Bleak Futures Week 19

We had our updated briefing last week. Basically it was admitted it's a complete mess. No estates sourced yet, but CRC are moving end September. No idea where people will be working whether that be the hub or out in the community. No idea who will deliver services etc. We are now into the first week of May and still NO ONE knows the plan.....

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The facts are, though, that the Prison Service has moved a lot of prisoners to be in resettlement prisons. Almost all of the designated resettlement prisons have 85%+ prisoners from the home CRC and most CRCs have very small numbers of prisoners with 12 weeks or less to serve who are not in resettlement prisons.

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Hmmm this may be the case in the male estate but in the female estate I doubt it very much as women are often held far from home due to the fact there are few female prisons and in some areas none at all so it is highly unlikely that the women will be sent to resettlement prisons in their home areas because there is unlikely to be one. Now if successive governments had actually implemented the recommendations of the Corston report this would have been solved a long time ago.

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I'm a dinosaur and an old git and from what I see it is this exclusive group of officers who are holding things together by just carrying on with things the way they work not the way lickspittle new managers have been told to do things. This is the group that can see through the bullshit and who won't be bullied. From what I see there are quite a lot of 'Sodexo positives' out there who hope that by pushing their masters line they will be spared the coming cull and offered a place at the top table. Eyes open please....they're just using you to do the dirty on your staff before they come for you. Being an old git means that you have seen this before. Who was it that said if you fail to learn from history you're destined to repeat it? Still not too late to tell it like it is.....

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Bloody nightmare week, horrendous IT problems, 6 days no email, had to get admin to do my safeguarding referrals as practitioner colleagues too stressed trying to recover work for court deadlines. Colleague also had the dreaded call case allocation not done (it was) ok then it's blank (it wasn't)...just bizarre. Then told by IT that the upgrade was done last weekend with no-one realising it was not compatible with parts of system (citrix and lotus notes) Just who are these people designing these systems? Or more to the point, just who is commissioning such not fit for purpose crap?

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In some ways from the outside looking in point of view, this is absolutely hilarious. In one way because it was so predictable.

I just wonder how long it will be before some enterprising lag decides to sue the MoJ and the relevant CRC for failing to provide the TTG services promised from May 1, 2015 if they are released with only the £46 and no support. After all, if it is contracted that that is when TTG was due to start and people don't get the promised support, then breach of contract ensues.

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Can you name one prison where there should have been a TTG service in place on Friday but there was not? I know that Purple Futures, Sodexo and Working Links all reported the service in place in all of their prisons on 1 May. So in which ones has it not happened?

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They'll all be claiming payments for TTG services from first of May- whether its operational or not. If they don't claim payment for TTG services from that date, then they risk being accused of contractual failures.

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Although one would like to assume that MoJ contract managers, and prison governors, would notice if a service didn't really exist.

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They lie. End of. As long as the facade is maintained the charade will continue. MoJ contract managers collude because TR failure is their failure. The only way forward is for the bidders to wake up to the enormity of the task and the MASSIVE potential for reputational damage.

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We used to refer to Skills4work and generally clients would report back that they had been offered courses, or voluntary work! However, once on their books they would keep an eye on case and if the client, through their own ingenuity, found work, S4W would call us and ask if client could produce a payslip or other evidence of work, so they could take credit for placing the client in work! I always refused, as it's lying, fraudulently claiming credit for another's endeavour! Shameful!

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No, they pretend they have provided the service to get paid that way they focus on the easy hits to get paid with minimal effort. Just like Shelter used to claim their payment for finding accommodation for prisoners by providing one nights B and B (often in v questionable accommodation) and then they were homeless on night 2 but it didn't matter 'cos they could claim the payment.

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After almost 25 years I'm serving (as it now seems like a sentence) the last month as a probation officer. I still remember the pride I felt when I got my first job but now feel only sadness when I think of leaving. I don't have another job to go to but simply can't face any more. What really pisses me off are those in management (many I remember coming in as new TPOs) who pretend nothing is wrong or they are teething problems. At first I believed them (I knew them to be honourable people or so I thought) but what is happening now & is planned for the future by our CRC bosses is just wrong on all fronts!

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This is ironic but since the privatisation I've never had so many re-offend on my caseload. I've had a CO offend and get 6mths custody, I've just done my first recall in 12 months and I've 3 re-offended. Absolutely nothing I could've done about any of it.

