I am pleased to have secured this important debate and to know that it will be chaired by your good self, Mr. Cummings, in your usual able manner.

I pay sincere tribute to all the men and women who work as probation officers. I say that with some experience. In my former calling as a criminal lawyer, I often found that their intervention could be crucial in turning people round and redirecting them away from an inexorable life as professional criminals. It is not an exaggeration to say that many thousands of young people owe a lot to the probation services for the advice and guidance that they have received. I saw at first hand young people who were heading the wrong way and going down the slippery slope to a life of crime. They were expertly diverted by probation officers, who often went the extra mile and put in huge effort for that purpose. Those people who were going the wrong way are now holding down good jobs, are responsible parents—grandparents even—and have a valuable input into various communities in my constituency. In other words, probation works.

We know that the rate of reoffending post a community penalty is considerably less than post release from prison. Probation not only works, but is cost-effective for obvious reasons. It saves the cost both of prosecuting individuals and recommitting them to prison and of the actual offence to society. So, the good sense of committing extra resources to community penalties that are properly supervised by qualified probation officers is clear for all to see.

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. For the £900 million it costs the UK taxpayer, probation is exceedingly good value. When I put the question about budgets to the Secretary of State on the day before the summer recess, he told me that budgets had grown by 70 per cent. since 1997 but that there were still some cuts pending. Does the hon. Gentleman welcome the fact that only last Thursday there was an announcement that those cuts have been scaled back, and does he expect the Minister to give us a bit more detail as to where the cuts will fall, because that is really important?

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and I know that he, like me, takes a great interest in this field. We welcome the partial reversal of the cuts, but I believe that the cuts will still amount to about £24 million. No doubt the Minister will explain further in due course, but I hear what the hon. Gentleman says and he is quite right to raise it at this point.

As a last resort before imprisonment, community penalties work. However, what we have found is that the probation service has seen its work load soar over the past few years. For example, in the South Wales Probation Trust area, the number of community service orders rose from 2,760 in 2006-07 to 3,163 in 2008-09, which is an increase of 14 per cent. However, breaches of community penalties in the same period rose by an incredible 73 per cent., from 2,002 individuals to 3,816. In the case of breaches—where a person fails to carry out court-ordered work—the individuals will be warned, and if they are unable to provide a cogent reason or excuse, they may find themselves summoned before a magistrate or judge who will often resentence them for the original or specimen offence and send them to prison.

Mike Dunne, secretary of the Gwent and Glamorgan branch of the National Association of Probation Officers said:

“The planned cuts by the Ministry of Justice will have a significant impact on the ability of the probation service in Wales to work effectively. Napo has been campaigning vigorously to fight these cuts and we have clearly made an impact, as the Minister of Justice announced a reduction in the cut to the overall budget for the Probation Service to £24 m down from a cut of £50 m. We welcome this change, but the proposed cut is still a significant reduction on an already overstretched and overworked workforce.”

The consequences of a reliance on an over-stretched work force are plain for all to see. Monday’s report by the chief inspector of probation found very serious failings in the supervision of potentially dangerous criminals. In almost half of the cases that he saw, probation staff fell short of the standard required, which, according to his report, was to ensure that the public in London were protected from criminals with the potential to harm them. The chief inspector found that only 54 per cent. of public protection work reached the required level, which is nine points lower than the score awarded 12 months ago.

The inspector’s report was in respect of London probation, which is just one of the 42 areas. Obviously, I can deal with that point in my own remarks, but I just wanted to emphasise that that was not a report on the entire probation service.

The Minister is right, and I did say that it was London; I was not pretending otherwise. It was in London that the Dano Sonnex matter happened because of lack of supervision. Probation officers did not have the time to devote to that very important work of public protection. Clearly, there have been shortcomings, and I argue that it is to do with work load more than anything else.

I just want to clarify the findings of the inquiries following the terrible case of Sonnex. Management failings and an inappropriate allocation of resources in the London probation area led to that case, which is well documented in the reviews that took place and were published after the case came to light.

The Minister is absolutely right, but I, too, am correct in saying that the individual concerned was overworked and could not possibly do the work that she was assigned to do. Therefore, I was right from the beginning. With regard to the findings, I agree with the Minister that they provide a snapshot of London, but I will come to other parts of the United Kingdom later in my remarks.

NAPO has discovered that it is not uncommon for staff who are supervising low-risk offenders to have case loads in excess of 100. Those involved in supervising medium and high-risk offenders have case loads in excess of 60. A rough figure for a norm should be 25 to 30. Therefore, it is not rocket science to deduce that staff are under huge strain, and that affects their health, the service and so on. The problem is not about their ability or commitment; it is simply that there are insufficient people on the ground to do the work.

The gloomy and rather dangerous situation is likely to worsen as a result of the proposed cuts in budget announced for 2010-11. The probation service faces a cut of 4 per cent. in real terms in 2010-11. Further cuts of at least a similar amount will occur in 2011-12. Such cuts are bound to lead to the loss of posts and curtailment and reduction in the number of offender programmes that the probation service provides. The probation budget will be cut by £24 million in the financial year 2010-11 from an out-turn in the previous financial year of £894 million. However, that is an improvement on the indicative budget, which we heard about in October 2008, with an anticipated cut of £50 million. Therefore, we are grateful for the reduction in the cut, but it is still very serious. NAPO calculates that at least 1,000 people will lose their jobs over the next two years, half of whom will be front-line staff. Currently, there are just over 6,200 qualified probation officers in England and Wales. It is highly likely that the staff lost through natural wastage or voluntary redundancy will be the most experienced. When it happens, that scenario will place untold strain on the service, with potentially serious consequences. It is obvious that we are on the brink of a precipice.

Some time ago, on 12 October 2009, the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) tabled a question to the Minister that read:

“To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what estimate he has made of the proportion of probation officer time spent on front line work with offenders in each year since 1997.”

The Minister responded:

“This information is not held centrally by the National Offender Management Service, nor is it held at probation area or trust level.”—[Official Report, 12 October 2009; Vol. 121, c. 153W.]

Imagine our surprise, then, to find the information in a document that was to hand in December 2008. I understand how such things work; I understand that the Minister signs off parliamentary questions. However, I am afraid that it is an untruth. We can dress it up however we like, but a question was posed in October 2009 about whether the information was available, and the answer—a belt-and-braces answer—was “No, it’s not.” But here it is, available from nine months before, in December the previous year. It is all there to be read.

