Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

My Lords, unlike the noble Lord, Lord Sanderson, I have more qualms about these particular prohibitions, broadly from a civil liberties point of view. The problem with the idea of bringing in endless surveillance and state bodies to keep their eye on people, banning people and prohibiting people on the basis that this is necessary because it will allow people to avoid prison is that it turns the community into something with prison-like conditions. I do not feel easy with that in terms of there being a ban on public events and entering drinking establishments, with new restriction zones and so on. Where I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sanderson, is on how on earth it will work, practically. How will probation cope with monitoring these prohibitions? I cannot understand how it would be feasible. We keep discussing the problem of probation not having enough resources and we are then assured that more resources will be made available; we are now asking probation to do even more than they were doing before. Resources always implies money, but this is about a lot more than money. I would have thought that a lot of the new things that this Bill is asking probation officers to do will require a lot more training. The Minister will know that, for example, because of the huge case loads that probation officers have, the last thing that they want to be dealing with are IPP prisoners, who are at the very least challenging. We know that, in many instances, in order to get them off the books, they adopt a risk-averse attitude, which means that anyone who even just technically breaks a licence condition—maybe they are a late for a meeting, or something like that—suddenly gets recalled into prison. So there are all sorts of complications around saying simply that probation will do it. I know that when I raise problems with probation, immediately there is a rush with people saying how brilliant probation officers are; this is not a slight on them as individuals but a problem with the service. In fact, if anything, it is probation officers themselves who feel frustrated and are tearing their hair out because they are expected to do so much with so little. There is a real reason why there is a difficulty in recruiting new trainee probation officers and where there are insufficient staff numbers. What I do not understand is how we would monitor this. Let us say that there is, for example, a prohibition on going to the pub or a drinking establishment—I cannot remember what they are called now. Are probation officers going to be standing outside the pub? How will they know whether someone is entering a pub or not? That is why I think that the amendments in this group are quite useful. Is this just a box-ticking exercise? If it is a practical thing, someone will have to let the drinking establishments know and monitor whether anyone goes into them. I also think that there is a whole paraphernalia, and there are potentially quite difficult issues when restriction zones are put in place. Who decides where they are and what they are based on, and who is going to monitor them? There is a wide range of new restrictions and prohibitions that are only being put in place because of the move to remove people from prison. Community probation officers do not have the resources; this will be not just technically bureaucratic to enact, but it will not keep the public safe or enable them to keep an eye on efficacy. Consequently, I would like to tighten up the whole notion of these orders via amendments such as these, but I am not even convinced that they are the way to go or that they are anything other than a problematic example of why there is a prior problem of letting everybody out of prison too early when you do not have the resources in the community.