Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Beith Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

The real risk would be not to accept the fact that reoffending is rising in this country, and that each year thousands of people are victims of crime committed by people who leave prison unsupervised and unguided. That is what this Government intend to change.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

Will the Minister look carefully at the evidence session that the Justice Committee held this morning and some of the practical difficulties that were raised there for achieving the objectives of his programme? Will he look with similar care at any recommendations that the Committee eventually makes, as the Department has clearly done in respect of our report on older prisoners, to which he responded today?

[Chris Grayling]

I can happily give my right hon. Friend that assurance. The reason that we have built into our plans a dry run-in period in the public sector of more than six months after the initial structural changes have taken place is precisely because we recognise the need to ensure that the transition is smooth and extended and that we iron out any wrinkles. I will look carefully at the evidence session and I look forward to giving evidence to his Committee and discussing these matters in greater depth.

Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Lord Beith Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

There should be no disagreement about the key objectives and features of the Bill in respect of through-the-gate supervision. However, there is plenty of scope for disagreement and concern over the mechanisms that the Government are setting up, the timings and the unlimited nature of the Bill. That is a consequence of the fact that they have readily available legislation upon which to build this structure, which was passed by the previous Government.

The Justice Committee will tomorrow take further evidence from organisations and individuals with expertise in this field because it is considering the implications of the probation changes. Further evidence sessions are planned. I do not want to prejudge the Committee’s conclusions. Several members of the Committee are present for this debate. However, I will convey to the House some of the concerns that the Committee has expressed on previous occasions that are relevant to the Bill.

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[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

rose—

[Sir Alan Beith]

I give way first to my hon. Friend.

[Roger Williams]

When my right hon. Friend takes evidence, will he focus on rural issues, because dividing the service between high risk cases and medium and low risk cases might make it uneconomic to deliver because the number of offenders in rural areas is so low?

[Sir Alan Beith]

My hon. Friend would be surprised if I did not take rural issues into account, given that I represent the most sparsely populated areas of England.

I give way to the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who is a member of my Select Committee.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I look forward to the evidence session tomorrow morning. Would it not be far better if the Secretary of State delayed further consideration of this proposal until after our Committee has examined the issue and produced a proper report on it so that there is an evidence base for the legislation?

[Sir Alan Beith]

It is our intention to report quickly on these aspects of the probation changes. There has been a considerable delay since the Bill completed its passage through the Lords, as was referred to by the shadow Secretary of State. Although the process for implementing the Government’s changes is fairly rapid, the consideration of the Bill has been relatively leisurely by parliamentary standards. It is my intention that the Select Committee will still influence the shape of what emerges.

When the Justice Committee reported on the probation service in 2011, we said that a more seamless, through-the-gate approach to dealing with offenders was vital and that less of a probation officer’s time should be wasted on bureaucratic processes that do not involve direct engagement with offenders. We saw potential in payment by results, but some dangers as well.

We also wanted something that the Government do not intend to give us, which is local commissioning. That would enable decisions about what is provided to be taken in the context of local circumstances so that we no longer have the absurd position whereby prison is a nationally provided free good, in that it does not engage local authorities through the provision of any expenditure. It is a national expenditure, whereas almost all other kinds of provision have to be financed and funded locally.

The Justice Committee reported earlier this year on women offenders. I welcome clause 11, which relates to the concern expressed in our report that the system was designed to meet the needs of male offenders and must make appropriate provision for women offenders. The argument is not that women who commit criminal offences are less guilty than men who commit criminal offences, but that the circumstances that generate the offences committed by women and the means by which women can be guided towards not committing further offences are often different. That is another area in which we have given advice that is relevant to the Bill.

There are some important questions about the Bill and the structure of the probation service that will be necessary to support it that must be considered. The first is whether there is a market out there. Are there enough potential providers that could take on the contracts and that could engage, as is necessary, with the wide range of charities, voluntary organisations and other bodies in which there is expertise? [Interruption.] I heard a reference from the Labour Benches to G4S and Serco, and the contracts of both those companies, which were brought about under the previous Government, are now the subject of serious fraud inquiries. One implication of that is that a number of companies may effectively be excluded from the bidding process. We must await the outcome of the inquiries as we cannot reach conclusions at this stage, but even were the process still going on, it would exclude at least two major companies working in that field.

[Mike Wood (Batley and Spen) (Lab)]

In view of those allegations, does the right hon. Gentleman think it would be appropriate for the Secretary of State to withdraw or suspend those companies from the bidding process until the matters are resolved? So far he has refused to do that.

[Sir Alan Beith]

There are complex legal reasons that I will not try and go into now, but I cannot imagine that this House would want a company that is currently the subject of a serious criminal investigation to be awarded a criminal justice contract. Both companies, of course, have contracts in criminal justice in other areas of activity or other parts of government, and they have perfectly satisfactory ratings on some of those. It is a difficult issue to deal with.

[John McDonnell]

As the right hon. Gentleman said, we should be clear about satisfactory ratings. He should refer to the press this morning because G4S has been referred for prosecution as a result of the forgery of documents that allowed the deportation of a prisoner.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I think I have made myself clear about what view the House would take if a company that was the subject of a serious fraud inquiry were to be awarded a bid in those circumstances. I do not think Ministers are in any doubt on that point.

My point about the market was generally much wider because we must take proper account of whether the Department has the capacity to manage that market. Indeed, it has been said on at least one occasion that the Department wants to draw new entrants into the market and cultivate new capacity, but has it got the capacity to do that? We must consider that important question.

On finance and timing, the Government have not made publicly available any assessment of the financial risk of not delivering the programme to the agreed time scale, quality or cost. The risk register apparently suggests there is a 51% to 80% risk that the reforms will fail to deliver the promised scale of savings.

[Sadiq Khan]

Will the right hon. Gentleman ask to see the risk register from the Ministry of Justice, bearing in mind the important report he is preparing?

[Sir Alan Beith]

We may do, but I expect to get the same answer as we would have got from the previous Government.

[Sadiq Khan]

rose—

[Sir Alan Beith]

I think the right hon. Gentleman has made his point and I have given my response. The Ministry of Justice has not provided an indication of how much it would additionally need to save to afford the cost of implementing the proposals, or said how quickly those savings would be realised. That puts my Committee in a difficult position when assessing the viability of the proposals.

There are also difficulties of risk management. The public probation service will have to assure itself about the risk management of up to 200,000 offenders for whom it has no direct responsibility, and we will need to ask many questions about how information will be passed between the public probation service, the police, and private sector providers. At the moment, transfer of information is relatively easy, but under the proposed arrangements it will become more complex and difficult. I hope the Minister will say something about that. That also affects other areas. I had a discussion with a victim liaison officer who is concerned about how far information of the kind she is able to get now will flow when reassuring victims about restrictions being placed on an offender, and whether that information will come so readily through the system the Government propose.

There are key confidence issues about how the proposals can be made to work. There is a confidence issue for the police on sharing intelligence. If police officers feel inhibited about sharing intelligence with the provider of these vital services, the effectiveness of the whole process will be impaired. There is a confidence issue for magistrates when considering how they can rely on a community sentence—a significant part of the Bill is on community sentences. We want magistrates to be able to pass community sentences confident in the knowledge that they will be carried out effectively. There is a confidence issue for those who deal with victims and, currently, for probation office staff, who are uncertain as to where they will end up. If they take no definite action to locate themselves in the new system, will they finish up in the public probation service or the private sector? Which way should they go if they want the opportunity to exercise their skills?

