we are not being given the opportunity to do so.
Another assumption that is being presented to us is that probation trusts are failing to reduce reoffending rates, yet reoffending rates are falling. The latest statistics published by the Ministry of Justice show that the probation service reduced reoffending by a further 5% below the target figure. This continues the downward trend in reoffending rates witnessed over recent years, and reoffending by all adult offenders in the community subject to probation supervision is now at its lowest since 2007-08. The probation service has achieved that while making the considerable budgetary savings asked of it. In South Yorkshire, the figures are even better, at 12.77% lower than the target figure.
Reoffending rates are important, but they are not the only criterion for success in this area. The probation service can also boast that victim feedback has been positive in 98% of cases; that targets for completions on domestic violence interventions, and for court report timeliness, have been met and exceeded; and that completion targets were also met or exceeded on the vast majority of probation programmes. The probation trusts are doing a superb job, and they should be allowed to continue to do so.
Another assumption that keeps being mentioned in the debate is that the only way in which supervision for people serving a sentence of under 12 months can be afforded is through privatisation. However, the proposals will necessitate the wholesale reorganisation of the probation service and a lengthy and complex national tendering and contracting process, all of which will require significant investment before we even get to the meat of doing the job. There is huge concern over the lack of information on the cost of the proposals. We have asked for that information, but it has not been presented. Despite the publication of several impact assessments, the Ministry of Justice has yet to set out the cost of the reforms and the way in which they will be funded. This is a fundamental point. If we are expected to take this leap in the dark, at least we should be chucked a lifeboat so that we can get into it.
The current budget for probation is approximately £800 million a year, suggesting a 10-year budget of £8 billion. The House of Commons Library has broadly estimated that the 10-year value of outsourced probation would be between £5 billion and £20 billion. That is in addition to the budget for the remaining public sector probation service. That suggests that a significant increase in costs is being predicted, contrary to Ministry of Justice claims that the reforms are a cost-saving initiative. In addition, there would be the unknown percentage resulting from performance-related pay.
Now it starts to get surreal—not that it was not already. The Government say that the probation service cannot tender because of the performance-related pay aspect, so why do they not just drop that element? The probation trusts have been saying all along that they would like the opportunity to support people serving short-term sentences. They are clearly the best trained and most skilled specialist people to do that work, but they are not even being allowed to tender for it. I find it incredibly challenging that the main stumbling block to retaining the status quo in that area is that the Government will not drop the performance-related pay element.
I support new clauses 5 and 11, but other people want to speak so I shall not say any more about the companies that are tendering for the work. Nor will I go into the whole data protection issue that will result from state, private and voluntary organisations sharing information. My hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) has already mentioned the logistics of reorganisation and the risks incurred during a transition period. Those risks are enormous. We are not talking about people not getting paid for a week. We are talking about people being out in the community without the necessary supervision, and the potential for the data to collapse around them so that we would not even know where they were.
In conclusion, new clause 1 would prevent the Government from being able to sell off or restructure the probation service unless their proposals had first been laid before, and approved by, both Houses of Parliament. The Government have not given Parliament any opportunity to scrutinise their plans to privatise probation, claiming instead that they can use existing legislation to push the plans through. The only time we have debated this topic is during Opposition day debates. That cannot be democratic. The way in which this has been handled has shaken me to the core.
Jeremy Wright
Of course democratic accountability is important. The hon. Lady has mentioned the opportunities the House has had to debate these matters. She has mentioned the Opposition day debate, in which there was a vote and the House voted against her point of view. She has also mentioned the Second Reading debate, after which the House voted against her point of view. She was also in the Committee, where the Committee voted against her point of view. How much more democracy does she need?
Sarah Champion
Again, it would be nice to have the evidence; instead, we are debating in the dark. I find it shocking that we had to raise the issue in an Opposition day debate, rather than the Government presenting their findings to us.
For me, it is right and proper that this House should debate the privatisation of 70% of probation services; the fragmentation of the resulting services; the abolition of local probation trusts; the commissioning of services direct from Westminster; and the imposition of an untried, untested payment-by-results model. Instead, the Government are pushing ahead with their half-baked plans for probation privatisation by misusing existing legislation and avoiding parliamentary scrutiny. I can only assume that that decision is driven by political ideology, but this proposal will put the public at risk.
The chairs of the probation trusts of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Warwickshire have written to the Minister to warn him of the dire consequences of rushing this reform through. Those experts say that
“performance is bound to be damaged and that public protection failures will inevitably increase”.
They go on to say that the fragmentation proposed by this Government would lead to
“more systemic risks and more preventable serious attacks and deaths”
and that the current timetable was
“unrealistic and unreasonable...with serious implications for service delivery and therefore increases the risk to public”.
I urge the Minister to listen to the people who know and understand the service best, and to support our proposal in new clause 1.
John Pugh
I rise to speak in support of new clause 4. The hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) mentioned ideology. It might surprise her to learn that I am a great fan of ideology; I think that people should have clear political beliefs. There is at least one clear ideology on public services, which states that government services are best delivered not by a Government agency but by private bidders trying to satisfy the Government. There is a general view that Government agencies are necessarily incompetent, inflexible or naturally the prisoner of Government employees and unions, and that outsourcing is always the best and first option.
Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
I wish to speak briefly to new clauses 1 and 4, both of which I have co-signed with Her Majesty’s official Opposition. The Government do not want new clause 1 in the Bill because they are concerned that, in due course, they will not win the vote in either House of Parliament because, frankly, what they are proposing does not add up to much. At the end of last year, the official Opposition held a debate on the Government’s plans to restructure probation work and, until that point, the Justice Secretary had refused to answer for his plans on the Floor of the House. During that debate, many of us outlined why we thought it baffling that the Government should want to target the probation service, a service that is so high performing and where the numbers speak for themselves.
The Ministry of Justice’s own figures show that none of the 35 probation trusts is currently showing cause for “serious concern” and none “require development”; and that 31 of the trusts are “showing good performance” and four are “performing exceptionally”. In 2011-12, victim feedback was positive in 98% of cases; 80% of orders or licences were completed successfully; and 49% of offenders were in employment at the end of their orders and 89% were in accommodation. Reoffending rates were better than predicted in both England and Wales, and the probation service met all its targets in 2012. The service achieved a successful completion rate of 81% for participants of sex offender treatment programmes and exceeded its completion targets on domestic violence interventions. In October 2011, the probation service became the only public sector organisation to be awarded the British Quality Foundation award. The board said that the service was
“on the right path to achieving and sustaining excellence and essentially to being the best providers of these essential services.”
The reoffending rate among those sentenced to more than 12 months but less than four years is 36.2%, while among those serving between four and 10 years it is 30.7%. As we know, the reoffending rate for individuals sentenced to less than 12 months—the cohort that currently, by and large, receives no supervision, despite some probation trusts asking for the authority to take control of them—stands much higher, at 58.5%. That takes us to the crux of the argument. Everybody in this Chamber agrees that something has to be done, but we disagree about how it should be done, because what the Government have proposed is untried, untested and downright dangerous.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
I endorse everything the right hon. Gentleman is saying about the excellent service that the current probation service provides. Is not part of the problem that the Government are failing to address a major problem, which is the reoffending by people with mental health conditions? If we tackled mental health and mental health services rather than imprisoned people, we could cut some of that reoffending more dramatically than we could by privatising the service.
Mr Llwyd
The hon. Lady, who has taken an interest in this subject for many years, as have I, is absolutely correct. I would go a bit further and say that if we dealt with mental health problems and drug addiction, we could empty about 40% of prisoners from prisons tomorrow without any danger—had we got the safety net out in the community.
The Government are taking a drastic step without having any proven record of any possible success. Unlike with some services that are privatised, there is an inherent danger to the public in all this. I agree fully with the Opposition when they say that we want the thing tried and tested. That is not a political scam to try to stop it. I would like it stopped, but let us also be honest and say that we are where we are and we should at least see whether these plans will work. That surely is a common-sense thing to do, but time and time again, in the Public Bill Committee and in all the other debates, we have been unable to persuade the Government to pause and to think carefully about why they initiated their two pilots previously. Why did they do that if they were that unconcerned and the pilots were bound to succeed?
The Secretary of State, who drifted in and out here today, in typical fashion, has said in some debates, “You do things sometimes because they are right.” I am sure that is right, but it is a bit risky to have a messianic view of life and say, “Because they are new and are being tried now, they have got to be right. What’s right is right.” That is absolute balderdash and I am afraid he will eat those words in the next two or three years. I hope not, but there will be a danger in this system.
As we are all aware, what will be left of the public sector probation service will work with victims, hostels and offenders who pose a high risk of harm. The remaining 70% of cases—the low-risk and medium-risk offenders—will be managed by the private sector under the model that we are talking about. The point has already been made that such risks vary—they can vary from day to day or from week to week. I do not know how the system will be managed, but co-location has been mentioned. I am not sure whether that will work, but, again, it is a matter of crossing one’s fingers and hoping for the best.
There are serious concerns about the payment-by-results model, most of which I will briefly outline with regard to another amendment that would compel the Government to pilot the plans before implementing them across the board. To some relief, we find that G4S and Serco will not be coming in on this, although they do know a lot about criminality.
Under the proposals, private companies will be responsible for the majority of cases involving domestic violence, sexual offences, burglary, robbery, violence against the person and gang-related crimes. That is highly sensitive work, which clearly requires trained professionals with experience of how to deal with victims and perpetrators of such complex crimes. It is highly unlikely that the private sector will prioritise holistic initiatives such as work with victims of crime. I am afraid that it will be driven by profit rather than levels of care. Many individuals who come into contact with the probation service have one or more mental health problems. They may have suffered abuse, have substance misuse issues, literacy problems and poor educational attainment. Such people need to be signposted to the proper avenues for care and support. They are highly damaged individuals and require special attention.
The proposals will compromise public protection and provide a perverse incentive for private companies not to put resources into decreasing offending behaviour. There are also numerous possibilities for conflicts of interest, the tackling of which is the aim of another amendment that I have co-signed.
The Social Market Foundation has argued that payment by results incentivises an increase in offending. To understand that, it is important to note that the Government have decided that a private company will neither be penalised nor rewarded for an increase or decrease in offending of 3% either way. Ostensibly, that is to take account of the fact that external factors can have an impact on offending rates. In practice, however, it would mean that private companies would have to achieve a 4% decrease in offending before being rewarded. They will simply not invest that amount of money when there is no guarantee of a return on their investment. Unfortunately, it is far more likely that the companies will make a profit by delivering court orders in the cheapest way possible by opening call centres. Understandably, the National Association of Probation Officers—the experts on this—is worried, and legitimately I would say.
The hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) referred to the GMB union. It is a question not of union versus anybody else but of what works and what does not work. NAPO has had experience over many years, and I have already referred to its successes.
Mr Llwyd
Yes, of course I shall give way, but let me make this point. Time and again, I have heard NAPO say, “If it is inevitable that we have to go down this path, let us see whether it works.” Let us pilot this system. Let it come before Parliament before the changes are effected, because, although NAPO refers to its jobs, its main concern is the safety of the public it serves.
Sir Edward Garnier
The right hon. Gentleman and I have many mutual friends who are members of NAPO. Harry Fletcher is a former assistant general-secretary whom we both know and respect. My point was quietly to tease the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) who happened to say in a parliamentary reference book that she was a member of the GMB, but she tells me that that is not the case. I was not making a substantive point but—
Sir Edward Garnier
I do not think that we need to divert into other areas. The short point I am making is that of course there are political differences between my party and Labour over the influence of trade unions. Essentially what I want to get across is that this needs to be done because the victims and the prisoners in question need to be assisted.
Mr Llwyd
I agree entirely with the hon. and learned Gentleman on that. We all agree that we need to deal with these prisoners. If the model works, that is fine, but if it does not, it will be a disaster. Pausing a bit would have been a good idea. There were two pilots that were cancelled halfway through. If they had carried on, we would have had some evidence to consider. Even people like me who need some persuasion about the system would see that it works and that there is no danger to the public. Instead, we rush headlong into the dark.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that there has been too much social experimentation between the private sector and some public sector organisations, such as the probation service? In industry, for example, if a company were bringing in an innovation, it would have a pilot scheme either to silence the doubters or to answer them. I agree that we should have a pilot scheme on this. It is far too dangerous to deal with it in the abstract.
Mr Llwyd
I agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman. That feeling is held widely across the House, and not just on these Benches. The hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh) referred to ideology. The Bill is a victory for ideology over common sense. That by itself is ridiculous enough, but the inherent dangers of it make it even more insidious.
To avoid treading over old ground, I will not talk about the risk register. None the less, it still alarms me that the risks were seen as so high at the commencement of this exercise, and I have no reason to believe that they have changed for the better since.
Briefly, let me refer to new clause 4. The impetus behind it is to ensure that we do not rush headlong into implementing these reforms without first having a pilot, which would be independently evaluated and reported on to both Houses of Parliament. I notice that the esteemed Chair of the Justice Committee, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), is in his place, so I must be careful about what I say. Over the past few weeks, we have taken evidence from many sectors involved in probation and rehabilitation. A considerable amount of it was from people who had been involved in previous Government privatisations. Surprisingly, they were saying, “Don’t do it. Don’t rush in. It is not proven. It may not be cost-effective and it could cause huge problems.” Such people are surely aware of the risks involved and they came before the Committee to give their opinion. It is not simply a matter of one political divide against the other. Some of those people presented as being more in sympathy with the Government than with anybody else, but they said not to do it because it is unproven and could be dangerous.
The probation service has prior experience of the damage that can result from privatisation. Building management, for example, has been contracted out to the private sector, which has resulted in a great deal of waste and inefficiency. I have heard of an engineer being sent from Liverpool to Cardiff to fit a carpet tile even though, ironically, there is a carpet shop opposite the Cardiff probation office—you could not make it up.
In 2007, the running of bail beds was outsourced to a company called ClearSprings, which had no experience in the criminal justice sector. Numerous complaints were made about antisocial behaviour and drunkenness and the contract had to be removed. We know about Serco and G4S, so I will not go there again. Clearly, there is a significant prospect of disorder and possible dangers if the plans do not prove to be sensible. As for the Government’s risk assessment, time is short so I will not go there.
The restructuring will mean that there will have to be an entirely new operating model with 21 new government companies; that staff will have to be allocated to new roles in community rehabilitation companies and the national probation service; that no fewer than 18,000 staff members will be transferred to new employers; and that up to 250,000 offender cases will be reallocated. It would be foolhardy indeed to proceed without some guarantee of success.
It would not be unheard of for new measures being introduced to the justice system to be piloted nationally. Recently, pilots on payment by results have been held at HMP Peterborough and Doncaster, albeit voluntarily, while in recent years Governments have held pilots on satellite tracking, the domestic violence 28-day prevention order and drug reduction schemes. Piloting is not unheard of.
This is not a question of reputational risk for the MOJ. We are all concerned about the safety of the public more than anything else. A further risk register produced by the probation employers last November of last year warned of a high risk of
“a failure of the programme to be delivered either in scope or within the timescale set by ministers”.
At this eleventh hour, I plead with the Minister and his colleagues to give the scheme a chance and to give us all a chance to evaluate it. We might come back one day saying, “Yes, it was right,” or, “No, it was not.” If the answer is no, many people will suffer. Those members of the public are the people whom it is our duty to protect.
John McDonnell
I apologise to the House for the fact that I will leave after my brief remarks, because at 3 o’clock I have a meeting, which I have been seeking for a couple of months, with the Secretary of State for Education, about a school in my constituency. I hope that I will be back in time for the Minister’s response.
Let me pick up on the point made by the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier). We have all been pressing for some time, under the previous Government and this Government, for the supervision of offenders with sentences of less than 12 months, but we all expected that to proceed normally—that is, with a proposal being made with a budgetary paper attached that the existing system would be challenged to meet—so that we could plan the development of the probation service. If there were to be additional funds, some of us would have lobbied the Treasury while others would have argued that the service should swallow its own smoke and keep the budget within its existing budgets. That was what we expected.
I think that clause 1 was inserted in the Bill in the other place because none of us expected the use of the previous legislation to introduce proposals for the wholesale privatisation of the probation service—that is what this means for 70% of the service going forward. When that legislation was going through, I opposed it and I warned those on my Front Bench that it could be abused in such a way. I was assured that the legislation, which was supported on both sides of the House if I remember rightly, would ensure that the third sector, voluntary sector organisations and others could participate in rehabilitation, and that it would introduce flexibility to the system. A number of organisations lobbied for that, particularly in the drugs rehabilitation field. That is why I think that this is an abuse of process. It is an abuse of the previous legislation, which was never intended to be used in this way, and I think that is why the other place inserted the clause.
