Following on from the blog post the other day about the continuing tagging disaster, here we have Professor Mike Nellis joining up the dots on the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies website:-
Electronic monitoring: in flight to where?
Mike Nellis assesses the latest developments in the electronic monitoring fiasco and asks where future policy is headed
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) session on the National Audit Office’s (NAO) report on the Ministry of Justice's (MoJ) failed 'New World' electronic monitoring (EM) strategy on the 13th November was a disappointment.
It did not get to the bottom of why things had gone so catastrophically wrong, concentrating only on the hows and whats, as the NAO themselves had done. Chris Grayling, the minister who more than anyone devised and drove this secretive, overambitious strategy, abetted by the Cabinet Office, and drawing on a Policy Exchange report that had considered radio frequency (RF) based EM curfews obsolete and 75,000 offenders per day on GPS tracking a feasible and desirable option, was not held to account in the way he deserved.
Three civil servants dutifully carried the can for him, Richard Heaton, Michael Spurr and Adrian Scott, the first two of whom were indeed there during the fiasco, although neither deserved pillorying for a strategy they would surely not have signed up to had their minister not been so determined. But they do get paid to apologise for it, and that's what they did, as well as assuring us that a now more modest EM strategy – in which RF EM will remain dominant – had been salvaged from the old, and would be alright.
A disaster from start to finish
The PAC members pressed the civil servants to accept that New World had been 'a catastrophe', 'shambolic', 'a total disaster from start to finish'. £60 million was spent on it, from 2012, and not a single person had been placed on GPS by 2015, its original start date.
The gist of the MoJ’s response was that New World had been conceived with the best of intentions – to 'break up the market' and 'go for innovation' – but they ruefully accepted that it had indeed been overambitious and flawed in execution, albeit hinting that this could only have been realized in hindsight. Furthermore, they identified two silver linings.
Firstly, it was the decision to move from a duopoly of EM providers – G4S and Serco each providing a regional service – to 'a tower model' involving four integrated companies providing a national service that had exposed the overcharging scandal.
Secondly the £60m fiasco itself had been a learning experience, which provided the foundations of the assuredly good, sensible strategy that was now, as Heaton confidently put it, 'in flight' and 'set up to succeed'. Only £4 milli0n (+VAT, making it £5.2 million), he said, had been 'fruitless expenditure'. This was the pay-off to Steatite, the second selected tag supplier, when the Ministry’s reckless pursuit of a bespoke supertag was abandoned.
A disaster foretold
There is no way that £60m had to be spent to work out how to introduce GPS tracking into an existing EM programme. All the academics, think tanks and commercial actors knowledgeable about EM, and indeed many of the MoJ’s own civil servants, would have advised a more prudent strategy.
There were several other countries, at that time, whose experiences with GPS could easily have been learned form. But the minister and his close advisers were never in listening or consultative mode about New World, and the PAC accepted too readily Spurr’s cursory, fudged explanations of why not even the probation and prison services were treated as important stakeholders in the proposed EM strategy.
Somewhat paradoxically, given its otherwise great influence, the most articulate and persuasive opposition to both the prevailing duopoly of EM service provision and the upcoming the tower model came from the centre right think tank Policy Exchange, whose report had strongly favoured localized contracting with Probation Services and/or Police and Crime Commissioners. A second centre right think tank, Reform, later made the same cogent argument.
Neither the NAO not the PAC asked why the MoJ had not explored the cost-effectiveness of local contracting, but after this fiasco someone somewhere ought to place it back on the agenda.
No evidence, no rationale
Famously, New World had had no evidence-base and no pilot schemes. This was about 'getting quick results'. The civil servants said: 'we were embarking on a major transformation programme', as if this was an excuse.
The PAC seemed more interested in the absent evidence-base for the transformation than the absent rationale for the transformation itself, the non-existence of a publicly debatable policy on EM in general and GPS tracking in particular.