[Guy Opperman]

I echo the concerns the Chairman of the Justice Committee outlines and accept their validity, but the idea that there is no example of partnership between charitable organisations and the police is surely negated by the St Giles Trust—the Committee has looked at the trust in great detail. The trust is a charitable sector organisation that works throughout people’s time in prison and outside in partnership with the prison, probation and all other services. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the St Giles Trust is a good example of how things can be done?

[Sir Alan Beith]

There are plenty of good examples—my Committee has looked at a number of them—but no one should start from the presumption that the existing system is the only way of managing prolific and frequent offenders. On the contrary, the reoffending figures should tell us that we must do something differently. We must harness the talents that exist in the charity and voluntary sectors, which may also exist in the private sector.

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Alan Beith]

No, I will conclude because many hon. Members wish to speak.

Elements of the Bill will provide the opportunity to realise the Justice Committee’s vision of how we can reduce crime through more effective use of taxpayers’ money. Currently, we waste taxpayers’ money in not dealing effectively with reoffending. That must change. However, there are significant risks in the pace at which the Government intend to implement the programme. We must ask questions about that, and my Committee will do so.

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[Paul Goggins]

That is a very real concern and I am glad that my hon. Friend has had the chance to put that point on the record and introduce it into the debate. Groups with specific and additional needs—vulnerable female offenders or mentally ill offenders, for instance—will not be an attractive proposition to people who are looking to do things at the lowest possible cost.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I do not disagree with the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), but does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the voluntary sector has done some extraordinarily good work in giving opportunities to women offenders, and if we can integrate what we are talking about here with women’s centres around the country, there is a possibility of real improvement?

[Paul Goggins]

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman, who is an excellent Select Committee Chair. I hope Ministers will still be listening to him and his Committee colleagues when they produce their report following the inquiry they are currently conducting. Many women’s centres are facing cuts at a time when we need them more than ever, so there is a very real difficulty, but I think all the points that have been made about women offenders are well made. I hope Ministers are gradually getting the message that they have to do something specific and different in relation to women offenders.

I mentioned offenders who are mentally ill. The Ministry of Justice and the Department of Health have made a very impressive commitment to do more to try to help people with a mental illness who get caught up in the criminal justice system. The national liaison and diversion scheme, which was introduced following a recommendation by our noble Friend Lord Bradley, who has done some fantastic work in this area, is very welcome. Again, however, I put it to the Minister that there are real dangers of the policy he is trying to introduce in this Bill running headlong into the more positive policy towards people with mental illness that he and the Department of Health are trying to introduce. Again, I am looking for reassurances about flexibility in the way people with mental illness are treated at the point where consideration may be given to returning them to prison, which might not be the most appropriate thing.

Finally, I have a concern about care leavers. Some young people in care might go into prison as a child and come out as an adult and a care leaver. That could produce additional difficulties, because who will have the prime responsibility? Will it be the private provider of the supervision that comes after a prison sentence, or will it be the local authority which has continuing responsibilities for those who leave care beyond the age of 18?

These are matters of detail, but they are important matters which must be addressed if the Minister is to get this legislation into the best shape possible. Then again, if the Minister does get this Bill into the best shape possible, he still cannot walk away from the context in which he is seeking to deliver it. Even though I agree with the core aim of the proposed legislation, I am deeply worried that introducing it into the turmoil of change that he and the Justice Secretary are planning is a recipe for disaster, and that is why, regrettably, this Bill is unsupportable at this point.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Beith Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

The Lord Chancellor will recall that prison privatisations had to be halted because of the investigations that were taking place into two private sector contractors. Does he recognise that the very small number of private contractors available to take on these major contracts and the limited skills of the civil service to manage those contracts pose a threat to the achievement of his objective of transforming rehabilitation?

[Chris Grayling]

It is certainly unwelcome when we have issues with private contractors. I believe that it is important for the Government to broaden their ambit in terms of the organisations that they do business with. There is a large number of organisations out there in the voluntary and private sectors with skills to bring to the Government, and I hope that we can latch on to those skills and make good use of them. It is important for the future of Government contracting that we do not become too dependent on a very small number of suppliers.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Beith Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I am afraid that I think the current situation is unacceptable, whereby we are obliged to provide legal aid to anyone who starts a judicial review regardless of the strength of their case. If an individual has a strong case with their lawyer against a local authority, they should seek to recover their costs from that local authority. It is not the job of the taxpayer to bank-roll all cases.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

Has the Lord Chancellor heard from the Bar Council since the Law Society sent me a letter yesterday describing the constructive progress that had been made in discussions? Does he recognise the genuine concern that when a fundamental change is made in the relationship between the two sides of the profession, it has to be after very careful consideration?

[Chris Grayling]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. Over the past few weeks, I have had very constructive engagement with the Law Society and I welcome the counter-proposals it has put to us. We have recognised many shared objectives in that and it has behaved with professionalism over this matter. I was very disappointed that when the Bar Council submitted its report and recommendations to us in response to our consultation it did not contain the same degree of constructive engagement. I am due to meet the Bar Council later today and I hope we will see that change.

Interpreting and Translation Services

Lord Beith Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard, and to have the opportunity to debate our report on the Applied Language Solutions contract, supplemented by the National Audit Office report. I am glad to see Members from all parties and different parts of the country here, including my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Ian Swales), a member of the Public Accounts Committee, which also considered the matter in the context of the NAO report.

Although that gives me pleasure, it gives me none to report that the subject of this debate is the procurement and management process undertaken by the Ministry of Justice. Serious flaws have been exposed in the Ministry’s procedures and policies; the process was a shambles. The contractual system for court interpreting, which came into operation at the end of last January, proved unsatisfactory from the outset and was subject to a boycott by many professional interpreters whose terms and conditions of employment were adversely affected. As we say in our report, that caused the adjournment or severe delay of numerous hearings and, in criminal cases, unnecessary remands into custody, with potential implications for the interests of justice.

One need not be an expert on court processes to understand the dangers to justice that can arise from inadequate interpretation. We acknowledged in our report that performance had improved markedly since the earliest days of the contract, but our verdict was not dissimilar to the Ministry’s admission in response to our report that

“performance…under the contract has not been of a satisfactory level”.

As I shall make clear a little later, on the available measures, performance has still not reached required standards; if anything, it has slipped back.

It is good practice, and my Committee’s practice, to look again and follow up the recommendations made in reports. I advise the Minister—a former Justice Committee member—that this debate is not the end of my Committee’s interest in the subject, and it will not be possible for the Ministry to escape parliamentary scrutiny after this debate.

[Lorely Burt (Solihull) (LD)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on the excellent report produced by his Committee. The summary says:

“There was significant concern revealed in the consultation process that quality standards could be diminished by the imposition of a tiered system to enable a wider pool of interpreters, and by the introduction of lower levels of pay.”