I do not like the use of the word “untruth”, and I refute it. The document to which the hon. Gentleman refers was a one-off exercise. It was basically a ring-round to some probation areas to get a snapshot—not statistics that would stand up to any rigorous process of the kind that we expect in our parliamentary answers. Although I accept that there was some information, it was a snapshot. It was certainly not a statistical estimate. On that basis, I refute the idea that I have been telling untruths to Parliament.

I think that perhaps the hon. Gentleman might wish to withdraw the word “untruth”.

Well, maybe the Minister unintentionally misled Parliament, if I can put it that way—I think that that is acceptable. But whether or not it is a snapshot, it is quite a bulky document, at 30 pages in length. She could at least have said, “Yes, some work is being done,” and referred the hon. and learned Member for Harborough to the work of this particular delivery plan. Unfortunately, it has come out purely by accident. The existence of the document has only recently been made public. I leave it there. I certainly do not impute any unfair motives to the Minister, but somebody somewhere needs to explain what is going on. I do not lay any blame on her; I appreciate how such things work.

The document to which I refer has just been handed down. It shows that the information, albeit a snapshot, is available. The document, entitled “Offender Management Direct Contact Survey of Probation Boards and Probation Trusts”, shows that 24 per cent. of time is spent engaged in direct contact with offenders, either face to face or by telephone, 41 per cent. of time is spent engaged in computer activity, whatever that means—

To illuminate slightly for the hon. Gentleman, some of the computer activity referred to includes completing OASys risk assessments of particular individuals. I would call that front-line work.

I am sure that is right, and I am glad that the Minister intervened. Some 35 per cent. of time was spent on non-computer activity, such as drafting correspondence and reports, administration and travel. The percentage of time spent with offenders falls to 18 per cent. in north Wales and an incredibly low 13 per cent. in west Mercia. A probation officer who was interviewed said:

“We should spend more time with offenders. I have been told to spend about 15 minutes with tier 2 and no more than 30 minutes with tier 3/4. The impression I have is for every 15 minutes I spend engaged in face to face contact with offenders, I spend another 15 to 30 minutes recording it”.

It is the old problem of “statistics, statistics”.

NAPO, not surprisingly, believes that it is an extraordinary state of affairs. Information from its members over the past 12 months shows that no more than 15 minutes a week is spent on low-risk offenders, rising to at most 30 minutes with high-risk offenders. In NAPO’s view, that is woefully insufficient for the amount of supervision required.

The situation is even more serious. Over the past few years, the number of sex offenders housed in hostels has risen sharply. The hostels hold 2,500 offenders, predominantly on parole, and half are now sex offenders. The premises are now taking significant numbers of released terrorists, yet staff ratios have been reduced at night and those working in hostels are less well trained, increasing the risk of public protection compromises.

The Prison Governors Association has called for the abolition of sentences of one year or less. Last year, 75,000 people received such sentences. If such a measure were passed, it would ease prison overcrowding by reducing the daily prison population by at least 5,000. However, the probation service could not take them, as it is over capacity, and the vast majority of such offenders are unemployed and would be unable to pay fines. Indeed, early evidence suggests that the amount of fines collected has fallen. It is no doubt linked to offenders’ ability to pay and a reduction in the number of enforcement officials. That analysis illustrates that the criminal justice system is beyond capacity.

The Government say that the probation service received an uplift of more than 70 per cent. between 1997 and 2006. However, there is no evidence of any increase in the number of trained probation officers. Indeed, since 2007, numbers have been in decline. What happened over that period was a two-thirds increase in the number of middle and senior managers. The truth is that we require more and more from an already overworked probation service for less.

The story on recruitment is also depressing. According to NAPO, it costs about £93,000 to train a probation officer for three years. The Government may argue that it costs £74,000, but both figures are high. It is therefore a waste of public funds to train someone without viable employment at the end of that training period. According to the most recent figures, announced last week, 459 trainees are expected to qualify this year. Of those, 59 have already left, 44 will be made redundant, 129 will be given temporary jobs until March and 27 do not yet know their future.

That is certainly reflected in the Dyfed-Powys probation service, where seven or eight trainees were trained at great expense and only one was given full-time employment at the end of it. Several were given temporary employment until next March. That is surely a waste of resources that could have been put back into employing trained probation officers who could have coped with the case load a lot better.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. He has hit the nail on the head. More to the point, as he knows, courts are being encouraged to consider properly structured and supervised community penalties, but there are fewer people to supervise them.

The hon. Gentleman is being very generous in giving way. The figures he quoted are from before the budget allocations. One would hope that they will improve significantly. The money in the budget additional to what the probation service expected is enough to employ 625 probation officers.

I hope that the Minister is right, but I have no confidence that the money will end up in the right place. The National Offender Management Service is a huge monstrosity and every right-thinking person thought that it was a waste of time. That huge empire is billowing out and spreading its tentacles all over the place. It was a waste of money from day one and is bound to fail. I suspect it will be reviewed yet again before long.

I secured an early debate on the Carter proposals that led to the creation of NOMS. As the hon. Gentleman said, the cost is one of the worst aspects of this issue. The training costs and two years’ salary aggregate to a cost of about £100,000 for each trainee probation officer who is lost. That is serious money that could be better deployed to drive down crime in this country.

The hon. Gentleman is right. I am not often accused of understating a case, but perhaps I understated the financial case by saying that training costs £74,000 or £93,000. Perhaps the cost is more than £100,000. That is undoubtedly a significant figure.

More than half of this year’s trainees will be redundant and have no secure future beyond 2010. That is the pre-budget situation and we will see what happens. According to a parliamentary question in May 2009, seven trainee probation officers in Dyfed-Powys are expected to qualify this year, nine in Gwent, seven in North Wales and 21 in South Wales. Earlier this year, estimates suggested that the seven officers in Dyfed-Powys had been told that there were no vacancies and that any that appeared would be subject to competition. Eight were in the same situation in North Wales, eight in Gwent and 18 in South Wales. We must hope that the partial reversal in the cuts will assist that situation. Even if it does, we are in deep trouble. If the aim is to ensure that we have properly supervised community penalties, we should not be maintaining the status quo, but increasing resources.

