I’d like to focus my contribution on the criminal justice system and the probation service in particular. It’s more than eight years ago now—back in the spring of 2008—that I produced a policy paper for Plaid Cymru, entitled ‘Making Our Communities Safer’. The purpose of that paper was to improve community safety, and it proposed the devolution of the criminal justice system so that Wales could, among other things, pursue an alternative criminal justice system that focused on tackling the causes of crime. I drew upon my experience of working as a probation officer and dealing with offenders, as well as the theoretical knowledge that I had, having practised as a social work probation professional tutor. I had a good understanding of what worked, and what didn’t, to form many of the conclusions that were set out in that paper.

I’m sure that many Members here will remember the Silk commission and that that commission recommended that control over youth justice and policing should be devolved and that other criminal justice powers should follow in future. As we know, Silk has been kicked into the long grass. The lack of action on the criminal justice elements of that agenda has since seen a large part of the probation service sold off and privatised, split up by a Westminster coalition Government that had no mandate to govern from Wales. There was no compelling motive for this reorganisation, and it has been hardly a success.

In 2013, the Ministry of Justice rated all 35 probation trusts in this country and in England as good or excellent. So, there was no justification whatsoever for the reorganisation based on performance. The consequences of this ideologically driven move are far and wide-reaching and they may not even be fully realised for many years to come. Morale among many of my former colleagues is at an all-time low. Staff at the community rehabilitation company—or CRC—in Wales have been warned that they can expect up to 44 per cent redundancies. There’s a division between the CRCs and the staff that work for the national probation service who deal with higher-risk offenders. Before privatisation, there was no such division within the service, and what is worth recognising here is that people can change in terms of the risk that they pose with time. So, it makes no sense to split offender rehabilitation in this way. Shared intelligence between the CRCs and the National Probation Service has become fraught with difficulty, when we should be making communication between professionals, particularly when we are talking about risky people, as easy as possible. I have no doubt that the privatisation of the probation service will lead to poorer outcomes for offenders, as well as poorer outcomes for our communities, which we all have a duty to serve.

I wrote to the First Minister on three separate occasions in the last Assembly about my concerns about the probation service privatisation and the damage that it would cause. He agreed with many of the points that I made. It was just a shame that the Labour Party in Westminster did not agree as well and do something effective about it. I hope that we can learn from this. I would like to think that we can agree that powers on this and everything else are best reserved to the places that are closest to the people that the decisions affect. A great opportunity to protect the robustness and the integrity of the probation service has been missed. We will no doubt pay a price for that, but we should not allow opportunities like that to pass us by again.