Does he share my concern that that is evidence of trying to deliver an important service at the potential expense of quality? Does he think that his hon. Friend and mine, the Minister, should review and be prepared to revoke the system if it continues to be proven not to work?

[Sir Alan Beith]

I will return to how we proceed from here. I am tempted to comment that people always say that when it is proved that standards fell after big changes and that some of the predictions were fully justified. That should be a warning to the Government, as they engage in a number of other contracts. I will come back to that as well.

It is worth pointing out that the problems encountered by the Ministry in contracting for the work, while serious in themselves, also have implications for wide swathes of its other activities. The Ministry is putting out to contract 70% of rehabilitative services under the transforming rehabilitation proposals, £450 million in custodial services over the next six years and a large part of criminal legal aid, all of which will be the subject of contracts. I do not need to spell out that if things go wrong in those areas as they have in court interpreting, we face a multiple-train crash. Does the Ministry really have the capacity to do the kind of contracting on which many of its policy proposals are based? I am not arguing about whether it is a good or bad idea to contract out those things, but the Ministry must have the capacity to do so well and properly.

Before I turn to the substance of the report, I will mention another point of considerable concern to my Committee: the Government’s insistence that they acted reasonably in discouraging court staff from taking part in the online forum that we set up as part of our inquiry to seek personal experiences of interpretation standards in court. That was a retrograde step. We did something similar with prison officers. Many contributed to our online forum, and as a result, we produced a much better-informed report than we could otherwise have done. We did the same thing with court staff, but they were strongly pressed by the Government not to co-operate. That is deplorable. We shall continue to use such mechanisms where appropriate in our inquiries, not with any intention of getting civil servants to question policy, but to get a proper understanding of how it is working on the ground. If Departments repeatedly give that kind of non-co-operation injunction to their staff, they may find themselves in contempt of the House, and the whole House may seek to do something about it.

On the substance of our report, we recommended that the Ministry of Justice audit the amounts being expended on interpreter pay and travel and said that it might be necessary for the rate of pay for tier 1 interpreters —the most highly qualified—to be increased. We also said that the MOJ and Capita should prove that the framework agreement could attract, retain and deploy an adequate number of interpreters to meet the requirements of the courts and other agencies. We called on the professional interpreter community to work flexibly with the Ministry to find an acceptable way to restore their services to the justice sector.

In response, the Ministry introduced, with effect from May, a number of changes to the system of remuneration for interpreters, which it says amount to an average 22% increase in rates. Those changes involve mileage payments, cancellation fees, payment in 15-minute blocks rather than by the minute, payment in accordance with the qualification tier of the interpreter and a daily fee for incidental costs. We welcome those changes, but it is not yet clear that they will be enough to encourage many more interpreters to undertake work under Capita’s auspices, given the breakdown in relations between the Ministry and interpreters and the fact that many interpreters cleave to the view that the framework agreement is fundamentally flawed and cannot be salvaged.

The Ministry says in its response that it has met Professional Interpreters for Justice since late 2012, but goes on rather ruefully to say that it

“accepts that it will not always be possible to agree with the Professional Interpreters for Justice Group but seeks to maintain ongoing dialogue.”

I am not surprised that my hon. Friend the Minister should try to establish better relations—I would expect no less of her in going about things—but a lot more work clearly needs to be done if the professional interpreter community is to be won back.

The group has a different slant on the dialogue. It says that it was invited to a meeting with the Ministry’s interpretation project in March, at which it was presented with a package of proposed changes. It says that changes proposed at separate meetings by interpreters registered with Capita were rejected, and it does not accept that the Government’s changes will attract and retain interpreters.

The dialogue has been inauspicious from the outset. We commented that the Ministry

“did not have a sufficient understanding of the complexities of court interpreting work prior to initiating the procurement of a new service.”

We endorsed the NAO’s conclusion that the MOJ did not give sufficient weight to the concerns and dissatisfaction expressed by many interpreters, even though having sufficient numbers of skilled interpreters was essential to the new arrangements’ success, to return to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt).

A constructive dialogue requires both sides to participate with good will. When we published our report, we were encouraged by the Minister’s commitment to repairing relations, but can she explain why she thinks relations between her Ministry and the main organisations do not appear to have improved? On what evidence or other basis did the Ministry choose to make the changes on which it lighted? How does the Ministry plan to monitor those changes to ensure that they bring about the desired improvements in the service?

On the quality of interpretation, we agreed with the NAO that the tiered system should be independently evaluated and that interpretation quality standards should be independently reviewed. The MOJ said that it would take that forward and report back to us on progress. The Minister gave us some more information in a letter dated 18 June. I am grateful to her for that. In the letter, she says that steps have been taken to “scope and initiate” the quality assessment and, following discussion with interpreter groups, Capita and others, will commission the advice and report back to my Committee in the autumn. Perhaps that should have been got on with a bit quicker, because it is a pretty fundamental prerequisite for improving the service. I urge swifter progress.

The Ministry has claimed that the changes to terms and conditions that it has made

“will increase the number and availability of Tier 1 and Tier 2 interpreters and therefore reduce the need to use Tier 3 interpreters”.

In her letter of 18 June, the Minister says that it is too early to say whether this is happening, although she notes that Capita says that there is an increased interest in accepting bookings from their existing pool of interpreters. I should like the Minister to report back to my Committee in the autumn on the extent to which the expectations have been satisfied.

We noted in our report problems with performance data being compiled to demonstrate the effectiveness of Capita in fulfilling courts’ requests. This is fundamental to a contract: there must be adequate performance data. Again, this reads across to some other contracts that the Ministry will have.

There were ambiguities about, for example, what constituted a customer cancellation, which is an ambiguous category. Professional Interpreters for Justice subtracts cancellations from the total number of requests, as well as failures by the contractor to deliver, to arrive at a figure of 80% of requests having been fulfilled by Capita, which is way below the contract requirement.

Even on the Ministry’s figures, performance is falling well short of the 98% target, and it tailed off markedly in January. That cannot be regarded as satisfactory. It is clear that, despite the substantial extra investment that the company has made since taking over from ALS, Capita continues to perform below the required standard under the contract.

[Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con)]

Has the Committee had an estimate of the impact of the cost of delays, extended custody and the performance off-contract on the expected savings that this outsourcing was meant to deliver?

[Sir Alan Beith]

No, but we think that the Ministry of Justice should have some reasonable estimates of those costs. Such estimates are quite hard to put together, but we have talked to people in the courts—judges, counsel, solicitors and court staff—and they all point to incidents, each of which involves significant additional costs, which clearly have to be offset against the savings.

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman share my concern that we are hearing from people, such as the chairman of the Bar Council, about the significant costs and money wasted when trials collapse because of failures under the terms of the contract? Does he share my view that perhaps we would be better served if we considered saving those costs, rather than embarking on a revolution in legal aid provision and putting all that at risk again?

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[Sir Alan Beith]

The hon. Gentleman is an assiduous and welcome member of my Committee, but I would not make the rather rash claim that we could meet the savings that the Government want to make in the costs of legal aid out of getting this contract right. However, we should be getting it right and so far that has not been achieved.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I am also a member of the Committee, so I am pleased that we are debating this report. When the Ministry comes back to our Committee, does not the right hon. Gentleman think that it would be helpful if it came with an analysis of the amount of money lost by the non-attendance of interpreters, which my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) mentioned, and the collapse of trials and all the costs that are loaded on to all three parties: the court, the prosecution and the defence?

