Bits and Pieces 2

It's Saturday morning and I've got nothing prepared. As was said yesterday, we're still hurting and in such circumstances it's hard to be focused. 

I'm still absorbing the discussion that was generated yesterday about what the hell we do to shake Napo out of its denial of a problem at the top. It's just all so sad and in the absence of any effective leadership, my only suggestion is that the NEC will have to get a grip and start some very old-fashioned plotting. It strikes me that the time for pussy-footing around has gone and it's only a row that will flush out the issues, crystallise who exactly is in charge and initiate the process of self-examination and renewal.

Ok, having got that out of the way, what next? Searching back through unpublished stuff, in desperation I've decided today is the day to resurrect a slot for all the stuff that doesn't seem to fit neatly into any particular category. It's old news, but probably worth mentioning, and who knows, it might get more up-to-the-minute towards the end:-   

On the theme of politics, it's interesting to note that Labour have highlighted the scandalous loss of nearly a million voters off the Electoral Roll this year. Because of changes to the registration process, colleges and universities no longer undertake 'block' registrations on behalf of students, so guess what? They've slipped off registers with the government sarcastically responding that 'it's really easy to register online.' It probably is, but the default position is that they won't, and guess what? Students are probably more likely to vote Labour than Conservative. This on the BBC News website. 

This is a bit old now, but I really can't let the Hinchingbrooke Hospital story go without comment, not least because it serves to illustrate an obvious fact of life, namely that any public service that is privatised must deliver a profit, or the contract gets handed back. And it's worth noting that Circle Partnership started out as a supposedly 'employee-owned' company.

Although not quite the same as the NHS situation, once the probation TR privateers start to lose money and get bad inspection reports, the contract will effectively become worthless and will similarly be surrendered. This in the Independent:-

"The first private company to be put in charge of an NHS hospital has announced plans to withdraw from its contract, hours before inspectors recommended the hospital be placed in special measures because of “inadequate” care.

Circle Holdings plc said its contract to run the Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire was “no longer sustainable”, citing 10 per cent funding cuts, “unprecedented increases in accident and emergency attendances” and a lack of care services in the area for people leaving hospital."

It's not been good news recently for the private sector generally with the announcement that the government have got fed up with the outfit running the decommissioning of the Sellafield nuclear site and have effectively sacked them:-

"It had been on the cards for a while but now it is official. The scale of the problems within the Sellafield nuclear waste clean up operation has led to the contract being ripped up and existing providers Nuclear Management Partners (NMP) being relieved of their duties. The NMP consortium, comprising of the UK’s Amec, France’s Areva and America’s URS, has had their 17 year contract ended after just 6 years.

Over that short period both the National Audit Office (NAO) and Public Accounts Committee (PAC) have been damning in their criticism of NMP’s failings. So much so that it had been a real surprise when the 2014 break clause in the NMP contract was not triggered having been awarded a five year extension in 2013 despite an already significant catalogue of failings."

It's interesting to see that not all Liberal Democrats think supporting TR was a good idea:-

"There are many problems with this reorganisation. Prisoners do not stay neatly in one category of risk – if they move from medium to high risk, they will now need to be transferred across two different probation organisations. The majority of the offenders that I see as a magistrate have complex problems that underlie their offending – most often a combination of mental health and substance abuse. The work needed to rehabilitate these offenders is not trivial and I am concerned that with projected caseloads, the CRCs will only be able to deliver superficial interventions. The companies running the new CRCs include the likes of major services organisations Sodexo and Interserve who will of course be looking to maximise profits. Will they be prepared to do the long term, two steps forward, one step back work that rehabilitating drug addicts requires?

The response I’ve had when I’ve raised these concerns is that ‘payment by results’ will ensure that the CRCs reduce re-offending. However there is as yet no evidence that this approach works – the Work Programme has had poor results with ‘harder to help’ long term unemployed.

Depressingly the prison population is 85,280 almost the same as it was in May 2010, despite a fall in crime. There has been a lot of good policy work around Crime presented at recent Lib Dem Conferences but probation and rehabilitation is the one area where a new approach is needed."

And what's this? More dissent on the ConservativeHome website of all places:-

 Grayling’s reforms to legal aid are damaging and unfair

"The Secretary of State is drastically cutting the number of solicitors available through legal aid, with the Law Society Gazette saying two-thirds of firms who currently offer the service will be able to do so no longer. In their place, a limited number of contracts will be issued to firms under the term “Duty Provider Work”, with solicitors facing an average fee cut of up to 17.5 per cent. Never fear, though, providers of legal aid services would be allowed to take on an unlimited amount of “Own Client Work” – where each individual has to pay thousands of pounds for representation.

Deliberately understating it, these changes will bring chaos to the justice system. It means that, as the Shadow Secretary of State Sadiq Khan has rightly pointed out, miscarriages of justice would flourish. Without representation, someone who has committed no crime and faces an unscrupulous charge has the odds firmly stacked up against them."

We all know there's a crisis in our prisons, so it should be of the gravest concern that Chris Grayling is clearly trying to cover things up by denying access to journalists. This from the Guardian:-

UK prisons won’t let journalists in – what do they have to hide?

Since the beginning of 2013, I have also been making repeated requests to the Ministry of Justice for permission to visit prisons. The requests have been considered, discussed and then refused.

In May 2014, after a year of refusals, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger offered to help and wrote to the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, to support the request. They met, discussed the issue and organised a separate meeting with Michael Spurr, the most senior civil servant handling prisons, where the issue was discussed some more. Spurr said he thought this kind of reporting was beneficial and could see no problem with it. We submitted new requests which were discussed again with MoJ officials. After eight months of negotiations, the final response was an email last week that concluded: “Unfortunately we are not in a position to take your request forward at the moment.”

Of course we also know Grayling is refusing to cooperate with research by the Howard League into sex in prison and turned down all requests for access to prisoners. Yet another damning article about prisons can be found in the Spectator here. 

Finally, this from Facebook shows how there's not much new under the sun:-

"PROBATION PROPOSALS UNNECESSARY, DAMAGING AND WASTEFUL

...To replace these arrangements with an untried, untested system which no-one in the Probation Service wants and which duplicates existing provision cannot be cost effective and does not make sense. The reasons offered for the changes simply do not stand up to close scrutiny."

This sounds gruesomely familiar but was written almost exactly 20 years ago (22.02.95) and was a response to Michael Howard scrapping social work training for probation officers. He did this despite receiving 482 representations against versus only 11 in favour. I found this yesterday in a library (by accident) so thought I would share it with you.