Omnishambles Update 45

There might be some interesting news today regarding the barrister's 'settlement' with Chris Grayling. I saw this on Facebook:-

Criminal Bar Association (CBA) has balloted its members: "Do you wish to continue No Returns and days of action until all the cuts and reductions in (solicitors') contracts are abandoned." It has come about because a lot of the barristers were unhappy that CBA negotiated a deal with MOJ without consulting with their members. Look out for the results on 9th April!!!

As we know the MoJ has a bit of history where trying to save money and negotiate contracts are concerned and this is interesting news in the Daily Express regarding that troublesome business with court interpreters:-

The Courts and Tribunal Service, run by the Ministry of Justice, spent £15,537,821 on interpreters last year compared with £7,940,128 in 2012. But the total is likely to be higher as the figures relate to a Government outsourcing contract with Capita and do not include bookings made elsewhere. 

Justice Minister Shailesh Vara, responding to a Parliamentary query, said the increased outlay was partly due to “changes made to the contract” in May 2013 and an estimated 20 per cent increase in the number of interpreters needed at court hearings. Mr Vara said: “The number of bookings made off-contract has substantially decreased since the start of 2012 with those bookings moving on to the Capita contract.” He insisted that major financial savings had been made under the changes.

Just like the Maria Miller story, the prisoner book ban story refuses to go away, as discussed here on the politics blog:-

Hopes for a negotiation over the ban on prisoners receiving books looked less and less likely today, as campaigners started to lose patience with Chris Grayling. The justice secretary received a letter asking for a face-to-face meeting yesterday but has so far failed to reply. The letter was signed by leading authors, including Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time author Mark Haddon.

"Only this morning former Children's Laureate - and my nine-year-old daughter's favourite author - Jacqueline Wilson spoke out in favour of the campaign on BBC Breakfast," Andrew Neilson, director of Campaigns at the Howard League for Penal Reform, told Politics.co.uk.

"With public support growing, we urge the Ministry of Justice to relax this ban on loved ones sending books and other essentials to prisoners. Give prison governors back their discretion to allow such parcels through and the Howard League and English PEN would be the first to congratulate the lord chancellor on a common sense decision that will benefit both prisoners and society as a whole."

Grayling has shown little sign of backing down on his ban on prisoners receiving parcels, with the MoJ carrying out a robust media response to the campaign, including sending journalists photos of contraband being hidden in gifts sent to inmates. Those efforts were undermined when prison officer representatives said they had never had any complaints about security screening parcels sent in to inmates.

I absolutely love this blog post entitled 'How to commission public services in 10 easy steps'. Here's a taster, but see the whole thing here:-

1. Create a waffle-doc
To justify spending a lot of money, you need a waffle-doc. Gather words from local  consultations, surveys, strategies and reports and numbers from performance indicators, demographics and trends. Collect historical information on service provision by individual organisations. Desktop research will yield enough waffle to fill several hundred pages.

2. Call it a Needs Assessment
It is not your job to question the validity of the words or their representation of reality, it’s your job to stitch them together and add a front cover. If the words have been published elsewhere, they are true. What you produce isn’t a Needs assessment. It’s a Frankenstein’s Monster of jargon, half-truths, gamed data, old data and numbers too big to be useful; made credible only by the title and careful formatting. It’s called a Needs Assessment because you Needs it. Welcome to the first stage of the commissioning cycle.



8. Get lies
To your great surprise, discover the provider has fabricated the achievement of targets and outcomes in a variety of ingenious ways. Search for the provider’s principles and find none. Learn that the provider is sticking rigidly to the service level agreement regardless of people’s actual needs. Discover that people who need counselling for agoraphobia in their own homes are being offered participative arts workshops or nothing. Only act on this ‘anecdotal evidence’ if you think someone will find out. If it only affects the people receiving the service, do nothing. If councillors, the media or board members make a fuss, show them the official performance reports to clarify any misunderstandings. It’s not your fault, you put the service user at the heart of the commissioning process.




9. Blame the provider
Issue a warning to the provider and employ more people at your end to monitor the service level agreement. Hold more meetings and ask for more performance reports. Don’t be surprised if the provider raises their costs in response. Professional performance report writers cost big money. If blaming the provider risks them blaming you back, blame the people who signed off the Needs Assessment. They signed off both the truth and the future.



10. Start again
Because it’s a circle, you start again, taking care to employ the same excellent provider as last year and putting the service user at the centre of everything you 
do write. .


Finally, here's a service that might be useful for all those remaining potential bidders out there 'Crisis Communication Planning:-