After I raised concerns over this issue in Parliament earlier this year, I was contacted by several trainees who were bitterly disappointed that, having gone through rigorous training, they would not be offered employment. When Gwenno Jones wrote to me, I wrote to the Justice Secretary to raise the complaint. On 5 September 2009, I received a response from Lord Bach, the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, on behalf of the Justice Secretary. He thanked me for the letter and wrote:

“I understand your concerns about the employment prospects for Trainee Probation Officers. Those due to graduate in October 2009 were selected on the basis of workforce planning estimates made by local probation employers in early 2007. This has proved to be too long an interval for an accurate prediction of the current employment situation. This issue will be addressed when the new, more flexible, modular Probation Qualification Framework replaces the Diploma in Probation Studies programme next year.

The current Trainee Probation Officers were recruited on the basis of a fixed term two year training contract without any guarantee of permanent contracts. In previous years the vast majority of graduates were offered jobs and it is unfortunate that, in common with graduates of all disciplines this year, the TPOs face a challenging employment market.

The employment situation is being monitored closely and the monthly returns show a steady increase in the number of jobs being offered as a clearing house system takes effect.”

The letter closed with the usual infamous local democracy clause:

“Decisions about probation staffing levels rests ultimately with the 42 areas and trusts who employ probation staff”—

as if they could employ staff with insufficient resources.

The Minister said that I had confined myself to the situation in London so I will move on to other areas. In Avon and Somerset, 16 trainee probation officers will not be offered jobs, eight will not be offered jobs in Dorset, nine in Lancashire, nine in Lincolnshire, nine in North Yorkshire, 18 in South Wales and 28 in the West Midlands. In Cumbria, 10 trainees will compete for two posts. In Durham, 10 trainees will not be offered posts after March 2010. In Gloucestershire, 10 trainee probation officers who are qualifying in the autumn have been offered temporary 12-month contracts only.

For the sake of the probation service and society, I hope that the Minister was right that things will change because of the change in the budgetary scenario. Whether it costs £93,000 or £100,000, training probation officers and not offering them employment when their services are desperately needed is the economics of the madhouse. In total, it is estimated that £20 million is wasted. At the same time, there have been huge overspends on large centralised projects. The National Offender Management Service headquarters has cost more than £1 billion.

NOMS HQ includes the shared services for all our prisons and special services such as tornado units, which deal with trouble and problems in our prisons. It does not just contain secretaries and staff for the senior people in NOMS. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will bear that in mind when he quotes the figures.

Did I say that it was just for senior staff?

I was just clarifying.

The Minister is very tetchy today. I have never been intervened on so many times by a Minister. Perhaps it is a compliment. She is obviously on the back foot, otherwise she would not be jumping up and down. She must be very fit because she has been jumping up and down at an alarming speed.

Perhaps I can put it like this: NOMS contains departments that might not be part of the probation service. The NOMS bureaucracy spend increased by £140 million between 2006 and 2009. It is interesting to compare that with the probation budget, which rose by only £29 million in that time. The Public Accounts Committee is taking an interest in the infamous C-NOMIS project, which is three years late and has reached twice its original budget. Had it been in use, it would probably have prevented the Sonnex murders.

Sadly, the overall picture being painted of the Ministry of Justice includes the wasting of resources and an unrealistic expectation of the work load that a probation officer can complete. I hope that the Minister will show some good faith and at the least ensure that the 450 recently qualified trainees will be offered posts. It is typical of this Government to try to run everything on the cheap and to squeeze more out of an orange than is possible. The criminal justice system is not far from collapse. I know that as a barrister who appears in court and am not just making it up. The price of failure is complete anarchy. I urge the Government to reconsider the settlement and to ensure that the highly-trained and motivated youngsters we are discussing can go into the work for which they are well qualified. Society would benefit as a result.

This is a useful debate, given the concerns that have been expressed about probation over the past few weeks. No doubt the Minister will refer to the big increases in the probation budget in the past 10 years, and rightly so. There was a 70 per cent. increase in the budget from 1997 to 2007. That is not something that happens by chance. Budget increases of that size happen because Governments decide to put the money in. It is important that we give credit for what has been done on the budget. In addition, there is no doubt that the service’s performance, in relation to meeting targets, has been improving, and that it is now doing extremely well. In 2008-09, only one of its service targets was not met, and that was one of a long list of targets.

However, as I am sure the Minister knows, and as the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd) has just described, there are concerns, particularly within the probation service, about what has been happening with budgets and what is going to happen in the next year or two. The Minister went to the National Association of Probation Officers conference in Torquay—I was there the following day—and she will have heard, as I did, some of the concerns expressed by serving probation officers.

As I say, the service is doing a good job, and it is important to recognise that, because it gets a bad press. It is inevitable that the press will report cases where something has gone wrong, and that there will not be many press reports describing a case that the probation service has handled well—a case where somebody has been supervised and kept out of trouble. We will inevitably get reports of the cases that go wrong or, to take the example of the Sonnex case, very badly wrong.

Of course, we do not want cases to go wrong, but the probation service sometimes deals with some extremely difficult and dangerous people. I would not like to be in the position of some probation officers, who have to make decisions about how dangerous people should be supervised, the risk that they pose and what should be done with them. Some hon. Members might have seen an article in The Guardian last month—I think it was dated 6 October—where a reporter was given access to a number of meetings, involving probation and prison staff, at which they discussed how to handle people who were about to be released from custody. There are some very difficult and dangerous people to be dealt with and, as I say, I am not sure that I would like to have that responsibility, with the tabloid press breathing down my neck and waiting to see whether I make a mistake.

If we consider the core tasks of the probation service and what has happened in the past few years, it is obvious that there has been a big increase in work load. From 2005 to 2007, court reports increased by more than 20,000. Between 1997 and 2007 there was a 36 per cent. increase in the number of cases of supervision in the community. Now, there are well over 200,000 community orders and parole cases being dealt with—there are 240,000—and significant numbers of those people have to be taken back to court or returned to prison because of breaches.

There has been a significant increase in the number of recalls to prison, which, again, indicates the work being done by the probation service to track what is happening to the people they are supervising. There are 2,500 people in hostels, half of whom are sex offenders. Practically all the people in hostels who are supervised by the probation service pose some real risk, and need experienced supervision.

