Bleak Futures Week 9

This blog makes interesting reading when we see practitioners experiences post TR, take for example ISPs. This is a target for both CRCs and NPS and more importantly starts the supervision process by defining what work will be done to address identified issues and also is the baseline risk assessment.

Given CRCs are now up and running as separate entities, we could perhaps expect some divergence of practice so eg the targets date for ISPs may vary in different CRCs. What is really concerning is that the NPS, one unified organisation, seems to have very different target dates for staff to complete ISPs varying between 5 and 15 days - how can that be? Does that means staff in the 5 day area could be placed in capability for missing a target which is 15 days somewhere else in that one organisation? It is absolute nonsense.

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No account is taken of pending prison releases when Community cases are allocated - but then N-Delius do not show prison cases due for release - another flaw in an overall piss-poor IT system.

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It is my understanding that ALL CRCs have same targets and for ISPs it is 10 days - some like my CRC are imposing 8 day as a safeguard since missing a target costs money. In relation to NPS - is it not 5 day for high risk and 15 for those in CRC which are deemed medium risk but due to nature of offence, RSR score or whatever the reason are in NPS? Just a thought - if NAPO is going to investigate it has to be across the board - they represent both sections of this ideological divide.

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The writing's on the wall. Each week it's getting bleaker and bleaker and the blogs are getting longer, staff are leaving gaping holes that remaining staff simply cannot fill. I cant see Sodemexo or Burple Futures bringing anything to the table that will reverse the mess we are in.

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I am NPS in the South West and our target is for terminations, so they get prioritised over ISPs, start custody OASys. I've got ISPs still waiting to be done as I've also had parole reports addendum, part B and C to all do at the same time. Casenotes written needing to be typed up. Been over WMT since Oct and when management retiered to be in line with rest of NPS, WMT went up to 48% over. Now the WMT is London model not so easy to see. Yet management looking at sample of my cases to see where I am at as if it is totally my fault (it feels like).

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My reading is that community ISP's for the NPS are 15 days. The 5 day ISP is for custody cases; the OM has to get into prison and complete this within 5 days. I have a feeling that whoever is stupid enough to apply for TTG will get the honour of seeing all of the new receptions and completing the ISP. This will be between sorting out accommodation/licences and the 1001 other issues that new receptionists in prison AND those leaving will have.

Looking at the work that needs doing in the reception/discharge prisons, I have a feeling that most of the CRC will need to be in the prison to cope. My own view is that I would have absolutely nothing to do with TTG, and if you are directed just claim you have claustrophobia and cannot work in such an environment! It's for them to prove otherwise and they would not have a leg to stand on if they subsequently directed you and then you went immediately on the sick! As you will no longer have a caseload by this time, you might as well take the whole six month off on full pay.

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I work in Wales and I can assure you that the 5 day target is for all cases in the community whether they have attended or not (we are pretending custody are still done the old fashioned way until directed otherwise). Other priority targets are terminations, parole, part B and C's and home visits. Of course reviews and recording contacts are suffering and there are rumbles of steps being taken to rectify this.

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How can there be such confusion in NPS, the national organisation? Most areas within NPS do not appear to be doing the same thing....surely it defeats the whole object of being the NATIONAL NPS??

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A Plea. I have just returned to work after 5 months sickness absence and have to tell you it was the worst period of my life and sometimes, in the response of managers, staff and yes, occasionally on this blog I have been made to feel a sense of shame. We really need to have care when making statements that imply colleagues who are certified as unfit for work by their GP and Occupational Health (in my case) are somehow not honestly too ill to work.

When colleagues, perhaps tongue in cheek, refer to "going sick" and "you might as well take the whole six months off on full pay" they clearly have no experience of how ill you have to be to be signed off for so long. It is not something to be spoken of lightly and it is devastating to think that some think of 'the long term sick' as avoiding work. I was ill not dishonest. So please don't suggest colleagues could do this to cause disruption to TR, it just feeds the very worst attitudes of some HR and some Managers.

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I'm the author of that comment. It was not an implication of anything, rather an instruction, albeit tongue in cheek. I hope you are feeling much better though and welcome back into the (significantly changed) fold.

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Sick leave a doddle hey. Threatening meetings with the overtones of being sacked. Being off ill is no joke. Come on colleagues where has your humility gone......

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This rings true with me - I was a nervous wreck at work due to the manager taking a dislike to me and ended up going off and almost every week there was a phonecall trying to entice me back with reduced caseload etc etc. Being off was just as stressful but in a different way to actually being in work.