I have been angry and have shouted about the subject in this House, and it is not good for my health. This is, however, a leap in the dark, and I am fearful for my constituents. As with other privatisations, there is a financial risk, but that is nothing in comparison with the risk to life and limb. As a result of this leap in the dark, there could be safety problems that will bear down on Ministers in the future.
I warn the House that if we allow this Bill to go through and any of our constituents suffer and are harmed in some way as a result of an offender not being properly supervised, we will, quite properly, be held responsible. The hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh), my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) have made exactly this point: why not ensure that the alternatives proposed by the Government are properly tested? Setting up pilots and then ending them without taking any account of them seems extraordinary and completely illogical.
In previous debates, we seized on the risk register because advisers to the Government were saying that there were risks. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd has said, there is an 80% risk of failure in some instances. The Secretary of State argued that the risk registers are only there at the beginning to point out a range of issues that will then be addressed, so we asked, “Why not publish the risk register and make it completely public, and why not publish those mechanisms you have put in place to address the specific risks? At least then we could be assured that they have been properly addressed and, perhaps, overcome.” As my right hon. Friend has said, we are walking into the dark and putting our constituents at risk as a result.
As other Members have explained, the experience of privatisation in the justice service has given us sufficient warnings that we need to tread very carefully. I do not want to go over those again, but many of us have had experience of the justice system over the years and I have never seen the system so vulnerable as a result of private interventions. There are riots almost monthly, and concerns expressed within our prison system. The introduction of the Serious Fraud Office into investigations of companies that provide services within the justice system is ironic, to say the least.
I support the amendments tabled by my hon. Friends on the Front Bench, which are supported by the chair of the justice unions parliamentary group and by the group overall. We have also tabled a number of other proposals that are somewhat bureaucratic but, I think, important: new clauses 10, 9, 11 and 13, which are all in my name. They are simple suggestions. First, if the Government are going down this path let us have full and open transparency. The new clauses suggest that the contracts should be fully published. The Minister has said that the draft contracts should be published, but I think that it is important that the full contract should be published so that we can all see it, in particular the elements of the contract that include the requirements and expectations of the providers’ performance. It is important that in future the National Audit Office can investigate and assess the effectiveness, economy and efficiency of the implementation of the contracts.
One change that I have suggested is just common sense: no company that has been investigated for fraud should be able to bid for the contract. I do not wish to see sleight of hand, with the suggestion that such companies will not be the primary providers but can be part of a consortium. They will play a key role within those consortia because of the resources they have.
New clause 9 suggests that companies that are the prime contractors for the Work programme in an area should not be able to bid, and I say that because there is a potential conflict of interest. If one company is implementing the Work programme at the same time as the new probation system for those with sentences of less than 12 months and there is a sanction, the Work programme will lose out. That introduces a conflict of interest within the system. What worries me is that a number of companies will bid for a range of contracts in an area, across the piece, with the result that mini-monopolies will be built up in particular geographical areas.
My new clauses are simply administrative amendments. New clause 13 says that we need an annual report to Parliament and I know that that is a standard amendment that we table for a range of legislation, but in this instance it is vital. I want to know from an annual report from the Government exactly how the contracts are being performed against, how safe my constituents are, how safe the offenders are and how successful the implementation of the new system is.
I do not want to go over everything I have said before. I am extremely worried and I will hold Ministers to account if any of my constituents are injured as a result of the Bill. I have said that twice before. In fact, the late Paul Goggins advised me that I was threatening Ministers and I said, “Yes, I am actually, because they are threatening my constituents with this legislation.” I hope that today we will be able to defeat it or at least pass some amendments that will stabilise the system and enable us to gain some accountability. If not, I hope that the other place will say no and introduce an element of common sense to the debate.
Meg Hillier
I rise to support new clauses 1 and 4. I will not repeat the excellent arguments that my hon. Friends have made, but I am concerned about the impact that this big and sudden change to the probation service will have in my community and on offender rehabilitation, both of which are central to the aims of the Bill, which is why elements of it enjoy cross-party support.
I am not opposed to having specialist providers in the probation service. For example, there is a high incidence of mental health problems in my constituency, and in Hackney as a whole, and many of the people affected, if they get caught up in the criminal justice system, would benefit from more specialised services, so I am not opposed to the private sector or voluntary bodies coming in to provide certain aspects of probation.
However, the scale of this outsourcing, particularly when it is being done in such a hurry, poses a real risk. I believe that it will reduce standards. People will be taken on by large companies that have no track record in probation, and will be paid at much lower levels, as probation assistants, rather than full-blown and experienced probation officers. I call it probation-lite. Those people will be making very important decisions. They will decide, for instance, whether someone is a high-risk offender who needs to be transferred to a probation officer. There is a risk there.
Jeremy Wright
It might help the hon. Lady if I clarified two points relating to what she has just said. First, in all contracts we will expect those taking on the work to employ properly skilled staff—not to do so will not be permitted. Secondly, those who decide whether someone is a high, medium or low-risk offender will be public sector national probation service employees, not contractors.
Meg Hillier
I thank the Minister for that clarification, particularly the first point, which is indeed good news. I was not a member of the Public Bill Committee and so might have missed some changes that have been made.
Meg Hillier
Yes, but I will just finish responding to the Minister’s intervention.
On the Minister’s second point, I hear what he says, but there is always a risk that someone might be miscategorised and dealt with by an employee who is of a lower grade. The Minister says that they will be qualified, but they will be of a lower grade than fully qualified probation officers, and that decision might need to be made in the other direction. Perhaps he can reassure us on that point when he responds.
Mrs Moon
I should have waited for my hon. Friend to finish responding to the Minister before seeking to intervene, because she has just covered the point I wanted to make. It is not about the level of skills, but the qualification, because the qualification provides a background of knowledge that enforces and informs the way in which a probation officer acts. Someone who is deemed to be skilled might actually be unqualified, so it is important to have the qualification and the experience and skills.
Meg Hillier
I thank my hon. Friend for her comments.
I am also worried about some of the companies that might come into this. I serve on the Public Accounts Committee, and I challenged the big public sector providers that appeared before us recently on whether they would bid for contracts in areas where they had no experience. They all denied that they would, but we have seen, in the Public Accounts Committee, in other Committees and on the Floor of the House, example after example of companies that bid for contracts because they are good at bidding but that do not actually have a background in delivering the relevant service. They then have to backfill by recruiting people to take on those jobs. I have dealt with the Minister on constituency matters and know him to be assiduous, and I am sure that he will bear that point in mind, but I think that it is worth reiterating that it is a very serious matter. Companies should not be bidding for huge contracts in areas where they have no experience because that fragments the service.
Fragmentation can be good where there is specialism, where there are smaller contracts, perhaps run by specialist voluntary sector groups, or indeed by private companies if they have the necessary level of expertise, but they have to work together. We are in danger of seeing another approach whereby the MOJ and the Government put out big contracts and the smaller specialist providers simply do not get a look in. They might get the odd crumb from the big contractors’ table, but they will be squeezed out. That is particularly true in mental health, one of the local concerns in my constituency.
There is an important concern about local accountability. I am a great supporter of extending freedom of information in the first instance, even with limitations, to private sector companies that deliver public contracts paid for by the taxpayer. It should be the tax pound that determines whether there is freedom of information, not the nature of the delivery body. Most parties in the House support some degree of contracting out, but we need to ensure that transparency is built in. Companies have told the Public Accounts Committee that they are in favour of a much greater degree of transparency, so perhaps the Minister will take this opportunity to challenge them to stand up for what they say and make that part of the bidding process.
New clause 4 is important—I will not repeat all the arguments Members have made—because we need proper scrutiny. If we look at reoffending as a whole, we see that there are other ways of looking at it, for example by looking at mental health support or the Work programme. We know that offenders who come out of prison with a job are less likely to reoffend, but does the Work programme, which is provided by another Government Department, go into prisons to ensure that offenders have jobs for when they leave? Perhaps we should be challenging them to step up to the mark and provide job opportunities as a major plank of what we all want to see: less reoffending, particularly by offenders given short-term sentences.
In summary, the Public Accounts Committee has seen far too many poorly managed large Government contracts. The Cabinet Office is pushing hard to see that procurement is done in a different way that allows smaller companies a bite of the Government contract cherry and to stop the big companies being able to snaffle public money without being held properly to account. This is an opportunity for the Minister to consider, even at this late stage, allowing something in the contract to ensure that the big companies are required to work effectively with the small companies and not, as many of them do, to dodge their responsibilities later by saying, “Actually, we can’t quite deliver what we promised, so we’ll do it differently, but we’ve taken it all on.” That is often how they get around that. That will need constant monitoring and an audit of what happens with the contract. If this is to go ahead, I urge the Minister to tell us how the Government plan to audit the impact and the delivery of the service.
Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
I begin by echoing the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) about our late colleague Paul Goggins. I followed him as a Justice Minister, doing the job he did when he was in the Home Office and had responsibility for probation, and I know how well respected he was in the sector, by officials and the community at large. I also had the pleasure of sharing time with him as a Northern Ireland Minister, where he was also well respected. This is my first opportunity to put that on the record in the House. I will attend his funeral on Thursday, along with many colleagues across the House, to pay my final respects to Paul for all his work.
I wanted to speak in this debate for several reasons. Nobody disagrees with the Government’s general premise for dealing with offenders sentenced to 12 months or less in prison. They are often prolific offenders who go on to reoffend. They are often tomorrow’s serious offenders. It was an aspiration we had when I served in the Ministry of Justice to try to reduce their reoffending. We need to involve the voluntary and private sectors in supporting rehabilitation work for individuals who go to prison and come out within 12 months. Housing associations, voluntary providers and employers all have a role to play. That can be done in a positive way by the voluntary and private sectors.
Let us therefore not have a debate today on the difference between the Government and the Opposition on the need to involve some elements of the voluntary and private sectors. Instead, I want to raise my concerns about the issues addressed by new clauses 1 and 4. New clause 1 would ensure that we put a parliamentary brake on reorganisation, pending proper parliamentary scrutiny, and new clause 4 would put in place a pilot to test some difficult and serious matters in relation to which mistakes—they will be made, because that is the nature of the business the Minister deals with—will have a real impact on the community at large.
New clause 1, which I fully support, would prevent the Government from selling off or restructuring the probation service unless the proposals had first been laid before, and approved by, both Houses of Parliament. It is no secret that if the Government did that this year, they could put a Bill before Parliament and get it through before the general election. They could have it scrutinised and probably, because of the votes they have in this House, get their way. I object to the Government using the Offender Management Act 2007 to achieve that objective. I declare an interest, because I was the Minister who took that Act through the House. At the time I was pressed strongly by many Members on my own side, including my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), on whether it meant the privatisation and break-up of the probation service. I was pressed very hard about whether it meant, in practice, the abolition, ultimately, of probation trusts.
I gave assurances during the Bill’s passage through the House and I want to repeat them today, not because they have not been heard here before, but because they support what my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington says in new clause 1 and are worthy of repetition. On 18 July 2007, I, as the Minister, said from the Dispatch Box:
“There will be a mixture of commissioning. Some will be at national level, because in certain cases and with certain contracts that will be the best way of securing a strong and efficient service. There will also be a strong role for those commissioning work at regional level. As my hon. Friend surely accepts, economies of scale will sometimes be necessary, and some services will be best purchased and commissioned at that level. However, there will also be a need for local probation trusts to act not just as service deliverers but as commissioners of services from the voluntary sector, or from others, providing a proper service to help prevent reoffending at local level.”—[Official Report, 18 July 2007; Vol. 463, c. 352-53.]
I said that in support of what my noble Friend Baroness Scotland and the then Lord Chancellor, my noble Friend Lord Falconer, said in another place when introducing the Offender Management Bill. I would be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that. I am very pleased that the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) is present, because I said it in response to a Lords amendment that he supported and that sought to do exactly what the Minister is seeking to do now to the probation service. We rejected it and I put it on record that the Offender Management Bill would not be used for that purpose.
I would be grateful if the Minister reflected on Pepper v. Hart from 1992. Legislation can be interpreted according to what a Minister said at the Dispatch Box about what they thought about a particular interpretation of a Bill. My assessment is that during our deliberations on the Offender Management Act, I, on behalf of the then Government, rejected from the Dispatch Box an amendment that sought to do what the Minister is now doing; supported the aspirations of my noble Friends Lord Falconer and Baroness Scotland; and spoke in support of retaining probation trusts to commission at a national, regional and local level. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington has said, it is an abuse of this House for the Minister to try to use that legislation to secure his objective.
Will the Minister—just for me, so I can sleep easy in my bed—put on public record the legal advice he has received that says that he can do what he is doing, so that we can test his interpretation against the potential interpretation of lawyers outside the House under the terms of Pepper v. Hart?
Jeremy Wright
I am not sure I will be able to help the right hon. Gentleman sleep easier in his bed. Equally, I do not want to pull rank on him, but I have to put to him something that was said by his then boss—the then Home Secretary and the now noble Lord Reid—on Third Reading of the Offender Management Bill in this House:
“I can therefore give an assurance today…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, 28 February 2007; Vol. 457, c. 1024.]
Will the right hon. Gentleman explain why his then boss did not say “for ever” instead of
“for the next three years”?
Mr Hanson
I do not wish to upset the Minister, because he is a decent cove, as far as he can be with his brief, but the noble Lord Reid was never my boss. I have never served under him and he never line managed me in any way, shape or form. When I served as a Justice Minister, my noble Friend Lord Falconer and my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) were my bosses. What I said at the Dispatch Box at the time was said on their behalf. We supported a publicly supported probation service.
Sir Edward Garnier
I think my shadow is rather bigger than it used to be. I want to encourage the right hon. Gentleman with the tedious little point that at least he and I have remained consistent over the past seven years, so why not comfort himself with that and then we can put this to a vote?
Mr Hanson
The point I am trying to make is that I support new clause 1 because the Government are trying to use the 2007 Act to take an approach that the then Ministers, in both Houses, rejected. I accept that the Minister believes that he has a legal basis to do this. I simply ask him to publish it, so that we can test it in due course. I am happy for the Minister to intervene, but he will have a chance to respond later. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington and other hon. Members who have spoken, I remain concerned about the proposal, because I believe it is a gamble.
Jeremy Wright
I take the right hon. Gentleman’s point that I will have a chance to respond later and I suspect I will have quite a bit to respond to by then, but I wish to address this specific point. I apologise to him for my misunderstanding of the chain of command back in the days of his time in government. However, unless I misunderstand him, I do not think he is suggesting that the noble Lord Reid was not speaking for the Government on that occasion. On the question of whether I will publish legal advice, I can do better than that by referring the right hon. Gentleman to the Offender Management Act itself. Section 3(2) states:
“The Secretary of State may make contractual or other arrangements with any other person for the making of the probation provision.”
That is clear authority to do what we are doing, is it not?
Mr Hanson
This is the nub of the argument: I accept that the Minister believes he is acting in good faith under the Act, but what I am saying is that the interpretation I gave from the Dispatch Box, and that other Ministers gave in another place and in this House, was that the Act could not to be used for the Minister’s current purposes. My interpretation was that the Act could be used to contract the voluntary and private sector to deliver some services, but not the core probation service, which is what the Minister seeks to do. We can disagree about that—it is a matter of conjecture—and I think that the appropriateness of our comments could be tested under Pepper v. Hart.
If the Minister votes for new clause 1 he will have an opportunity to bring back new proposals and, as has been suggested, to pilot them so that we do not have to take a serious gamble and have an artificial split between public and private providers, or face the risk of cherry-picking and big companies hoovering up contracts. Moreover, we would not have the risk brought to my attention by a probation officer in my own constituency who corresponded with me this very week. She will remain anonymous because of her current status, but she said in her letter:
“This system is not tested. It’s just ideas and assumptions based on political ideologies. Knowing the work as intimately as I do I can’t tell you how risky this is.”
I know from my time in the Ministry of Justice that there will be risks and challenges in the management of offenders. One of the serious cases with which I had to deal as a Minister was when a low-level offender who was being supervised by the then London probation service broke into a property in Lewisham, close to the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), undertook a burglary and, in doing so, murdered two individuals, set fire to them and burned the property down. The offender was given sentences of 40 and 35 years respectively and is, as we speak, serving them at Her Majesty’s pleasure. That was a low-level offender who committed a high-level offence. There is always risk.
I accept that that happened under the probation service—mistakes will happen; this is a risky business—but I am worried about the steps the Minister is taking without the pilot proposed by new clause 4 or the brake and proper parliamentary scrutiny proposed by new clause 1. That raises the risk even higher in a system that, by its very nature, is risky.
Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)
On that point, does my right hon. Friend agree that there have been discussions about the difficulties of making judgments about low-risk people left in the private sector? He may recall that I raised in the House the case of Jane Clough who was murdered in the Blackpool Victoria hospital car park by her former abusive partner while he was on bail. The Government accepted the thrust of that campaign when they made changes in relation to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. Does that not show that the ability to have an artificial division between the two will not work?
Mr Hanson
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning that case. Given the nature of probation service business, mistakes will be made. My contention is that mistakes that might currently be made could very much be exacerbated by the fragmentation of the service and the potential downgrading of its quality, as well as by the fact that the existing public accountability will not be as clear cut.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman is making a very interesting speech. I am sorry that I missed its beginning, but I was at the Backbench Business Committee. Has he dealt with the sifting process? Some of my constituents have expressed concern that it is done at a snapshot in time, as they have been allocated to two different services based on the window of 11 November. Has he tackled that?
Mr Hanson
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that matter, which just exacerbates and adds to our concerns.
The process is never a precise one. I want the Minister to justify—perhaps not today nor by agreeing to new clause 1, but through a proper parliamentary procedure or the evaluation of pilots—how his proposals for a radical change in the probation service will do what he wants, as well as what my hon. Friends and I want, which is to reduce offending and reoffending. My worry is that the Minister’s proposals—in many ways, they are adjacent to the provisions in the Bill—might increase the reoffending that may occur for reasons that have been mentioned.
I urge the Minister to consider new clauses 1 and 4 in particular, and to publish, for the House to scrutinise, the basis on which he has so far made decisions in relation to the 2007 Act.
Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson). He has great expertise in this matter, given his previous ministerial role. I am not sure that I will trouble the Minister with the same level of detail about the proposals. I want to make a short speech on some of the things I have learned about how the probation service operates in my area and about the need for us in Parliament to have a vote on whether the wholesale privatisation of the probation service should go ahead.
In recent weeks, I have visited Lewisham probation trust and met its staff. The Lewisham trust is very busy. It ranks fourth among London boroughs with respect to the complexity and risk of the cases with which it deals. A quarter of the cases it deals with involve young people aged between 18 and 25.
When I spoke to staff, they expressed very serious concerns about the plans to fragment and break up the probation service and, indeed, to privatise great chunks of it. They believe that the proposals actually endanger some of the important and innovative work they are doing. For example, they recently set up a specialist team to deal with the problem of young offenders, whereby staff time is split between the youth offending service and the probation staff so that the two services join up better. They told me that the proposals the Government wish to force through in the next year will lead to huge upheaval and massive duplication, and will make it less likely that the work that is so important in our community for reducing reoffending is moved forward and can bring about the outcomes we all want.
The management of the trust told me that instead of being externally focused on reducing reoffending and protecting the public, over the next couple of months their priority will be to support staff through the transition and to make sure that they move cases between the split services in a way that ensures that no cases are lost and no mistakes are made. That does not make sense to me. The priority for the management and those with experience should be to ask, “How do we reduce rates of reoffending out there in the community?”
What will happen when the case load is split? As I understand it, 70% of the cases will be dealt with by community rehabilitation companies and others will be left with the new national probation service. How will those really difficult decisions be made about the risk that such young offenders present? The people who work in the probation service tell me that such judgments, particularly those about young people, are very difficult to make.
Jeremy Wright
The first point I want to make to the hon. Lady is that the proposals we are discussing do not cover young offenders, but only adults. The second point is one that I made earlier, but I am not sure whether she was in the Chamber at the time. It is that in relation to risk assessments and the judgments she describes—I accept that they are difficult—such judgments will be made by employees of the national probation service, who are public sector employees.
Heidi Alexander
I fear that the Minister may have misunderstood me. When I spoke about young people, I meant those between 18 and 25. As I understand it, the proposals in the Bill relate to that age group.
Another point that has been made to me by probation staff in Lewisham is that one key to the reduction of reoffending relates is having stable relationships between probation staff and the individuals with whom they work, so that they can build trust and work together to achieve the things that will put those young adults on to a better path in life. If young people are transferred between different organisations because their risk fluctuates, I wonder how there can be that stability in such relationships that I am told is so crucial to the reduction of reoffending.
Some Government Members, particularly the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier), seemed to suggest that the Opposition have some ulterior motive for saying that we want to pilot the schemes and to have a vote in this House before these very significant proposals go ahead. I want to put it on the record that our interest in this debate is public safety, what is effective and what works. They ascribe to us motives that simply do not represent our position. We are advocating what is in the best interests of the public and asking how we can really get to grips with reducing rates of reoffending, which are far too high in our country.
Jeremy Wright
May I begin by endorsing entirely what the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) and the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) said about Paul Goggins? Paul was the first Minister I went to see as a newly elected Back Bencher. I was struck not only by his command of the brief, but by his inherent kindness, his reaction to somebody who was not of his party and his willingness to give me whatever assistance he could. That continued throughout the time that I knew him in this House. As others have said, he will be missed on a personal level by a great many people on both sides of the Chamber. It is right for us to recognise today that he will be missed in debates such as this. The lack of his warmth and wisdom on these subjects and many others will make our debates all the poorer. I know that we will all miss him in the Chamber more generally.
We have had an interesting and informed debate on this group of new clauses. There is no doubt that the substantial burden of the debate on the Bill has been not about the contents of the Bill, which are broadly uncontroversial, but about the wider reforms that surround the Bill. I understand why that is. It might therefore be helpful if I spend a little time dealing with what is at the heart of the Government’s reforms to probation and why we believe they are so urgent. That will relate to the issue of piloting, which has been raised this afternoon.
Jenny Chapman
If the Minister wants us to accept everything that he has said so far, will he explain why it was a good idea to cancel the trust probation pilots when he did?
Jeremy Wright
The pilots that we cancelled were not sufficiently close to the proposals that we are making for us to learn as much as Opposition Members would like us to have learned from their conclusion. That does not mean that we learned nothing from their period of operation. The point has been made from the Opposition Benches that it is possible to learn from pilots even if they are not allowed to run to full term. We certainly have learned from those pilots and from other experiences of payment by results. I will return to that point in a moment.
The Government essentially had two options. We had to decide how to approach the task of tackling reoffending rates within our means. The hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) is right that reoffending rates are too high. We could not allow that situation to continue without a response. We could simply have imposed further significant cuts on the 35 probation trusts without targeting our efforts on those with the highest reoffending rates, or we could have brought in innovative approaches to supporting offenders that would also be more efficient and that would allow us to reinvest some of the savings to target support through the gate on the under 12-month group. We chose the latter option. At the heart of our proposals is the aim of opening up the supervision of low and medium-risk offenders to a diverse range of new rehabilitation providers to bring in the best of all sectors to tackle reoffending.
The right hon. Member for Delyn discussed the Offender Management Act 2007. He was here at the time and witnessed the passage of the Act at first hand. He knows that what I have described was the policy of the Government at that time. The Opposition want to forget it now, but they have to be reminded that the powers for which they legislated and to which Parliament agreed in 2007 entirely underpin the reforms that this Government are making. I have explained what Lord Reid said when he was Home Secretary. He made the matter perfectly clear when he said:
“The Secretary of State…will be responsible for ensuring service provision by entering into contracts with the public, private or voluntary sectors. With that burden lifted, the public sector can play to its strengths while others play to theirs.”—[Official Report, 11 December 2006; Vol. 454, c. 593.]
Mrs Main
The Minister is making a powerful case for why there needs to be reorganisation. However, will he help the staff who will be involved in the transition process by saying what the new organisations will look like? My constituents have told me that there is uncertainty about the new bodies that they will be obliged to work with and concern about what they will look like. Perhaps that would help to make the transition a little easier.
Jeremy Wright
I agree with my hon. Friend that it is important to keep existing staff informed about what is going on. We are trying very hard to do that. If there are specific issues in her area, I am happy to look at them. We are keen to ensure that staff are informed. If she will forgive me, I will come back a little later to the pace of the changes that we are making, which has been a substantial issue this afternoon.
Before I do that, I want to make a couple more points about the background to this point, and the issue of further parliamentary approval for what we are suggesting. I have already made the point that section 3(2) of the Offender Management Act 2007 states:
“The Secretary of State may make contractual or other arrangements with any other person for the making of the probation provision.”
In Committee, the Opposition were unable to dispute that the power that they legislated for is clear and unambiguous. The phrase
“contractual or other arrangements with any other person”
does not mean solely with probation trusts or trusts commissioning other providers, or solely with the public sector.
Mr Hanson
I do not wish to take up too much time on this point, but the Minister will know that when that debate took place, the intention was that the national probation service and the Ministry of Justice could contract for unpaid work, for example, on a national basis, but that for core probation services the probation service locally would still be responsible for the lead provision under that Act.
Jeremy Wright
Again—I made this point earlier when I intervened on the right hon. Gentleman—I do not think that Lord Reid could have been any clearer on Third Reading. No doubt under considerable pressure from Back Benchers in his party, he undertook that those core functions, including two things that we do not propose to move from the public sector—advice to court and breach of proceedings—would remain in the public sector for three years. That was not in perpetuity, not as a matter of principle, but for three years which, conveniently enough, took him up to the date of the general election. I think we can all take from that a pretty clear understanding that the Labour Government were not promising that those functions would stay in the public sector for ever; they did it to take them up to the general election.
Mr Hanson
Can we be clear? Lord Reid was not the Minister responsible when the 2007 Act was dealt with in these Houses of Parliament. I was the Minister of State, my boss was Lord Falconer, and the Minister in the other place was Baroness Scotland. Those were the three Ministers dealing with the 2007 Act in June 2007.
Jeremy Wright
I understand the right hon. Gentleman’s point, but it is pretty clear that Lord Reid was speaking on Third Reading of that Bill on behalf of the Government. If the right hon. Gentleman thinks that what Lord Reid was saying did not represent the Government’s position, he had better take it up with him. We have to go by what Hansard tells us.
Mr Sheerman
As someone who was present at that time, and who would count themselves as a reasonably good friend of Lord Reid, I think there is a different interpretation and that the Minister is taking this out of context. Lord Reid had no experience of the many private sector providers, such as Capita and G4S, that are being sought for this role but that now have a different focus and profile because they have failed. With that experience, do we really want to destabilise a wonderful profession and give it to companies such as those?
Jeremy Wright
The hon. Gentleman is making a slightly different point. I am talking about what authority is given to this Government by the Offender Management Act and, more broadly, what the previous Government thought they were doing when they passed it. The case made by Labour Members is that we have in some way taken that Act and twisted its meaning. It has been taken wholly out of context, and we have a travesty of a representation of what that Act says and means. I have been saying to the right hon. Member for Delyn and his colleagues that what the Act says is very clear, and the Hansard that supports it is also clear. Not only did the previous Government anticipate that such a thing could happen, they chose not to rule out the possibility of its happening. They had every opportunity to do so but they did not take it. That is my point.
More to the point and in connection with further parliamentary approval, the Offender Management Act says nothing about requiring Parliament to approve the exercise of that power. By contrast, section 15 of the Offender Management Act provides that an order repealing or disapplying the restriction of certain functions, including advice to court, to the public sector, must be subject to parliamentary approval. If, when in government, the Opposition had wanted to ensure that the power in section 3 for the Secretary of State to enter into arrangements for probation provision was subject to the affirmative resolution procedure, they could have done so, but they did not.
What is more, the Labour Government were prepared to guarantee that the supervision of offenders more widely would remain in the public sector for only three years, as I have said. Let us be clear: the Labour Government’s position was that the supervision of any offender—not just medium or low-risk offenders—could at some stage be competed for outside the public sector. This Government are not saying that. We say that medium and low-risk offenders should be competed for. Secondly, the Labour Government’s position was that the only element of parliamentary scrutiny of the Secretary of State’s powers to organise the probation service relates to the relatively narrow concept of advice to courts, which this Government do not intend to alter. Thirdly, the previous Government’s position was that the public sector monopoly on providers would be guaranteed for only three years.
The hon. Member for Darlington now proposes a new version of the new clause. I am not convinced that new clause 1 does exactly what the Opposition want, because the word “national” next to the word “restructure”, which is designed to avoid the need for any small change of probation to be debated in the House, does not necessarily apply to the word “reform”. Therefore, we might end up being asked to discuss very minor changes to the probation service. Beyond that, the basic point is that the Labour Government were given the opportunity to ask for a further check in Parliament for the provision but did not do so. It is a little odd that Labour Members now say that they want one.
On the substance of the reforms, we have spoken about the establishment of 21 new community rehabilitation companies in England and Wales. In the first instance, they will be publicly owned for a number of months before we consider whether to transfer ownership to other organisations. It is open to organisations from the private, voluntary and community sectors, as well as organisations currently working in probation trusts, to bid for those first-tier contracts. Part of the payment of those organisations will be based on results, so that we incentivise a greater focus on tackling reoffending and achieving better value for the taxpayer.
A number of the proposals tabled by the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell)—he has tabled new clauses 9, 10 and 11—remain flawed, as they were in Committee. As drafted, they would apply only after a competition has concluded, and would not prevent organisations from bidding, which is what I believe he wants to do.
Jenny Chapman
The Minister unsurprisingly comes up with technical reasons why those proposals are deficient, but he knows what my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) is getting at. Will the Minister therefore confirm that he will not accept bids from any consortium that has, as a partner, G4S or any other organisation that is under criminal investigation by the Serious Fraud Office?
Jeremy Wright
I entirely understand what the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington is getting at, but I am afraid that I do not dismiss as lightly as the hon. Lady flaws in the proposals that we are being asked to support. If they are flawed, the House should not support them.
Let me reiterate the Government’s commitment to publishing contracts for the delivery of services to low and medium-risk offenders. That includes not just draft contracts, as I have said, but final versions of the future contracts for probation services. I hope that that is some reassurance to the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington. Likewise, I reassure him that the Government will include within the contracts for rehabilitation services a provision that enables the National Audit Office to access private providers’ records and documents for audit purposes. Of course, the NAO might require access to the community rehabilitation companies’ financial systems when there is a need for public assurance. That will be reflected in the contracts. That also answers the point made by the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier).
The new clauses seek to limit who can bid for contracts by excluding certain organisations. For example, prime providers for the Work programme could be excluded. I am afraid that that would simply reduce the diversity of the market of rehabilitation providers. Many organisations are doing important work within the Work programme, including voluntary organisations working with disabled and disadvantaged people.
The hon. Member for Darlington made a point on fraud, which the new clauses tabled by the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington address. Let me be clear that the Justice Secretary and I are determined to ensure the integrity of future contracts to deliver value for money for the taxpayer. The Ministry of Justice is currently following a proper procurement process and will do so in future competitions. It is that process that should rightly be used to determine who can bid for contracts and who the future providers of services should be. Procurement law permits consideration of issues that affect a bidder’s eligibility, such as fraud, only at the initial prequalification stage, and not after that stage unless a bidder’s circumstances have changed.
In respect of the current competition to identify the future owners of the 21 CRCs, the prequalification stage was completed in December. Even at that stage, we would not have been legally allowed to exclude a bidder on the grounds that they were under investigation for fraud. The grounds for mandatory exclusion under procurement law are that the bidder has, or any of its directors have, been convicted of fraud. The ongoing investigation by the Serious Fraud Office into the conduct of G4S and Serco—which, I remind the House, this Secretary of State initiated—in delivering the Government’s electronic monitoring contracts would not have provided a legal basis for excluding those organisations from the current competition.
Jenny Chapman
I just want to be clear about this, so that colleagues on both sides of the House can be clear. Despite all the assurances that the Minister has given here in the past, he is saying that companies under criminal investigation by the SFO will be able to be partners in bidding for provision of services to monitor offenders in the community.
Jeremy Wright
The point I am making is that the rules, which pre-existed this Government by the way, are very clear: investigation is not the same thing as conviction. We have made it very clear, however, that we have initiated our own investigations. I have warned the hon. Lady before that she is sitting in a very large glass house and that she should think before throwing stones. This is a contract negotiated by her Government and substantially abused, it would seem, during her Government’s term in office. That abuse was discovered by this Government and acted on by this Government. She is hardly in a position to suggest that we have behaved in any way improperly. In any event, I remind the House that both organisations, Serco and G4S, are not on the list of lead providers.
The hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington raised the question of whether those organisations could act in a supporting role. The answer is that we will want to look very carefully not just at the process of corporate renewal those companies are undergoing at the moment but at the specific bids they are making. However, they are not on the list of lead providers. I remind Opposition Members that we were told not so very long ago that the proposals could never work without G4S and Serco, that no one would be interested in bidding. We have a list of 30 different bidders, comprising 50 different organisations at lead bidder level. The Opposition are simply wrong about the level of interest.