[Sir Alan Beith]

I would welcome a reasonable estimate from the Ministry, but I should like it to devote most of its effort to moving from the bad situation that we have now to a better one. I would not want all its management to be occupied with collecting the figures, but if it starts to claim significant savings, I am afraid that we will all want to insist that some of those costs are set against those claims.

Quite a lot of off-contract booking is going on—courts have to do it to meet the need to go ahead with a trial —but we need more information because we do not know how extensive it is. Of course, that too is an extra cost item.

Interpreters’ organisations have been compiling dossiers of instances where court proceedings have been disrupted by failings in the interpretation service. Such information should be systematically captured by the Ministry. We recommended that there should be a user satisfaction measure, and the Ministry replied that it would discuss this with Capita and other partners. I should be grateful for an update on these discussions.

A lack of basic management information has contributed to the Ministry’s apparent inability to monitor and drive better performance. For example, there are costs of defendants being remanded in custody, additional legal aid costs and all the rest of it. We thought that the Ministry

“must get a better grasp of the costs of underperformance”.

I shall not quote the savings figures that the Ministry quotes, which are seriously at risk because of the additional costs involved.

The Minister could provide further clarification on how much of the expenditure of £13.3 million in the first year is accounted for by off-contract bookings. Perhaps she could let us have that information later, if not today.

We noted in our report that the problems arising in relation to the contract must have meant the Ministry’s incurring additional administrative costs as a result of the higher than expected level of oversight that has become necessary. The Ministry in its response gave a figure for staffing costs of the core project of £315,000 between January 2012 and March 2013, but it did not give an estimate of additional costs that it might have incurred.

We should not assume that there was some golden age under the previous arrangements for court interpreting. We concluded in our report that, despite clear administrative inefficiencies, there does not appear to have been any fundamental problem with the quality of services when sourced under the terms of the then national agreement. It is understandable that any Government would consider whether there were more efficient, cost-effective ways to provide the same service, but the principle must be to provide the same level of service. The Government signally failed to achieve that objective.

We said that there

“was clear potential for problems with ALS’ capacity to deliver on its promises which were not adequately anticipated or dealt with either by the Department or by the contractor itself”.

ALS was a small undertaking, visibly lacking the capacity to undertake anything as major as the entire national court interpreting provision.

The Ministry’s naivety at the start of the process appears to have been matched by its indulgence towards underperformance against the contract once the new arrangements came into operation. In introducing the new framework agreement, the Ministry has alienated many experienced court interpreters. The contract may have achieved a net book saving in its first year of operation, but it has not, on the available evidence, achieved any improvement in service to the courts. Indeed, on the information available to judge performance, which continues to be rather defective and limited, there has been a deterioration in performance and a negative impact on the ability of the courts to do their job properly.

The whole saga has been an inglorious one. It might almost have been constructed as a cautionary tale of what a Department should avoid in undertaking a procurement and contract management process. And this is a Department that intends to undertake several such processes, some of them much larger even than this one, so some lessons have to be learned pretty quickly. The standard of court interpretation needs to be restored, preferably by bringing back those whose experience can return the service to the standards that the courts used to expect.

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[Ian Swales (Redcar) (LD)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Pritchard, to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) not only on his diligent chairmanship of his Committee but on his comprehensive introduction to the subject today. I am a member of the Public Accounts Committee, which considered the matter on 6 December 2012 and drew some shocking conclusions.

Life on the Public Accounts Committee involves meeting twice a week and each time hearing about very different situations, usually a litany of failure or ineffectiveness. As a result, we become a little cynical or even punch drunk. However, even by those standards, the hearing on 6 December 2012 was appalling. I am reminded by the large number of people in the Public Gallery today—no doubt some of them are personally interested in the matter—that we had a large attendance in the Public Gallery on that day. It was one of the few hearings I remember when there was shaking of heads in the Public Gallery as Ministry officials responded to the Committee. That is rare, but it happened repeatedly on that day, which says something about the officials’ complacency,

Our Committee found, not surprisingly given what we have heard, that the outsourcing of interpreter services was terribly mismanaged. We concluded that the Ministry lacked management information on the previous use of interpreters and therefore did not have a clear understanding of the requirements when contracting out the service. It did not know how much it was already spending on interpreters, or even how many interpreters were required or in what languages. As a result, the system it selected was driven by bidders’ proposals rather than the actual requirements.

Applied Language Solutions, the company that was awarded the contract, was clearly incapable of delivering on such a large contract, yet it was handed £42 million a year to cover the whole country, despite a credit rating report to the Ministry recommending that ALS should not have been awarded a contract of more than £l million. Departmental officials could not adequately explain to the Committee why it had ignored that advice. It is one thing to make such a striking error in the first place, but the Committee also found that the Ministry failed to penalise ALS effectively under the contract. Its penalty was only £2,200, and there was no penalty for the first four months when its performance was at its worst. Risible levels of penalties and low expectations of performance obviously allow private companies to get away with over-promising and under-delivering.

The Ministry should draft and implement future contracts to minimise transitional problems by piloting and rolling out new systems gradually, and incentivising contractors to meet contractual requirements from the outset—for example, through the robust use of penalties. Will the Minister tell us what penalties have been levied on Capita for failure to deliver since it took over the contract? ALS, of course, was handsomely rewarded for its failure. It sold the business on to Capita for £7.5 million only 10 months after winning the contract. As we often find on our Committee, the public sector had no say in that reassignment and certainly got no financial benefit from the on-selling. That is something we see constantly in the public sector: it is now a business to win a public sector bid or a PFI contract and then trade it on. That is how companies really make money, and ALS is a good example of it.

The Ministry estimated that it would need access to 1,200 interpreters to meet its requirements. However, it allowed the contract to go live when the supplier had only 280 interpreters ready to work under the terms of the contract. The Ministry believed that many more interpreters were available to work, in line with contractual obligations, than was actually the case, because it received over-optimistic assurances from ALS and there was confusion over definitions of what important terms such as “registered” actually meant. The Ministry was also unable to confirm that all interpreters working under the contract had the required qualifications, experience and enhanced Criminal Records Bureau checks.

The company was only able to meet 58% of its bookings, initially, against a target of 98%, which is entirely unacceptable. As previous speakers have said, it is not only about the mechanics of the contract; we are talking about people’s lives and life-changing decisions that may be made on their behalf. People who needed the services have paid a heavy price for the Ministry’s incompetence. We have seen a sharp rise in the number of ineffective trials, as others have said. A trial was recently cancelled in my area because, unbelievably, the chosen interpreter was on trial in a neighbouring court at the same time. Extra costs for the Ministry are then incurred by unnecessary trial postponements and delays. Those costs have not been revealed but they will almost certainly be far more than the money saved on the contract, and I urge the Ministry to measure the waste in the courts system caused by the problem.