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Because of the current crap and job uncertainty I have decided to sell my house, I do not want to be jobless with a mortgage and face the inevitable re-possession. I will rent somewhere so if I go off sick or sleepwalk into a mistake that could lead to disciplinary I do not have to worry about finding somewhere to live. I have a few debts but all under 1k and will be paid off as soon as possible. Hopefully this will improve my approach to work - at the moment I work over and above cos I'm terrified about the house, but once my plans are in place I can see my mood lifting and feeling much better.

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How sad am I? To get myself to work I have written my daily salary in my diary and when it all gets too much I look at it and tell myself that's why I have to stay for another day. Honestly, I used to love my job.

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Well at least you got phone calls. I was off for 10 weeks, not one phone call, one letter, nothing. Not until I called in and said I was coming back to work. Then they asked me for a back to work meeting. At the meeting I was to be on phased return. Only to find because they are short staffed I was full time on my third day back. It felt no different, nothing has changed for me. They totally ignored why I was off. I said I nearly had a breakdown with the work, their reply, 'lucky you caught it in time'. What the hell does that mean?

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I'm in a prison and there is a review by NOMS of the OMU process. Do I stay or do I go because as we stand no one has the foggiest what's going to happen in the next twelve months.

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Stay in HMP. The field is a NIGHTMARE.

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I am fortunate in that being over 60 I have made the decision to take early retirement & leave at the end of March (PO in a CRC) - I just felt I no longer have the mental energy to take on board all the new changes ie not only the split but also ORA & TTG. Interestingly, just 2 days after I sent my email requesting early retirement, my SPO (a thoroughly nice & decent chap by the way) came to me following a senior management meeting saying would I consider returning after the end of March as agency staff on £24 per hour! I am not interested in this, it wasn't about the money for me, but it makes you wonder how much is sloshing around to pay for agency staff? Best wishes to all.

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At a Staff Roadshow for London CRC, MTCNovo said they made their bid for the contract with no knowledge of exactly what state the office buildings were in or what were the terms and conditions of the leases. This is why the "transition period" from 01/02/15 to 30/04/15 will allow due diligence to be carried out so that they know exactly what they have bought!

Reminds me of that TV programme "Storage Wars" where professional buyers bid in an auction for the contents of a storage locker that has been requisitioned when 3 months rent is owing. The buyers only have 5 minutes to peek at the contents and most of the content is kept under cover so he buyer needs to trust their judgement and experience. So now I understand why it it currently "business as usual" in London CRC.

This would definitely not happen in the takeover of a private business. Any take over without due diligence would be regarded as reckless. Why is it thought acceptable when bidding for London CRC? Clearly London CRC is so big and inefficient that any economies of scale will be well rewarded. I agree though that some of the smaller CRC areas will fail but I can see MTCNovo hoovering those CRC areas up - for a price of course! Welcome to Grayling's brave new world!

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Comment overheard today in CRC. "Our job should be reducing reoffending rates, not dealing with all the regions f***ing social problems". Methinks reality is dawning.

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As another many, many years in, I too have worked through many types of change and up to this point have always been able to find a way through whilst carrying on without really changing the core. However, this is the biggest and worst mess of them all. The abusive way the so called management are prepared to behave whilst deluding themselves, their sycophants and those 'above' them that they are actually achieving anything is slick/slimy management speak and the ability to present the Emperors New Clothes seems to be their only skill. 

They achieve nothing. Their job is to resource and manage the worker to produce. They do neither. They produce nothing. They do not protect the public, reduce crime or victims. Yet they have the gall to sit around in meetings, oh so important, best frocks and suits and think they can come up with processes, solutions, when they could not, had no interest in or did not, do the job of protecting the public by reducing crime, they now seem able to persuade those who know no better that they actually know what they are talking about.

Consult they say, utter rubbish they wouldn't and don't know how to consult. No wonder it's a mess, cobbled together, ridiculously lengthy and ineffective...they don't even have the decency to proof read the stuff, amendment after amendment. Now, having given themselves plenty of time to get their dishonest self affirming, haven't I done well, stuff to send up the line. What manager tells their manager they are actually hopeless at their job? They forgot all about the 'bottom up' appraisal process conveniently and quickly didn't they! Now they reckon we have had enough time to have been able to work through their mire and let's pretend the months since June just didn't happen.

