TR Week Fifteen

Manchester is no longer functioning at any level. Middle managers look like rabbits in the head lights. Staff morale lower than zero. However the heart warming CEO blog is a great source of comfort and reassurance at this time.

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Think the feeling of tumbleweed recently might be down to the lack of staff over the Summer. Our county is huge (just under 2,000 square miles). Four of us in the CRC covering the entire area over the Bank Holiday week. The SPO did office duty for us and we took turns to cover the front office because we only had one admin. Unintended consequence of the split, everyone having pre-booked leave at the same time.

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1: This blog is well read by CEO's and middle managers in Manchester and it can only be a matter of time before censorship is applied.
2: Most middle managers are trying to make things work despite their misgivings - not one. middle manager in Manchester that I have met supports TR - therefore how can they implement the changes with any authority?
3: There is not one CEO (that I am aware of) who has openly come out against the changes. Apologies to you honourable lady or gent if this is the case - please keep trying..after all you have a 3 year protected pay deal (I think) whilst the rest of us are cannon fodder.
4: How many staff are actively involved in the setting up of their mutual CRC in Manchester?
5: Manchester is relying on agency staff to lurch from crisis to crisis which is not of their making.
6: Manchester's Connect forum however refers to this crisis as 'teething problems'.
7: The Justice Minister fears making any changes as he fears looking weak and politically inept.
8: The Justice minister is weak and inept.
9: Those who failed to object to the changes now eagerly grab the chance to write FDRs for £150 a time and in doing so try and prop up a system that is toppling slowly over
10: So as you can see we are well and truly shafted.
11: However, the dates for signing the contracts keep getting pushed further back.
12: I heard that a reunification strategy was being discussed between the opposition parties last week in case things didn't go according to plan with the sell off.
13: So with all things considered and despite what we are being told via the electronic blogs (Northumbria Crack takes the prize for best title) there is still much to fight for....

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Personally I cannot wait for the contracts to be signed. Things will soon go FUBAR for all those involved it will put paid to any future similar schemes. Plus I want to see Sodexo try to make a silk purse out of the sows ear that our trust has descended into!!!

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Northumbria Crack is a real magazine made of paper. It's a complete work of fiction, nothing in it is reflective of what is really happening. We think they have named it after the drug they were smoking when they wrote it.

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There is a generation of Probation staff out there that earn their living unpicking the flawed thinking of deviant others. They DO NOT fall for spin. I advise management to stop trying to bullshit us. It belittles them and it belittles us.

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Manchester - sickening joke! In other areas there are options for CRC PO's to complete PSR's for overtime. Not Manchester - on no! CRC PO's HAVE to do them under the threat of disciplinary action. CRC PO's have been "instructed" to attend RSR and CAS training next week. So, my only supposition is that there is no clear end in sight for Manchester. So, we're doing 2 PSR's per week, holding up to 20 NPS cases on top of a 70 person CRC caseload. Hilarious! 

I am particularly enjoying the fact that a number of offenders have been transferred around officers so much that they are being terminated with just one contact (induction) and no requirements completed throughout a WHOLE order. Manchester was an unfunny messy joke pre-split. Now, it has officially collapsed. Mind you, if you are to read the chiefs blogs from CRC and NPS they might tell you about the fancy lunches they have been to this week, or tell you we're getting through the teething problems very well! I love our managers, they are so motivating and in-touch.

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Merseyside CRC were asked if we wanted a regular bulletin and my office decided it would be a waste of time as it'd be full of propaganda and we wouldn't have time to read it.

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Derby's, Notts and Leics CRC have just issued a questionnaire of how the staff feel, including how management are doing and TR. Hmm not sure what they are letting themselves in for because probably come back as everything is fine.

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Teesside NPS could not give a flying. For them it's just another JFDI day.

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JFDI: Just F*cking do it. A favourite saying of our ex chief and now embraced by most SPO's when you raise a concern.

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We had to do a weird 'push button' questionnaire at the launch of our CRC. We were asked hugely loaded questions like 'how important is it to you to feel valued as an employee?' This has been translated into 90+% of staff agreeing with the cultural aspirations of the new company. Statistics lie.

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Re: survey mentioned above. It asks if we think that management is 'strong and visible'. Given the question posed a few weeks ago asking what happened to our leaders as TR was bulldozed through, I can only surmise that they have had a collective irony bypass or perhaps they are being tongue in cheek?

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I'm getting a feeling that this whole shebang i.e TR is going down the pan. Wonder if we had Ladbrokes on it what would be the odds that contracts are not in place before the next Election?

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Too many robots will make it trundle on, reality is 98% of staff don't care who they work for. Could be arms dealers for all they care or understand ... Get out whilst you can before even the automones recognise its bad. I did and can do the work we all aspire too.