John McDonnell
I just want to get this absolutely clear and on the record. What the Minister is saying is that the two organisations that the Serious Fraud Office is investigating will be allowed to bid as part of a consortium for some of these contracts. In addition, I see that also on the list are A4E, which, if I remember rightly, was forced to hand back money to the Government as a result of its failure on contracts—in fact, some fraudulent activity on contracts—for the Department for Work and Pensions. We are opening up this whole network to a group of villains.
Jeremy Wright
The hon. Gentleman needs to be very careful with his language. He needs to understand that someone being investigated is not the same thing as someone being found responsible for poor conduct. It is important for a Justice Minister, in particular, to recognise that distinction. I assure him that in relation to each and every bid we receive we will look very carefully not just at the bid but at the organisations making the bid. He has heard me say on many occasions that we will not be awarding contracts to any organisation we think unfit to hold them.
Let me make the point, because it has been raised, that all the bidders on our list have experience of either working with offenders or across the wider criminal justice system. This is exactly the broad market that we want to see deliver these services. Below the community rehabilitation company level, we want to ensure that smaller organisations from the voluntary community and social enterprise sectors are able to play a key role in delivering rehabilitation.
Mr Marsden
I am grateful to the Minister for being generous in giving way, but does he not understand that the Secretary of State introducing these proposals is the same Secretary of State who did the same thing with the Work programme, from which those voluntary and third sector organisations are, more or less, entirely absent?
Jeremy Wright
I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman’s characterisation of the Work programme, and anyway, as he might have heard me say more than once, this proposal is not a clone of that programme. It is a different proposal, as it must be, because the criminal justice system is a different entity. It is important to recognise that.
On smaller voluntary organisations, about which people have understandable concerns, the House might be interested to know that along with the 30 lead providers that have passed the competition’s first stage, a further 800 organisations have expressed an interest in playing a role as part of the wider supply chain, with more than 550 voluntary sector organisations among them. In the process of contract management, we will want to manage properly the relationships between the larger and smaller players to ensure that those relationships are sustainable in the long term.
John McDonnell
Let me explain to the Minister why some of us feel strongly about this matter and why some of our language is strong. The Government awarded the contract for unpaid work in Greater London—so this affects our constituencies—to Serco. I will briefly set out some of the problems that have occurred: works shops have been closed, shutting down placements for women high-risk offenders; offenders recently complained to a probation officer in north-west London—my area—that no supervisors were available onsite; and rival gang members have been placed on the same scheme and transported in the same way. In addition, a known sex offender was alleged to be on the same placement as a victim. That is why we are angry.
Jeremy Wright
I understand the hon. Gentleman’s concern, but I do not agree with his characterisation of Serco’s contract. As he would expect, we have looked closely at its performance under the contract and, again, I assure him that we will look closely at all those who bid for this work. As with all competitions, the decision to award each contract depends on our being satisfied that bidders can meet our standards in respect of quality of service and price and, in this case too, on our being satisfied about the financial risk being taken to reduce reoffending and ensuring good value for the taxpayer. If we are not satisfied that overall bidders can meet our requirements, we will not award them contracts.
Hon. Members have raised the issue of the management of high-risk offenders, so let me make it clear exactly what will be involved. We are creating a new national probation service to manage directly all offenders who pose a high risk of serious harm and any sexual or violent offenders subject to multi-agency public protection arrangements. After an offender has been sentenced, the NPS will make an initial assessment of an offender’s risk of causing harm, and all offenders assessed as posing a high risk of serious harm will be the responsibility of the NPS. For low and medium-risk offenders, CRCs will be required to manage any risk of serious harm that the offender might present and to have appropriately trained staff and robust procedures in place for the management of cases where the risk of serious harm escalates to high during the offender’s supervision. They will also be contractually required to refer cases back to the NPS if they consider that the risk of serious harm might be escalating. In the end, the decision will be taken by the NPS.
New clauses 5 and 13 deal with reports by the Secretary of State to Parliament and the public on the impact of the reforms we intend to make. I want to reassure the House that the Government are already committed to acting in the spirit of those amendments. We are already considering how we can provide information about reoffending rates broken down by CRCs and the NPS. As Members will know, the MOJ already publishes reoffending statistics, not just annually but every three months, broken down by probation trust, prison and upper and lower-tier local authorities. I am happy to commit to the House that, in the future, the reports will break down reoffending rates for the different CRCs and the NPS. Indeed, as a first step, we have already published on the MOJ website a set of indicative figures to show what reoffending rates and cohort sizes in each contract package area would have looked like had the new structure been in place for the 2005-10 period. We are also piloting the justice data lab, about which I have spoken before, which will give providers the opportunity to match the performance of their cohort with something comparable.
On freedom of information, CRCs will be required in contracts to assist the MOJ in discharging its obligations under the Freedom of Information Act—very much along the lines of what my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), the Chairman of the Select Committee, outlined earlier, and in accordance with his Committee’s reports and conclusions.
On penalties, we are developing a performance framework that will include financial penalties for services not delivered to time or to quality. Contracts for CRCs will reflect that and, as I have said, the House will be able to see that this is the case when we publish those contracts in draft. I do not want to lose sight—nor should the House—of the major prizes here: first, expanding support for offenders released from short sentences and, secondly, developing a through-the-gate system for offenders released from prison. I think that that commands a broad measure of support.
That brings me to new clause 6, tabled by the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd). I want to reassure him that as part of our reforms there will be a new resettlement service provided in custody for all offenders before their release. This will be tailored to the individual’s needs, but is likely to include support in finding accommodation, family support, mentoring and financial advice. Services in custody will be underpinned by the changes to the way in which the prison estate is organised. That will mean that, in most cases, the same professional can work with offenders in custody and continue their rehabilitation work in the community.
As the right hon. Gentleman would expect, the Ministry of Justice and the National Offender Management Service are working closely together to ensure that the Prison Service is well prepared to implement these proposals. Right from the outset of these reforms, we established a joint working group on this topic that reports to senior officials and ultimately to Ministers. The working group has commissioned an analytical model of prisoner flows through the prison estate. That allows us to test the impact on prisoner flows and locations from implementing the resettlement prison allocation model. Furthermore, I can reassure the right hon. Gentleman that the Prison Service is undertaking a full review of facilities and staffing levels at all proposed resettlement prisons. Together all these things will ensure that the changes we are proposing are deliverable and sustainable, which I think is exactly his concern.
On new clause 4, I understand that the case of Opposition Members is that this is a huge leap in the dark and that no testing of what we are doing is or will be going on. That is not the case. Let me set out to the House the key elements that make up our reforms, what we are doing to test them and the steps we have built in to assess how effectively they are working at key stages of implementation.
First, there are the reforms at the heart of the Bill: the extension of licence and supervision to offenders released from short custodial sentences. There are lawyers among Opposition Members, and they will know, and ought to appreciate, that with a change to the sentencing framework of this magnitude, it cannot be desirable to introduce it one part of the country but not another. To do so would risk postcode justice, with some offenders getting different sentences from others.
To expand supervision to the under-12-month group, as we all say we want to do, we need to make the changes at a national level. That means funding those changes at a national level. The savings to fund the changes come from two sources; first, the efficiencies generated by competing supervision of low and medium-risk offenders and, secondly, the back office savings from moving to 21 from 35 CRCs, along with a single national probation service. Competing services in only one area of the country, if that is what is being proposed—I have heard little detail as to what sort of piloting is being proposed here—would extend supervision to short-sentenced offenders but, in every other respect, we are carrying out extensive local testing of the reforms in no fewer than 14 probation trusts. There is also the testing we are carrying out on the new operating model for the CRCs and the NPS. Those tests will enable us to inform how the new processes will operate once implemented. The first round of tests has already started and will continue over the coming months.
Secondly, there is the important fact that the 21 CRCs that we are creating will remain in public sector ownership for some months after their creation until the conclusion of the competition. This gives us further opportunities to carry on testing and to refine the system. Caseloads will not all necessarily transfer at the point the NPS and CRCs come into being, and we have made it clear to trusts that where there is a case for doing so, we will give greater latitude to allow for caseload transfer to operate more slowly than the people transfer process. That will avoid disruption and the type of dangers that that might create, which Opposition members have described.
Thirdly, there is the testing that we are carrying out of our approach to payment by results. We have consulted extensively on this and there are also pilots under way to test different approaches to payment by results. Opposition members would have us believe that there has been no piloting and that there is no piloting. Neither of those two things is true.
Jeremy Wright
In just a moment. The pilots that we are already undertaking—HMP Peterborough and Doncaster—are providing significant lessons for our wider reforms. Not only that, but they are engaged in another aspect of the reforms—the move to a through-the-gate system supporting the transition from custody to the community. The difference between them and the other pilots referred to is that these are much closer to the model we seek to pursue.
Jenny Chapman
I have a feeling that the Minister knows what I am going to ask him about payment by results. If he has done so much piloting and testing and has such confidence in this system, why has he repeatedly refused to tell us what percentage of a contract will be paid regardless of performance, and what percentage the reward element will be? We suspect that it would be very little.
Jeremy Wright
The hon. Lady keeps asking the same question and she is going to keep getting the same answer: that is called consistency. Let me tell her once again that she will have to wait until she sees the documentation on the invitation to negotiate. What she will see from it is that we are very interested not just in the initial figure, but in how those bidding for this work will develop the amount they are prepared to put at risk over time. That will assist precisely the type of organisations that Labour Members claim they are interesting in helping—voluntary sector organisations that might not be able to put a great deal at risk to start with, but might be able to build on it in the future. We think that is important, and I very much hope that the hon. Lady will support it.
Let me deal with the Peterborough pilot and what it does. It is worth making the point that the interim figures from the pilot—we have been told often this afternoon that there is no evidence for the changes we are making, so let me offer some up—show an 8% fall in reconvictions among offenders released from Peterborough between September 2010 and June 2012 as compared with the preceding period. Similarly in the Doncaster pilot, the sixth-month reoffending rate fell 5.7 percentage points compared with the preceding period. That clearly demonstrates that with targeted support and help aimed at the right people at the right time, we can divert more offenders from a return to crime.
We have built into our plans a set of our own business and system readiness tests, which will be carried out throughout the implementation process. There are therefore a number of things that we are doing to test these reforms—completely contrary to the characterisation of Opposition Members—and we are determined to implement them in a measured and orderly way to ensure that public safety is in no way impacted. That is why we are taking a structured approach to implementation, as I have set out.
Mr Llwyd
There is no clear read-across from Doncaster and Peterborough because those are voluntary schemes and what the Minister proposes is not voluntary. Those who know better than I do—and, with great respect, as much as he does—will tell him that the figures do not correlate precisely.
Jeremy Wright
I would say two things to the right hon. Gentleman on that. First, he and his colleagues have busily argued that we should have had more pilots, while some of the pilots we cancelled were less comparable to our reforms than were Peterborough and Doncaster, so he needs to be careful what he is arguing for. Secondly, he is absolutely right to say that the Peterborough and Doncaster pilots were conducted on a voluntary basis. That is because the law does not allow us to impose them on a compulsory basis. That is the law I am inviting the right hon. Gentleman to vote in favour of today, and I very much hope he will do so. Unless we have that law, we will never be able to impose those kinds of provisions on a compulsory basis.
Finally, on the issue of the pace of the reforms—an issue of which others have made much—I want to say two things. First, it is important that those who are employed by probation trusts—my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) made this point—understand where they stand. It does not benefit them for us to drag our feet at this point. We need to get on with it so that those people can understand what their own futures hold. Secondly, to reiterate a point made by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier), I make no apologies for the urgency of these reforms: as long as we wait, there will be further cases of reoffending and further victims created. Some 600,000 offences are committed every year by those who are reoffending. That is the problem that everyone here has identified correctly and everyone says they want to do something about. The difference between the Government and Opposition Members is that we know how we are going to do it and they do not have the faintest idea. They do not know how they would pay for it, either. We know that the last Government set out to achieve this, but could not afford to do it within existing budgets. That option is out. We know how we will pay for this; they do not. They have not told us; they should certainly support what we propose.
Jenny Chapman
The Minister talks of paying for the reform. We worked out that we could not afford it at the time, but he has not presented a single bit of evidence to show that he can afford it: we have been presented with no costings whatsoever.
Jeremy Wright
I have already explained to the hon. Lady that one of the commercial realities is that we do not disclose such information to those who we hope will bid under the amount concerned, because we want a better deal for the taxpayer. We are very interested in getting a good deal for the taxpayer, and we think that this is the way in which to do it.
The last Government intended to introduce these measures within existing budgets and without contracting out. The hon. Lady opposes contracting out, but we say that that is the way to pay for it. What does the hon. Lady say is the way to pay for it? Or is this, once again, the sort of opportunistic opposition that says “We like the idea, but we do not really want to do it”? I remember—and perhaps the hon. Lady does as well— that on Second Reading the shadow Secretary of State for Justice, the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), said that if we will the ends, it is very important to will the means. It does not seem to me that the Labour party has done any of that since his Second Reading speech.
By my count, we have engaged in 21 hours of parliamentary debate, and there have been three votes on the principle of our reforms. Opposition Members lost every one of those votes, and they still ask for more parliamentary debate. I wonder how much more of it they feel that they need in order to be persuaded of something that they supported, and legislated for, when they were in government. Now, for reasons of sheer opportunism, they wish to walk away from, and leave abandoned, the victims and potential victims of crime whom our proposals would help.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
New clause 3—Veterans’ rehabilitation requirement—
‘(1) The Secretary of State must by order establish a pilot scheme enabling courts to include a veterans’ rehabilitation requirement in a community order.
(2) A veterans’ rehabilitation requirement may only be used where an offender was previously a member of HM Armed Forces.
(3) A veterans’ rehabilitation requirement must provide for the offender to be referred to a veterans’ rehabilitation panel at the start of a community order, which will put in place a rehabilitation plan for the offender.
(4) An order under subsection (1) must make provision—
(a) about the membership of veterans’ rehabilitation panels; and
(b) to allow for the requirement to be reviewed periodically by the veterans’ rehabilitation panel at intervals of not less than one month.
(5) An order under this section—
(a) shall be made by Statutory Instrument; and
(b) may not be made unless a draft has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.’.
New clause 12—Building better relationships programmes—
‘It shall be the responsibility of the National Probation Service to provide all Building better relationships rehabilitation programmes for male perpetrators of domestic violence where a court makes an order for participation. It shall also be the responsibility of the National Probation Service to provide any programmes that are deemed necessary for short-term prisoners who have been involved in domestic violence.’.
Amendment 7, page 9, line 41, leave out clause 10.
Government amendment 5.
Jenny Chapman
To begin with, I shall briefly mention Government amendment 5. This welcome proposal deals with the provision of restorative justice as part of a community sentence. I observed in Committee that it had become something of a tradition in justice Bills for the Government to show support for restorative justice and for the Opposition to try to push them a little further. We duly tabled an amendment in Committee that would add restorative justice explicitly to the Bill, with the aim of encouraging its use. The Minister was supportive, assuring the Committee that he would go away and consider the amendment. On this occasion, he has not disappointed us.
There is much cross-party support for the use of restorative justice, not least because of the high satisfaction rates it has received from victims who have been offered it. We know the Government intended that restorative justice would be able to be used as part of a rehabilitation activity requirement, and the Minister has now taken care to add that explicitly to the Bill. I know that Paul Goggins, who spoke in Committee in support of this, would have been very pleased that the Minister has done so. We welcome the amendment and I thank the Minister for the care with which he considered the issue.
New clauses 2 and 3 concern the involvement of veterans in the criminal justice system and stand in the names of hon. Members from both sides of the House. These provisions deal specifically with the rehabilitation of armed forces veterans who become involved with the criminal justice system, aiming to improve the support we are able to give them. The new clauses were tabled last week, since when there has been a flurry of activity from the Government, which I will discuss shortly. I thank all hon. Members who added their names in support of these new clauses, and I am sure they will join me in paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) for his work in raising awareness of the issue.
Most of us, and especially me, can hardly imagine the experiences that some of our servicemen and women deal with on a day-to-day basis, but we all know, and can appreciate, that the transition back into civilian life is not always easy. Happily, most of those who return from service will never need the particular support we are discussing today, but some will. The purpose of our proposals is to ensure that all our veterans are properly supported when they come home. Those making the move back into civilian life can face problems that include homelessness; drug and alcohol addiction; family breakdown; and mental health difficulties.
