Guest Blog 32

The rumours continue

One of the greatest problem that confronts the new owners of the snappily titled Community Rehabilitation Companies is rumour control. Six weeks into this new industry, most of us are still waiting to find out what any of it actually means and what is the answer to the redundancy related questions of how many and when (rather than if). 

Provider ‘briefings’ are proving as useful as MoJ briefings in terms of giving people the clarity they seek and the spinning is achieving very little other than leaving us increasingly giddy. The reality is that the MoJ ‘briefings’ and ministerial statements in Parliament have become so preposterous that it is almost impossible to take anything they say seriously. The knock on effect of this, however, is that the ‘briefings’ provided by the providers, because of their lack of content and depth, are increasingly being viewed in a similar light.

Probation staff are generally highly competent at unravelling the minimisations, justifications and distortions created by offenders seeking to ennoble their offending behaviour and mitigate their culpability. Using those skills to pick apart the information or lack thereof being provided by the MoJ or by the ‘newbies’ is all but unconscious and recognising the subtext merely routine. 

The absence of information is, as Probation practitioners (or is that ‘responsible’ practitioners?) well know, information in it’s own right. The unwillingness of an individual to provide information tells you an awful lot about the nature of that information and the motives behind its being withheld. It is, consequently, apparent to anyone with half a brain that the workforce are being left in the dark because

• The providers do not know the answers and, in many cases, didn’t even know there was a question;
• The high level models contained in the successful bids do not fit the real world; 
• The processes they had in mind have not been risk assessed in the real world and are likely to put offenders, staff, victims and the public at risk; 
• The ‘expertise’ of the partnerships is, in general, more rhetorical than real and they are furiously recruiting a legion of inexperienced and often unsuitable people to fill the posts; 
• The bidders are beginning to realise that they have been misinformed in the procurement process; 
• The MoJ has shown itself all but incapable of foreseeing the debacle that even the lowliest Probation worker saw coming a mile off; 
• The IT systems that have been poorly managed since their inception are proving to be impervious to the changes necessary to facilitate their ‘home-working’ operating model. 

It is this last rumour that needs consideration at the moment. Rumour has it that the technology required to allow provider’s own systems to ‘talk to’ nDelius, the main case management software for the entire operation, doesn’t work. 

The inability of the MoJ to give anyone a straight answer means that some of the ‘facts’ around the issue are speculative but, in a nutshell, until the issue is resolved, the providers are irrevocably tied into the Steria IT infra-structure. This, in turn, means that not only is the proposed ‘flexible working’ (working alone from your car with an ipad) potentially on hold but that the CRCs will be unable to move out of the buildings where they are currently located until the MoJ have resolved the ‘bug’ that is currently exercising them is resolved. Rumour has it that this could be many months. This will have financial implications for both the CRCs and the NPS.

Alarming Increases in both the prison populations and the use of conditional discharges in favour of community disposals, the removal of existing providers from Prisons and Probation premises before replacement services are available, resource centres being set up without any resources in evidence – the list of casualties is growing by the hour. Most of these are down to the recklessness of the Secretary of State and the MoJ and it is obvious to anyone with half an MBA that this is what happens when you proceed to change on this scale without proper pilots. No-one knows what is happening but, more worryingly, nobody knows what is going to happen as these ‘unforeseen’ consequences manifest themselves.

Grayling has opened Pandora’s Box and the new providers are as aghast at what is coming out of it as the rest of us are. Attempts to smooth the process with patronising and disingenuous briefings that ignore the presenting evidence are increasingly futile and the unwillingness of all parties to accept that they have done irrevocable damage to the ability of the Criminal Justice System to manage offenders in the community is really starting to make them look more than a little foolish. The sooner they cotton on to that fact, the sooner we can start trying to put this thing back together again.

Ishmael.