Probation is not an easy service to work in, or an easy job to do. Over the past 10 years, there has been a big increase in resources, but there has also been a big increase in work load—I do not think that there is any question about that. It depends on exactly which figures we look at, but I get the impression from some of the available statistics that the increase in work load has outstripped the increase in resources.

A report produced last year, which I know some hon. Members will have seen, by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s college examined what has happened to probation staffing and work load over the past few years. It found that between the creation of the national probation service in 2001 and 2006-07, the budget had increased in real terms by 21 per cent., which is a significant increase, and that the number of staff had increased by 37 per cent. However, in that same period, the number of fully professionally qualified probation officers had fallen. So although there have been big increases in the number of less qualified staff—probation service officers—and in managerial staff, the overall increase in staff numbers actually masks a significant change in the composition of the work force.

During that period, the ratio of offenders to fully qualified probation officers therefore rose from 31:1 to 40:1. We would not see the shift in that ratio if we simply considered total staff numbers, but as far as fully qualified professional staff are concerned, there has been a significant increase in that ratio. I notice that a parliamentary question on the ratio of probation officers to offenders was answered just last month. It was interesting to note the variation from one area to another that was revealed by the answer. For example, in Rutland, Leicestershire, the ratio of offenders to probation officers is 10.5:1, which is the lowest in the country. By the way, that figure relates to all probation staff, not just the fully qualified. The ratio is 10.6:1 in Norfolk, 22:1 in London, 20.4:1 in Greater Manchester and 21.4:1 in Devon and Cornwall, so the issue does not just affect big city areas. There is significant regional variation in those ratios, and that must impact on the work loads in those different areas.

In conversations that I have had in the past few months, particularly with probation officers, it has come through regularly that people feel that their work load is too heavy, and that there are too many relatively inexperienced staff who have to deal with complex and difficult cases. As has been mentioned, from what I know of the Sonnex case, the person who was given the responsibility of dealing with Sonnex was relatively inexperienced and was not given sufficient support and supervision. As the Minister said, there were clearly management failings, but that was the situation in which that probation officer had been left, and it was an extremely difficult position to be in. Probation officers keep telling me that such a scenario is not uncommon, and that too many people are in that situation.

There are also concerns about the IT systems; for example, the offender assessment system has been mentioned. Of course, an important part of the work is ensuring that there are appropriate reports and records, but probation officers say that it takes a long time to do a report for a single individual using OASys. They would like it to be streamlined, so that for each case, they can spend less time filling in the necessary data to produce a report through OASys.

For many probation staff, the worst thing is the worry about budget cuts. Last week, the Secretary of State announced that the budget for next year will show a smaller reduction than the indicative budget did, so I hope that some of the cuts that we were told about will not happen. In the summer, staff from all over the country came to see us in Westminster, and the Minister came along to one of our sessions. From one region after another, we had reports of cuts, staff going and trainees not being offered jobs, and I hope that some of that will be dealt with by the change to the budget. People have been left feeling very uncertain about their futures—about whether there will be redundancies and about whether trainees will have a job at the end of their training—and it is demoralising for people in any job to feel that degree of uncertainty.

The relationship between the work load and the budget is quite difficult, because although funding for the probation service comes via NOMS, and there are service-level agreements with the different probation areas, the size and nature of the work load is determined not by NOMS, but by the courts and the sentences that they give. It is difficult to strike a balance, which perhaps accounts for some of the regional variations that I mentioned. I appreciate that that causes difficulties, but if we look at where the service is now—at how it performs and at how the people who work in it feel—it is clear that it has been delivering, although it obviously needs adequate funding. More than anything, however, it needs stability, and the people who work in it need to have some confidence about their future. That is partly a matter of budgets, but it is not just about budgets.

Another issue is the introduction of the best-value framework. Some people are worried that best value will actually mean privatisation of some of the core work. We discussed that during the passage of the Offender Management Act 2007, and the Opposition Front Benchers’ view was that it would be perfectly all right to privatise anything going. The Opposition argued that that should be done at local level, rather than regional or national level, but they had no problems with wholesale privatisation. In our discussions with the Secretary of State, we reached consensus on the point that we should not privatise core probation work. However, the announcements that have been made about best value in the past few months have made staff quite worried that there will be some backtracking, and that “best value” might turn out to mean privatisation by the back door.

We know that there are people around who would be quite happy to jump in, and I have real concerns about some of those who are starting to say that they want to be involved in running prisons. Some charities say that they want to do so, but that should not be part of their business. Charities do really good work in the criminal justice system by providing specialised services, such as treatment for drug and alcohol problems, and that is a perfectly reasonable function for them, but I do not want to see them delivering core services. That is a concern, and I hope that the Minister can give us some reassurance, when she replies, on how best value will operate. People are worried about their jobs and scared about what is happening to budgets, and adding the fear that privatisation is high on the agenda will make things worse.

I know of people who worked as probation officers, but who left the service because they were unhappy about the direction in which they perceived it to be going and were worried about what their future would be if they stayed in the service. We really cannot afford to lose experienced and skilled people from the service, and some stability and certainty on budgets and job prospects would go a long way towards starting to persuade people that there really is a future for the service in which they have been working.

I want briefly to take up where my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard) left off. I am secretary of the justice unions parliamentary group, to which most Members present belong.

The issues before us have been raised constantly in debates over the past decade or so, but I want to start by reassuring the Minister of the commitment of those working in the service to the implementation of the original principles of NOMS, which were welcomed. The objective was a seamless service, in which fully resourced professionals with sufficient IT back-up could deal with an offender through every stage—pre-sentence, sentencing, imprisonment or community service, probation and rehabilitation back into society. That was the model to which everyone right across the service signed up.

From the beginning, however, we expressed concerns about a number of issues. The first was the lack of consultation about the involvement of the probation service in the development of NOMS. At the time, people thought that we were crying wolf, but the Select Committee on Justice report on the role of the prison officer, which has been published in the past week, makes an interesting point relating to NOMS. It quotes a probation officer, Cordell Pillay of NAPO, who reiterated a point that we have made in previous debates—that many people endorsed the idea of creating NOMS, but were critical of the practice. In one of his key criticisms, he said:

“From the outset there was not a clear structure or framework for NOMS, so there is no clarity from the probation perspective and no clarity from the prison perspective…There was no serious planning in relation to it. There was no real consultation.”

