How's TTG Doing?

From the recent proceedings of the Public Accounts Committee:-

Q41 Caroline Flint: 

Before I pass on to my colleague, Mr Pugh, we heard earlier, Mr Heaton, about the new system for those with less than a 12- month sentence. Through-the-gate services have now been running for a year, and this is to enable the process to start while people are still in prison, before they leave. How do you think the community rehabilitation companies are performing? 

Richard Heaton: My impression, although others will come in on this, but my impression is that this has not quite settled down and the story is probably mixed. It is not a part of the service that I am 100% confident about— 

Q42 Caroline Flint: Why’s that? 

Richard Heaton: Just because I detect inconsistency, that’s all. I am not 100% confident about any of this; that is why it is such a difficult programme.

Q43 Caroline Flint: 60% confident? 

Richard Heaton: Yes, all right, if you like. 

Q44 Caroline Flint: Do you want to put a number on it, Mr Heaton? 

Richard Heaton: Mr Spurr or Mr Porée will be able to come in on this, but I detect some inconsistency. I think it has been slow to get off the ground, and it is one of those areas where we have caught up quite a lot recently, but that is an impressionistic view. 

Michael Spurr: As I said earlier, I think this is an area where there is a significant amount of variability in provision. There are some good examples: there are a couple of private sector prisons, HM Prison Parc and HM Prison Forest Bank, with very good inspection reports. Talking about how the CRCs operate in the public sector, Lewes and Durham are good examples. In other areas there has been a real difficulty for the CRCs in making those services work. There are a lot of reasons for that. Frankly, I think that we probably expected greater investment in this area early on. That has suffered because of the volumes, so there have been delays in investment. We had expected it to be earlier. That is part of the conversation that we are having now with providers as we look to restructure the contacts. 

The other issue is around the complexity of providing resettlement services, working with the whole range of partners. I think that the Chair asked earlier about our engagement with second-tier providers and others, and Mr Porée gave answers on that. We are very conscious of the impact of provision with a lot of voluntary and social sector engagement, but then there are also a lot of local third-tier providers in prisons who feel to some degree that they have been squeezed out by other, larger social sector organisations such as Nacro or Catch22. Clinks has done a review of what the impact has been on those third-sector organisations. A lot of that is about prison provision, where there has been very niche provision in some prisons which feels squeezed out at the moment. 

I spoke at the Clinks AGM to the social sector about how this is developing and how we are encouraging providers to work with smaller, niche providers where that works and where that can really add benefit. That is not yet all at the place where we want it to be; it is still developing. A year is a reasonable time, but we need to think about the scale of what has been taken on in terms of providing these services at a time when their volumes overall are lower than anticipated, and as a result of that their cash is also lower. That is where the hit has been, frankly.