The Future's Purple

Who the hell is purple futures?

Purple Futures? Is it just me? Sounds like a Heavy Metal tribute band!!

Yup, the colour one is left when battered and bruised.....seems apt don'tcha think?

F*cking Interserve for Manchester, to top it all I hate purple. I feel a notice going in. 

Interserve CEO, Adrian Ringrose said:

“The Purple Futures partnership brings together the best of the private, voluntary and not for profit sectors. Interserve will bring its business expertise, investment capability and public service delivery pedigree. Our four partners, 3SC; Addaction; P3 and Shelter, will bring a wealth of service delivery and community engagement experience. It’s an exciting prospect.

“Probation and rehabilitation services have always been embedded within local communities. By working closely with local businesses, voluntary agencies, local authorities and the police, which are all critical to successful public protection and rehabilitation, we believe we can make a real difference.”

Interserve and its partners have spent over 12 months co-designing services to reduce re-offending, working with local voluntary sector groups who will provide a range of specialised services in local communities designed to improve the life chances of offenders and help reduce reoffending rates.

Proposals include measures such as the setting up of new social enterprises, to provide employment opportunities for offenders and ex-offenders. Purple Futures will also continue to use the well established Community Payback model.

Interserve's 'Charity Charter' sets out the principals of what it, as a substantial commercial enterprise, can offer and what it expects from its voluntary sector and social enterprise partners. 

A client called me today to thank me for getting him through his licence and being so respectful. Unlike those 'Interserve shits' he said, who have given him twelve different work programme mentors in two years and done absolutely nothing for him. Very funny I thought, especially as they will soon be delivering probation services in our area. In fact he told me some real horror stories about his experience with them. Our more aggressive clients will look forward to those challenges I'm sure.

I forgot to mention - he got plenty of employment thanks to our Skills 4 Work advisors who got him on all sorts of useful courses that Interserve couldn't because they put up a different advisor every time he went.

Everyone that I have on the work programme run by Interserve highlight the futility of going to their appointments as they do nothing when they get there other than to tick the register of their arrival.

The internet is littered with unhappy customers venting their feelings. This from last year on David Icke's website:-

I have had the misfortune of having to attend a Government work program that is run by the company "Interserve".This company is supposed to help unemployed people find work placements and courses to attend. I have to attend every fortnight and failure to do so will result in my benefit being stopped.

I have been going to this work program (Interserve) for a year now, each time I attend which is every single fortnight I ask the same questions, "are there any job vacancies?" "are there any courses that I can attend?". And every single fortnight I get the same reply which is "No".

When I ask why there are no courses i am told there is not enough funding? Yet this same company Interserve received several MILLION pounds bonus from the Government last year ...but yet there are no funds available!?

This company Interserve also receive £400 for each individual person they get on to their work program. It's pretty obvious who is benefiting out of this work program and it certainly isn't the unemployed!

We know the work programme has a dismal performance record and Interserve has never been one of the better performing 'primes'.

Purple Futures on Merseyside?? Only two colours here - red & blue. In fact the blue army's slogan 'you're in my heart you're in my soul' is kind of a mantra to those dedicated to Probation work.

Don't be fooled by the new names. Purple is still a big multi national that is subbing to all the others in with them. Some of these subbys will be unbearable! Nacro have been a bit player for some years now. They will think they are the cat that got the cream. If I was CRR and MTC Amey I would have your lawyers on speed dial, not that I want you to win, but you have been had over by Grayling! SUE HIS ARSE.

What's the latest on Purple Sprouting Futures? Who's going to be CEO? I think Harry Fletcher was alluding that there was some dodgy connection.

I may have misheard but someone told me Yvonne Lewis who used to be a bigwig in NOMS is now MD of Purple Futures. I may have got the surname wrong because the only Yvonne at NOMS I can see is an Yvonne Thomas. 

Any which way, if somebody from NOMS has now got the MD job at Purple Futures and they have coincidentally won the winning bid it does raise some interesting questions.

Last week there was an email announcing the Managing Director of Purple Futures is Yvonne Lewis who was in her previous role the Director of Offender Management at NOMS. It said Purple Futures had a 'strong offender management background' (it will be interesting to see who these could be and I can only assume are possible ex-ACO or SPO?).

