10. When he expects to put out to tender contracts for privatising probation. (900373)

On 19 September, the Ministry of Justice launched the transforming rehabilitation competition. It will be open to organisations from the private and voluntary and community sectors, as well as those who are currently working in probation trusts, to bid for contracts for the 21 community rehabilitation companies that will be responsible for supervising and rehabilitating low and medium-risk offenders each year. The competition will continue during 2014, and contracts will be awarded and mobilised by 2015.

Does the Minister accept that the Offender Management Act 2007 was about probation trusts commissioning services locally, rather than about the abolition of local probation trusts and the commissioning of services from Whitehall, which is what he is now proposing?

No. I have the Act in front of me, and section 3(2) states:

“The Secretary of State may make contractual or other arrangements with any other person for the making of the probation provision.”

The Act means what it says. If the hon. Gentleman believes that the last Government passed legislation that they did not intend to pass, no doubt he will want to take that up with the former Ministers in his own party who were responsible.

The Secretary of State said in the House, referring to this very issue,

“Sometimes we just have to believe something is right and do it”.—[Official Report, 9 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 318.]

However, leaping in and hoping for the best is a sure-fire way of getting it wrong.

Let us look at the Secretary of State’s record. Only 2% of offenders on the Work programme have found jobs; dangerous offenders are not being properly risk-assessed before release; in a brand-new prison, obtaining drugs is easier than obtaining soap; and mismanaged contracts with G4S and Serco are under investigation for fraud. I could go on. Does all that not represent the triumph of the Secretary of State’s wishful thinking over public safety?

I barely know where to start, but let us start here: it is a good idea to read the facts and not the newspaper headlines. What the hon. Lady has described is a travesty of what we are proposing to do. If she is talking about the involvement of the private sector in the monitoring of contracts, she needs to be extremely careful, because she ought to know that those contracts were negotiated by the last Labour Government. She is sitting in a very large glass house and throwing stones in every direction.

I think it important for us all to understand exactly what we are proposing to do, which is to bring new people with new ideas into the provision of rehabilitation for offenders of all kinds. It is important for us to recognise that the status quo should not be what we seek to defend. Reoffending rates are too high, and we need to bring them down. If the hon. Lady wants to defend the status quo, that is up to her, but we intend to improve the situation.

Order. We must make some progress. I want to allow Back Benchers to speak, and conceivably even a Front Bencher.