There Has Always Been a Plan B

As the wheels start coming off project TR and the epic nature of the omnishambles becomes ever clearer, it really is time to consider the urgent need for a Plan B. We know that Chris Grayling continues to bang on about the under 12 month custody people coming out of prison with only £46 in their pockets and the need to 'right a wrong' as a way of justifying it all. 

Yesterday the Guardian carried an article following the leak of another MoJ document making it clear that the private sector cannot be trusted with high risk clients:- 

The supervision of high-risk criminals who have committed notorious offences that have attracted significant and prolonged media attention will not be handed to the private sector when 70% of the probation service is outsourced this year. Criminal justice experts are concerned the system has been devised so that all the risk is passed to the remaining rump of the public probation service.

Leaked Ministry of Justice "restricted policy" draft guidance on the allocation of 220,000 offenders in England and Wales between new private and voluntary sector providers and a residual probation service shows the public sector will be left to deal with all high-risk offenders, such as murderers and serial sex attackers, and those cases where there is an exceptional public interest in retention by the public sector.

but Jeremy Wright is quoted as coming out with the same old mantra:-

"We must act now to address the scandalous gap that allows our most chaotic offenders to leave prison with no support or supervision to turn their lives around."

I've discussed this issue a few times, most recently here in a post entitled 'Time For BoB'   

The one killer argument for TR is that it will embrace all the under 12 month custody people who probation do not have a statutory responsibility for. Without doubt, A Good Idea. So the answer is quite easy and straight forward - give them all to the experts to deal with, the existing local Probation Trusts. The time has come, a bit belatedly it has to be said, for whomever is left and able to speak for the public probation service to arguethat a way has to be found of undertaking all the extra work more cheaply and effectively than as proposed under TR.

To take a leaf out of the TR omnishambles book, lets call it a straw man and lets give him a name. Not Tom, but BoB - Bloody obvious B. What I'm about to suggest is not rocket science. On the contrary it is quite obvious and even Chris Grayling acknowledges this in his recent video fireside chat. The trouble is he then goes on to advance some pretty unconvincing arguments why it isn't possible:-

"Now you know and I know that the rate of reoffending for those people who are not supervised post prison is much higher than for those people who are, and that is something we have got to change. So the obvious question is why not just do it within the current system?

Well there’s a number of answers to that. To start off we have a system that is much too bureaucratic. I mean you all went into the Probation Service to spend time working with offenders, and all of the evidence I see is that the processes that we have in place means that much too little time is spent working with offenders, much too much time is just dealing with the systems. So what I want to do is to create a Probation system where the professionals working in the front line have got much greater freedom, don’t have the interference of central bureaucracy and have got much greater freedom to innovate and do things completely differently.

We looked at whether that could be done across the current system of 35 trusts and actually the last government looked at whether we would provide supervision for the under 12 month group, using the current system. They came to the conclusion it wasn’t affordable and that we would need to do things differently. I don’t think we can afford to carry on with a situation where we’re not supervising those under 12 month people. And the other thing I don’t think we can carry on with is a situation where we don’t have a proper, through the gate service."

The way I see it is this. In order to achieve the apparent miracle of achieving more for less we do what any organisation does when it finds itself up against a brick wall - it gets much more efficient, it makes savings and it focuses on it's core business.

As with any organisation that finds itself having to do more with less resources, it must look at all overheads. This will inevitably mean Trusts looking towards mergers or forming collaborative alliances and drastically cutting back on Head Office functions. It may well be that services such as payroll become national or regional and possibly outsourced. I don't know of a single PO who hasn't been astounded in recent years at the sheer size and headcount of their respective Head Office and number of managers, in stark contrast to frontline staff. It has to change - end of. Funnily enough this would be pushing at an open door with Grayling:- 

"If you look at crime in Britain today, the number of people entering the Criminal Justice System for the first time is coming down, fewer crimes overall being committed but more and more of our crime problem is about people who are committing crimes again and again, going round and round the system and what we’re doing, rather than having a situation where, as we would be other wise in Probation, closing trusts, merging operations, making people redundant to meet a tough budget settlement, what we’re actually doing is spending more money on supervising those people who go to jail for 12 months and less, who at the moment walk onto the streets with £46 in their pocket, get no supervision and more likely to reoffend than anyone else." 

Fortunately there are a number of changes to the probation landscape that could assist with BoB, such as a move towards a generic Community Order with probation staff having complete discretion as to the exact nature of any requirements, along the lines of that pioneered in West Yorkshire and so admired by Jeremy Wright. 

We know that the MoJ have been working on a much simplified risk assessment tool for use at first point of contact such as court and we know that significant numbers of the under 12 month custody people will not require any probation involvement at all. Using the skill and professional judgement of existing probation staff there is plenty of scope for making sure resources are deployed where they are most required, but conversely making sure that those not needing attention are moved out of the system as quickly as possible.  

I would envisage a return of the good old day centre concept, staffed by a combination of PO's PSO's and volunteers that could ensure cost-effective supervision and oversight of significant numbers of people, whilst ensuring those in most need are identified and assisted.