The email also said contracts would be signed before 17/12/14 and that before Christmas there will be new versions of Oasys and delius in order to allow for custody screening on all cases with the introduction of supervision for all those sentenced to custody.  

I actually think Purple Futures is currently scurrying around trying to recruit ex Probation management staff in order to bolster it's know-how because nobody else would be have offender management background unless ex-prison? I wonder if the reference to Yvonne Lewis should be Thomas?

It's a shame to give Sodexo all the negative press, lets look at Interserve. Debbie Ryan is the Director of Interserve. In 2007 she joined Working Links before rising to become the Director of their Justice Division responsible for all justice preparations and the realisation of the vision to support the governments justice reform agenda. 

2012-1013 she became Director of G4S Rehabilitation and Resettlement. When G4S were barred from bidding it is said that Interserve swallowed up the G4S justice Team. While at Working Links Debbie was the boss of Max Chambers who joined from being a senior research fellow in the Policy Exchange, who drove the policy to privatise probation. He returned to the Policy exchange in 2012 as the research director again pushing the privatisation agenda and is now, as of May 2014, a Special Advisor to the Prime Minister. It's all very cosy in the Transforming Rehabilitation World.

Didn't Max do well? This from Policy Exchange site:-

Max Chambers is now Special Adviser for Home Affairs and Justice in the Number 10 Policy Unit. Before joining Policy Exchange, Max worked for a leading welfare-to-work provider, where he was recruited to help establish and grow a new justice services division. As Commercial Development Manager, he led the company’s bids for Ministry of Justice payment-by-results pilots, probation contracts and as part of a major programme of prison competition. Prior to this, Max worked for Policy Exchange as Senior Research Fellow, authoring seven influential reports on police reform, criminal justice and health. Max has also worked in Parliament for the Shadow Justice and Home Affairs teams. He read law at the University of Nottingham.

This from 'Omnishambles Update 29' when Debbie was at G4S:-

Talking of twitter, I really do feel it's worth highlighting the nonsense that Debbie Ryan, Director of Rehabilitation and Resettlement at G4S has recently been engaging in:-

I would welcome all & any probation individuals to come to G4S and see for themselves. Anyone interested?? R u passionate about probation? Want to help shape the G4S TR bid? I am ready to listen. Would u attend workshop to share ur frontline exp? If you want to contribute to the G4S bid. Have your say and shape the future - let me know. Happy to host workshops if enough interest??? Have had soo many tweets - emotions are high. Have your say and let's work together to make sure your experience shapes the future??

if you get involved you will know exactly what the future holds. You will help shape it. Take control. Get involved in The G4S TR bid. Help shape the model? Want to hear what you would do?? I agree the spec is key. But you want us to be transparent so help us to make this work? I know you are entrenched in this. It affects your lives and careers. My offer is for you to b able to input! on going experience is essential to manage risk and protect the public. Tell us what YOU think works.

Another historical gem from 'Omnishambles Update 10' last year:-

Interserve's criminal justice team is headed by Yvonne Thomas, just one of the small army of senior civil servants formerly at NOMS/MoJ HQ who have feathered their own nest by jumping ship and in order to make sure their bids stand a good chance of being successful.

"Yvonne will lead a formidable team which allies operational and strategic prisons expertise from both the public and private sectors. Adding operational expertise to its existing knowledge and experience, Interserve now has a complete end-to-end capability to develop innovative solutions in the delivery of custodial and community services. 

 Yvonne tells us in her own "SustainAbilities" blog:

As one of a number of organisations which has submitted bids to operate the contracts, we at Interserve believe that public service delivery benefits from the participation of a wide range of service providers and partners. We have therefore developed a fully integrated model with a range of partners including SMEs, the public sector, charitable and not for profit groups to create a more efficient and better value service while also fulfilling the MoJ’s ambition that such entities should be a key part of TR delivery.

A business of Interserve’s scale and capability brings business expertise, investment, infrastructure and vast experience of delivering front-line public services, for example in the welfare field. Our strategy is to engage the 3rd Sector Consortium (3SC) to create and manage the performance of our TR supply chain. The overall aim is to round up local, on the ground expertise to change the behaviour of individuals – fundamentally the only way to reduce offending. 3SC will manage more than 30 voluntary, community and social enterprises (VCSE) delivering these services locally according to their strengths.