Whatever value-for-money considerations drove the original decision will now bear little relation to what has actually happened. It seems certain that there has been a net cost rather than a net benefit to the justice system. In short, the Public Accounts Committee found that the process descended into total chaos, and that almost everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. I hope that the Ministry will follow up the recommendations of the PAC, the Justice Committee and the National Audit Office in order to clean up the mess. Given the large potential contracts that the Ministry is looking to award, it has a lot to do to convince the public that it has learnt the lessons, and that contracts such as those involving legal aid and rehabilitation—

[Sir Alan Beith]

Before my hon. Friend concludes, I wanted to put this point to him, which is not always recognised or understood by people. What has happened in this case, as is proposed in the case of legal aid, is that instead of outsourcing to a very large number of small, usually one-person businesses and making an assessment as to whether they are capable of doing it, the whole process of obtaining interpreters has been outsourced. It has been done on such a large scale that few organisations in the country would be able to do it.

[Ian Swales]

My right hon. Friend makes a valuable point, which is of great concern to the Public Accounts Committee. We seem to have a number of Government Departments that—I suppose it is belt and braces—are making the outsourcing, or contracting-out process, so complicated that now only four or five companies can win the bid. The whole job is how a bid is won and not what the service is, because frequently the people who win the bids do not do the work. Eddie Stobart will not be providing legal aid; its expertise is winning a Government bid. That is the almost farcical situation that we have now got into. The Ministry needs to learn the lessons from that process, particularly as it seems to be about to do some very similar things on a much bigger scale.

One of the other issues that we have—we use the expression on our Committee “following the public pound” —is that the more this type of thing happens, the less access the National Audit Office has to the people who are doing the work. If the services are run by the Department, the NAO can be all over them, but typically, the contracts do not provide transparency or access, so our auditors are unable to get into the key providers.

In summary, the Minister needs to convince us about the lessons learnt, and about what improvement actions will be taken. I feel—not my Committee but I, personally—that a lot of scrutiny by a lot of people should take place before we walk into the same trap again, and I fear that the Public Accounts Committee may have a lot more work coming down the road towards it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Alan Beith]

Conscientious though my hon. Friend the Minister is, she will not have convinced any of us that the situation is acceptable and sustainable.

The Minister referred to court staff being told not to respond to the Committee’s survey. At no time did the Committee seek to pit the opinions of staff against those of Ministers; that would be wrong, and we would not seek to do it. Committees will continue to collect information about how contracts are operating, and if Departments maintain their current line—the Ministry of Justice has not done so on other occasions—they will be on a collision course with the House.

The Minister referred to teething problems, which is an extraordinary way to describe the total failure to meet contract requirements in the early part of the contract. That should have attracted penalty or break clauses in the contract. We questioned the head of the Courts Service, who said that there were break clauses that he could activate. As my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Ian Swales) said, the current situation—90% achievement against a 98% target—represents a failure to meet the contract requirements, which should probably attract a penalty.

The Minister will never convince us that the savings figures take adequate account of the additional cost to the system. I am afraid this issue will continue to be controversial.

backbench business

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Beith Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

That information is already available to a degree. It is available to hon. Members and has been published under the Freedom of Information Act. It is very important that at the same time as ensuring we have a proper legal aid system that provides access to justice to all, we ensure that the payments we make are payments we can afford.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

How can Ministers be confident that under their proposals there will be a genuine market and not just a few very large businesses that would have no great incentive to maintain quality once they got a fixed proportion of the business?

[Chris Grayling]

That is a very important point. First, I have absolutely no intention of ending up with a legal aid market dominated by a small number of very large firms. A central part of the tendering process will involve a quality threshold that ensures that we have the quality of advocacy and litigation support in this country that we need and expect.

Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Lord Beith Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Greg Mulholland]

Technically, in terms of the law, absolutely. As I said yesterday, the new clause cannot be seen in isolation; it has to be seen with amendment 10, which sought the repeal of the Marriage Act 1949. It must also be linked with the amendment that I tabled to remove clauses in the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 and to repeal the Civil Partnership Act 2004. The point is that there would be one single definition of a legal recognition for relationships.

I am not necessarily dictating whether this should be called a union, a marriage, or, as Peter Tatchell suggests, a civil commitment pact. I am not particularly interested in the language. Some people feel very strongly that we should call it marriage; others, including my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), do not like the word “marriage”. That is a debate to be had. The point is that what we need to do, and what the Bill should have sought to do, is give all citizens of this country the right to one single recognition by the state of their union. Of course, that would apply to everyone in an existing marriage or an existing civil partnership. Everyone would have the one single recognition through the state, and the legislation would have been drafted to achieve that. That answers the hon. Gentleman’s question very simply, but we are now moving into technical legal questions. In reality, this change would require a separate Bill, but it is currently proposed as a new clause.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

Would my hon. Friend’s proposals mean that Methodists, Catholics and others who fought for many years for the right to conduct a marriage ceremony that was valid in law would lose that right and have to go along to the town hall to get validation for the marriage that they had conducted?

[Greg Mulholland]

I believe that Methodists and Catholics should have exactly the same rights as humanists, Baptists, Jews and Quakers. That is my whole point. I do not accept that some religions should have the right to access a civil marriage ceremony but not others; as a liberal, I find that indefensible. My right hon. Friend has to accept, as do I and all right hon. and hon. Members, that marriage is being redefined; the state has chosen, through its Parliament, to do that. Therefore, now is the time to deal with the complex, multi-faceted and, indeed, confusing and discriminatory current marriage laws and to carry out the reform properly, which is not happening.

I suspect that there is also a practical dimension to my right hon. Friend’s question, and I am happy to address that. In order to have the necessary separation between civil and religious ceremonies, we would need to ensure that no religious minister was able to convey the rights of legal marriage. Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible, either through the presence of a registrar at a belief-based or religious marriage ceremony, or by another process, to have that conveyed at the same time. If my right hon. Friend is arguing against that separation, he is defending the situation that the Government are proposing, which will mean having to legislate on what certain Churches may or may not do and needing a complex system of law to ensure that other Churches, including the one he belongs to, are not then forced to do things they do not want to do. If we have a proper separation, none of those things is necessary, and surely that is the sensible way to proceed.

I have had support from all sorts of different sources, including ministers from Churches of various denominations and other religions who are saying that this is indeed a sensible way to proceed. On the Gay Leeds website there is an article by Colin Ross in which he says:

“This seems a very sensible approach to me, I am a gay man and not religious. If I wanted to spend my life in a loving relationship recognised by the state I want to be able to do that—without any religion having their opinion on it—but what is more I want to have the same rights as everyone else. The current Marriage (same sex couples) Bill does not offer equality, the legislation is flawed it still doesn’t provide equality especially in respect of pension rights when one partner dies and issues affecting the Trans community, likewise the Civil Partnership legislation was not about equality—as it neither gave equality to marriage and also did not allow opposite-sex partners to have Civil Partnership as well.”

Similarly, in the release that he put out today under the headline, “Gay marriage bill is not full equality”, Peter Tatchell says:

“Instead of bringing same-sex couples fully within the ambit of existing marriage law, the bill leaves some aspects of marriage law different for gay and straight married couples. Although these are relatively minor, they violate the fundamental principle of marriage equality for all.”

He goes on to say:

“While this may be a progressive reform of marriage legislation, it makes the law unequal. If we want marriage equality, that’s what the bill should give.”