Anyway, it turns out that Probation Trusts offered well over a year ago to take on the work with the under 12 month people within existing budgets and savings, but the offer was rejected. Here is the Chair of Avon and Somerset Probation Trust, Joe Kuipers, writing on the subject in his latest blog post:-  

Last week probation featured in Any Questions, and again in Any Answers - in the latter the topic of probation took about a third of the programme with some excellent contributions. Even I managed to get through and my focus was to remind listeners that contrary to the expressed views from the centre many Trusts already work with the most risky offenders who served less than 12 months. Here in ASPT working hand in hand with the police and supported significantly by local authorities we do exactly what the JS is looking for. The tragedy is that our scheme (IMPACT) is threatened by the future proposed changes as investors question both the merit of some of their investment going to the profit % of the private sector and the safety of the real-time intelligence sharing between public sector and others. And, it must be questionable to impose supervision on all those offenders when at least 40% do NOT reoffend. Hardly best targeting or best VFM?

So, I am confident that given the chance all probation Trusts would undertake this work, and that Trusts would finally wake up to the fact that too many are too small creating savings opportunities through amalgamations (reduced numbers of chief officer grades, reduced HQ buildings, economies of scale, etc) whilst retaining the locality delivery focus of the LDUs. In this respect Trusts have been their own worst enemies by failing to grasp this before - the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Some years ago I advocated regional probation Trusts, and have had this held against me ever since.

To me this confirms at the very least a degree of dissembling on the part of government ministers and also removes one of the main justifications for the whole disastrous TR project.

As the Third Reading of the Offender Rehabilitation Bill looms and following on from my open letter to Liberal Democrat MP's yesterday, I've had sight of a similar message aimed at the same group from a well-informed and concerned officer:-

As the Bill moves to a third reading, the issue about the future of the Probation Service increasingly turns on strategic pieces of misinformation around the claim that the Probation Service cannot provide a costed and economic plan for the supervision of those sentenced to under 12 months in prison, and that the only existing work being carried out with the under 12 month group is in HMP Peterborough (as mentioned by Mr Grayling on Question Time, last Friday). 

For example, Avon and Somerset Probation Trust  have in place a scheme called IMPACT which is a core means of working across the Trust, built around co-location of probation and police, real time intelligence sharing, and supported (in Bristol) with significant investment from the City Council. This is exactly what the Justice Secretary is looking for. 

The tragedy is that IMPACT is threatened by the future proposed changes as investors question both the merit of some of their investment going to the profit percentage of the private sector and the safety of the real-time intelligence sharing between the public sector and others. It must also be questionable to impose supervision on all those offenders when at least 40% do NOT re-offend. 

In fact there are several schemes already taking place, for instance in Gloucestershire where we have a resettlement project already under way with voluntary offenders for the under 12 months and it is costed at £75,000 a year and funded by the PCC. The project will engage with the offenders prior to release, through engagement within the prison, with the purpose of connecting the offender to the relevant support services in order to enable them to engage with those services at the point of release in an effort to work towards reducing the chances of re-offending. 

This cost-effectiveness runs counter to Mr Grayling's claim that he cannot give this work to the Probation Service, and highlights his refusal to cost alternatives or indeed, to run any meaningful pilots. 

As the recently retired HM Chief Inspector of Probation stated about plans for the under 12 month group, ' these individuals, many of whom have long-standing problems such as drug and alcohol abuse, poor educational achievement and family disintegration, can be notoriously difficult to engage and often do not comply with any form of intervention. For these individuals, the revolving door back into prison may just have begun spinning a bit faster.' This group will be supervised by private companies seeking to make a profit. Yet the revolving door will cost the taxpayer dearly. 

Further, a year ago, at a national meeting of chiefs and chairs addressed by Mr Grayling and Mr Wright early in Transforming Rehabilitation one of the Probation chairs did raise in the meeting with Michael Spurr the willingness of certainly his trust and undoubtedly others to manage the addition of under 12 months with whatever cost saving was required. The response was that this option was not going to be pursued. 

I urge you to differentiate yourself as Liberal Democrats from what is an ideologically-driven destruction of a high performing, professional, and efficient Probation Service, in the interests of risky and hurried privatisation. 

Nor is at all likely that the taxpayer would benefit from these changes, as is shown by other privatisations and by the fact that the MoJ have already spent £125,000,000 on this project while claiming that it will save the taxpayer £200,000,000. This profligacy contrasts markedly also with Probation Trusts that nationally and collectively have met all savings targets assigned and have been in a position in previous years to return surplus to the MoJ.

An independently evaluated pilot could take place alongside those schemes already in place in the Probation Service and make sure that this so-called 'reform' is evidence-based, rather than ideologically driven. Please vote for the following amendment:

“Any restructuring of the Probation Service in England and Wales, which will involve multiple providers of such services, must first be the subject of an independently evaluated pilot scheme prior to the introduction of tendering on a national level.”