That was one of the issues that we raised from the beginning. Interestingly, the Justice Committee concluded:

“We have seen no evidence that the creation of the National Offender Management Service has achieved the seamless end-to-end management of prisoners that was intended.”

That reflects the views of those serving on the front line in the probation service, and we need to address that.

Another issue that we raised early on related to information technology and computer systems, which colleagues have mentioned. In the past week, the Public Accounts Committee has published its report on C-NOMIS—the national offender management information service—which completely endorses the criticisms that we have been raising since the early stages. The fact that the costs escalated from £234 million to £513 million under NOMIS, with delivery planned for 2011, confirms some of the early criticisms that we made. We heard from the unions about their concerns about the lack of involvement and consultation, the lack of proper management of the project and the lack of practical engagement with the staff who would eventually have to implement the system. It is not just a matter of “I told you so”; I mention all the critiques levelled by front-line staff because they have proved remarkably accurate.

Another issue that was raised—it has been raised again today—is the disparity between the Government’s figures for the amount that has been invested in the service—the 70 per cent. increase—which we all welcome, and the amount that seems to have been translated into implementation by front-line staff. My hon. Friend mentioned the figures for staff recruitment. Although the argument is that there was a 53 per cent. increase in work load between 1997 and 2007 and a 70 per cent. increase in the budget, the information we have received from the front line, as my hon. Friend said, is that the investment has not produced the fully qualified and experienced staff that the service needs at the very front edge. Again, we need a detailed examination of where the resources have gone.

My colleague, the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd), argued that elements of levels and tiers of bureaucracy have been introduced in the service. We have raised such issues before, and sometimes they have been addressed. In the last round of budget reductions or re-examinations in the London service, certainly, a large number in the middle-management tier was taken out, and more money was applied to the front line.

That raises another issue. Apart from the fact that money did not seem to reach the front line in a form that effectively met casework needs, there has been turbulence in budget planning. Speaking as a London Member of Parliament, there was a period when we were having annual meetings with the Minister to resolve the London budget. We were seeing the prospect of trainees not being employed—before other areas, I believe. Only as a result of ministerial intervention on a number of occasions were we able to retreat from the inadequate proposed budget; we then arrived at a situation in which we were not involved with cuts on a scale that we felt would directly impact on service delivery.

The same happened nationally this year. We had discussions about the prospect of a £50 million cut—the Minister attended—and then consulted our NAPO members from the probation service. As my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow said, we received representations from area after area about the implications, which demoralised staff, who faced the prospect of trainees not being recruited and the potential that their jobs would be cut. Then, a week ago, it was no longer a £50 million reduction but a £24 million reduction. We are grateful that it is not £50 million, but that demonstrates a lack of consistent planning in budgets and introduces a turbulence in the system that undermines the effectiveness of the staff, and certainly their morale, in a number of areas of delivery.

What is needed now is a short, sharp exercise of standing back to see where we are in relation to the probation service and its budgets and their implementation vis-à-vis investment in front-line staff, and where we are going in terms of support services, in particular information technology. The Government need to get across to staff working in the field that a clear and consistent vision is being introduced in the coming period, that there will be stability and that they will have an important role not just in providing the service but in designing it as well—that they will be listened to. A consistent theme of the representations we received earlier this year, and of more recent statements from NAPO, supported by the other justice unions, is that they do not feel fully listened to in the development of policy and its implementation.

I make this offer on behalf of the justice unions cross-party group: we are happy to organise for the Minister another one of our seminars, in which we stand back and look at where we are. We could invite more front-line representatives to discuss how our budget is translated into real investment in front-line delivery, not just in the coming year but over the forthcoming years as well, how we look at the tiers of management or bureaucracy and whether there is a need for rebalancing from those tiers towards the front line. We could also look at the long-term future in terms of investment in the IT systems that are needed. That might give us an opportunity of restoring confidence, among probation officers in particular, that the Government have a sense of direction, are listening and want to involve the staff we expect to deliver on the front line.

My hon. Friend mentioned some of the hard cases that have been dealt with. We put a burden on such staff, not setting them up to fail, but placing on them some of the hardest burdens of the justice system. At the same time they are vulnerable to criticism in a way that many other professionals may not be, because they are at the sharp end. It behoves us therefore to engage them in a process where we listen to them, so that we can implement the policies at least in the full knowledge of what they are experiencing at the front line.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd)—my apologies if I have mangled the Welsh language—on securing the debate and on having outlined, as did the other speakers, the values of the probation service and the problems that it faces. Those problems are twofold: the cuts in funding of 2.68 per cent. and the increase in case load at the same time. In Derbyshire, for example, the two-year trainees who are approaching the end of their training are effectively being told that there are no jobs for them to move on to. Out of the existing 400 staff, Derbyshire has to lose 30 by March, as well as not being able to take on the trainees who have completed their work.

As we have already heard, the Minister will say that there has been a 70 per cent. real-terms increase in probation funding between 1997 and 2007. That is true enough, but there are two points, which we have already heard discussed. First, we are talking about cuts now, not increases in spending in years gone by. Secondly, when the increases took place after 1997, at the same time there were real increases in case load; the bare case load went up from 159,200 in 1997 to 243,400 in 2007-08. Yes, there were real-terms increases in funding, but there were also real increases in case load, partly because the prison population is up by more than 60 per cent. since 1997—we now lock up more people per head of population than any other country in Europe. That has a concomitant effect on the work of the probation service, with people coming out of prison as well as others being given non-custodial sentences in an attempt to keep them out of our already chock-a-block and overcrowded prisons.

We are, therefore, demanding more of the probation service, not just in basic case load but in terms of the quality of what we now expect it to do with people—the work on monitoring, rehabilitation and community punishment orders that we expect it to deliver. As we have heard a number of people say, probation actually works. We are not defending the existing system just because it exists, but because it works. There are hard statistics to prove that it works.

On 19 August this summer when, according to the press, all MPs were lazing around on a warm beach at exotic locations around the world, I spent the day with the probation service in Derbyshire. I hope that I will be forgiven if a number of my examples are parochial to Derbyshire, but they illustrate the national picture and fit in with the examples that we heard from previous speakers. During that day, which was very full and intense, I spent time with managers, front-line probation officers, victim support staff, community payback staff, education and training and employment staff, the drug and alcohol team, and the accredited programme staff, who deliver behavioural management courses and so forth. It was the works—an incredibly intense day.

