Justice Week 8-12 December 2008

---

March 28, 2007

On to the Lords

The Offender Management Bill will receive its Second Reading in the House of Lords on Tuesday 17 April.

Meetings have already been held with Lord Ramsbotham and Baronesses Stern and Howe (cross benchers); with Baroness Anelay and Viscount Bridgeman (Conservatives); with Baronesses Gibson and Turner (Labour); and Baroness Linklater and Lord Dholakia (Liberal Democrats).

The response from all groups has been very positive. It is now highly likely that amendments will go down which will:

· Exclude supervision from the Bill;
· Retain national collective bargaining;
· Ensure that commissioning is local:
· Place a duty on probation service providers to train staff;
· Establish the core aims and principles of the Service.

Lords of all Parties are also committed to a fundamental debate about the aims and principles of the Probation Service. This will be the first major debate during the Bill’s passage through the Lords.

Napo has produced a briefing paper for Second Reading and this has been sent to over 240 Peers of all Parties with a letter asking for support.

If any Napo member knows a Peer they should feel free to also contact them. A model letter to adapt can be downloaded below.

Download model letter for Peers

Copies of the Second Reading briefing are available from branches and from Napo centrally from Kath Falcon.

Posted by kfalcon at 06:41 PM

March 02, 2007

The Campaign Continues

In the end the Government had a majority of 25 over the combined opposition at Third Reading of the Bill on Wednesday 28th February.

This is a disappointing result but there are a number of mitigating factors, including over a dozen Northern Ireland MPs who were supporting our campaign being away involved in local elections and massive pressure from the Whips on potential dissenters.

It is also important to the campaign that the Home Secretary, John Reid, did make a number of concessions in response to Labour Members’ concerns during the course of the debate.

The Napo campaign - particularly the effort made by members and branches with their MPs locally - has therefore had a very positive effect and that campaign WILL continue.

The Bill will now move swiftly into the Lords. It had it's first reading today, which means it will come up for debate in about two weeks. We have already made contact with a number of Peers about coordinating amendments there. If these are successful - and we believe they will be - they will have to be voted on again in the Commons. This gives us another chance to lobby MPs.

We had always known it was extremely difficult to get MPs to vote against a whole Bill - and much easier to get them to vote for amendments. Indeed, 51 Labour MPs did vote for Neil Gerrard's amendment excluding core probation tasks at Report Stage .

You can download a copy of Stop the Bill Bulletin No 15 below.

It gives an analysis of the Third Reading debate and the vote, looks at the concessions made, and sets out the timetable for the continued campaign in the Lords and then back to the Commons.

Download file

You can also download a copy of John Reid's speech at Third Reading here.

Or click here for a copy of the Report Stage debate.

Posted by kfalcon at 12:45 PM