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I think that does 64 per cent of staff a disservice(insert meaningless percentage here). In our area NPS staff are not far from breaking point and the CRC staff are starting to get worried as a lot of them are quiet. (I know the workload varies between areas and sometimes offices as to which part are overworked i.e CRC or NPS).

I think that a lot of people are just trying to get through this and hoping the following day/week/year will get better. I also think that when or hopefully if the CRC's transfer to the big players, we are going to see a massive cull. They will want to pay SPO's, PO wages, PO's, PSO wages and on and on. It is potentially going to be horrible for all involved.

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How on earth can CRC be quiet? - it doesn't make sense as the majority of cases through our courts are low/medium. Everyone in our CRC office has a case load of 60/70 and that's a lot to keep track of. NPS are quiet as most of theirs are sitting in prison doing long stretches - oh and they're over-staffed.

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NPS employing 100's of agency temps to assist with 'breach'. Is this the breaching of under 12 month sentencers who will (we presume) be tagged?? Nice work if you can get it, eh? I am still quietly enraged at this wide scale dishonesty and the resulting chaos and confusion. Probation is hanging by a thread.

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Northumbria CRC has been overtaken by the work load measurement activity. They have gone about it in the most convoluted way possible and it’s taking hours and hours of staff time. It’s really highlighting how much time we spend doing ridiculously mindless bureaucratic tasks that make no difference to anything. Not sure anything will actually change as a result.

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My clients are also increasingly feeling the impact of welfare changes. I find the men the most distressing to deal with. North East men are a proud bunch and it’s soul destroying to see them in tears because they are in such despair with benefits sanctions, rent arrears, lack of crisis loans, bedroom tax, being found fit to work etc, etc. There’s a real sense of desperation creeping in and I hate this bastard, cruel government more each day.

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Admin just found three cases sentenced at the beginning of the year & have never been allocated an officer. Whoops

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Seeing how my local CRC are asking staff to 'fudge' OASys scores is making me so glad I'm not a part of the CRC

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Just been offered an agency job in Manchester. Pay negotiable, will fund travel & hotel + £250 bonus. Where is all the money coming from?!?

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Practice is being changed to suit the TR agenda and the court reports are the beginning of this. I have tried the risk escalation process, it is a bloody nightmare to use and took me half a day and two calls to IT, then the NPS officer had a nightmare too. Previously I would have just talked to my manager updated the risk and continued to manage the case myself reacting to the change in risk. It really makes me so sad to lose a case I've worked with for ages and where I was the one to recognise the changes, only for someone in NPS to take it over not knowing anything about it. Plus, don't get me started about the DV reports coming out from courts, really they are just not good enough.

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First I would like to say in my area we have also seen a decline in the quality of reports prepared for court. This is because court PSO's are writing majority of them. These have been staff who have been in court for years who have never even held case loads let alone written reports. I'm sorry but their inexperience shines through and the amount of poor assessments and inappropriate proposals is embarrassing quite frankly. The problem with the split is you don't necessarily have the right person for the job.

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Our FDR template does not even have a section for Relationships. Some court officers will type it in manually but others not. I have now begun complaining each time I get a sub-standard report from court and I believe that these complaints are being carried forward.

With regards to being split into the CRC, I am a PSO and am struggling with mental health cases that would previously have gone to a PO - I feel as though I'm in over my head and can't do the job anymore - good luck to those PSOs who feel able to take DV/CP/MH cases on but I'm not and have no wish to do so - in effect I'm being put out of a job. Finally, I've had no training on any of the above either and it's a case of ask a colleague if and when you come upon a query.

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The split does not have the right people for the right job. I have noticed in Manchester in our office 3 newly qualified officers are in NPS, they should be on protected caseloads, they are refusing to take lifers, sex offenders, holding a small case load, had only written about 10 PSR's and perhaps 1 Parole report during their training. Then you have highly experienced officers that have 25 years plus service that have been shafted into CRC. IT'S ALL WRONG and giving the NPS a right headache which higher managers are refusing to see. And no one from CRC are rushing to apply for the NPS posts and rightly so for the way we have been treated. They have had to re-advertise. THE TRAIN CRASH HAS ALREADY HAPPENED IN MANCHESTER, WE ARE JUST PICKING UP THE SCRAPS.

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Since I have been shafted into the CRC, I have never worked so hard due to having a 90% caseload of DV cases. It is impossible to do all the work with each case that I am supposed to do due to the shear volume of cases. Prior to the split we probably had about 10 DV cases each. Also should child protection cases not be managed by NPS? When I trained 30 years ago our first and most priority was child protection. Running around like a headless chicken is going to cause a lot of mistakes and last minute fire fighting and maybe cost to human lives. THE RISK TO THE PUBLIC IS MORE APPARENT NOW THEN IT HAS EVER BEEN.

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Omg that takes the biscuit. We are now using Facebook to find documents to do our job.........priceless