These groups, which include Shelter, Addaction and New Charter Housing, have been selected for their knowledge of local areas and have extensive experience of dealing with a range of complex offender needs. They have been drawn from the public and charitable sectors because they understand local environments and have a proven track record of successful local delivery.

We believe that this approach should encourage local communities to participate in the rehabilitation process.

Interserve has pledged to give VCSEs significantly more responsibility than current arrangements do to maximise the benefit of their local expertise to proactively deliver innovative services that make the critical difference to reduce reoffending.

We undertook a robust and lengthy due diligence exercise to assess our partners’ delivery capacity and decided on a volume of work for each partner that is realistic and commercially sustainable for both parties.

Interserve would manage the financial risks of the TR contracts, allowing our partners to benefit from the stable cash flow a company of our size and scale can provide. We have created and published a ‘Charity Charter’ which sets out what we can offer our VCSE partners and, in turn, what we expect from them.

Interserve prides itself on being a company which operates in a sustainable way. Our approach to TR aligns with the aims of our business-wide sustainability plan – SustainAbilities – which sets out ambitious targets for the business to achieve by 2020, two of which are to deliver public services in the public interest and to build more skills and opportunities.

These commitments are fundamental to reducing reoffending. We would aim to deliver these objectives for significantly less than the current costs and the nature of the Payment by Results element of the contract means that we would only be fully paid when results are delivered, namely that reoffending is in fact reduced.

These are old problems. It’s time for new solutions – this is what we commit to deliver." 

The Times offers this morsel:- 

Big shot: Yvonne Thomas of Interserve

Robert Lea Last updated at 12:01AM, February 7 2012 

Age 53 Position Managing director, Interserve’s Justice division  

When Ken Clarke next locks up the Ministry of Justice at night, he might want to check just how many senior civil servants he has left on the premises. The Justice Secretary’s privatisation and contract plans for the prison and probation services have prompted a flow of executives to the burgeoning private sector “offender management” industry.  

The latest to quit is Yvonne Thomas, operations director of the National Offender Management Service. Ms Thomas is off to run the justice division of Interserve, best known for being a caretaker of buildings from schools to Buckingham Palace. There she will team up with an impressive group of fellow defectors, including the former heads of Noms’ large prisons and high-security prisons, respectively, as well as the former chief executive of the Probation Association. Interserve has been shortlisted to run three prisons up for privatisation. It expects more, as well as the contracting out of probation and rehabilitation schemes.  

Ms Thomas makes the point that Whitehall cost-slashing is making public sector offender management unsustainable, but she argues that private sector justice services are not necessarily about looking after prisoners on the cheap. “You have to ask yourself: ‘Why do you want to do this, are you qualified to do this and can you do a better job?’ ”  

Ms Thomas spent four years at Noms after a decade at BT, a spell preceded by a decade in software sales. She took an English degree from UWIST, the old Welsh University, and retains a house in the Principality. And despite being English, she supports the Welsh rugby team.

An interesting comment on Yvonne Thomas ex MoJ now heading up the Justice team at Interserve: Found them all interesting, informative and entertaining - with one exception - the Yvonne Thomas from Interserve whose presentation I found lacked depth and insight and did not reflect much empathy for the client group - i.e. people who need Rehabilitation services.

This again from the 'Omnishambles Update 10' archives ref Interserve:-

“When the initiative was launched by the then employment minister Chris Grayling, he name checked a ‘voluntary sector organisation’ called Rehab Jobfit whose involvement was a ‘massive boost for the big society’. But Rehab Jobfit is in fact a joint venture between an Irish Charity called Rehab and Interserve, a distinctly non-voluntary sector PFI specialist, chaired by the conservative peer Lord Blackwell. 

Interserve has three ‘prime’ Work Programme contracts in Wales and the South West – but its public sector work is, alas, nothing to boast about. In 2009 the Office of Fair Trading fined it £11.6m for rigging the price of public sector building contracts after it and other builders carved up supposedly competitive bids on big public contracts such as hospitals. The fines followed an investigation into ‘cover pricing’, whereby companies put in artificially high bids to ensure another firm in the scam wins the deal. 