Spurr helpfully conceded that more than evidence was at issue: 'we should have had an underlying policy base for what we wanted to do with tracking, and we didn’t'. But the PAC did not pursue that. It rightly pointed out that it had called for more research on EM in 2006, which had not been done. But it still failed to raise the larger question of why, after all this time, the MoJ was still no nearer to having a clear strategy for EM in the context of a clear, coherent penal policy.
Providers badly treated
The PAC was concerned that the 'small, medium enterprises' (SMEs) involved in the tower model, first Buddi, then Steatite, had been badly treated by the MoJ and indeed set up to fail. The civil servants conceded that the original specifications for the supertag were too numerous and complex, and that the participation demanded of small companies with few staff and other customers to serve was excessive.
Buddi’s understandable unwillingness to share technical secrets (intellectual property) with a much larger company (Airbus) so that the hardware and software could be integrated with each other had become grounds for its withdrawal before contracts were signed.
The civil servants feigned regret on this, but defended it all the same, begging the far more pertinent question, which the PAC spared them, of why the tower model separated hardware and software provision in the first place. In the original procurement, Buddi had sensibly bid to do both, and had a proven track record of delivering both in its successful police and NHS schemes.
Few wanted the job
The issue with Steatite was somewhat different. They replaced Buddi despite, as the NAO had revealed, being below the benchmark for reliability, partly because they had no experience of making GPS devices. What was barely made clear in the session was that Steatite got the job by default, because there were too few other companies willing to take it on.
This was less about SMEs as such being unwilling to work with the MoJ, as the PAC hinted, and more about experienced EM providers refusing to invest their time and money in the MoJ’s pursuit of a bespoke supertag, whose intellectual property the MoJ would own, when there were already satisfactory devices available on the open market.
During Michael Gove’s brief tenure as Justice Minister – the MoJ conceded this – paying off Steatite and closing down Just Solutions International, the commercial arm of the National Offender Management Service, established by Grayling to sell British penal expertise abroad. His supposedly world-beating EM technology was to have been one of these services for sale.
Continuing problems
Turning to the present, the PAC were understandably concerned that even the salvaged programme would not deliver. They sought (and got) assurances that sufficient staff time was now being devoted to it, that it was insulated from Brexit, that MoJ competence in procurement and contract management was now adequate to the task.
The civil servants insisted that now that the integration function in the tower model had been shifted from Capita to the MoJ, as the NAO had recommended, they were in a better position to drive the programme forward. But the question of whether the delivery structure was more complicated than it needed to be still hung over proceedings.
The PAC worried that there had already been slippage from the new programme’s projected national start date in 2018 to February-March 2019. It was also mildly irritated that the civil servants would not even commit firmly to that.
Despite acknowledging the still low take-up in the 8 GPS pilot schemes – 491 subjects so far, out of the 600/1000 anticipated – the PAC seemed reassured by the MoJ’s now modest model, from which, Scott said, 'lessons are being learned as we go'.
One of these lessons, revealingly, 'was that we now understand when sentencers will use GPS or not'. This has apparently shrunk the MoJ expectations of what the future scale of GPS use will be to no more than a 1000 per day, with the current figure of 12,000 on RF EM remaining static. This is lower than it was before New World was conceived.
A recipe for penal conservatism
What the PAC did not seem to understand was just how far the MoJ’s aspirations have fallen: from a world-beating grand plan for mass satellite tracking without RF, imposed from the MoJ, to a sentencer-determined model of GPS use in a mostly RF system.
The programme is indeed 'in flight', but not only in the sense that Heaton meant. It is 'in flight' not only from Grayling’s crazy hopes of having the world’s biggest and best GPS programme but also – still – from any attempt to consider what EM technologies might actually contribute to a rational, coherent penal policy.
Given the broader decline in the use of community sentences, of which the decline in RF EM use may be a part (no-one knows for certain), leaving sentencing to the vicissitudes of sentencers is a recipe for penal conservatism and the untenable status quo.