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I consider myself lucky to have a job I love and a reasonable income, although no pay rises anymore as I've been in a while, however a colleague pointed out, no payrise is actually a reduction in my pension. So for anyone who begrudges us payment, it's not all its cracked up to be especially as I now have to work until I'm 67! I've never been scared of hard work and will keep going, although I will do so with the same attitude expressed by today's guest blogger!

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I have tried to close my ears and eyes to all the bull shit speak that people seem to think they need to spew to sound as though they have something to say: "driving the..." "mobilisation..." "reconfiguration..." I try to remember why I chose to do this work, but I notice that, increasingly, those who come before the courts, are utterly irrelevant to the new and unnecessarily complex systems and processes dumped on us.

CG has set out to destroy the CJS - and the notion of 'justice seen to be done' - by replacing it with a production line set at such a pace we will all be too busy with our faces stuck in yet another shitty IT tool that doesn't work to notice exactly who is passing through the doors of the court. Once an error has occurred, it tends to be compounded as it travels along what is now an increasingly bureaucratic journey. The excellent reviews coming out of Hanson & White and others, all now counts for nothing, because all that matters now is the market, the volume, and process. I mourn the simplicity and efficiency of what has been destroyed.

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Everything that has ever come out of any serious case review has been completely ignored and abolished. Lets remember this when the Serious Case Reviews start pouring out in the future - and when they do lets bombard the MOJ and the media with the reasons for the failings, reminding them how we repeatedly said what would happen. The more pipes you put into a system, the greater the risk of leaks - that's the only thing I remember being said by a previous ACO - the very one who as a CEO was known for the 'JFDI' quote.

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Had to do a double take reading this, I could have written today's guest blog myself, and wondered if I'd been sleep blogging. I'm one of the people in line to be directed to a new LDU so have decided to volunteer in the vague hope I might get a little bit of a say in where I go. There will be no time to handover any of my existing clients. I don't know what will happen to them, some will be moving to their third PO in less than 9 months. The new LDU is in an area I am unfamiliar with. I don't know what services are available, who the partnership agencies are or even how to get around. I'm supposed to hit the ground running, it feels more like I'm hurtling to earth without a parachute.

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This just can't go on, and I sense a further split in the service around the corner. One where there will be those who do all the paper work, inputting, collection of information, referrals, recalls etc etc, and never see a client, and allocate cases to officers who's job will be 'only' to see clients all day and pass information back to those chained to their desk to update and take action.

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I am so glad I got VR. I could see, normally unflappable, colleagues starting to unravel with the atrophying effect of TR last year. There are few worse sensations than starting a new job, feeling completely overawed. You know though, it will soon start to ease off as you settle in and your new workmates rally as they don't want you to fail. When you've been there years and you spend every other day doing conference calls where the only crumb of comfort is that your managers and 'The Centre' or 'The Hub' are just as fucking clueless as you, you know that knot in your stomach is not going away any time soon.

I remember one of those calls where 2 admin managers reported experienced staff crying at the pace of the changes. The ACO listening in said that it was important that management had that kind of feedback to feed upwards. I suppose he had to say something but we all knew it was whistling in the dark. What a complete fuck up. Great blog today despite the subject matter, thanks for sharing.

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Really enjoyed today's blog - like somebody else said, it could have been written by any casemanager. We all seem to be experiencing the same problems up and down the country. The loss of staff is the most mindboggling of all - I've spoken to someone today who'd have stayed till 65 as they love their job and have no personal commitments per see but TR has put paid to that and they are going in the coming months aged 61 - that will be the 5th PO left from that office in the last 12 months.

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It's all gobbledegook - I've no idea what the NPS newsletter is saying. It seems we're getting processes for processes and guides to tell us when we're too stressed to read them. Nobody reads or uses process maps, audits and databases are of no benefit to probation officers, and IT upgrades are pointless when the IT is shite. My view can be summed up as Believe It Or Not I DON'T Care.

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We are all getting ridiculous numbers of briefings on updates on our email. If they get opened at all, they usually get discarded after reading the first paragraph, or more likely two sentences. Yesterday we got an urgent update on a briefing paper that no-one remembered or ever opened. It was written in a language no-one could understand. The next update might include a dictionary that no-one will ever look at! The fact that a 'Deputy Director' or whatever she is, could seriously think that this communication would be welcomed is unreal. The disconnect is now staggering. We need things that matter and make sense.

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Where are the offenders in this management speak, the people NPS are supposed to be working with to rehabilitate or protect the community from? This is someone who know nothing but wants to pretend what they are doing is important. Its a case of read and weep or laugh.