The north-east, where my constituency is, has a proportionately higher level of recruitment to the armed forces than any other region. A collaborative review of the mental health of veterans by north-east councils found that in the younger population—the under-45s—members of the ex-service community were three times more likely to suffer a mental health disorder than the general population. Some of those who fall on tough times upon their return will, unfortunately, become involved in crime or offending behaviour. As Lord Ramsbotham, president of the Veterans in Prison Association, has said, we are often talking about
“the person who has fallen on hard times through trying to come to terms with civilian life and needs particular help to enable them to re-engage.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 11 June 2013; Vol. 745, c. 1562.]
The intention of our proposal is not to let people off the hook or turn a blind eye to serious offences, but where adjustment does prove difficult, and an individual’s criminal behaviour could be linked to their military experience, we believe that those underlying problems need to be addressed to prevent further offending. The military covenant recognises that members of the armed forces, and their loved ones, can be left disadvantaged because of their service, and veterans have made a unique contribution to our country. As my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central recently put it, the support we offer in return needs to extend to every area of a veteran’s life.
There are varying estimates as to the number of ex-service personnel who are in the criminal justice system. The Ministry of Defence estimates that veterans make up about 3.5% of the prison population, with a similar percentage under supervision in the community. Unfortunately, we have only estimates and unreliable data rather than a detailed understanding of the veteran population, which is an indication of how far we have to go to support those ex-service personnel who break the law.
Alison Seabeck
Does my hon. Friend accept that there was a similar problem in the GP service? People with mental health issues turned up at surgeries but were not identified as former service personnel. Clearly, ensuring that that information is available at some point in the process is important.
Jenny Chapman
It is difficult to develop policy sensibly without having the information to inform decisions. One thing we want to achieve in this debate is a commitment to gather the data that we need to make those decisions in a more structured fashion. The specific issue of rehabilitative services for veterans was first raised in debate on this Bill last summer by Members in another place. Noble Lords had taken inspiration from the United States, from which we have a lot to learn on this issue, and laid down amendments calling on the Government to establish a pilot of a so-called veterans court. Veterans courts are now quite well known in the United States, but, as yet, we have not used them here.
A veterans court is staffed entirely by ex-servicemen and women, and deals with veterans charged with non-serious offences. As it was explained in the other place, a veteran who has committed an offence can be referred from the trial court to the veterans court. Under the system, the court assigns a fellow veteran as a mentor and systematic efforts are made to help the offender deal with a range of problems with which they are struggling to cope, such as substance misuse, mental health issues, lack of housing, anger management, skills, jobs and family breakdown. Other problems can be addressed in that way. The veteran is expected to attend monthly hearings so that progress can be assessed. Failure to co-operate leads to recall by the trial court and the possibility of a custodial sentence being imposed. The reported results of the courts are extremely impressive. The state supreme court in Pennsylvania reports an average reoffending rate for courts in its counties of just 1%. In other reports, rates vary from 10% to 30%, which is substantially lower than rates for custodial sentences.
Mr Llwyd
I am interested in what the hon. Lady has to say. In 2008, I went out, as an adviser to the Howard League, to see the courts in action. The first such court in the United States was in Buffalo, New York state. Currently, eight years down the road, it still has a 0% reoffending rate, which is absolutely incredible.
Jenny Chapman
The right hon. Gentleman clearly has a great deal of experience and expertise in this area. I am heartened by what he has said, which makes the idea of veterans courts all the more compelling. Since the first court was opened, the programme has been replicated across the country, and a number of states have passed legislation providing for the state-wide establishment of such courts. One has introduced changes to allow veterans to be diverted, where appropriate, into treatment rather than prison. That is the mark of simple, systematic support that can make a life-changing difference to an individual.
New clauses 2 and 3 are the starting steps. They aim to start our catch-up with the US and other nations. New clause 3 provides for a pilot of a variation of the veterans court to be trialled in the UK. New clause 2 requires a wide-ranging consultation on the issue as a whole. Both new clauses are reasonably small asks and, if passed, would offer the chance to learn more about the particular needs of veterans and how best we can support individuals to prevent future offences.
Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the experience in the United States shows that when such cases go through the courts the judge dictates how the person should be helped? The judge makes the point to the other key agencies that they have responsibilities to the person. For example, if the housing people or health people are failing, the judge can have a go at them. That makes things work much more effectively than saying, “Let’s just sit down and talk about this,” as it provides some direction.
Jenny Chapman
I agree with my hon. Friend, who has knowledge and expertise in this area. What he says could apply to any offender, as many of us are concerned that judges are not always as aware of the outcomes of the decisions they make as they could be. This particular idea would also help in that regard.
That might also start to make a world of difference for servicemen and women struggling to find their feet after their service to the rest of us. The Minister’s consultation is welcome, but we would like a commitment from the Government that action will be taken to trial and improve services for veterans who enter the system. As the noble Lord Beecham put it eloquently in another place,
“we should… not allow another situation to develop in which sentiments are pronounced but nothing much happens.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 11 June 2013; Vol. 745, c. 1565.]
I thank the House once again for the wide-ranging support on the matter and look forward to the Minister’s reply. We will not press these new clauses to the vote, but I would like him to respond carefully to what we have said and give us more assurances than he has given so far on the review he has begun.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
I wish to speak to new clauses 2 and 3. As the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) has just pointed out, the Secretary of State has asked me to lead a review of these matters. I would like to pay huge tribute to the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) and the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) for the work they have done on that. There has been a very good cross-party focus on the matter over the past few years, and I have a huge amount to learn.
Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)
Is my hon. Friend aware that the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee visited Washington last summer and saw at first hand some of the stuff we are talking about? Is he willing to take evidence from some of the Members who were on that trip to ensure that it is included as well?
Rory Stewart
I would be delighted to do that. My hon. Friend’s intervention reminds me just how much expertise there is in the House. I see that there is an enormous amount of expertise on the Opposition side of the House. He has a great deal of expertise on the matter, as do many other Members in the Chamber this afternoon.
We need to focus on this for three reasons: first, we have an obligation towards individuals in the criminal justice system as a whole; secondly, we have a huge obligation specifically to those who have served in the armed forces; and thirdly, we have an obligation to society as a whole. The US experience suggests that there is something we can do. It is unusual in such a situation to find that we have concrete levers that might be able to improve our relationship to reoffending.
There already exists enormous expertise, for example in the Howard League for Penal Reform, Combat Stress and the Royal British Legion, and in the work that has been done by all the forces charities—29 different forces charities are currently working on the issue. There is also deep expertise in our universities. For example, King’s College London has done an enormous amount of work on some of the trauma elements, and in the past 24 hours I have been contacted by seven doctoral students doing theses on these issues. I hope not to try to reinvent the wheel, but to learn an enormous amount, including from Opposition Members, to make this as much of a cross-party enterprise as possible and to bring in the expertise that is here.
Alison Seabeck
I look forward to the results of the work that the hon. Gentleman is undertaking, which I know he will do with a great deal of care and intelligence. We are talking a lot about trauma and front-line experience being among the key issues, but surely the institutionalisation of young men in particular has an impact on how they behave when they come out. That must also be part of his review.
Rory Stewart
That is a very important intervention. First, essentially we need to be looking at the base data. We need to understand what exactly is happening because, as hon. Members have pointed out, we do not yet have enough data on that. Secondly, we need to look at the causes of the incidence of offending and reoffending by people who have formerly been in the armed forces. Thirdly, we need to look at our response. In doing that, we need to be absolutely sure that we are not stigmatising. We must make it absolutely clear that we are not trying somehow to portray people who have been in the armed forces as more likely to offend. In fact, a lot of the data suggest that they might be less likely to offend than those from similar socio-economic backgrounds. We need to get that clear. It is important in terms of the recruitment and employability of people leaving the armed forces.
On the specific issue of causes, most of the research, according to my preliminary reading, suggests that the hon. Lady is absolutely right that there are different elements, one of which may be experiences before people join the military. For example, people who join the infantry tend, comparatively, to come from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. A second element is experiences in the military, such as combat stress, and another is that raised by the hon. Lady, namely the question of what happens when individuals leave the military and go from what for many of them may be a very fulfilling institutional framework in which they feel a strong amount of team work and esprit de corps, to suddenly finding themselves in an environment in which perhaps less support exists.
That said, people coming out of the armed forces already benefit enormously from the forces charities and even from individual regimental associations, so we should not underestimate the amount of support that exists or try to reinvent the wheel.
Oliver Colvile
Will my hon. Friend also recognise that in the United States of America all veterans are given a mobile phone when they leave the military and receive a couple of telephone calls during the following six months to a year, which means that there is permanent contact?
Rory Stewart
I can see that the hon. Lady wishes to intervene and I will let her do so.
Lady Hermon
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for taking an intervention from me as a Member who represents a constituency in Northern Ireland. I know that he will be very sensitive to the role of the British Army in Northern Ireland, which has in the past been very divisive for some sections of the community. May I urge the hon. Gentleman to bear it in mind, when he does his research in Northern Ireland, that former members of the Royal Irish Regiment and the Ulster Defence Regiment are very reluctant to raise their profile, because they are anxious not to be targeted by dissident republicans? I would be keen to meet the hon. Gentleman when he comes to Northern Ireland to do his research and to be as helpful as I possibly can be. I am sure I speak for all Members who usually sit on these Benches.
Rory Stewart
I thank the hon. Lady very much for her offer and I would love to take it up.
On the penultimate intervention, the provision of mobile phones is a simple example of a very important point that every Member has raised so far: what we do know about veterans who offend and reoffend is that the military provides a very powerful possible support network. Unlike other sectors of society, it provides an instrument or lever that could be incredibly helpful and supportive to backing people in their recovery process. Trying to make sure that we get the very best out of institutions that already exist will be the key. We have an obligation to the individuals who offend and reoffend; we have a particular obligation towards the military; and we have an obligation towards society as a whole.
John McDonnell
I add my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) and, in particular, to the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd). I attended the first session he held in Portcullis House about two and a half years ago, which was also supported, I think, by the ubiquitous Harry Fletcher, and we were shocked at the scale of the numbers of ex-military who were in prison and at the scale of the trauma they were experiencing. I welcome the review. It will be useful to get clarity on time scales and on how the recommendations will be dealt with by the Government at a later stage. I appreciate that.
I want to speak to new clause 12, which stands in my name and relates to domestic abuse. The scale of domestic abuse and the figures involved are always shocking. Last year, 7% of women reported some form of domestic violence or abuse against them. Two women a week are killed by partners or lovers, and the number of sexual assaults is about 70,000.
The existing probation service established national programmes in response to the issue. There is a 30-week programme in which perpetrators are placed, but there are concerns that it will be lost as this privatisation rolls out. I therefore suggest in my new clause 12 that programmes for tackling domestic abuse on which offenders are placed should remain with the national probation service. That would give the assurance that such work will continue and that there is consistency of approach. It would also allay several fears. I do not want to make this a contentious point, but one of the fears that has been excited relates to the unpaid work programme that Serco has taken over, in that some women’s workshops have been closed as a result of that privatisation. We do not want that to be experienced by such important programmes as those currently provided by the probation service, but they would be laid waste if privatisation took place.
The new clause is fairly straightforward. It would ensure consistency of approach, as well as the maintenance of such programmes, and the best way to do that is to retain those programmes within the state sector.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
I apologised to you in advance, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I apologise to you again for missing the beginning of the debate on this group of amendments. I extend my apology to all hon. Members. I had an important meeting with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and I got here as soon as I could. I did not intend any discourtesy, and I hope that no one will think that I have been discourteous.
I want to speak briefly about my amendment 7, which would delete clause 10. I do not want you to remind me that today is not a Friday, Mr Deputy Speaker, so I intend to be as brief as possible. Therefore, I will not read out exactly what is in clause 10, save to say that it makes special provision for the arrangements for supervision and rehabilitation of female offenders. As far as I am aware, the clause did not appear in the original draft, but was added to the Bill at some stage in the other place. Perhaps the Minister will expand on the reasoning behind the Government’s keenness to accept the clause, given that they do not appear to have been keen to introduce it in the first place.
The reason I object to clause 10 and therefore seek to delete it is that it is absolutely unnecessary. I suspect that it was put in—I hope that the Minister can help us here—to appease those whose whole mission in life is to keep virtually everybody, but female offenders in particular, out of prison. They have perpetuated a myth, which has built up a head of steam over recent years, that—bizarrely—women are treated more unfairly than men in the criminal justice system.
I pressed the Minister during Justice questions not long ago—I think it was just before Christmas—on whether he accepted, agreed with and stood by the figures produced by his Department on rates of offending, reoffending, sentencing and all the rest of it in relation to male and female offenders. I got the impression that he was prepared to stand by the Ministry of Justice figures. If so, and he still stands by them, he should clearly know that not this bizarre claim that women are treated more harshly in the criminal justice system but the exact opposite is the truth.
As it happens, as I am sure that the Minister knows, for every single category of crime, men are more likely than women to be sentenced to prison, to be given longer custodial sentences and to serve longer proportions of their sentence in prison. Yet clauses are still introduced to Bills to try to give even more preferential treatment to women in the criminal justice system, which is totally and utterly unjustifiable. There is this sort of politically correct myth that women offenders are currently hard done by and need special protection.
I am not a big fan of the equality agenda. In the previous Parliament, not only did I introduce an awful lot of amendments to the then Equality Bill, but I voted against it. This clause is a perfect example of why the equality agenda is such a sham. It should not really be called the equality agenda. It should be called the “equality but only when it suits us agenda”. All the people who campaign so vehemently on these issues argue, quite rightly, that men and women should be treated the same. There should be no difference in their pay, the way they are treated in the workplace and so on. I agree with the premise that we should be gender blind in all matters. That, to me, is true equality. It should not matter what somebody’s gender is. It should not matter what their colour is, what religion they are or what their sexual orientation is. Those are all irrelevances when it comes to anything, whether it is what they are paid or what opportunities they are given.
It therefore seems to me that gender should also be irrelevant in how the criminal justice system treats offenders. It should not matter whether the offender is male or female—they should be dealt with on the basis of the crime they committed, the seriousness of the crime, the persistence of their offending and their likelihood of reoffending. I do not see what on earth their gender has to do with any of those factors. Their treatment should be gender blind.
I believe that the view I have set out, which is that everybody should be treated the same, irrespective of their gender, is what most people would sign up to. If that is the case, perhaps the Minister and the other Members who support clause 10 will explain—because for the life of me I cannot see it—why they believe that everybody should be treated the same, apart from when it comes to sentencing and the treatment of offenders. Perhaps when he winds up, the Minister will explain why he thinks that women should be treated far more preferentially in the criminal justice system. If anybody doubts that, I have all the figures to hand. In the interests of time, I will not bandy them about the Chamber, but I have them here and am happy to share them with anybody. They are the figures from the Ministry of Justice itself and the evidence is striking.
Women are treated more favourably than men not only when it comes to being sentenced to prison, although that is particularly stark, but in the recommendations of the probation service. In a recent parliamentary question, I asked on how many occasions the probation service makes a recommendation of immediate custody for sentencing in the Crown court, which considers the most serious offences, for men and for women. The probation service recommends immediate custody for 24% of men who are up before the Crown court, but only 11% of women.
People would be forgiven for thinking, on the basis of that statistic, that the probation service is already bending over backwards to treat women more favourably than men in the criminal justice system. It recommends prison twice as often for men as it does for women. And yet there is a clause that seeks to make the probation service go even further in giving preferential treatment to women. That seems to me to be completely unnecessary.
The Minister might have been better served finding a way to ensure that men are treated more fairly in the criminal justice system, because that is where the problem lies at the moment. The figures on that are stark, and yet the Minister wants to go further in the opposite direction. The argument I have heard is that women should be a special case because they are often more vulnerable, but that ignores the fact that there are plenty of men who come from vulnerable backgrounds as well. Why are we not interested in those people? Why are we not giving them a fair lick of the sauce bottle, as they say in Australia? Why is it only vulnerable women offenders that we are bothered about?
Not only is what I have said about prison sentencing true, but men are more likely than women to be given the highest level of community order. More men than women go to prison, so we might therefore expect women to get more higher level community sentences than men because of the shortage of numbers going to prison. Even at that level, however, more men are sentenced to the highest level community orders than women—10% of women compared with 16% of men. At every possible level in the criminal justice system, men are already treated far more harshly.
So that the Minister is aware of this I will quote the latest report from the Ministry of Justice, “Statistics on Women and the Criminal Justice System 2011”, which makes it clear that on average, women receive shorter and less onerous community sentences:
“The average length of a community order and Suspended Sentence Order for women (12.9 and 17.8 months) was shorter than for men (at 15.0 and 18.3 months respectively). The average length of both orders was also shorter for women in each of the four preceding years.