No solution to the probation and prisons crisis
From wanting too much control, the MoJ seemingly now wants too little. EM is no solution to the manifest problems of the privatised probation services or the understaffed prisons. It is also no substitute for measures which meet the psychological and practical needs of offenders.
But used properly, integrated with other supportive measures, EM technologies can make a modest contributions to reductions in custody and public protection in ways that those under criminal sanction themselves find legitimate.
There is still a need for a 21st century penal strategy with a properly contextualized place for EM. It is up to the penal reform network to at least imagine what that could be.
Mike Nellis
Electronic monitoring: in flight to where?
Mike Nellis assesses the latest developments in the electronic monitoring fiasco and asks where future policy is headed
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) session on the National Audit Office’s (NAO) report on the Ministry of Justice's (MoJ) failed 'New World' electronic monitoring (EM) strategy on the 13th November was a disappointment.
It did not get to the bottom of why things had gone so catastrophically wrong, concentrating only on the hows and whats, as the NAO themselves had done. Chris Grayling, the minister who more than anyone devised and drove this secretive, overambitious strategy, abetted by the Cabinet Office, and drawing on a Policy Exchange report that had considered radio frequency (RF) based EM curfews obsolete and 75,000 offenders per day on GPS tracking a feasible and desirable option, was not held to account in the way he deserved.
Three civil servants dutifully carried the can for him, Richard Heaton, Michael Spurr and Adrian Scott, the first two of whom were indeed there during the fiasco, although neither deserved pillorying for a strategy they would surely not have signed up to had their minister not been so determined. But they do get paid to apologise for it, and that's what they did, as well as assuring us that a now more modest EM strategy – in which RF EM will remain dominant – had been salvaged from the old, and would be alright.
A disaster from start to finish
The PAC members pressed the civil servants to accept that New World had been 'a catastrophe', 'shambolic', 'a total disaster from start to finish'. £60 million was spent on it, from 2012, and not a single person had been placed on GPS by 2015, its original start date.
The gist of the MoJ’s response was that New World had been conceived with the best of intentions – to 'break up the market' and 'go for innovation' – but they ruefully accepted that it had indeed been overambitious and flawed in execution, albeit hinting that this could only have been realized in hindsight. Furthermore, they identified two silver linings.
Firstly, it was the decision to move from a duopoly of EM providers – G4S and Serco each providing a regional service – to 'a tower model' involving four integrated companies providing a national service that had exposed the overcharging scandal.
Secondly the £60m fiasco itself had been a learning experience, which provided the foundations of the assuredly good, sensible strategy that was now, as Heaton confidently put it, 'in flight' and 'set up to succeed'. Only £4 milli0n (+VAT, making it £5.2 million), he said, had been 'fruitless expenditure'. This was the pay-off to Steatite, the second selected tag supplier, when the Ministry’s reckless pursuit of a bespoke supertag was abandoned.
A disaster foretold
There is no way that £60m had to be spent to work out how to introduce GPS tracking into an existing EM programme. All the academics, think tanks and commercial actors knowledgeable about EM, and indeed many of the MoJ’s own civil servants, would have advised a more prudent strategy.
There were several other countries, at that time, whose experiences with GPS could easily have been learned form. But the minister and his close advisers were never in listening or consultative mode about New World, and the PAC accepted too readily Spurr’s cursory, fudged explanations of why not even the probation and prison services were treated as important stakeholders in the proposed EM strategy.
Somewhat paradoxically, given its otherwise great influence, the most articulate and persuasive opposition to both the prevailing duopoly of EM service provision and the upcoming the tower model came from the centre right think tank Policy Exchange, whose report had strongly favoured localized contracting with Probation Services and/or Police and Crime Commissioners. A second centre right think tank, Reform, later made the same cogent argument.
Neither the NAO not the PAC asked why the MoJ had not explored the cost-effectiveness of local contracting, but after this fiasco someone somewhere ought to place it back on the agenda.
No evidence, no rationale
Famously, New World had had no evidence-base and no pilot schemes. This was about 'getting quick results'. The civil servants said: 'we were embarking on a major transformation programme', as if this was an excuse.
