Fairness and Priorities

One of the over-riding aims of the Comprehensive Spending Review is that it is perceived as being fair, with the pain spread over all sectors of society in order to gain acceptance and the avoidance of civil unrest, as in France currently. This has been one lesson learnt the hard way from the experience of trying to introduce the Community Charge or Poll Tax by Mrs Thatchers government. It was because that measure was felt to be grossly unfair by large sections of society that civil unrest resulted and the coalition government has no desire to repeat that mistake.

Of course the pressure is now on as each Probation Service has to examine it's own organisation in order to make the significant savings now being demanded by government. It is a foregone conclusion that jobs will have to go, so the question will become who and where? As this process gets under way, I find myself again getting increasingly angry about closures of community-based probation offices at the expense of Head Office. This is happening all over the country and apart from anything else, goes against the obvious wishes of government who want to see cuts in 'back office' functions rather than 'front line' services. 

Sadly, as with other public services such as the police, I've had to watch the inexorable growth in Head Office from a small single storey office to a sprawling mansion with massive extensions. Over the years, as the Service enthusiastically embraced 'managerialism' every square inch of space has been filled with numerous managers for diversity, research, business development, public relations, offender management etc etc. The list goes ever on and each of course justifies their own position as being vital to the successful operation of the Service. The fact is that the only vital part of the service are the front line staff who deal with clients on a day-to-day basis and they are precisely the group that will suffer the redundancies and office closures.

Of course any bureaucracy needs some back room services, such as payroll or HR and Chiefs will say they are making efficiencies by sharing functions across county boundaries, but this is just tinkering at the edges and an attempt to justify too many unnecessary management posts. We need a fundamental re-balancing of priorities on the front line and a cull of Head Office management. This sounds very harsh and uncaring, but it should never have got to this point in the first place and there is evidence that they've simply 'lost the plot'. Just look at this example of what I mean:-

"Our Glossop office will close after business on Thursday 30 September, 2010 as part of our ongoing focus on maintaining an efficient, effective yet viable organisational structure to support our front line service provision."

I know of an impending office closure in another area in order to save about £90,000 per annum in rent. That's about the cost of two managers at Head Office. What is the Probation Service in existence for? To provide a service to the community, or have a Head Office full of policy makers and bureaucrats? Unfortunately NAPO will not be able to say any of this because the managers concerned at Head Office may well be represented by them, or another Trade Union. Instead they will be constrained to engage the wider membership in an ultimately futile battle against government cuts that as a Nation we all know have to be made.