Chief Gives Game Away

I don't normally listen to Sunday on Radio 4 but I was alerted to it by a friend. I'm very glad I caught up with the piece on women and prison because I heard the Assistant Chief Executive of Cheshire Probation Trust say a couple of remarkable things. She was singing the praises of an exciting new initiative whereby her Service is providing a 'bespoke tailor-made package of community support measures' as part of a community sentence and specifically aimed at women at risk of receiving custody. In response to a cracking question from the interviewer along the lines of 'isn't that what you do in probation anyway?' she replied that most clients were male and it's a 'sort of one size fits all' approach. 

So there we have it. A Chief actually admitting that the modern probation service is no longer a client-centred service, because we ditched that sort of stuff some time ago, but now we can go public announcing a brand new initiative that's all about 'a bespoke tailor-made service'. Like the interviewer, I thought that's what probation was all about anyway. I don't wish to denigrate in any way the idea of highlighting how custody can be particularly harmful and unnecessary for women, as it most certainly can be. But having been led to believe that my practice was old-fashioned and what I needed to do was embrace change, and now to be told the latest thing is a bespoke service, I find a tad irritating to say the least. 

It was also interesting to hear John Thornhill, Chairman of the Magistrates Association, commenting that 'magistrates often don't get sufficient information prior to sentencing'. I find this alarming, but sadly not that surprising, even though common sense says there should have been a PSR in each case where custody was a possibility. So what's going wrong here? Now it may not be common knowledge, but each Probation Trust has a target to reduce the number of full Standard Delivery Reports on cost saving grounds. All Court Duty staff are instructed to try and get as many FDR's as possible and even when a full SDR is requested, there are huge pressures on PO's to convert them into FDR's. All this is monitored closely - not I hasten to add the quality of any report, just reasons why the PO felt a full report was necessary.

The reason why the Service has had to reduce the number of full reports is because since the introduction of OASys the time it takes to prepare a report has increased by at least two hours. Of course it might well be that Mr Thornhill is making reference to a reduction in the quality of PSR's due to them being OASys generated and I have commented on this at some length previously.