The PAC seemed more interested in the absent evidence-base for the transformation than the absent rationale for the transformation itself, the non-existence of a publicly debatable policy on EM in general and GPS tracking in particular.
Spurr helpfully conceded that more than evidence was at issue: 'we should have had an underlying policy base for what we wanted to do with tracking, and we didn’t'. But the PAC did not pursue that. It rightly pointed out that it had called for more research on EM in 2006, which had not been done. But it still failed to raise the larger question of why, after all this time, the MoJ was still no nearer to having a clear strategy for EM in the context of a clear, coherent penal policy.
Providers badly treated
The PAC was concerned that the 'small, medium enterprises' (SMEs) involved in the tower model, first Buddi, then Steatite, had been badly treated by the MoJ and indeed set up to fail. The civil servants conceded that the original specifications for the supertag were too numerous and complex, and that the participation demanded of small companies with few staff and other customers to serve was excessive.
Buddi’s understandable unwillingness to share technical secrets (intellectual property) with a much larger company (Airbus) so that the hardware and software could be integrated with each other had become grounds for its withdrawal before contracts were signed.
The civil servants feigned regret on this, but defended it all the same, begging the far more pertinent question, which the PAC spared them, of why the tower model separated hardware and software provision in the first place. In the original procurement, Buddi had sensibly bid to do both, and had a proven track record of delivering both in its successful police and NHS schemes.
Few wanted the job
The issue with Steatite was somewhat different. They replaced Buddi despite, as the NAO had revealed, being below the benchmark for reliability, partly because they had no experience of making GPS devices. What was barely made clear in the session was that Steatite got the job by default, because there were too few other companies willing to take it on.
This was less about SMEs as such being unwilling to work with the MoJ, as the PAC hinted, and more about experienced EM providers refusing to invest their time and money in the MoJ’s pursuit of a bespoke supertag, whose intellectual property the MoJ would own, when there were already satisfactory devices available on the open market.
During Michael Gove’s brief tenure as Justice Minister – the MoJ conceded this – paying off Steatite and closing down Just Solutions International, the commercial arm of the National Offender Management Service, established by Grayling to sell British penal expertise abroad. His supposedly world-beating EM technology was to have been one of these services for sale.
Continuing problems
Turning to the present, the PAC were understandably concerned that even the salvaged programme would not deliver. They sought (and got) assurances that sufficient staff time was now being devoted to it, that it was insulated from Brexit, that MoJ competence in procurement and contract management was now adequate to the task.
The civil servants insisted that now that the integration function in the tower model had been shifted from Capita to the MoJ, as the NAO had recommended, they were in a better position to drive the programme forward. But the question of whether the delivery structure was more complicated than it needed to be still hung over proceedings.
The PAC worried that there had already been slippage from the new programme’s projected national start date in 2018 to February-March 2019. It was also mildly irritated that the civil servants would not even commit firmly to that.
Despite acknowledging the still low take-up in the 8 GPS pilot schemes – 491 subjects so far, out of the 600/1000 anticipated – the PAC seemed reassured by the MoJ’s now modest model, from which, Scott said, 'lessons are being learned as we go'.
One of these lessons, revealingly, 'was that we now understand when sentencers will use GPS or not'. This has apparently shrunk the MoJ expectations of what the future scale of GPS use will be to no more than a 1000 per day, with the current figure of 12,000 on RF EM remaining static. This is lower than it was before New World was conceived.
A recipe for penal conservatism
What the PAC did not seem to understand was just how far the MoJ’s aspirations have fallen: from a world-beating grand plan for mass satellite tracking without RF, imposed from the MoJ, to a sentencer-determined model of GPS use in a mostly RF system.
The programme is indeed 'in flight', but not only in the sense that Heaton meant. It is 'in flight' not only from Grayling’s crazy hopes of having the world’s biggest and best GPS programme but also – still – from any attempt to consider what EM technologies might actually contribute to a rational, coherent penal policy.
