Pick of the Week 31

Privatisation is like capitalism. It doesn't matter how many times you screw it up, you get to keep trying. The public sector is like Socialism. If anything goes wrong, there is an attempt to condemn the whole idea to the dustbin of history. Failed government IT projects and tagging must have sucked up most of a £billion over the last ten years? Why do we let these people get away with it?

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The MoJ seem to have plenty of money to splash about. New super prisons, digitisation of courtrooms, prison maintenance contracts and the cost of heating, utilities, and maintenance of all the prisons and courts they've closed. New technologies developed to prevent smuggling into prisons and blocking mobile phones. Recruitment of extra prison staff, more money for CRCs. Failed IT projects and now millions of pounds overspent on developing and delivering GPS tagging.

Were the MoJ ever subject to the Governments Austerity programme? Now G4S are given another line in the water to pick up the pieces that another private company have left behind. You have to ask why G4S and why the MoJ would award them any contract that contained the word tagging after the last fiasco. I'm not even sure if the Serious Fraud Office have finished their investigations into that yet.

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Yet more management speak.: the MoJ project is not a disaster – it's in 'mid-flight'. Normally if you run out of fuel mid-flight you crash to the ground, but when you have taxpayer in-flight refuelling there's no worries. Mind you, if they had 'piloted' the project, they perhaps wouldn't have overshot the budget by £60 million – but the good news is that only £5 million was 'fruitless expenditure'. And G4S, subject to a serious fraud inquiry, gets the contract. Meanwhile, all we hear is that 'probation must do better' whilst elsewhere mismanagement is bailed out by the taxpayer. At some future point, no doubt, the MoJ project team will receive an award for their innovative work! - and job opportunities courtesy of all the friends they have made in the private sector.

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The graduates training as prison officers: 'People think we just turn keys and shout orders'. "Building relationships, interaction, assisting and advising, and a helping hand now and then"? Well I never! Who would of thought that approach might make a difference?

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It's looking more like they've elected to pursue a scorched Earth policy than to acknowledge anything of the hubris and incompetence that has characterised their ill-fated adventure in Criminal Justice. The closure of their Fareham 'Professional Services Centre' for their CRCs, with the loss of all jobs, has just been announced, and it looks like this will just be the beginning of a ruthless paring back of the otherwise already sorely diminished 'service' that presently passes for probation provision under Interserve.

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Just received an email from Unison and Napo regarding redundancies and what not to sign. I don't know if this 'fit for growth' will help them in the medium and long term, their shares have plummeted and they can't meet their payments, last month they struggled to pay their construction workers, if this goes on for too long they will go BUST, that's what greed does one deal too many. Even their chums in the gov will not be able to pull them out of this hole. Our office has been measured in the last few weeks, probably have to work from Micky D's. Not a good time at Manchester CRC with all this shit going on, why should their financial problems and bad deals have to have an impact on a service to the most vulnerable in society, that's privatisation for you.

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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?

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* Star contribution of the week
It 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'.

The 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.

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The lease on our office has expired. We are being moved, out of borough, to share a CRC office. For 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.

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Would this be Harrow coming to Barnet? Yes I've heard about this. London CRC MTCnovo. 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.

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The NPS pays these enormous agency rates yet can't offer continuation of service and therefore tenable pay rates to vastly experienced Probation Officers currently stranded in floundering CRCs. Is blatantly propping up the private CRCs by freezing staff out of defecting to NPS really worth all this additional government expenditure on enriching employment agencies?

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Agreed, so NPS paying equivalent of ~£50,000 pa to agency staff PLUS agency fees, but insistence that taking on PO's has to be at bottom of scale AFTER months of waiting for clearance. We really need to know who in Govt is benefiting financially from their shareholdings in CRCs & these agencies. It must be the only explanation for maintaining & financing such a ridiculous state of affairs.

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And agency fees are what? About the same again as the money paid to the agency PO? We're getting close to £100,000 per agency worker - that could pay for three POs with plenty of experience if they were offered continuity of service in coming over from CRCs (that were all part of the same organisation just a few short years ago). So we have the CRCs being given hundreds of millions in extra payments, and millions more being needlessly poured into private employment agencies to prop up the NPS while a pool of experienced and capable staff presently stranded in the floundering CRCs are deliberately excluded in order to maintain the fantasy that the CRCs are anything other than a massively expensive and ever more dangerous failure.