We should also have equality of religions and belief systems, and the Bill does not achieve that either.

Rehabilitation of Offenders

Lord Beith Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I plead guilty to having done a couple of media interviews this morning, but I am at least in the House right now. My opposite number, the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), also gave some media interviews this morning but has not made it to the House, which is rather a surprise to me.

We learned an important lesson in opposition, which is that sometimes when one aspires to be a Government it is necessary to accept that something is the right thing to do. That is a lesson that today’s Opposition have not learned. I do not understand why they are coming out with this faux anger about what we are doing when the legislative foundations that enable us to push through these reforms were passed by the previous Labour Government. If they supported the concept then, why do they not support it now?

The hon. Gentleman asked about costs. That highlights an important difference between us and the previous Government. They believed that a problem would be solved by throwing money at it, and they ended up with an over-bureaucratic, over-complex system which simply did not deliver. Thanks to the work done by the Select Committee, we know that probation officers spend only about a quarter of their time at work on supervising offenders, while about 40% of their time is spent on providing support services. Are the Opposition really saying that it is not possible to run that system more efficiently and deliver support where it is needed to the offenders who are most likely to reoffend when they leave prison? Again, there is a divide between us and them. They think it is a question of spending more taxpayers’ money and having higher taxes; we want to get better value from the taxes that we already raise.

On resettlement prisons, again, it is about making our system work more effectively. At the moment, we move far too many prisoners all over the country in a fairly haphazard way. Over the past few months we have worked with prison governors and prison officer teams to work out a better way so that short-sentence offenders will almost always stay in one place and longer-sentence offenders will go to a prison close to where they will be released to ensure that when they are released we can deliver continuity of support through the prison gate. The Opposition should welcome that. It is the right thing to do and it should have been done years ago.

The hon. Gentleman asked about the past three years. It is only a few months since the Opposition were attacking me for not undertaking pilots on this issue. In fact, for the past few years we have been looking at how such a system would work, in Peterborough prison and in Doncaster prison. The work that has been done there is first-rate. It has also shown how effective older prisoners who are turning their lives around can be in supporting and mentoring younger offenders who have yet to do so. The hon. Gentleman needs to go out and look at what is happening, not in the world of big businesses, which his party’s Government contracted with regularly, but in the voluntary sector with some of our first-rate charities, where there are living examples of former offenders who have gone straight and who are now helping to turn around the lives of the next generation of offenders. I want to capture those skills in helping to bring down reoffending.



The hon. Gentleman questioned payment by results, but why is it such a bad thing in the eyes of the Opposition? They want to pay a whole-contract fee, but I believe that we should pay part of a fee based on whether the taxpayer gets a good deal or not. We should pay not unconditionally, but conditionally, and that is what we will do under these contracts. I want to pay for real results that bring down reoffending and crime.

Under the previous Government, reoffending barely changed. We ended up with a situation in which people were going round and round the system. We finally have a set of proposals that will start to change that. It is shame that this did not happen, not three years ago, but 13 years ago, when the Labour party was in power.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

If this reform can be carried through in such difficult financial circumstances, it will be one of the most valuable and important things this Government do. Does the Lord Chancellor agree that the system must be tailored so that charities and voluntary organisations can viably play their full part, and that the creation of a national probation service must not be allowed to undermine the local co-operation between agencies, which is vital to reducing reoffending?

[Chris Grayling]

I can give assurance on both those points. The national probation service will continue to have local delivery units operating at a local authority level with local agencies, which is essential, and multi-agency supervision will and should continue for the most serious offenders.

On charitable groups, I am clear that quality and the likelihood of delivering success in reducing reoffending will be crucial in the contracting process. This is not simply a money-saving exercise; it is about easing pressure on the system by reducing reoffending. That is what it is all about and the bidding process will ensure that quality rises to the top.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Beith Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I can absolutely give the hon. Lady that assurance. I very much recognise the issue that she mentions, which was discussed at my meeting with David Ford. I can reassure her that we are mindful of the situation in Northern Ireland and giving it due consideration as we reach our decision.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

Why are Ministers not engaging properly with the House on those opt-in decisions, given that the five memorandums promised for mid-February have not yet been produced and the Government appear to be discussing with the Commission important opt-ins without having discussed them with important Committees of the House?

Budget and Structure of the Ministry of Justice

Lord Beith Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

Today is an estimates day and the presence of pound signs and a lot of noughts on the Order Paper tends to frighten Members away, when really it ought to draw them in to see what on earth the Government are doing with very large amounts of taxpayers’ money. Repeated attempts by zealous reformers to make Parliament pay more attention to expenditure have still not, I think, achieved the degree of success that many of us would like. I am pleased to have the opportunity to open this debate on the Ministry of Justice’s supplementary estimate for 2012-13, with particular reference to the report published by the Justice Committee on the budget and structure of the Ministry of Justice.

This is the first debate on the Ministry’s estimates since it was established in 2007, and I gather that the Minister who will respond is one of two in the Department who were formerly members of the Justice Committee—well, three if we count the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice, the right hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green). We are infiltrating our Committee members into relevant positions, which I hope will lead to almost all our recommendations being carried out.

The Ministry’s resource departmental expenditure limit for this financial year amounted to £8.2 billion. The supplementary estimate that provides the occasion for this debate adds a net £379 million in programme expenditure to that total, but MOJ spending, if not huge, relates to crucial areas of great public concern and interest: prisons, probation and legal aid. Most of the expenditure that the Ministry is responsible for is incurred in programmes administered by agencies and non-departmental public bodies. The broad figures of the budget show that the National Offender Management Service—prisons and probation—receives £3.4 billion, that the Legal Services Commission, which deals with legal aid, receives just under £2 billion, that the Courts Service receives £1.3 billion, that the Youth Justice Board receives £300 million and that the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority receives £282 million. Between them, they account for the lion’s share of the Ministry’s budget.

I said that the supplementary estimate added a net £379 million to the main estimate resource expenditure limit. I will write on behalf of the Justice Committee to seek some further information on the components of the increase, as well as on increases in resource annually managed expenditure; but, in the meantime, it would be helpful if the Minister responded with some of the reasons for the £159 million increase for NOMS in the resource departmental expenditure limit, which is mysteriously described in the Ministry’s memorandum as due to “emergency cost pressures”. Last year, £51 million was included in the supplementary estimate under exactly the same heading. What are those pressures? Is that money part of the £1.2 billion funding agreed in 2007 for prison capacity, following the Carter review, and, if so, when was it carried over into the current comprehensive spending review period and what will the money be spent on?

The supplementary estimate includes provision for a net extra £750 million in round terms in resource annually managed expenditure, the largest elements of which are impairments on the court estate, £326 million, and impairments on the prison estate, £252 million. I hope that the Minister can explain why those elements are there.

I shall turn to the main conclusions of my Committee’s wide-ranging report. We took evidence in the first half of last year and reported in August 2012, and the Government responded in October. We visited the Department during our inquiry, and we did so in an innovative way that I commend to other Committees. We simply said, “We don’t want a formalised tour. We wish to enter every part of the Department and, on a second day, NOMS, and all we want is someone who has got the keys to every door in the building.” That is what we did, and we just wandered about every part of the Department, talked to staff and got a clear picture from them—interestingly, it was to the Department’s credit—of their commitment to the transforming justice programme. We just landed on anyone and asked, “What are you doing? What is your role in all this?” That gave us a much better feel than formal presentations sometimes do for how the Department was functioning, and it was to the Department’s benefit.