Given the broader decline in the use of community sentences, of which the decline in RF EM use may be a part (no-one knows for certain), leaving sentencing to the vicissitudes of sentencers is a recipe for penal conservatism and the untenable status quo.
No solution to the probation and prisons crisis
From wanting too much control, the MoJ seemingly now wants too little. EM is no solution to the manifest problems of the privatised probation services or the understaffed prisons. It is also no substitute for measures which meet the psychological and practical needs of offenders.
But used properly, integrated with other supportive measures, EM technologies can make a modest contributions to reductions in custody and public protection in ways that those under criminal sanction themselves find legitimate.
There is still a need for a 21st century penal strategy with a properly contextualized place for EM. It is up to the penal reform network to at least imagine what that could be.
Mike Nellis
You can talk to your fridge, or microwave or car; things have landed on the moon, mars, a comet travelling at insane speed in space; pictures have been received from the edge of the known universe - but they can't fit a GPS tag to a naughty person in the UK? How much wasted so far?
ReplyDeleteIt is my belief that the fundamental issue here is competence. The simple fact is that the whole of the MOJ, NOMS and HMPPPS along with the providers who took up the CRC contracts have operated on the basis that what Probation used to do was easy and that anyone can do it. They got rid of arguable two generations of management and replaced them with people who THOUGHT they understood the job but didn't. They ditched around 40% of the workforce, generally the most experienced, and created a workforce that was inexperienced and unmotivated (just as they did in the prisons). The Ministry and the privateers lacked the knowledge, experience and insight and surrounded themselves with the sycophantic, the self serving and the nakedly ambitious, bought what these people were selling (themselves and technological gimmicks that serve no real purpose and which offenders hold in utter contempt, nothing more) and replaced the heart and soul of the service with a misguided and uninformed ethos of 'cocking about on the margins of the issues'.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with performance management is that the targets determine organisational behaviour. The targets have always been 'that which can be counted'. The old school management recognised the need to meet these targets as PART of a corporate approach and not as the COMPLETE corporate approach. That is the difference. The new kids on the block have never understood the complex relationships between offender need/responsivity and the credibility of the service in the minds of sentencers, Police and Prisons. They never recognised the depth of the work undertaken and have approached the issues as would a Daily Mail reader; 'these Left Wing, namby pamby lightweights wasting public money on cups of tea and a chat'.
They have got what they deserve and should be held accountable.
Excellent analysis, in my humble opinion. Thank you.
DeleteMaybe for 'held accountable' you could substitute 'held eight feet in the air by the hair while being hit with long bamboo poles like human piñata'?
DeleteIn flight to where?
ReplyDeleteLooking like Woking Links maybe moved on from the library.
http://www.thewestonmercury.co.uk/news/weston-super-mare-town-hall-health-and-safety-review-after-probation-service-concerns-1-5281545
Are probation arrangements at Weston’s Town Hall putting public at risk?
DeleteArrangements where criminals mingle alongside library users during probation meetings in Weston-super-Mare have been called into question – prompting a health and safety review at the Town Hall’s gateway building.
A number of services are run from the same building in Walliscote Grove Road, including the library, the council’s housing team and a police desk.
Staff from a probation company moved into the Town Hall 15 months ago, but, because of the lack of space, offenders can be interviewed alongside library users, meaning their personal conversations can be overheard.
One probation officer interviewed by the Guardian newspaper said the situation was putting the public at risk, and was also denying offenders a proper chance to engage in the rehabilitation programme.
A health and safety review was carried out as a result of those concerns, although a spokesman for the Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC), which runs the probation service in Somerset, said the probe has not revealed security breaches.
A spokesman for North Somerset Council said the company is looking at alternative locations to see some of its service users in.
They added: “The gateway in the town hall is used by a number of different organisations and has been held up as a good example of partner agencies working closely together and offering a variety of services in one location.”
A CRC spokesman said the Town Hall is part of its network of community hubs, which are designed to bring services together to reduce offending.