One overwhelming message came out of meeting all those people that day. Not once in the entire day did any of the members of staff that I met complain about pay or the usual things that we tend to hear about, rather they emphasised—it shone through in what they were doing—their immense pride in what they were doing. They believed implicitly in the value of their work in benefiting the community and turning people’s lives around. They were imbued with a public service ethos, which some journalists and politicians find hard to understand when they see the world only in the light of people being incentivised to do anything if they are in a bonus culture and receive bonus payments.

When I was a teacher, the Government of the day tried to introduce bonuses into teaching—the only way that teaching could be improved was to start offering teachers bonuses and incentives, totally ignoring why so many people had entered a public service profession in the first place. Those probation staff whom I met, across the board reminded me of that over and over again. They were so full of passion for and pride in what they were doing, but frustrated with what they saw was stopping them from doing the job as effectively as they might.

What specific examples did they raise? One that we looked at was the intensive alternatives to custody programme that has been run in Derbyshire. Derbyshire was the first of six pilots to introduce the programme as an experiment. It involves 100 hours of intervention with an offender each week, which is a lot of time to spend with one person; it covers curfew, supervision, education, mentoring, unpaid work and a range of other things appropriate to that individual. It is intensive and involves a lot of staff work, but it is very effective in reducing reoffending.

The pilot seems to reduce reoffending, but what is the cost of such staff-intensive work? I asked that question of the Derbyshire probation service, but it did not know the answer at the time. It did some calculations later, and sent me a letter showing the detailed costings. On a like-for-like basis, a 12-month programme for one offender on the intensive alternatives to custody programme would work out at £4,575 a year. The programme is more effective in rehabilitating offenders and stopping reoffending than a prison sentence.

What is the alternative? Derbyshire probation service worked out that a full year’s custodial sentence would be equivalent to £28,000 a year, yet a prison sentence would be less effective in preventing reoffending and delivering rehabilitation. Those figures were produced by the probation service. The Prison Reform Trust estimates that a year’s custodial sentence can typically cost as much as £39,000, which would be an even starker contrast. However, even the Derbyshire figures show a huge difference in the ratio between the cost of prison and that of intensive intervention; and it can prevent a person from reoffending, get them back into work or education, into housing and whatever else is appropriate, including behaviour management, so that they do not reoffend and cause yet more misery in the community.

On cost grounds alone, it seems madness to endanger such an experiment in favour of the more expensive and less effective custodial sentence. That was the view of the front-line staff at Derbyshire probation service. It has long been the Liberal Democrats’ view that prison policy should be based on evidence of what works effectively. That is also the view of that well-known left-winger, the former leader of the Conservative party, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith), who on 2 November published a report saying that prison sentences of less than two years should be scrapped entirely. He went on to explain that if the money was made available, the alternatives would be far more cost-effective and more effective in preventing reoffending.

Other examples considered on our day with Derbyshire probation service included the multi-agency public protection arrangements to which Members from other parts of the country have referred. Derbyshire is currently working with 700 sex offenders who were released from prison once their sentences had been completed and with more than 200 violent offenders. The programme started in 2001, and its record of nearly eight years shows that a low percentage of offenders absconds and a low percentage reoffends. They are dangerous people and a threat to the community. They may have come out of prison but they are still a danger; nevertheless, the programme has a high success rate with them. Not only is it cost-effective, but it prevents misery for the community by reducing later reoffending.

Community payback, which is now called community punishment, is another non-custodial sentence. I have visited three schemes in and around Chesterfield and seen offenders working in the community. On my latest visit, I spent time in the office talking to the staff who run the scheme. They deal mainly with young people, the unemployed and drug users, although when visiting them on site I have seen people in their 50s and people in employment.

One virtue of community punishment is that it is a step before custody. An offender in work who is given a short jail sentence, which is ineffective in any case, would lose their job and therefore be more likely to reoffend when released. By going through that scheme, such people can keep their jobs and still pay their debt to the community. It is done in a most constructive way, and many in the community really value the work that they do in and around north Derbyshire. It is useful as a way of paying back society, it is useful for justice, and it works for the individual. We should not say that it is perfect; no scheme is. One of the staff told me that he had been working there for 20 years and had seen one man come back eight times, so it clearly does not work for some. What we should do with those constant petty reoffenders is another matter.

I have spent time with all sorts of other groups—the drug interventions programme, the prolific and other priority offender programme, the behaviour management programme, Victim Support, the domestic abuse programme and the offenders into employment programme. The latter was proud of the fact that it had got 378 offenders into employment during the last year. People who have employment on coming out of jail on completion of their sentence are far less likely to reoffend; all the statistics show that. Those programmes work. They all make vital interventions; they all improve quality of life for the community; they all cut reoffending rates; and they do it far more effectively and at a better cost than prison does.

The Derbyshire probation staff know that what they do is effective, a fact that is echoed in other national examples. However, they complain about the self-defeating cuts that they face in funding and staffing, as they will inevitably lead to more reoffending and more problems for the community. This is most certainly one area of public spending that it would be self-defeating and foolish to cut in the years to come.

I start by thanking the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd) for launching this debate. We are all grateful to him for doing so. This is my first formal encounter with the Minister since I became shadow Prisons Minister. I look forward to many more.

Many, many more.

Many, many more, perhaps from the other side of the House in due course.

For the last 102 years, the probation service has worked tirelessly to protect the public and rehabilitate offenders through its effective supervision of those offenders out in the community. It is and always has been a vital part of the criminal justice system. Great credit must go to all those who work so hard in what is often a difficult job, especially as so many of their efforts and achievements are left unsung.

There is no doubt that a service that supervises more than 175,000 new offenders every year, that supervises approximately 200,000 offenders on community sentences each year, that supervises a further 50,000 offenders on licence each year, that provides over 246,000 pre-sentence reports and 20,000 bail information reports, and that supervises more than 8 million hours of unpaid work in local communities is indispensable, worthy of respect, and requires careful management, motivation and intelligent, strategic leadership.