We have regularly taken evidence and reported on the annual reports produced by the Ministry. On the broader relationship between expenditure and policy, our predecessor Committee in early 2010 produced a seminal report on the case for justice reinvestment—a strategy for the transfer of resources away from custody to the prevention of crime and the reduction of reoffending. It remains my firm belief that the blueprint set out in that report is the only sensible way forward for a long-term criminal justice policy. Some elements of that philosophy are present in Government policy today, but quite a lot more could be included.

Our report focused on managerial and operational matters, but it also covered some important questions of policy, particularly on the commissioning of prison and probation services and payment by results. Our inquiry was the first major examination of the activities of the Ministry and its associated public bodies. We looked at the background to the setting up of the Ministry, its internal governance, budgetary provision, financial management, commissioning and procurement, the relationship with other public bodies, Departments and the judiciary and the prospects for achieving the Ministry’s radical long-term policies of transforming justice at a time of severe public expenditure retrenchment.

Some of the subjects that we covered, such as the Ministry’s financial management and procurement capacity, may seem technical, but when things go wrong with those functions, as happened recently in the shambolic outsourcing of court interpreting services, excoriated by the Public Accounts Committee and by us, the political fallout and the effect on public confidence in the judicial system can be deeply harmful.

We concluded in our report that the Ministry’s structure and performance had improved since its creation and that progress had been made in integrating the Department, but many of the improvements had been from a low starting point and there had been criticisms and failures. The culture in which the focus was on policy creation previously had changed to an increasing recognition of the importance of programme management. The Department had developed a greater understanding of its cost drivers, although it still did not have sufficient management control of its finances.

We noted that the Ministry had sought to bring its sponsored bodies under closer central control and make them more accountable to Ministers and had streamlined senior management structures and reduced the duplication of functions. We called for further structural change to create an integrated system of offender management, involving the commissioning of both prison and probation services in defined geographical areas. In fact, we look like ending up with roughly the opposite: national commissioning of prisons, which is what we already have, and now of probation, as part of the Government’s probation proposals. The Lord Chancellor defended that on the grounds that, at this stage at any rate, the limited available experience needs to be concentrated to carry out that commissioning function, but that seems to us to be entirely the wrong strategy. The commissioning of ways to deal with offenders really needs to be associated with all the other agencies that are situated in an area. The prisons, police and crime commissioners, local authority social services departments and housing authorities need to work together, as they have done in youth offender teams, for example, to achieve the best results locally.

We expressed doubt about whether the Ministry had sufficient skills capacity to implement the radical change of approach, with the greater outsourcing of the delivery of services, and we pointed to a danger that the way payment by results would be commissioned might undermine the work of voluntary sector organisations, which play, and need to play, a vital role in the justice sector. I think that Ministers have got that message. I am less sure whether they can implement it properly. There is certainly considerable anxiety across the voluntary sector, where so much of the skill and commitment that is required to change offenders’ lives is available. We drew attention to the wide range of public, private and voluntary organisations that need to work together if the wider justice system is to operate more effectively and efficiently when resources are so constrained.

It is difficult to think of any part of the Department’s activities that are not affected by the process of transformation, which has been under way and has gathered pace. In particular, the proposals in transforming rehabilitation document will entirely re-fashion the terrain of probation services. There are welcome plans to extend rehabilitation to prisoners serving sentences of under 12 months who currently receive no such provision. We pitch them back into society with no realistic expectation that they will turn away from a life of crime merely because they have spent a limited time in prison.

More controversially, the plans include contracting out to the private and voluntary sectors of the majority of work with offenders in the community currently overseen by probation trusts. This rehabilitation revolution agenda is in addition to a huge amount of change occurring across other parts of the Ministry’s core business: changes in legal aid entitlement and in the status of the Legal Services Commission, which has moved physically into the headquarters building in Petty France and is becoming an executive agency under closer central control. The Ministry is closing a number of magistrates courts. It has announced plans to transform youth custody by introducing secure colleges. In family justice, Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service will transfer back to MOJ control effectively from the Department for Education.

On prisons and probation policy, I think we all share the same goal of reducing offending and reoffending, which in turn will free resources currently spent on keeping people in prison, to maintain progress and to have a virtuous circle, rather than the vicious cycle that the system now has. But we remain to be persuaded that the Ministry has at its centre the right people to steer through this monumental transformation process. Most importantly, does it have people with the commercial, technical and legal skills necessary to embark upon a huge range of highly complex and sometimes novel commercial projects?

The transformation agenda coincides with a period when the Ministry, like most Departments, is being tasked with making very large savings. By the end of the spending review period—by the end of the 2014-15 financial year—it needs to make annual real-terms savings of more than £2 billion against its spending review baseline. According to the National Audit Office’s departmental overview, the Ministry still has some way to go to meet its cost reduction target. It aims to make front-line savings of around 10% over the spending review period—it has already saved £244 million—and to reduce back-office costs by around a third, which will contribute about £1 billion towards its target.

The Ministry has projected legal aid savings of about £320 million annually by 2014-15 and sentencing savings of £51 million by the same year, from the changes introduced under the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. A further statement from the Minister today gives an accelerated timetable for proposals yet to be spelled out in relation to criminal legal add. Obviously, we will be closely interested in what comes out. We have some indications that things such as cost recovery from offenders will form part of that. Of course, there has been more coverage today in reference to the President of the Supreme Court and anxieties in the judiciary—of course, such anxieties are widespread among lawyers and voluntary organisations—about the effect of the legal changes.

I will make a personal comment, which I think is broadly shared by the Committee. It is widely recognised that we cannot go one having the most expensive legal aid system in the common law world with no real prospect of restraining its potential increase. The Government had to do something, and any Government would have had to do something.

Secondly, and this is a view that the Committee expressed strongly in a previous report, the welfare and tribunal systems are part of the problem. The extent of legal advice necessary in much of the tribunal system indicates a weakness in the way services are delivered in the first place, and in the tribunal system. We ought to have a system under which people receive the right benefit to start with, and, if they do not, the tribunal system should obtain directly the information required to judge the matter correctly. Where Departments in particular fail to achieve that objective and generate a lot of failed appeals—failed on the Department’s side—they should contribute to the cost. It should not be the MOJ budget that bears the cost, but the Department that is not doing its job properly. Change is required in this area.

Savings of approximately £50 million per year are expected from changes to criminal injuries compensation criteria, and there will be other, lesser savings from the closure of courts and prisons, and from rationalising the administration of the Ministry itself and its sponsored bodies. Restructuring the NOMS headquarters is expected to save £91 million. At the same time, there are cost implications to changes that the Ministry is making. Is there any costing for the plan to extend rehabilitation to short-sentenced prisoners? That is welcome, but we have not seen any plans for how it will be paid for. How feasible will it be to fund it by introducing competition into probation?