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As an SPO at the top of the scale, I was 'sifted' into a CRC and took redundancy for no other reason that I was not going to work for the kind of people that Sodexo were clearly going to be. The NPS was something I did consider prior to the split and I did try to get back across the divide before it was too late but failed to do so and left (for the record; I never regretted leaving the CRC as it was patently obvious that this was going to be a disaster. My only regret was that I was forced out by the TR debacle and that the service I had enjoyed working in for decades was being compromised so completely.

Since that point, however, it subsequently became known that, were I to return to the NPS at any point in the future, I would have to start at the bottom of the scale and that my service to date would not amount to a hill of beans. It is that fact and that alone that prevents me from considering applying for the NPS. It is not the money, it is the principle. It is like being robbed and then being offered my own property back at a higher price than I originally paid for them. Simply put, they can kiss my ..........

There is no acceptance of the abusive nature of what has been perpetrated on the workforce within the Probation Service over the last few years. No acknowledgement of the unfairness, the deception, the sleight of hand. Our only response is to turn out backs and it is heartening to see that the Probation Service and CRCs are experiencing recruitment and retention difficulties. It is a free market and they, the NPS and the CRCs are reaping what they have sown.

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The salary scales are a massive problem in the CRCs. People are accepting jobs knowing the salary scale is £22k - £27k but have no idea until it's too late that it will take 15years at least to get to the top. Many are looking to escape as soon as they realise this fact. To give someone an annual increment that amounts to £120 pa is an absolute disgrace bad enough no cost of living rise. About 10yrs ago we'd get cost of living plus our increment but now nothing. If I didn't have the service in or not as old as I am, i and many like me would also be off I can guarantee you that.

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Ah but hang on, lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Credit where its due, some probation people did very nicely out of this, e.g. those who were given full EVR terms; especially those got full EVR & were subsequently employed by the CRC or NPS in newly created roles... not forgetting the large golden goodbyes to Chief Officers. And some have been able to take their voluntary severance & immediately register with agencies spending 6 months here, 2 months in the sun, 6 months there, a month's skiing, etc, etc - a nomadic workforce on SalaryPlus cherry-picking their locations. 'End-to-end case management' at its best!!!

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Just a small point in response to your smartarse comments. I took severance because EVR was not an option in my area and I could see what was coming with the CRCs (Can't Really Cope?). The money I got was effectively used to fund the downsizing of my house and the payment of the mortgage whilst I sorted a load of things out financially that I would not have had to deal with had I not been 'let go'. The money literally ran out just as I was getting back on my feet. I now earn about £6k less than I did when I was with Probation but I am ok because the money I got in severance, a relatively large sum on paper, allowed me to 'regroup'. The sums of money that most people got were pitiful compared to what they would have earned had they been allowed to carry on with their careers unhindered. No new car. No foreign holiday. Just the life changes necessary when you are sideswiped.

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Sorry for any confusion &/or distress, annoyance, etc ... I was having a go at the greedy bastards, whilst also recognising that some modern-day 'pragmatists' aren't unhappy with their lot. It was NOT a cheap shot at those who left with severance under sufferance. Hope this clarification helps remove some barbs.

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When the Tory/Lib Dem coalition introduced the TR wrecking ball; aided by a degree of very weak opposition, let loose the free market into the Probation Service and then unimpeded, allowed the carpetbaggers to do what they do best... Plunder! Who can then blame experienced POs playing them at their own game. If the market wants and needs their experience, pay for it; market rules apply. Loyalty within the CRCs, and I suspect also within the NPS is now a very one way street. I can never condemn an agency PO.... at the very least they expose by their daily presence the utter madness of TR. A constant reminder to the overseers of the MoJ balance sheet of the act of sheer folly in putting ideology above everything...

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It’s just sickening. Well meaning staff are just being abused. As it stands, there is no way to challenge or change this. Staff are not kept informed with any decisions which hugely impact their job, their day to day work and even their personal life (location, pay, inappropriate demands daily). Senior management - either don’t care, have no compassion or are simply yes men/women. What they all display is a weakness. A moral weakness. A professional weakness. Weak management, all of them.

MTCnovo - the company who introduced BIONIC. Believe It Or Not I Care. Laughable. Front line staff are regularly mistreated, uninformed and restricted but numerous barriers to do a decent job. Morale is at rock bottom. Staff now literally do the minimum to not create any notice from management. Sad thing is, the recent London Inspection will no doubt disclose an improvement. It always was a fix. Which will be confirmed when the report is released. Exit plan in full motion. When complete, all evidence of mismanagement, shoddy management, the abuse of power, the disgusting service now pretending to manage risk and protect he public - will be shared with news, papers, MP’s, Panorama.