Women beginning the most common types of supervision orders in 2011 generally had fewer requirements with which to comply than men. For community orders, 43 per cent of women and 51 per cent of men were given more than one requirement with which to comply. For Suspended Sentence Orders, the corresponding proportions were 55 per cent for women and 63 per cent for men.”
Women were also more likely than men to be given supervision as a requirement, and regarded as a lower risk category when being assessed.
There are already sentences run by probation services that women cannot be given, even if they fit into the offending type. The hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) referred to his new clause 12, and the sad thing about that is that it perpetuates the problem I am trying to highlight. It states:
“It shall be the responsibility of the National Probation Service to provide all Building better relationships rehabilitations programmes for male perpetrators of domestic violence”.
As it happens, there are an awful lot of female perpetrators of domestic violence. They may not be a majority, but there are an awful lot of them and in some age groups I think they are the majority of offenders. The new clause states that only male offenders are required to go on treatment programmes, and there is nothing about female offenders. I would have supported the new clause if it also included a requirement for female perpetrators of domestic violence to go on those courses, but the hon. Gentleman has spectacularly failed to mention that, for reasons best known to himself.
Lady Hermon
I have listened patiently to the hon. Gentleman, but with increasing exasperation. Has he made equal efforts to obtain statistics from the Department of Health about the impact on the mental health of women who have been sent to prison or had custody orders imposed on them and—just as importantly—on the welfare and health of the children of women who have been sent to prison? I would be interested if the hon. Gentleman read out those statistics to the House.
Philip Davies
I am delighted; I am trying not to go off the scent, so to speak, but perhaps you will allow me, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am sure these facts are a terrible irritation to the hon. Lady and may not suit her particular agenda and the world she would like to portray, but I am merely stating the facts as produced by the Ministry of Justice. If she does not agree with the statistics, she should feel free to contact the Minister. I can do no more than ask questions and get the answers.
The hon. Lady asks about children, and there may well be a case there. I would not mind so much if people said to me, “Well, of course women are treated more favourably in the criminal justice system, but there is good reason for that because they might have to look after children.” If somebody wanted to go down that line of argument I would at least have some respect for that; the point may or may not be valid, but that is not the argument that is made. The argument is that women are treated more harshly in the criminal justice system, but—quite frankly—they are not. It is no good people pretending they are when the facts are perfectly stark: they are not.
As the hon. Lady mentioned children she might want to bear it in mind—again, the Ministry of Justice made this clear—that two-thirds of mothers who are sent to prison are not even looking after their children at the time. In two-thirds of cases the children have already been taken off those mothers because they are not deemed fit to look after them. The people we are talking about are hardly great role models for their children. In fact, some prisoner organisations have made it clear that it is actually a relief when the mother is sent to prison—in one case they described those mothers as causing “merry hell” in their families. Therefore, the idea that it is to everybody’s advantage, including the children, to keep persistent and serious offenders out of prison to look after children is a bizarre one by anybody’s standards.
Lady Hermon
I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for taking a second intervention so promptly. When did he last visit a women’s prison? Will he do me the great courtesy of accepting an invitation to Northern Ireland to see the conditions in which women prisoners in Northern Ireland exist? I would be grateful for a response on both points.
Philip Davies
I would be delighted to visit Northern Ireland. As it happens, I have been a regular visitor to prisons around the country, including women’s prisons. I have visited 12 or 13 prisons in the UK, including two female prisons. I have also visited prisons in America and Denmark to see how they treat offenders. My point is that there is no justification for the new clause and no evidence to justify it.
Mrs Moon
I, too, have listened with great patience to the hon. Gentleman and have considered whether it is worth bothering to intervene. However, I must reiterate the point on community sentences and the selective passage he has read out. The fact is that eight out of 10 women who receive prison sentences have committed non-violent offences. That is why they have less onerous conditions in their community sentences. I draw his attention to the Corston report and the Prison Reform Trust report, “Lacking Conviction”. Instead of getting out more, he needs to stay in and read more.
Philip Davies
To be perfectly honest—I am trying to think of the polite way to describe that—what the hon. Lady says is utter garbage. It is utter rot. The idea that women are sent to prison for short sentences and non-violent offences is a myth—it is a big myth, but it is a myth. At any one time, there are about 3,700 women in prison. Perhaps she will tell the House which ones she believes should not be there. Perhaps it is the 211 who are in prison for murder; the 135 in for manslaughter or attempted homicide; the 352 in for wounding; the 142 in for serious assaults or other violence against the person; or the 58 in for cruelty to children. Perhaps she means the 58 who are in there for cruelty to children; or the 83 who are in for rape, gross indecency with children or other sexual offences. Perhaps she means the 272 women in prison for violent robbery. Perhaps she means the 151 who are in there for burglary. Perhaps she thinks the 398 drug dealers should not be in prison. Perhaps she means the 91 arsonists; the 24 convicted of violent disorder; the 45 in there for kidnapping and blackmail; or the 192 in there for serious fraud and forgeries. Perhaps she means the 320 in prison for importing drugs into the country, which end up being sold on our streets. She might mean the 111 others serving time for other serious drug offences. The hon. Lady might believe those people should not be in prison, but they are not non-violent, minor offences. It is a disgrace for her to suggest to the victims of those crimes that they are the victims of minor, non-violent offences. She should be absolutely, utterly ashamed of herself for suggesting that. That is the type of nonsense we have had to deal with in the debate for many years. I am delighted that I can shine a light on the utter rot that people like her have spouted year after year.
Rory Stewart
I am interested in what my hon. Friend says, but some of those figures on female offending seem relatively low. Does he have comparative figures for men in those categories?
Philip Davies
Absolutely. My hon. Friend is making my point for me. Some 95% of people in prison are men. If 95% of either men or women were treated in what we might call a harsh manner in any other walk of life one would think there would be uproar on behalf of the 95%, but, would you believe it, all the uproar is that 5% is too many women prisoners. It is a nonsensical argument to suggest that women are treated more harshly than men. My hon. Friend is quite right that a lot more men are in prison for those same offences. My point is that men and women should be treated the same, irrespective of their offence. For the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) to suggest that they are non-violent, non-serious offences is utterly disgraceful. Perhaps she would like to go to each of those victims of crime and tell them that they are the victims of non-violent and non-serious offences.
In conclusion, clause 10 is unnecessary because the facts are already stark: women are treated more favourably than men when it comes to sentencing. Men are more likely to be sent to prison, more likely to be given a longer sentence and more likely to serve more of that sentence in prison than women for every single category of crime. For every single category of crime, men are also more likely to be given a serious community order and a longer community order, and are more likely to have more requirements made. Why is it, then, that the Government are not satisfied with that and want to go further to make the criminal justice system even more imbalanced and even more in favour of female offenders?
Mr Llwyd
The previous speaker should not read anything into the silence in the Chamber. It was not acquiescence; we were stunned into silence.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) on being the driving force in bringing forward new clauses 2 and 3 on veterans to which I would like to speak briefly. I also welcome Government amendment 5 on the extension of restorative justice, which is a positive step. We had a debate on that in Committee. The Minister said that he would go away and consider the matter and he obviously has done so. I am sure we are very grateful for that.
I was glad to read in the papers over the weekend that there will be a Government review of how to improve the rehabilitation of ex-service personnel who are in prison, and that it will be led by the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart). I wish him well in that work. I have a feeling that it will be done consensually and that we will all be able to muck in, as it were, and do our best to come up with some good answers for the Government, because the work is long overdue.
As the House may be aware, I have campaigned for a number of years for greater recognition of the welfare needs of veterans of the armed forces, and I have raised the issue in this place and elsewhere since 2008. In January 2010, I published a paper that contained detailed recommendations for increasing the support available to veterans, in particular to those who come into contact with the criminal justice system. I have also had the privilege since 2010 of chairing the veterans in the criminal justice system parliamentary group, which meets under the auspices of the justice unions parliamentary group. The group comprises parliamentarians and representatives from criminal justice trade unions and charities, including the National Association of Probation Officers, the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Prison Officers Association, the Royal British Legion and several military charities. The group is able to disseminate good practice to ensure that it is available throughout the British isles, and I think that that is coming together and is working. I hope that at some point the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border might care to attend, to contribute and to perhaps pick up on a few points.
Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)
May I draw attention to what is happening in Midlothian, where Police Scotland has been giving out leaflets to local pubs, clubs and voluntary organisations? When an arrest takes place, the police now ask directly whether the person arrested is an ex-member of the armed forces, which helps quite a bit. We should replicate such things and learn from each other.
Mr Llwyd
That is precisely the point of the joint group, and I am proud to say that the police force where I live, north Wales, have been doing that for more than 12 months, as have others. It is difficult, though, because some ex-military personnel are not prepared to admit to having been in the forces; they feel they would be letting the regiment down. Then there are others—we have all met them; they always seem to be former leading members of the SAS—who have not served a day any more than I have. It is not simple—we need to be doing a complex set of things—but I am pleased that we now have something to concentrate our energies upon.
I first became aware of the disproportionate number of veterans in the system when appearing as a barrister in Chester and north Wales Crown courts one particular week some years ago. I noticed that increasing numbers of people who were appearing in court for serious crimes professed to have a military background, and often the distinguishing feature was that their crimes were inexplicable, or at least difficult for a person who had not served in theatre to explain. I remember one case vividly of a young man who had come back from Iraq and was standing in a fish and chip queue when the lad behind him who had had too much to drink bumped into him. He knocked the hell out of the young lad in no time at all. He was trained to look after himself—almost by reflex he would do it—and he ended up doing three years for assault.
When people come back from theatre, they need to be decompressed and brought back into society. Heaven knows how I would be affected, had I been out with the forces in theatre. It is natural to presume that many people will suffer mental scars as a result of service, and we owe it to them to do something about it.
Rory Stewart
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that there is a particular issue with the reserves? For those in the regular forces, there is more of a framework for returning from operational theatre to battalion, whereas for the reserves we have a very specific challenge.
Mr Llwyd
Yes, and actually, as one who follows these things, I know that, interestingly, an increasing number of reservists are appearing in court, having left their work for a period and gone into the eye of the storm. On coming out again, as the hon. Gentleman rightly says, they are expected to go back to civvy street as normal, but it is clearly extremely difficult. That is a big problem, and the amendments would be a step forward.
Almost by instinct, as a lawyer I have something at the back of my mind saying, “Why should any class of society have a court set up especially for them?” In this case, the answer is simple: because these people have been through extraordinary situations that we cannot even imagine. Of those who would wish to argue along the lines I previously argued, I would ask: why do we have specialist drug courts in the UK? They have worked well. The Liverpool drug court was a great success when it was in full swing, as these courts, or disposals, could be—we are talking about disposals for veterans, to begin with, which is perfectly sensible.
Mr Anderson
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the American experience shows not only that such courts are effective, but that they are economically viable? People are not going to prison, so there are not the problems of family breakdown, and the huge array of things put in place when people keep going back to crime are no longer there, so there is an economic as well as a social case.
Mr Llwyd
Yes, there is. In addition, ex-service personnel are not used to paying regular bills and so on, and sometimes they do not balance their monthly income and outgoings, they end up in debt and everything spirals from there. I remember speaking with SSAFA in south Wales some time ago, and it told me that about 60% of its work was to do with debt, the handling of money and so on. That is another issue that has rightly been identified.
Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)
I shall speak briefly to new clauses 2 and 3. I congratulate the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) and the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) on their work. I have no personal experience in the matters raised, but I am aware of some of the issues and problems of ex-military ex-offenders from a particular project run in my constituency, so I shall speak briefly about that.
As the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) said, this is a hugely complex issue, and other Members have made it clear that there are multiple needs when people end up leaving the services and going into prison. It is clear that, as the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd said, we are not supporting those people adequately when they leave the services and go back to civvy street. Perhaps that should be the starting point. When they end up entering the criminal justice system, we need to ensure that their very specific needs for exiting prison are dealt with properly, too. That is why we need a joined-up approach.
We need to ensure that people coming out of the services do not find themselves misusing various substances, that their financial and housing needs are dealt with and that they are given support into employment. If they find themselves in the criminal justice system, they need to be given similar support. As we know from other aspects of people’s experience of leaving prison, something as simple as not having a bank account can be crucial. If they do not have a bank account, they might not get paid for the work they are doing and they might end up entering the criminal justice system much more quickly than those who do have a bank account. We need to think of this issue from an incredibly wide perspective.
It is good news that my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) has been appointed to look at these issues. I hope he will notice the degree of party consensus and the wide and varied expertise that exist; he will, of course, take submissions from all parties and all those who have taken an interest in the matter for some time.
Let me focus specifically on people’s employment needs and on how the third or voluntary sector can help. I have seen this for myself in my constituency. Chatham and Aylesford are very different parts of the constituency and have very different needs, but on this particular project, they have combined and are working as one. Chatham has a long history and association with the military, while Aylesford is home to the Royal British Legion Industries. The RBLI has done a fantastic job over the last couple of years in trying to support ex-military ex-offenders into employment, which we know is a key part of successful rehabilitation from a custodial sentence.
The Victor project is a small-scale employment programme that assists ex-military ex-offenders into sustainable employment. The Secretary of State came to Chatham to meet people involved in the project, and I think that he thoroughly enjoyed himself and found the experience fascinating. I extend an invitation to any other Members who may wish to come down and see the work—especially my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border, who could include it in his review.
Victor began as a partnership between the RBLI, Blue Sky and Medway council, with funding from Forces in Mind. It has been co-ordinated brilliantly by the Shaw Partnership. The project, which has been operating for nearly a year, has provided six placements for ex-military ex-offenders undertaking grounds maintenance work at Medway council’s main offices in Chatham, and eight others with Veolia Environmental Services in Kent, Surrey and Essex. The grounds maintenance work would normally be undertaken by the council’s own contractor, Quadron, but Quadron has agreed to give part of the contract to the project, which is absolutely fantastic. Most of the participants are from the local prison at Elmley. This is the first initiative involving the partnership, and I believe that it is a pump primer for wider work for that group.
I think that there are initiatives out there that can really help ex-military ex-offenders to return to sustainable employment. Those whom I have met in connection with the project have described it as life-changing. They are getting up every day, and they have a routine. People are saying to them, “What you have done is fantastic: the grounds look amazing.” They are receiving the positive feedback that they need—something that they may have had when they were in the Army, or in other parts of the services—and they are being given support by a wider section of the community. I think that that is absolutely essential. If we are not giving such people the initial support that they need when they are coming out of the services, we must ensure that we give them support when they come out of prison. Very few former members of the armed forces go to prison, but they are an important few.
I am proud that the Victor project is operating in my constituency, and I hope that it will go on to greater things. I know that the Ministry of Justice is well aware of it, but I should like others to come and see it, and to think about whether it could be helpful to other initiatives. I think that, while we need to review this issue regularly, we can draw on the work of the voluntary sector.
Meg Hillier
I rise to speak with far less authority and experience than has been displayed by those who have spoken so far, but I am delighted to have added my name to new clauses 2 and 3, which were tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis). I speak with some experience, as someone who, as a schoolgirl, grew up in Portsmouth in the 1970s. I saw at first hand how little support was often given to people leaving the armed forces in those days. I also saw the aftermath of the Falklands conflict, when those returning from it were having to readjust to life.
I want to tell the House a story. In September, I had the privilege of meeting Harold. Harold served in the Australian air force during the second world war, and saw action in the Pacific. Harold is 90 years old. Ten years ago, he began to receive support and counselling for the experiences that he had had in the 1940s. One of my main reasons for adding my name to the new clauses is that I remember speaking to Harold and being very impressed by him, and impressed by the service that the Australians provide their armed forces. They recognised that, even so many years later, Harold still needed support.
Harold has no criminal record. He has been an upstanding member of his community throughout his life, both in the armed forces and since. However, if people like Harold are still facing problems, that explains a great deal about why ex-members of the armed forces form such a large proportion of the prison population, and why my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central and other members—I welcome the Government’s review, which is to be led by the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart)—want to ensure that these problems are nipped in the bud in the case of other veterans.
Mr Anderson
I want to speak in support of new clauses 2 and 3 and in support of veterans.
About five years ago I was approached by an ex-colleague who asked me to meet a group he was working with. Tony Wright was that colleague and he is an ex-Marine. He had to leave the Marines as a young man because of an injury and he went into the social services, ending up in the probation service. Everywhere he went he bumped into people who had gone through experiences similar to his. They had left the forces, sometimes under a shadow and sometimes not, and they had lost their way. He had become increasingly concerned about their well-being and eventually decided to do something about it, and five years ago he set up a group called About Turn, which has now become the charity Forward Assist. Tony asked me to become a patron of the charity. After sitting down with some of the people he works with, I said I would be very pleased to help them.