This is a seriously important service, but it is fair to say that it is seriously overstretched. I shall consider what it is achieving. Most crucially, we must look first at reoffending rates. Above all else, the protection of the public and the reduction of reoffending must be the goal of the probation service. There is no doubt that it faces new and more difficult challenges than it did 10 years ago. For instance, violent crime has doubled and drug offences have increased dramatically; those are but two of the serious ones. The probation service cannot supervise offenders minute by minute, every day and night, or guarantee that offenders under their supervision will not reoffend.

With the current reoffending rate at 36 per cent. within one year for community sentences, and at 47 per cent. within one year of release from prison, we are clearly not doing well enough. The latest annual MAPPA figures published this month show an increase in the number of serious further offences committed by the most dangerous offenders—admittedly from a low percentage; but only one is still a serious problem. There has been an increase also in the number of level 2 offenders returned to prison for breach of their licence.

The Government continue to say nothing about level 1 offenders, who make up over two thirds of those covered by MAPPA. They may be the least dangerous, but we are told nothing about them and have reason to believe that they are responsible for more reoffences than other levels of offender.

In taking probation performance as a whole and considering where we might improve it, the hon. Gentleman focused to some extent on funding. Given the current economic climate, that is no small issue. At a time of economic recession, we need to ensure value for money. No public service will be immune from economies, and funding problems will inevitably raise difficult questions. However, value for money and savings in the long-term cannot be bought at the expense of public safety or by putting justice or the running of an effective probation service at risk.

Ministers have claimed that there has been a 70 per cent. increase in probation funding in the past seven or eight years, but the vast majority of that increase has not reached the front line. That seems to have been a common theme in a number of speeches this afternoon, and no doubt the Minister will want to reply to that point. Despite what might have been overall increases in spending, front-line probation services have been struggling for the past 10 years. We would like some clarification from the Minister about this matter. Last week, the Government announced that they would cut the probation budget in 2010-11 by £26 million less than was originally intended. Still, however, savings of £20 million had to be found in 2009-10, and, as has been mentioned, another £24 million will have to be found in 2010-11, equating to £54 million over those two years. To make matters worse, the National Association of Probation Officers estimates that by 2011—so, over the same period—there will be a 6 per cent. rise on the 2008-09 probation numbers of 150,000 people being under supervision. The Minister is looking at me rather incredulously, so we look forward to hearing her reply.

No one doubts that savings will be necessary in coming years, but it is essential that they are made in the right places and that we understand that the service cannot function without front-line services that are adequately supported. The total case load of offenders being supervised by the probation service rose by 53 per cent. between the end of December 1997 and the end of December 2008, from 159,200 to 243,400, but the number of qualified probation officers increased by only 15 per cent. to 7,120. However, research published by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies in April 2008 showed that between 2002 and 2005 the number of managerial staff increased by 70 per cent.

The savings could begin with a slimming of what might be called Government waste. Can the Minister explain where the £54 million that was spent on consultants went and what they were employed for? Until their comments on funding last week in 2008-09, the Government spent £90,000 on training each new trainee probation officer, only to have to tell more than half the group that they will be redundant or will have no secure future beyond March 2010. Of course, we know the sad, sorry tale of the Government’s IT project, C-NOMIS—the custody-national offender management information system.

In the past 10 years, the probation service has fallen victim to too many unintelligent reorganisations. The structure, organisation and management of probation services have changed substantially at least three times, but change is not necessarily the same as progress, and the wrong changes benefit no one. Following the latest reorganisation and the creation of the National Offender Management Service, we are left with a NOMS headquarters with only 113, or 3 per cent., of the 4,270 NOMS headquarters staff hailing from a probation, as opposed to a prison, background. I am advised that 98 of those 113 are on secondment rather than being in permanent positions. All that suggests that there is a virtual absence of probation personnel in senior positions in the NOMS hierarchy.

I am acutely aware of the Minister’s sensitivity to suggestions that NOMS is an expensive leviathan, and I expect that the Government will argue that much of the budget is money that hitherto would have been included in the separate prisons and probation budgets. Even if one takes that into account, there is still a rather large hole—perhaps as much as £300 million—that one can only assume is accounted for by the massive failure in the IT systems that it has been designing. Also, it is estimated that the ratio of bureaucrats to front-line workers is about 1:3.

The hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy mentioned a parliamentary question asked by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier). The hon. Gentleman considered the reply to be rather inadequate because a survey from within the Department did exist at that time. The Minister has said that that document was quite a cursory snapshot, but there is a lot of serious information and strong opinion within it. The document shows that in some probation areas of England and Wales, officers spend as little as 13 per cent. of their time in direct contact with offenders, and the fact that many officers spend less than a quarter of their time doing face-to-face work comes through in the report quite a lot. It also found that officers in some parts of the country see those who are judged as being at low or medium risk of harming the public for as little as 15 minutes a week.

In that survey, there was a tone of anxiety, if not complaint, particularly about the amount of time that officers have to spend on paperwork. One was quoted as saying:

“The impression I have is that for every 15 minutes I spend engaged in face-to-face contact with offenders, I spend another 15 to 30 minutes recording it.”

Will the Minister commit to offer to the House not only the full publication of that survey—with all the qualifications and, perhaps, inadequacies that she has mentioned—but a written response containing her assessment and explanation of what is important within it? The whole point of the probation service is that it should be looking people in the eye and trying to help them.

Furthermore, the tragic case involving Dano Sonnex illustrated that some probation officers are supervising more than 100 offenders at any one time. A recent written parliamentary answer from the Minister admitted:

“There is no specified maximum number of offenders that an officer may supervise.”—[Official Report, 12 October 2009; Vol. 497, c. 154W.]

I can accept that answer, but will the Minister give us a feeling of what she thinks is an ideal number that they could and should supervise? I think we would all like to reduce officer case loads by redistributing resources to the front line. The Conservatives would like a review that would minimise the time spent on form-filling, ensure that resources follow risk and ensure that the amount of time spent face to face with offenders is maximised as far as possible.

When the prison estate becomes overcrowded, there is a clear and obvious physical display of that, and some limitations, but the same is not true of probation services. When the probation service is overburdened and overworked, as the Prison Service is, in some respects, there is no early-release operation safeguard and there are not the same controls of discipline and prison walls. Overcrowding in the probation service can result in cases such as that of Dano Sonnex and could lead to an increase in reoffending on our streets. More offenders are being supervised by the probation service than there are offenders in prison, but there are far fewer staff. Also, resources are often focused in the wrong place and there is too much emphasis on bureaucracy and process instead of the better public protection that would come with more face-to-face contact.

