Peterborough Leads the Way

It might seem reasonable to assume that todays announcement that the Ministry of Justice has agreed a six year contract with private contractors to supply rehabilitation services at HMP Peterborough is the result of fresh thinking from a new government. In fact it is implementing a scheme devised by the previous government with cross party support and focussed on short term prisoners, those serving 12 months or less. Of course this is the group that the probation service has not had responsibility for and effectively have been left to their own devices. There were plans to fund the probation service to take this group on, but clearly all political parties have now decided not to go down that route.

This scheme will no doubt be the model for testing the coalition governments ideas for a larger involvement by the 'third sector', but more significantly in a system of payment by results. HMP Peterborough is interesting because it is a privately contracted Cat 'B' prison built for both male and female inmates. The contractor is called Kalyx (I've never heard of them either) a wholly owned subsidiary of Sodexo (?) basically a food supply company based in France. No matter, we live in a strange world. The deal is that private investment of £5million is supplied by Social Finance (a new body set up to fund third sector groups) in order to engage charities like the St Giles Trust. They have a track record of working with offenders and will use staff and former prisoner mentors to support 3,000 short term prisoners and help them find accommodation, employment etc. Most importantly however, they will aim to prevent this group from re-offending after release. If the rate of re-offending falls by 7.5% it will trigger dividend payments in each year of the contract, thus giving a possible return of £3million on the initial investment. If the re-offending rate does not fall, investors get no return.

Like everything, the devil is in the detail. There will be suspicions that the most prolific offenders somehow might get excluded from the project. No doubt there will be scope for 'fiddling' the figures generally, but basically it strikes me as a worthwhile initiative aimed at helping a group that up to now has been largely ignored. Of course if it is successful, it will be yet further ammunition to support the case for privatising the core work of the probation service and that impetus will be even more difficult to resist.