Three years ago, Tony won a Winston Churchill scholarship to travel to America. One of the first places he went to was Buffalo. He went to some courts that had been spoken about, and he was blown away by his experience there. The whole thing was based on comradeship. People who had gone the wrong way in life were being pulled back by the people in those courts. Everybody from the judge downwards was ex-service personnel and their determination that nobody would fail was what made things succeed. As we have heard already today, so far, in five years, not one person has gone back to crime—not one person. We should compare that with any other form of justice system.
As a result of that visit, Tony asked me if I would go with him to Arkansas to try to develop a link between Tyneside and Arkansas. The intention was not only to develop a civic link, but to develop a veterans exchange project. I went with him last December. While we were there, we were invited to go and meet Judge Mary McGowan, who runs one of the courts in Little Rock in Arkansas. She originally ran the drugs court, but after a discussion about drugs courts she decided—along with a gentleman called Rob McDonald, who was a prosecutor at the time—to set up the veterans treatment court. We sat in and listened to the court in action and spoke to people who were going through the system and we realised that this was something that could really work.
One issue we have not got our heads around was mentioned by the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd): are we saying that these people are a special case? I think the answer to that has got to be yes. They are a special case because of what Members in this Chamber ask of them. We ask them to go around the world and to be prepared to die for us and to be prepared to kill for us, and if they refuse to kill for us, they will do time in jail. That is the complete opposite to the norm. We ask these people to do abnormal things. If somebody fires a gun at us, we run away. When somebody fires a gun at service personnel, they run towards them. When these people come out of the forces, what happens to them?
I will describe some experiences. A meeting was hosted by Mr Speaker in the House of Lords last year. There were about 10 to 12 men ranging from guys in their 20s to a gentleman who was 92 and who had been a tail-gunner in world war two. One of these guys told a story about when he came out of the services. He sat down with his wife and said, “Whatever you do, don’t ever leave me alone with the children, because I’m not sure I can cope with them.” Is that not really, really frightening? At least the man had the nous to accept his potential shortcomings. Another one told his story. Everything was normal in his life except that every time he went to bed, he got a panic attack. When he thought it through, he realised the cause was the simple act of turning the bedroom light off, because the switch reminded him of the time he was walking along with a friend who was killed by a booby-trap that was triggered by an electrical switch. That was put right by putting dimmer switches into his home. These are the sorts of situations that we, as ordinary people who send those guys out there, would never ever think about.
I talked with another guy who for 10 years had been given the wrong medication because nobody had realised that he had been in the forces. When that fact came out and people started trying to work out the causes of his problems, it was discovered that they stemmed from the fact that he was the only man who jumped out of a burning tank that still had his friends inside. After that discussion had taken place, the way in which he was looked after completely changed, and he is now on the right track and working towards a normal life.
When we came back from Arkansas, I was proud to invite people from the US to Newcastle to develop a link, and to discuss the Buffalo veterans treatment court. We held a seminar in Newcastle in May, which was addressed by Prosecutor Rob MacDonald who had come across from the United States. Lord Beecham was also there. He is a former leader of Newcastle city council, and a gentleman with whom I have had the privilege of working for more than a quarter of a century. He had never heard about the courts before, but he was instantly able to see how important they were. I asked him whether they could work in Britain and he said, “There’s no reason why they can’t work, Dave. We have the models; we already have family courts. We could adapt that model and we could make this work if we really wanted to.” He came back here, and he and Lord Ramsbotham tabled amendments in the House of Lords. Unfortunately, none has been accepted so far, but I am glad that progress is being made.
We are talking about giving people a purpose in life and a reason to get out of bed in the morning. We are not talking about people who have committed really serious crimes. This is about men and women who have committed crimes almost as a cry for help because they have no money or because they do not understand the chaotic world that we live in today. They have had a structured life and, all of a sudden, that life has been pulled away from them. This is about helping them to make a difference.
As the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile) mentioned, we went to Washington with the Northern Ireland Committee last year to meet prosecutors and others involved with the veterans treatment courts. Some members of the Committee were, to put it mildly, cynical about them. Some, unlike myself, have a legal background. No one pretended that the courts provided a magic wand, but when it was explained how they worked, those Committee members agreed that this was something we should pursue. The veterans treatment court in Buffalo was the first, and more than 100 are now up and running. I think that two have been given up on, but the rest are reporting really positive results. They also link into the work being done on drugs, because the link between drugs and the activities that the veterans get involved in is hugely relevant.
I am often loth to push the American experience, but the way in which the Veterans Administration was set up can teach us some lessons. For example, it can teach us about the horrible experiences that came out of Vietnam. Vietnam veterans were treated disgracefully in America, but somewhere along the line, the light went on and the Americans realised that that was wrong, and that they should not blame those men and women for the mistakes made by the politicians. The work that has been done since is a great example to us all. It covers a huge range of things, and it shows us how we can learn to treat people properly.
I am a great advocate of the national health service. People in this country tend to think that if someone has a problem, the NHS can put it right. Well, it can be put right if people happen to put all the pieces together. As I have said, one of the biggest pieces is the ability to realise that a man is where he is because of his experiences —not because he is inherently violent or because he has a mental or physical problem but because of what he has gone through, and what we have put him through.
There is a raft of information available from America on how big this problem can be. A recent seminar held there under the auspices of Justice for Vets estimated that, in 2010, about 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and that almost 50% of the people who had been in those theatres of war were seen to be suffering from traumatic brain injury. The numbers are huge compared with those we have seen in previous wars. This is about the changing nature of war, and about being exposed to the real world of modern-day warfare 24 hours a day. That is very different from what people experienced before.
That does not mean that veterans from earlier wars do not have the same problems. The group I work with in Newcastle has a guy from world war two and people who went through the situation in Aden. Those events are still as live to them today as they were 50 years ago or more. They lost friends there, for example. Those who served in Northern Ireland also played their part in trying to put things right over there. There are huge issues involved in how we deal with those people, and we need to be aware of how we can help them.
A psychiatrist we met in Little Rock said, “You need to understand that a tsunami of mental health problems is going to hit this nation in the same way as it hit ours.” We know that the number who went from these shores was small compared with those who left America, but the number who are coming back with problems is big. I am not saying, and I would not like to be portrayed as saying, that everybody who goes to war and everybody in the services will have these problems, because they will not, as we know. Lots of people make a good new life for themselves and move forward, but the ones who are not able to do that deserve special care from us in this House.
One of the real issues was touched on by the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd—the numbers. Some of us from a group in Tyneside met one of the Justice Ministers just before Christmas, and the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport talked through this issue. What is clear is that nobody really knows how many people from the forces are in jail. A gentleman called Colin Back works on rehabilitating the forces to get them back into work, and he has done work in the south-east of England. He reckons that we could be talking about almost 12% of this population, which is hugely more than the official figures suggest. So as part of the review and the ongoing work, we need to get these figures to see how big the problem is. If we can get a fraction of those people out of that situation, that would be the right thing to do, not only for them and for us, but for the economy. If these people are in work, if their families do not need special support and if there is no family break-up, we will not have probation on the side and prisons that are too full—everybody will win, and that is the great beauty of it.
I am really pleased that the commission has been set up. The hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) is exactly the right man to lead on it, and I ask him to come over the Pennines as quickly as he can. He will be made to feel welcome in the north-east, because people there have lived through this, and although I am telling their story, I can never relate to it in the way they can. These people have been given a lifeline and they want us to help them, and we should do so. Part of that is about supporting these provisions. If the Government decide not to support them, I ask them to do the work regardless.
Mrs Moon
I will be as brief as I can, Madam Deputy Speaker, because I am aware that the Minister needs to wind up. I give credit to my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) for tabling the new clause, to the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) for the work he has done and to the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart). On the work the hon. Gentleman is going to undertake, may I urge him to ensure that whatever we bring forward and whatever is recommended, appropriate research is done and data collected to sit alongside it? What will be important is to learn a huge amount from this, not just about the number of people who will need the support of the veterans courts, but about the effectiveness of having specialist courts that will advise on the most appropriate way to prevent reoffending.
One question that has been raised was how we are going to define “a veteran”. The importance of reservists has been mentioned, so I will not go back over that in the way that I had planned. We have to recognise that post-traumatic stress disorder and mental health conditions relating to service do not necessarily happen on return. I know that the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border is very aware of that, but we must ensure that we clearly identify who will be eligible for veterans courts. We must not just discount people because their service took place years ago. It was suggested that an 18-year-old who had joined the services but not completed basic training might not be suitable. May I ask the hon. Gentleman to look at the research on suicide carried out by Professor Nav Kapur at Manchester university, because it shows that the highest number of people who have served in the armed forces and are likely to go on to take their own life are found among exactly that group? Often that is because they have been failed by society because they have gone through the care system and, yet again, they feel that they have been failed.
In collecting that data, can we please look at how many of those people who go on to reoffend have gone through the care system? That is critical information, because we know for a fact that many people who end up in the criminal justice system have served time in our care system and have already been failed by society. Let us use this opportunity constructively and creatively to look at how we can tackle reoffending and to ensure that we offer the best way forward to reducing it. We have an opportunity to be not punitive or negative but constructive and creative. I look forward to the work that will come forward. If I can help in any way, I look forward to doing so.
Jeremy Wright
I apologise in advance to those who have participated in this interesting and useful debate, because I will not have the chance in the time that is available to go into the issues in the detail that I would ideally like.
Let me begin with new clause 2. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) for what she has said about the nature of the amendments, and I hope that will curtail what I need to say about them. I pay tribute not just to the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) but to the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) and many others across the House for the extensive interest they have shown in this matter. I know that they will want to interact with my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) and express their expertise to him.
I agree that our armed forces do a difficult and dangerous job. We should also be clear—I know that no one has suggested otherwise in the course of this debate—that service in the armed forces does not inevitably lead to a life of crime following a return to civilian status. Undoubtedly, however, there are those who struggle with the transition, although, as my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border said, it is also true that those with a service background are less likely to commit offences than those who do not have such a background. We should also recognise the considerable support that the armed forces, as an employer, offer to those who are returning to civilian life.
The prison and probation services already work with ex-service personnel, and my hon. Friend will want to look at that and perhaps suggest further improvements. We are doing more in prisons to identify veterans as early as possible, and all prisons should now have a veterans-in-custody support officer to co-ordinate and assist in that task. The proposed probation reforms offer an opportunity to do better in that regard, and to encourage all sectors to work together to identify service personnel and offer the assistance that we can. I recognise entirely, as the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd and my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) have said, that a variety of organisations already do good work with offenders, but there is always an opportunity to do more. The review that my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border has been invited to lead will, I hope, give us that opportunity.
Alison Seabeck
What I have to say is very pertinent. If there is no enabling clause in this Bill to bring forward any suggestions that come from the hon. Gentleman’s review, how long will it take for the necessary changes to be put in place, and is that something we should be considering?
Jeremy Wright
I want to come to the timetable. Without wishing to get into too much detail on these probing amendments, there are deficiencies within them that would require further legislation in any event. I understand the hon. Lady’s point, but I want to answer the question of the hon. Member for Darlington about what my hon. Friend’s review will be covering. First, we will ask him to consider the rehabilitation needs of ex-service personnel convicted of criminal offences and sentenced to a custodial or community sentence, and the current rehabilitation available to them. Secondly, we want him to consider the process whereby ex-service personnel are identified following conviction, and that goes very much to the point that the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson) was making. Thirdly, we want him to consider best practice relating to the rehabilitation of ex-service personnel offenders, including evidence of effective interventions in other countries. Fourthly, he should consult with the cross-government military reference group, which already exists, and report to the Secretary of State within six months. That is an important time frame, because we want to ensure that our reforms are informed by what my hon. Friend and those working with him can tell us. We will publish my hon. Friend’s report and place it in the Library of both Houses so that it is available for all to see. If we were to wait for the conclusion of the Bill process, as the new clauses suggest, that would delay the beginning of the review. We do not want to do that as we want to get going as soon as possible and I hope that that will meet with the approval of the House.
In view of what the hon. Member for Darlington has helpfully said, I do not think that I need to go through the deficiencies we believe that there are in new clause 3. I recognise the intent behind it and we very much support that. We want to ensure that the review produced by my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border can assist us in producing solutions and suggestions that we can make use of in the course of our broader reforms.
Let me say something about new clause 12, tabled by the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell). He is right that it is hugely important to ensure that domestic violence is treated seriously and that the programmes he has described are implemented effectively. He knows that those at highest risk of serious harm will in any event be the responsibility of the national probation service, and the NPS will also manage all offenders who are subject to multi-agency public protection arrangements. That will include all offenders convicted of sexual and violent offences attracting a sentence of more than a year and all those whose offending leads them to become registered sex offenders.
On the specifics of the programmes that the hon. Gentleman described, I entirely agree with his enthusiasm for a consistency of approach. I hope I can offer him some reassurance, as such programmes would have to be accredited. Accreditation is overseen, as he will know, by the National Offender Management Service, which ensures that the programmes are evidence-based and have therefore demonstrated their effectiveness in reducing reoffending. The programme requirement will continue to be available to sentencers, and the NPS will have a key role in assessing offenders and providing advice to courts on their suitability for such programmes. CRCs will be mandated to deliver the sentence imposed by the court, and that will include the provision of accredited programmes. All offenders, whether they are managed by the NPS or CRCs, will be able to access accredited programmes and other interventions provided by CRCs.
I hope that the hon. Gentleman is reassured by those points. I understand that he would prefer all those programmes to be delivered by the public sector, but I think that he and I would agree that what is crucial is that the standards and quality of those programmes are maintained. We will achieve that by virtue of accreditation and, of course, the accreditation process will still take place within the public sector.
I am grateful for what the hon. Member for Darlington and others have said about Government amendment 5, which I will move at the appropriate time. I am also grateful to the hon. Lady for raising the issue initially in Committee. I also want to take the opportunity to pay tribute, as she did, to Paul Goggins and the contribution he made not only to the amendment but to the restorative justice agenda over a considerable period of time. There are few who can say that they have contributed more to the agenda than he did. I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her support, and I hope that there will support on both sides of the House for amendment 5.
The final amendment in the group is amendment 7, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies). As he has outlined, the amendment would remove clause 10, which was added in the other place, rightly, by the Government. I am sorry to disappoint him, but it would not be right to remove the clause at this stage. I know that he has a healthy disrespect for consensus, but the fact that almost everybody disagrees with him does not automatically mean that they are all wrong. In this case, I do not think that they are. We should recognise that this is not a sentencing question, as he says that it is—I agree that there is no justification for treating female offenders per se more leniently than male offenders. We are discussing not the sentencing process but the process of rehabilitation that takes place after sentencing. It seems to me that the evidence is clear that how one approaches rehabilitation for female offenders must be materially different, if one expects it to be successful, from how one approaches it for male offenders. That is what clause 10 sets out.
The experience of female offenders is different in a number of ways, whether that concerns the abuse that they might have suffered before committing offences or the rate at which anxiety and depression are suffered. As my hon. Friend said, female offenders have different rates of child care responsibilities from male offenders, so a one-size-fits-all approach will not, in all likelihood, be successful. Let me be clear again that this is not about advocating preferential treatment for women in the criminal justice system or a different sentencing regime for female offenders; it is about ensuring that our reforms remain responsive to offenders’ needs in order to ensure that we turn their lives around and end reoffending.
On that basis, I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley will see fit not to press his amendment and that Opposition Members will see fit to withdraw new clause 2 and not press their other amendments.
Jenny Chapman
I beg to ask leave to withdraw the clause.
Clause, by leave, withdrawn.
New Clause 4
Piloting of probation reform
‘The Secretary of State may not undertake a national restructure of the provision of probation services until the proposals have first been subject to an independently evaluated pilot scheme, and the results of that evaluation laid before both Houses of Parliament.’.—(Jenny Chapman.)
Brought up, and read the First time.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Third time.
I thank all right hon. and hon. Members who served in Committee and those who have spoken on Report. The Bill contained many excellent measures when it was introduced in the other place last May, but following the House’s scrutiny it returns there with important improvements.
Before I set out the detail of the Bill as it is now, and although words have already been said in the House on this, it would be appropriate to refer to the tragic loss of the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East, who played an active role in the debate on the Bill. The news we heard at Christmas time was distressing for hon. Members on both sides of the House. He will be much missed. All involved in the Bill send our best wishes to his family.
On restorative justice, the Bill gives many more victims the means to bring home the impact that crime has had on them. On drug testing, the Bill provides for testing after release for a wider range of offenders whose drug abuse contributes to their offending. For offenders who enter the justice system as juveniles but leave as adults, the Bill gives the support they need, either from an adult probation provider or a youth offending team, whichever is best suited to their needs.