They said: “We share this venue with Avon and Somerset police and North Somerset Council’s housing team – two of our main partners delivering important services affecting our service users. At all times we aim to deliver a safe service, working in an environment enabling us to build up trust and relationships with the people we support.
“We are talking with the council about the facilities and are exploring options to ensure we continue to deliver safe services that deliver results for our service users and the wider community.”
Weston’s MP John Penrose met with the probation director and said he was pleased they accepted they needed to find alternative accommodation.
Shirking Links again another anonymous spokesman quote. Focus on the issue and the risk to public.
DeleteNews is that Working links have done a deal with Mc Donald's. Apparently the burger chain is offering its restaurants as a meeting place under a small contract that includes coffee and a packet of chips per use of each interview. The new provider of open use of the restaurant has said they welcome all customers offenders and working Links to meet as part of the chains contribution to safer community cohesion. Working Links said frankly we don't give a F*** just so long as we get the odd offender seen we count the numbers as we got caught fiddling them before and now we don't have to fork out rents on expensive buildings. Its a save save scenario as we buy some chips and a coffee at a bulk discount and its not like offenders cant get themselves down to the home of the Big Mac. There are no negatives on this initiative although staff do smell of onions and burger fat. Working Links are looking to expand their community engagements more widely and will shortly be utilising all bus shelters for interviews and reporting claiming this is a remarkable and positive step forwards because by the time the reporting is done the offender can cross the road in time to get their return ride home in less than 5 minutes. They claim to have plans to use the GPs waiting rooms and a few of the shop doorways on the high street where the big stores have closed. CRCs are so innovative and this is exactly why staff were excited about the new privatised provision bringing unparalleled new dimensions. It has plumbed as low as it can ever be now. Working stinks.
DeleteThe lease on our office has expired. We are being moved, out of borough, to share a CRC office.
ReplyDeleteFor service users, this means an hour journey on public transport to attend appointments at our new place of work.
It’s challenging enough to engage with service users who have chaotic lifestyles, substance issues, mental health concerns, limited access to funds.
Leaflets are being prepared to provide to service users.
Yet to clarify whether they will be provided with travel fares (unlikely). If it is a permanent move out of borough (likely).
What is evident - and comes as no surprise - front line staff & service users are not considered in any major changes. All about money. Staff who have attempted to speak up have a received a clear message - put up, shut up.
CRC is an absolute travesty. A near impossible job made even more impossible. There is no hope.
Just one problem - they are without shame.
Delete$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
23.30 would this be Harrow coming to Barnet? Yes I've heard about this. London CRC. MTC Novo. They have no shame and they haven't got a clue. Allegedly they have ended their lease in the premise they were in. Allegedly they had another place to go. But that plan fell through. So their plan b is to colonise Barnet office. If that story is true it shows utter incompetence. Already Barnet office have received a large group of unpaid work staff very recently. That is ok because there was space. Needless to say though there has been no extra printers or photo copiers provided so it won't be long before we have only intermittent ability to send letters out or print documents for service users . Not sure these will bother to attend that often come the move. If you have to come to barnet from Harrow on public transport it could be well over an hour depending on where in Harrow you live. A three hour round trip at vast expense to see a harassed overworked desk hopping probation worker who will interview you in accordance with the crissa way of recording . I think I might just take my chances instead if I were a service user.
DeleteWhat does London Lord Major think of this? Might be worth contacting him to spell it out. CRC owners will try to gloss over the truth but itvis starting to come out now. Managers within CRC's who go along with this without speaking up are complicit and will have their day in court.
ReplyDeleteYes 6.28 I agree. Managers are complicit. It is time for them to choose their side and most find themselves bereft of a backbone. Neither do they appear to have the ability to work with each other against these and other developments
ReplyDeleteAllegedly, staff were only notified this week - despite senior management knowing for weeks. Noticed via email. Disgusting management form the top towards the people who keep on rolling with the punches.
ReplyDelete