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PbR pilots.....disappointing results. Not sure why anyone who works with our client group finds this a surprise. We told them time and time again yet Mr Grayling, Messrs Spur, Allars et Al all knew better. Please keep your fingers crossed that Mr Grayling is out of a job on Friday..

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Glad I'm not running the Sodexo CRC Contracts! I'd be very concerned and worried if I was in that particular hot-seat at this moment. It doesn't even look as if they did good thorough due diligence. Oh, yes, nearly forgot, they've also pissed off most, if not all, of their CRC workforce.

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Interesting development. As Sodexo's CRCs get rid of 70% of their Band 5 SPOs, Seetec's Kent, Surrey and Sussex CRC is recruiting SPOs at Band 6.

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My friend spends far too much time in pubs in London and he has big ears and he let slip that he's heard that Sodexo is looking to do 'deals' with the likes of those winning bidders who won conurbations and not huge great green grassed shires where their operating model falls apart. He says that they never wanted shire counties and now see them as a bloody great albatross round their corporate necks.

Man in the pub says that all the 'that there London talk' is about how they can ditch the big counties...quick.....watch some underhand deals being done whilst the rest of the country watches the election and stand by for announcements about 'wonderful new innovative partnerships'. You thought they'd been quiet. Not a bit of it....a heady dose of realism has hurt them hard with lots of talk about duplicitous government....surely not..

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Did you see the other day that unpaid work bods are being taxied to projects because of the van situation? I can't be exactly certain but I'm quite confident it would've involved a 40mile round trip. Not cheap but better than sending them home and getting the potential bad publicity.

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I voted but really didn't know who to vote for, I hope the party that gets in will have an effect where I don't have to watch a grown man crying in probation as he hadn't eaten anything for a week, had a disability and had been sanctioned because he couldn't go to an interview due to his mobility scooter having a flat and not having the money to repair it in time. It really upset me today and all we could offer was a food voucher... makes me so sad.

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I was a PO from 2007 - 2015. I didn't leave 'because' of TR but I found a job elsewhere and was feeling tired of how my PO life had become. I feel saddened by the TR mess. So I feel a special happiness this morning that Simon Hughes especially lost his seat and that the LD party in general have been trashed.

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I work in the Court team as a PSO. Over the past two - three months I've seen both a rise in people appearing for Shop Theft (with mitigation being Benefits Sanctions) and the Court mainly sentencing to Conditional Discharges. I think many of the Bench in my area are aware of some of the issue which are now occurring under the Tories and I was wondering if this has been replicated across the country? I fear that with the planned welfare cuts we are going to see a lot more of these cases.

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We had someone in last week on shop theft, he was very miffed that he wasn't put in prison, he was very vocal about why he had done it. Some steal to feed a habit, others are stealing to feed themselves, mostly due to being sanctioned.

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I work in Manchester Mags Court. The number of people who are appearing before the bench for shoplifting must have doubled compared with previous years. People are committing offences simply because of being sanctioned and have no other means so are going out offending.

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We have a new Justice Secretary and whilst not quite going as far as the Howard League in congratulating Michael Gove on his new appointment, this blog wishes him the best of luck in sorting out the comprehensive mess left behind by his psychopathic predecessor. This from the Guardian:-

Michael Gove is to be returned to a major government department as justice secretary in the wake of the Conservative general election victory.

In a second round of senior appointments since the election, the prime minister is reshuffling Gove, who has been his chief whip in charge of party discipline since July last year, to the Ministry of Justice, taking charge of prisons, sentencing and criminal justice.

Gove was removed as education secretary last year to head the whips’ office, reportedly at the behest of the party’s general election strategist Lynton Crosby, who feared that the former journalist’s “toxic image” could be a vote loser. At the time Gove’s wife, the journalist Sarah Vine, made her feelings clear about the cabinet minister’s move out of the limelight by tweeting a link to a Daily Mailarticle that the newspaper headlined “A shabby day’s work which Cameron will live to regret”.

Downing Street sources have always insisted that the move was made merely to bring a key operator into the centre of the election campaign at a crucial time.

Gove’s return to a government department appears to confirm the prime minister’s trust in him, although it will inevitably dismay many outside of the Conservative party who were enraged by his trenchant views and combative style during his time at the Department for Education.

Gove is seen as a genuine radical unafraid of ruffling feathers by many within the Conservative fold, some of whom will be disappointed that he is not returning to the education department.