I commend the excellent work in Committee of the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright), who has responsibility for prisons and rehabilitation, and who has done a fine job of leading on the Bill to this stage. I pay tribute to those on the Opposition Front Bench for engaging in lively and constructive debate. We may not always agree on the detail, but this has been a constructive debate of the kind that does credit to the House. I also thank the Clerks and the Bill team in the Ministry of Justice for their advice and support.
For too long, the criminal justice system’s efforts to reduce reoffending have been hampered by a major gap in the law—the lack of any statutory supervision for offenders released from short prison sentences. As a result, the most prolific offenders have historically received the least support. The Bill will change that. It will put an end to offenders who cause havoc in our constituencies leaving prison with only £46 in their pockets and little or no support. It is not a surprise that about 60% of them go on to reoffend within a year. It is often easier for them to return to a life of crime than to sort their lives out. The Bill begins to address that huge problem.
The human cost of not providing support for that group is enormously high: 85,000 crimes every year, including hundreds of serious sexual and violent offences. The Bill will significantly reduce the terrible harm that that group of offenders currently causes to victims and communities. It will also help those people to turn their lives around.
The Bill will give 12 months of licence and supervision after release to every offender who is given a short sentence. That will give those working with them the time and professional discretion to deliver the rehabilitation necessary to provide proper mentoring support after offenders leave prison to help them turn their lives around. It will create a light-touch framework for dealing with breach of supervision that allows for sanctions in the community or a warning, as well as a return to custody. It will expand the group of offenders who can be tested for drugs after release from prison to tackle what is a major cause of reoffending, and it will make reforms to the community sentencing framework to create equivalent flexibility and discretion to what we are creating for post-release supervision and mentoring. All of those are sensible and long-overdue reforms. They will, I believe, make major inroads into the current reoffending rate of nearly 60% for short sentence offenders. They should command the unanimous support of this House.
It has been disappointing to see a long list of flawed wrecking amendments from the Opposition to our wider reforms to probation that are the polar opposite of policies that only three years ago they supported, and which they seek to undo even though they emanate from their own Offender Management Act 2007. What they have tried to undo are reforms to the supervision of offenders that will harness all sectors, bringing in the right expertise from the voluntary, community and private sectors to reinforce the work of the public sector. The reforms will bring new ideas and new approaches to rehabilitation and will deliver more for less for the taxpayer. Crucially, they will finally deliver a proper through-the-gate resettlement service for offenders leaving custody, so that support starts well before people leave prison and follows them through the gate in a seamless way. They will create a new, single national probation service dedicated to managing offenders who pose the highest risk to the public, working alongside 21 community rehabilitation companies drawing on the best of other sectors.
I am happy to say, too, that following intensive negotiations before Christmas, in principle an agreement has been reached with the trade unions on the terms and conditions for staff transferring to the new organisations. We are currently awaiting ratification by the formal probation collective negotiating machinery later this month. The unions have written to all their branches, making it clear that local trade disputes are suspended pending ratification, after which the disputes will be formally withdrawn.
The great irony of all this is that the Opposition’s approach to reducing reoffending when in government was very similar, recognising that organisations from a range of sectors have something to offer offenders. I remind the House once more of what Lord Reid said on this topic when Home Secretary:
“The Secretary of State, not the probation boards,”—
as they were then—
“will be responsible for ensuring service provision by entering into contracts with the public, private or voluntary sectors. With that burden lifted, the public sector can play to its strengths while others play to theirs.”—[Official Report, 11 December 2006; Vol. 454, c. 593.]
That is precisely what these reforms do. I could not agree more with him. That is why the Offender Management Act gave wide powers to commission probation services from across all sectors, yet only a few years on it is disappointing to see that the Opposition have returned to many of their roots and want to forget that they ever passed the 2007 Act.
In spite of that, the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) said on Second Reading:
“we agree with the broad objectives of the Bill.”—[Official Report, 11 November 2013; Vol. 570, c. 671.]
I very much hope that this remains his position, and that right hon. and hon. Members on the Opposition Benches will join us in giving the Bill a Third Reading tonight. It is a Bill about giving rehabilitation to a group of offenders who desperately need it. It is about reducing the 85,000 crimes committed against individuals and communities across the country. It is about giving those working with offenders much greater freedom to pursue what works in stopping offenders, without all the constraints that can often exist within the public sector and without central diktat. It is about taking action for the victims of the 85,000 crimes committed by those short sentence offenders every year. Last but not least, it is a long overdue offer of rehabilitation to offenders who have been let down by the rest of society.
The Bill is designed, no more and no less, to fill a gap that is wholly unjustifiable in our criminal justice system. We cannot go on for year after year with people who are most likely to reoffend released from prison with £46 in their pocket, and with nowhere to go and no one to support and mentor them. More often than not, they simply return to the same streets and the same people, and reoffend all over again. The Opposition might not like our approach to these reforms, but in government they looked themselves at trying to do the same, and decided they could not. If they understand the importance of the step we are taking, they should at least give us credit for following a line that we believe could make the difference we have all sought for so long, and I urge the House to give the Bill its Third Reading tonight.
Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
I intend to keep my comments short. The Bill has many worthy objectives that we support, although I will have to mention those things that are missing. First, however, I want to begin by thanking colleagues in both Houses and on both sides who have worked hard to refine and revise the Bill, as the Lord Chancellor has just explained.
I would also like to pay tribute to Paul Goggins and express on behalf of both sides of the House our particular thanks to him. My hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) and the probation services Minister began their contributions on Report with kind, moving words about this decent, conscientious and kind man, and the Lord Chancellor did the same just now. Paul brought to the House his enormous experience of criminal justice, as a passionate advocate for the excellent work done by our probation service. His contributions to the Bill’s Second Reading, a previous Opposition day debate and the Bill Committee were of the highest quality. He spoke with a depth of knowledge, and the House will be the poorer without him. Many of us will miss him enormously.
I have previously outlined how the Bill is controversial more for what is not in it than for what is. I am pleased about the provisions on drug testing and rehabilitative support for women offenders. We have sought to include provisions to address rehabilitation for former members of the military services, and late in the day, to be fair, the Government have partly come round to the importance of this, although they have not gone as far as we would have liked. In winding up, the Minister was going to give time scales for the review, but he ran out of time. Will he write to me about that?
Jeremy Wright
The right hon. Gentleman is right that time was short, but I got the chance to say that it would take six months for my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) to report back to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State.
Sadiq Khan
I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the six-month time scale.
No one can disagree with the objective of extending supervision and the accompanying help to all those released from prison. In this regard, I want to place on record our admiration for the massively important work that professional probation staff around the country do to rehabilitate some of the most troubled individuals while keeping the public safe. Much of the public do not realise the work of the probation service, and it is a sign of its success that the Government will leave to it the most high-risk offenders. It is welcome that offenders released from sentences of less than two years will be subject to at least 12 months of mandatory supervision in the community, but it is multi-national companies with no track record in this area that will be responsible for this, rather than the probation service, which we know can do the job very well.
It has always been an anomaly that short-sentence prisoners—the group with the highest risk of reoffending —are the ones left to their own devices when released from prison. As has been mentioned and the House knows, the previous Labour Government tried to address this with custody plus, but financial constraints prevented it from being implemented. The House also knows, from Paul Goggins’ Second Reading contribution, that by contrast the Government have no idea how much the extension of supervision to those serving 12 months or less will cost. Their impact assessment skirts around this, saying that
“the cost will be dependent on the outcome of competition”.
The Government have done nothing to update the House on this and so the plans remain uncosted.
The Justice Secretary and the Minister with responsibility for probation say that extending supervision will be paid for by privatising probation. But if that is the case, one would assume that the Justice Secretary and his officials must have figures to support it. It is hardly surprising that experts and others are suspicious about why the Government will not come clean on the numbers. The Justice Secretary has linked the cost of extended supervision to savings delivered by privatising probation, so the Bill is directly related to the wider probation privatisation plans. The two issues simply cannot be separated, which is one of the reasons new clause 1 was inserted by the other place.
The changes that flow from the Bill are untried and untested and will see supervision of serious and violent offenders fragmented. I must give credit to the Justice Secretary, whose plans have created an impressive coalition of those opposed to them: probation officers, chief executives and chairs of probation trusts, The Economist, his own officials and, most recently, the chief inspectors of both probation and of prisons, who questioned the system’s ability to cope with his plans. The chief inspector of probation warned that the plans would lead to
“an increased risk to the public.”
The Economist called the plans “half-baked.” The Ministry of Justice’s own risk register warns that there is an 80 per cent. risk of an unacceptable drop in operational performance, which when dealing with offenders can only lead to higher risks to public safety.
But still the Justice Secretary pushes ahead, with the same arrogance and dismissal of expert advice that led to the disaster that is the Work programme—a Work programme so bad that someone has more chance of still being in work after six months if they do not go on it.
Chris Grayling
We may be going slightly off track, Mr Speaker, but may I just point out that the Work programme is doing about twice as well as the predecessor programme that we inherited from the last Government?
Sadiq Khan
I wish the Justice Secretary was right, but he is not.
Imagine that shambolic record being repeated in a privatised probation service, with someone’s chances of being rehabilitated being better if left to their own devices than if they go through £600 million of supervision by the likes of G4S, Serco, A4E and Capita. By the way, for those who believe that G4S and Serco will have nothing to do with the privatised probation service, that is not necessarily the case. On 19 December, the Justice Secretary said that the Government had left open the possibility of either supplier playing a supporting role, working with smaller business or voluntary sector providers to support their objective of achieving a diverse market. Once more, there is smoke and mirrors from the Ministry of Justice, more hiding the real facts. G4S and Serco could still be involved in the probation service.
The best way to pursue plans that lead to massive changes of this kind and affect public safety are through piloting and testing to see if something works before rolling it out, rather than a big bang. Perhaps the Justice Secretary should also consider asking probation trusts to take on the extra supervision rather than ignoring them and opting for big private company involvement instead. That is precisely the kind of piloting and testing that his predecessor planned and which the Justice Secretary cancelled in his first week in his job in a fit of pique, when he announced that his own gut instinct trumped evidence and statistics. Does the House really think, without any evidence whatever, that a privatised and fragmented probation service will be able to deliver the provisions in this Bill? The Justice Secretary has nothing to point towards to support this—not the Peterborough scheme, as he claims, which is a totally different model. That is comparing apples with pears.
It is a double risk because at the same time as supervision is extended the institutional landscape responsible for supervision will be radically overhauled. This will see the Government abolishing local probation trusts, commissioning services on behalf of local areas direct from Whitehall, splitting responsibility for offenders based on a non-static risk level between public and private organisations and handing over to big multinational companies supervision of serious and violent offenders, and all at breakneck speed without any evidential base: a monumental gamble with public safety.
Of course we support attempts to reduce reoffending; we support extended supervision of those in custody for fewer than 10 months; we support attempts to provide through-the-gate support for those leaving prison; we support attempts to get more charities, voluntary groups and small and large businesses involved—but we do not support reckless, half-baked plans without any evidence that they will not put public safety at risk. We cannot support something that undermines public confidence in the criminal justice system, and we will not support ideologically driven leaps in the dark.
It is simply wrong for the Justice Secretary to argue that those who are concerned about his plans are against reducing reoffending just because we are against his particular half-baked and reckless proposals. We happen to believe that his plans are precisely that, and those concerns are shared by experts, staff, the chief inspector and even his own officials.
The Bill will now return to the other place. I hope colleagues there will insist that their clause—to ensure that probation privatisation should not happen without both Houses having the opportunity properly to scrutinise the Government’s detailed plans to change the structure of the probation service—is reinserted in the Bill. I see no reason why the other place should back down. The concerns reflected in the clause it inserted are as important now—if not even more so—than they were last summer. Scandals involving private companies have increased, and more evidence has come to light about concerns from the chief inspector of probation and from the Ministry’s own internal assessment of the risks. It is thus only right and proper for the Government to submit their full and detailed plans to proper parliamentary scrutiny, and not rush things through. We cannot afford to take reckless gambles where public safety is concerned. The Government’s plans risk doing exactly that, which is why we cannot support them.
Lorely Burt
I originally intended to make a full contribution at this stage, but a great deal has been said and I shall not detain the House by going over ground that has already been covered.
Let me make a point about the pilots in Peterborough and Southampton, which have had encouraging interim results. The hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) suggested that pilots had been concluded and stopped, but the pilots for Peterborough and Doncaster have not been cut, and as I say the interim findings have presented encouraging results, although we will have to wait and see the full results. The right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) asked whether the pilots were precisely comparable; notwithstanding that, it looks good.
I am not content to wait another four or five years to get the full results; we need to make progress now. I understand that the Opposition believe that there are flaws in the Bill, but I believe it will bring about a great improvement. I regret the fact that when in government, Labour made provision for a Bill but did not bring it into practice when it had the opportunity. We have wasted too much time already. The previous Government facilitated the legislation eight years ago, and now is the time to get on with the job. I am delighted to support my coalition colleagues in doing that.
Mr Speaker
I pay tribute to the hon. Lady’s stoicism and fortitude in not allowing matters beyond her control to divert her from the content of her remarks. I feel sure that the sex change made by the Annunciator will now be corrected.
Mr Llwyd
I hope I do not suffer a sex change, which with this moustache would be awful to see!
When we enter the legislative processes, we usually start with a lot of unanswered questions. What distinguishes the process for this Bill is that we have almost as many such questions now as we had at the very beginning. The Justice Committee took evidence very recently, and experts in the field are asking some fundamental questions about how the procedure will work and how safe it will be. I do not know; obviously, I do not profess to know all the answers.
We have had an interesting debate or two during the Bill’s passage so far. I pay particular tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright)—he is the man steering the Bill through the House—for attempting to engage constructively with the process at all times. I am sure that, on occasion, that has been as difficult for him, as it has been for Opposition Members.
Let me also associate myself, warmly and sincerely, with the tributes that have been paid to our friend and colleague Paul Goggins. He played a large part in the Bill’s progress, speaking as he did with great knowledge.
I welcome the provisions for the rehabilitation of female offenders and for the extension of restorative justice. I also welcome the parallel process—if I may call it that—of over the weekend appointing the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) to prepare a report on veterans. That is all to the good. Overall, however, I still feel uneasy, because there are a great many unanswered questions. I do not pose the following question in expectation of an answer today, but I should be pleased if the Lord Chancellor could respond to it in due course.
During our debates, including those that have taken place today, the Government have prayed in aid the Peterborough social impact bond pilot. The original published figure for crime reduction was 6%. The Under-Secretary of State said on Radio 5 Live that it was 12%. In Committee, the Justice Secretary said that it was 20%, and today, in the Chamber, the Under-Secretary of State said that it was 8%. All four figures cannot be right. It would not be a bad idea for us to be given a single figure, because that disparity underlines my unease about some of the facts and figures that have been cited. I do not think that we should be prodding around in the dark when it comes to such a potentially dangerous area of law.
Chris Grayling
I hope that I can help the right hon. Gentleman. Two sets of statistics have been published. The comparators are between the absolutely numerical reduction at Peterborough and the reduction among a comparable group at a prison elsewhere in the country. The 20% figure, which is the highest, refers to the number of further crimes committed by the cohort, while the lower figures show the overall reduction in the absolute rate of reoffending—the binary rate. I should be happy to write to the right hon. Gentleman and set out the figures in detail, but I can tell him now that the experience of mentoring at Peterborough has been very encouraging indeed.
Mr Llwyd
I thank the Justice Secretary for his response, and I am sure that he is right about mentoring. I think he will find in due course, when the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border reports to him, that it is key to any improvement in dealing with the rehabilitation of ex-service people, and I am sure that that experience will translate into other forms of rehabilitation.
I do not want to elaborate on the position that I have taken, or, indeed, on the position that anyone else has taken. We have had a good-natured tussle over the past few weeks; I only hope that some of our worst fears are misplaced, for the sake of the British people.
Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. With the leave of the House. [Laughter.]
I am given to understand that I recently made a speech. Even more unusually, I cannot remember what I said. I know that that happens to all of us sometimes, but what concerns me is that, as far as I am aware, it is a very rare occurrence.
I wanted to give my full support to the speech that was given in my name by my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt), but also to suggest that, if anything unfortunate was said, you might refer it to my hologram, who may have been speaking instead of me at the time. I am grateful for the opportunity to set the record straight, and to make clear it that I was somewhere else at the time. That excuse is given commonly enough in politics, but on this occasion it is actually true.
Mr Speaker
All is now clear. I think that the House is grateful to the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) for his sense of humour, and not least to the hon. Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt) for hers.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed, with amendments.