The Ministry has little control of many things that determine its cost, such as the demand for prison places. One has to ask: how would its transformation and cost-cutting agendas be affected by an unforeseen event. Into that category fell the national riots—they are described as national riots, but it may be fairer to describe them as riots in a number of cities—that occurred in 2011 and generated significant expenditure in the court service and in the prison system.

The Ministry is moving forward with its radical plans for transforming rehabilitation. Payment by results, for example, has not yet been tested in the field of criminal justice. There are a number of pilots up and running, but we do not know what their outcome will be. The Secretary of State clearly feels that to wait, probably for many years, for the outcome of the pilots is to wait too long—he is impatient to get on with developing payment by results. One has to ask, however, how can the Ministry know that it is rolling out programmes that will work and not waste money? How can it learn from the programmes that are up and running, even though we are not at the stage to receive final conclusions?

My Committee took evidence from the Secretary of State last week on the transforming rehabilitation proposals, and put some of those questions to him, including the concern that he makes full use of the voluntary sector that has so much to contribute. Since then, there have been some reports in the press of doubts in the Treasury on whether the payments by results programme can achieve its predicted financial outcomes. I think that those reports came out accidentally in a conference or a seminar on related issues, but they indicate that not everybody is confident that the Ministry can achieve that kind of saving from the programme.

Much depends on getting the basics of financial management right, and our report devoted considerable attention to the effectiveness of financial management in the Ministry and its sponsored bodies. The Ministry did not produce its resource accounts for 2009-10 and 2010-11 before the summer recess, and blamed the accounting arrangements of probation trusts. Last year the Department’s accounts were submitted before the recess, but still after the deadline set by the Treasury. The Committee considered that to be unacceptable.

The Committee was also critical of the regular qualification of the Legal Services Commission’s accounts because of error rates in overpayments—£35.7 million in 2011-12—and called for it to establish a clear plan to reduce those rates significantly.

Our final main concern related to the accounts contained in the Her Majesty’s Courts Service trust’s statement. The Comptroller and Auditor General issued a disclaimer of opinion on those accounts, meaning that he could not say whether they gave a true and fair view. Its chief executive explained that the Courts Service’s accounting system was not able to handle the requirement placed on it by the Treasury to produce an auditable report. The Secretary of State said that the £3 million it would cost to put that right would not represent good value for money.

The Committee was highly critical of the lack of financial management competence in the Ministry and its sponsored bodies. We said that there was “unacceptable complacency” and a “defeatist mindset”. That is strong language, but the Committee think it is justified. The Committee thinks that the Ministry is now taking financial management more seriously, including centralisation and standardisation of processes and standardised forms. The LSC is implementing a new IT system. Frankly, we were horrified when the LSC told us that it could not possibly ask all solicitors to submit claims online, in a world where you and I, Mr Deputy Speaker, and most other people have to use online procedures. This is having to change, thank goodness. The Ministry, however, still faces an uphill struggle with IT legacy systems and its estates. In particular, in the courts many IT systems are old and require a great deal of effort and input to work at all. There is a question regarding whether any useful analysis has taken place to determine whether investing in capital projects now would save money in the longer term.

On European-related issues, the Committee said that the maintenance of separate teams in the MOJ and the Home Office to deal with European, international justice and home affairs issues was a duplication of effort, and that they should be merged. The Ministry has not accepted this recommendation, which seems so obvious to us.

The Government, with some fanfare, announced that they would exercise their right, under protocol 36 of the Lisbon treaty, to opt-out en bloc from justice and home affairs measures, and would consult parliamentary Committees, my Committee included, on their proposals regarding which ones they would opt back into. Up until now, negligible information has been forthcoming from the Government on their plans. The Committee, and other Committees, have had nothing on which to carry out any work. I emphasise strongly that my Committee expects to be provided with the time it requires to scrutinise the Government’s opt-out proposals. The same applies to the other affected Committees too, and we have written jointly on that.

The Ministry of Justice has not yet shown itself able to achieve the full savings to which it has committed, despite some tough decisions and some welcome improvements. The Department is trying to achieve major change, a process that always involves front-end costs with the hope of later savings. We should not be wasting taxpayers’ money on ineffective use of the prison system, where half of those released from prison reoffend within a year—for those on short sentences the figure is 60%. We should not lose sight of the long-term objective, which is to cut crime and reduce reoffending to such an extent that much less money has to be spent on the consequences of crime, whether in the criminal justice system or beyond. For that to happen, we need to spend money to ensure that people are not drawn into crime in the first place. The troubled families programme and early-years education are examples of what the Government are doing and need to build on if we are to cut not only the costs of crime, but the misery it brings to those of our constituents who are victims of crime. We are spending their taxes on trying to keep them safe from crime. That money needs to be spent wisely and that is why it is important that we debate it today.

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[Jeremy Wright]

The hon. Lady knows that we are carefully considering the design of the system, so we will need to determine the appropriate percentage. She will also recognise that it is not going to be 100%, because anyone taking on this work will need to implement the orders of the court and to fulfil licence requirements. The fact that it will not be 100% may have some bearing on the discussion we have been having about the accessibility of this new landscape to smaller organisations, particularly those in the voluntary sector. We will settle on the precise figure having listened to those who may be involved in this landscape, and others, to make sure that we get it right.

Let me deal with some of the points made by the Chairman of the Select Committee. He raised the concern that he and his Committee have about having national as opposed to local commissioning, and I appreciate that that represents a change. It is explained simply by the need to ensure that the necessary expertise and abilities to commission on a payment-by-results basis are held by those doing the commissioning. We think it is difficult to see how that can be done on a local basis, but we think it is important, just as he does, that there are local elements in the commissioning process and that local intelligence is included in deciding what needs to be commissioned. We want to design a system—I hope he will see this coming through the process—that enables us to include that local understanding as well as greater expertise on payment by results. He is also right to say that we must design a system that allows voluntary sector organisations to participate actively.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I am grateful to the Minister for seeking to clarify this point. Let us analyse it a bit further. If the local partnerships that know the local situation best can design what the contract should be about, it is perfectly proper that they should turn to a national body that has expertise in how to include the measurements of results and so on. I would be worried, however, if the national commissioning body was also the body that said, “What you need in Blackburn is this.” That decision should be taken locally, even if the expertise must be drawn on from a central body.

[Jeremy Wright]

Yes, I understand that entirely. I am saying that it will be important under the system that we are trying to design for local requirements to find their way through the system so that they can be clearly understood. We will try very hard to ensure that that can be done.

Let me return to the voluntary sector organisations, on which we have rightly spent a bit of time in the debate. There are probably two areas in which we need to be careful to ensure that the design of the system is right. The first is in the assessment of the bids that are made for the rehabilitative work that we are discussing. When we consider the bids, we will want to be satisfied not just about their quality and price but about the sustainability of the relationships brought forward as part of the bids. We anticipate that a large number of bids will include more than one organisation and will often include smaller voluntary and community sector organisations. We will want to be persuaded when assessing those bids that the smaller voluntary and community sector organisations will have a sustainable future in the course of the contract. We will want to ensure that the design is right and that we keep our eyes on what is happening in contract management. It is partly about assessing the bids when they come in and partly about assessing how they are implemented over the lifetime of the contract.