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I agree, it took same dep director 15 minutes to mention clients at recent engagement shots! Its all bollocks!

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Probation officers (and some clients too) are generally pretty good at stringing words together as evidenced by the posts on this blog. I agree there must be a course where managers are trained how to forget this and instead adopt this new business speak - a way of masking content that doesn't amount to much it seems to me. They are also given delusional pills that make them think everything is OK bar a few hiccoughs. I try to read stuff, I really do, but I get 'brain fail' (see today's guardian) when I try. I have however created a nice file in 'My Documents' where I'm dumping all of this garbage.

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"While Aegis is a good system, it doesn't fully meet all of our business requirements. There are also some technical limitations to it as a system which mean we need to plan now to put in place a more strategic solution. The NPS has therefore commissioned the development of a full set of business requirements. This is the first step towards creating a new victims database."

So it's not that good after all? Or maybe, just maybe, there is another opportunity to line the pockets of friends and old school pals, whilst continuing to sit around doing nothing of any use to anyone.

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Good-Christing-Hell. I don't know what terrifies me more: The fact that not only does this twaddle pass muster at High Command, or that someone thought it just the thing to pep up an already demoralised workforce. Want to know something really scary? This represents the best plan they've got for hammering a square peg into a round hole. Charts. Systems. Whisper on the grapevine has it that phone scripts are being considered to ensure continuity of supervision as workloads rotate around staff. This, to be fair, wasn't Grayling's big idea behind restructuring Probation - it's just one of the real world consequences of it. The Cocktrumpet.

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A direct result of TR in our area is that high risk (or schedule 15 offences) DRR/OMU cases come to NPS and get less intensive supervision than before the split. Whose bright idea was that then?..also..ooops - a significant number of people I supervise have come out of prison with a drug problem they didn't have before they went in.

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I am not as bleak as some about the future because I was always unhappy with being a slave to NOMS and its ridiculous need for control. I have taken the opportunity to drop some hours and am trying to fill the gap with my own creative ideas as to how to make things better. But I am clear that I need to be mercenary to a degree - no giving my ideas to my employers or other parties. It's not been an easy thing to do and so far there has been little reward.

Having a young family means there are risks, but there are risks involved in not taking the risks - risks of regret and a low level depression of staying and sticking to a routine, risks of not being a good example to my children. Under full-on NOMS control, as the Trusts were, there was a risk of just rusting away in front of a computer. For those in the NPS there is a risk of becoming moribund under ridiculous bureaucracy and terrible Civil Service speak - it seems that yesterday's blog shows how our new directors are already lapsing or fully immersing themselves in this. In my office people have left to start businesses and follow dreams. If you have a dream or an unfulfilled ambition outside of Probation, then this is as good a time as any to follow it.

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The wheels have already come off... it just remains to see how long before the momentum of the combined NOMS & CRC mass eventually grinds to a disastrous halt. There will always be some sort of service provision for those sentenced to supervision or released from prison - because that's what probation staff do, regardless of allocation. The courts won't stop making sentences. What is likely is that something terrible will happen and it will be evident that the disruption per the TR agenda was the cause. However... the disconnect of the MoJ/NOMS/CRC management structures from the reality of day-to-day practice is palpable; I would submit the argument that it is evident that they are making themselves ultra-distant from practitioners in order to distance themselves from any imminent disaster.

The CRC decision was made to enable profit for global enterprise - hence the budget & recruitment freeze & the apparent lack of CRC ownership activity (they ain't stoopid). The NPS decision was a Tory General Election smokescreen regarding high risk offenders & sentencing. Sad to say I fear that it will be NPS who fall foul of something dreadful first...and I suspect CRCs are hoping for this, so they can dodge any bullets & respond with some clever PR of their own. But some poor bastard somewhere is going to have to be the unnecessary victim in all of this.

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Lots and lots of overtime is going to be announced soon as they realise that OASys completions are up the Swanee and emergency measures will have to be put in place to give the impression that everything is all going well. The train is so huge that it has now left the rails and is careering into the public that have gathered to see what all the fuss is about. It might not have ground to a halt but it has certainly caused damage and those that can't see it are either on the outside looking in, on the inside with their eyes shut hoping it's not them that gets the 4am knock, apologists for TR (well it's happened now lets just get on with quietly slitting our own throats), or the three or four who really believe that TR will bring them great opportunities...usually CEOs and ACEs....

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Oasys means nothing, whats the problem? Just fudge them quickly, they'll be just as useful as before.