The answer to that problem is not simple, short or straightforward, but we can at least try. It is vital to allocate resources intelligently, focus on front-line work, minimise reorganisation and run simple but effective IT systems, but what we need overall is intelligent, strategic leadership from a Government who value the probation service and the vital role that it has to play in reducing reoffending and keeping the public safe.

Let me begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd) on securing the debate, which I think everyone present has enjoyed. As ever, he put forward his points in a deeply irritating manner that forced me to keep leaping up and down, and I ended up annoying him because he thought that I was being tetchy.

The Minister’s description of me as deeply irritating is probably the best compliment I have had in my political life, so I am grateful to her.

I am glad to have made the hon. Gentleman’s day, but he has made mine as well, so our debate in this Chamber has been mutually beneficial. We have had a good debate about some extremely serious issues.

One thing has come across overwhelmingly in everyone’s contribution: Members on both sides of the House appreciate the work that probation officers and others who work for our probation service do in all our constituencies and across the land. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) made absolutely clear, sometimes it really is a thankless task that they undertake on all our behalves. They do not get thanked enough when they do brilliantly well, as they usually do, and when something goes wrong it is frequently on the front pages of the newspapers and lynch mobs want to blame someone. I realise, as do all Members who have spoken in the debate, that that makes for a difficult working environment and a difficult job generally. We thank them for the work that they do, because it is generally absolutely brilliant; we all agree on that, if on nothing else. The 42 areas that comprise the national probation service, whether trusts or area probation boards, are generally high-performing organisations, and their performance has been improving over the years.

I want to say something about the Sonnex case and London Probation, because that was a particularly appalling instance of failings adding up and resulting in an absolutely terrible situation. We know that Sonnex could and should have been in custody at the time he committed those terrible murders, and that the individual from London Probation who was wrongly charged with looking after him was far too inexperienced to do so. No blame is attached to that individual, as was made absolutely clear at all times in the reviews and reports that were published. Andrew Bridges’ report, to which the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy referred, made it absolutely clear that there were serious management failings in London Probation at the time, so much so that the gentleman in charge of that organisation felt the need to resign.

London Probation now expects to recruit 120 new probation officers, 100 of whom were being recruited anyway, with money that London Probation already had. One of the biggest concerns highlighted in the Sonnex case related to the poor allocation of resources among the different parts of London Probation that needed them. The problem was caused not by a lack of resources, but by poor management and failure to deal with issues of concern, such as the high work loads of inexperienced officers. London Probation is beginning to make significant improvements, as we expect it to do, so I would hate the whole service to be judged by that set of horrendous failings, which have been acknowledged all round, and which will be put right in London for the future.

The hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy referred to budgets, and to the consequence of the expectation, which existed until late last week, that the indicative budgets that probation areas had been working to would become next year’s actual budgets. It is now known that that is not the case; an additional £26 million has been found, which means that the reduction in budgets for next year across the entire probation service will be 2.68 per cent. The precise allocations from the director of offender management to each probation area or trust have not yet been determined and are being worked out, but we will want to ensure that the money goes from the centre to the front line.

There is enough money in the budget to employ 625 probation officers and offer permanent opportunities to all the trainees, about whom Members have expressed concern; they gave the figures from their areas. Some of the people who have been offered only temporary contracts ought now to see those translated into proper, full-time employment opportunities. As all Members who spoke in the debate have suggested, it is nonsense that someone should be trained at a cost of £94,000, and then find that their services are not needed because of budgetary constraints. I can make it clear that that kind of nonsense will not occur under the new training arrangements, because people will not be offered training contracts without a guaranteed job. I hope that the extra resources that we have found for probation areas this year will ensure that those people are able to employ the skills that they have acquired during training.

Several Members referred to the 70 per cent. increase in probation resources since 1997. That figure is correct; it is a 70 per cent. increase in real terms, taking account of inflation. There has also been a 53 per cent. increase in the work load, a point to which several Members referred. There has been an overall increase of 49.3 per cent. in the total number of probation staff in post over the same period, and an increase of 15.5 per cent. in the total number of probation officers in post. There have been some real increases, and that is without taking into account the number of probation service officers, which has been subject to a bigger increase. That budget increase has been translated into real and significant increases in front-line staff who are there to do the job. We want to ensure, however, that the money that we provide goes, as far as is possible, to the front line.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington asked me to come to one of the justice unions group’s seminars, and I would be happy to do that—I do not think that I have ever refused to do so. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I meet the probation trade unions together monthly, and I meet them more frequently than that. I am always open to hearing from trade unions that are representing staff, and from staff directly, if Members wish me to do so.

I welcome my opposite number, the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan), to his new post as shadow Prisons Minister—it will be a long stretch, with tough work to do. He and several other Members referred to the proportion of time that probation officers and front-line staff spend in front of computers. I am not willing to accept that all the time spent in front of computers is not front-line work that reduces reoffending, because some of that time is used to make proper records, which we would all expect them to do, of the work that they do face to face with the offenders whom they manage. That time is also spent completing the risk assessment process using the OASys tool, which is the basis of the system whereby the service as a whole assesses the risks posed by individuals who are being supervised; that is an essential part of the job.

In answer to a point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington, I accept that OASys is deeply frustrating to fill in and far too slow. We are looking with our staff at ways of improving and streamlining the process, and we hope to be able to make progress on that. However, it is important that we do not simply say that any time spent in front of a computer is wasted and somehow means that the system is bureaucratic. The work done on computer is a fundamental part of the work that probation staff and officers do, so we cannot promise to remove it completely.

The hon. Members for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy and for Chesterfield (Paul Holmes) referred to the situation in Wales and Derbyshire respectively. I accept that the picture can be different in each local area, and that the number of fully qualified probation officers will have decreased slightly in some areas and increased in others. I do not think that it is for me, the Minister sitting in Whitehall, to determine precisely how resources that go to the front line are used. That is why those areas are run locally. It is important that we send the signal that we want the additional money being provided to go to front-line services. I am sending that signal strongly. We certainly want to ensure that over the next year, the extra money—the money that is over and above what was expected—is used on front-line services, to employ trainee probation officers and ease some of the work load pressures to which Members have referred. I am afraid that I do not have time to mention all the other points—

Order. We must move on to the next debate.