Interserve likes Work Programme contracts so much that last year it bought some more, taking over Business Employment Services and Training Ltd (BEST), which runs the Work Programme in West Yorkshire. Rehab Jobfit and BEST, now renamed Interserve Working Futures, receive at least £22m a year between them from Work Programme contracts.”

From London Evening Standard earlier this year, looking at outsourcing etc. & some familiar names feature:-

Companies that were awarded contracts to build and maintain state schools for 25 years have been doubling their money by “flipping”, or selling on, the Private Finance Initiative (PFIs) projects just four years after finishing them.The chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, Margaret Hodge, described the huge profits as “a total scandal” and said it meant “we have all been ripped off”. 

The Evening Standard’s sister paper The Independent’s findings shine a new light on how private companies have made fortunes in pure profit from the rising value of the schools and hospitals they have built – value which critics say could have been retained by the taxpayer. 

Four contractors alone made profits of more than £300m. Of the companies studied – Balfour Beatty, Carillion, Interserve and Kier – Balfour Beatty is by far the biggest beneficiary of the rising value of its Private Finance Initiative and Public Private Partnership deals. It alone has made profits of £188.9m.Only this week, it flipped the University Hospital of North Durham and seven schools in Knowsley, near Liverpool, generating a gain of £51m. In the case of the schools, it doubled its money from the £19m investment made when the 27-year contracts were awarded in 2007 and 2011. 

The Durham hospital, which was one of the first hospitals to be built under PFI-style private financing, was dogged with controversy about bed shortages and poor design when it opened. Carillion has made £12.2m, Kier £20.7m and Interserve £90m, according to stock market filings and company documents. Ms Hodge said: “It is a scandal, a total scandal that the public sector has privatised these projects so badly. We have all been ripped off. 

Isn't the Chair of Interserve Lord Blackwell, a Tory Peer? 

Is Lord Blackwell still the chairman of the board of directors for Interserve? Are they the lead for Purple Futures? Feels like XFactor when Simon Cowell isn't happy with the competitors so puts together his own group a la One Direction!

I do believe that CS Grayling is the constituency MP for The Lord Blackwell, a resident of Epsom. Clearly Mr Grayling is taking excellent care of his constituents' best interests.

Interserve buildings maintenance seem to be coining it. 3 separate people in 3 vehicles sent to the same place on the same day, one to replace a light bulb. Each paid as highly qualified electrical or other engineers, none doing work that required their level of skill and each paid for hours of work when the problem was resolved in approx 30 minutes.

Is it just me or is there also something inherently wrong with Interserve having the building contracts in areas where Sodexo are the preferred bidders? I can't understand how it can possibly be right that one company gives the keys to all its buildings to a competitor and allows them access when no one is there!

Interserve have got the keys to all the buildings in Northumbria...

Why? They may be prefered bidders, but they have no contract, and may still not get one.

They have the contract for building management. They do the cleaning and alarm services. We are actually a Sodexo preferred bidder area in Northumbria. Interserve meanwhile can come in whenever they want to and wander around at will when no one is there.

Hmmm, I think Interserve has the same deal for all Probation Approved Premises certainly they have in my area....so they appear to have a lot of NPS work too. I also think they do some of the NPS buildings...

As with lots of this, what the MoJ think happens and how things are organised on the ground is very difficult. The MoJ have no idea how local partnerships work for instance (or even that they exist), or how many of these have been destroyed by TR.

The thing is that Shelter, Addaction etc will come in expecting some of the TR pie, when actually the services they are hoping to offer are actually financed by local partnerships who will withdraw the funding. TR contractors will therefore have to find money for services which have seemingly disappeared. It's hilarious how naïve these companies are. They just have no idea of the complexities of how Probation works and how much good will we used. It is also not a service they will be able to skimp on. Just ask Atos. They're gonna need deep pockets and long arms if they're gonna avoid profit warnings to their shareholders.

Tell staff in the voluntary sector agencies they are about to get caseloads of 90+ and see what they do. They're not used to managing more than 20 at a time.