The Evidence Mounts

I distinctly get the feeling that things can't go on as they are for much longer, not least because there's a veritable tidal wave of evidence emerging that completely contradicts all the positive spin the MoJ, CRCs and NPS can muster. There must surely come a point at which it not only has to be acknowledged, but the penny finally drops that there could be political advantage in just calling it a day and doing something different. 

We know influential people read this blog, such as Bob Neill MP, chair of the Justice Select Committee and that committee are currently collecting evidence for an inquiry into the TR omnishambles. We know he reads it because he told us when he spoke at the Napo AGM in Nottingham a few weeks ago just seven minutes into his address. It's well worth listening to in full. 

I think he'd be interested in reading the damning testimony that was sent in yesterday by practitioners from London CRC, currently being inspected and from colleagues getting hacked-off by the NPS recruitment process:-

A constant theme and message from those in parliament or criminal justice ‘experts’ - CRC’s are not performing as expected. There is limited, if any, purposeful activity with offenders. No targeted intervention. A simple question. What do they expect?

An average caseload is 50-60 (London). We are constantly told by management, 55 is a ‘manageable’ number. That’s part of the problem. It is just a number. It fails to take into account the person, the service user, offender. It fails to take into account issues contributing to their behaviour. Their problems. Support needed. Whether they are homeless, have substance misuse issues, mental health concerns, financial issues, learning difficulties.

A caseload cannot and should not be assessed as a number, but as a person. With complexities. With time required to address these. To allow and provide positive change. Sadly, that has all been lost. Buried under a need to reduce costs, display a green tick next to a meaningless target, de-skill staff and ultimately offset any actual quality rehabilitation. Services get cut. Targets get changed. Weekly.

The current inspection in London is a farce. All cases being inspected have be identified. Quality assured. They have been manufactured to look good. It is all a lie. A cover up. In Inspection briefings, schools and OFSTED has been used. We are told schools prepare. So should we. Schools are generally notified 24 hours prior to an inspection. You can’t cook the books in a day. In LondonCRC, you can in three months. It’s shameful really. There will be no real, true assessment of the shambles our service has become.

I have been a Probation Officer for 10 years. I am ashamed. Ashamed at what my profession has become. Ashamed at the service I am now delivering. Gone - despite policies and talk - are supervisions with your line manager. Gone is any form of training to increase knowledge, improve your quality or skill set. All that is implemented are boxes being ticked. Cover ups.

Gone is community payback. I quote ‘do not contact CP for a month or so, they won’t answer, they are retraining’. It’s a shambles. Gone is any decent IOM work. No budget. No effort. Just a monthly meeting where no actions are set, no support offered to prevent. Just a tick box exercise. We have met. That’s all is expected.

Recently rolled out has been ‘Plan, Meet, Record’. A patronising policy on what our job is. We can plan. We can meet. We can record. We cannot effect change when polices like these are rolled out to simplify what is a challenging, demanding role. Front line staff are not valued, not appreciated, not supported we have been de-skilled. It will only get worse. Until front line staff are increased, services portfolios built, funding in important areas rectified. Management with actual experience in the field. Not faces that fit with limited experience who simply become yes men/woman.

LondonCRC has become lazy. Management are - except a rare few old school SPO’s - clueless. Front line staff are demoralised and do what is required to be seen to be doing their job. There is a deep rooted negative atmosphere. An unhappiness which creates poor quality. A poor service to people who need help.

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I also work at LondonCRC and you have said it perfectly. I am approaching my 15-year anniversary as a London PO and I am ashamed to be a part of this organisation. I have lost the energy to keep fighting - I am known as the "challenging one" because I have never been afraid to ask management to explain the anomalies and downright failures in their decisions. I use the MTCNovo policies themselves to challenge the management lazy approach that has led to poor frontline provisions.

So, for example, if this new "Plan, Meet, Record" is meant to encourage us to have meaningful interactions with service users (which surely is the whole point of probation anyway and the way professional staff work when we have the luxury of time!) why is my SPO now issuing me with a "management instruction under threat of disciplinary action" to waste time entering appointments onto Microsoft Outlook and my mobile device when I already have this system entered within the MoJ nDelius required recording system. Why too am I being told to 'just cancel' service user appointments in order to attend performance meetings to sit around in her tiny office looking at an Excel spreadsheet? Surely, actually meeting with the people we work with is the whole point of performance (ironically, the most recent 'just cancel that appointment' command was for a new case that she went on to as me, 'when will you lock the initial sentence plan eOASys?'). It just makes no sense!

We are working in a demoralising environment and do not have line management support. The comments above are absolutely spot on. I actually feel like I am in an unhealthy relationship with London CRC and I am making my exit plan - with a very heavy heart, because I actually LOVE the frontline probation work I do - both with the clients/service users and colleagues, but it is either I stay and get sick, or I leave to ensure that I can be psychosocially healthy.

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Thank you! You are spot on - all energy and enthusiasm is being removed. There is absolutely no direction from senior management. Decent, knowledgeable, passionate staff are being forced to move on. Like you, my exit plan is being made. Until then, I will fight. I will challenge. Stay strong and look after yourself.

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I see you tweeted today "There is a massive shortage of qualified staff and MoJ are pushing for CRC's and NPS to retain fully qualified staff." They are also recruiting qualified staff, except... over in another place, NPS recruits are comparing notes on how long the process takes from interview to sitting at a desk. So far the average seems to be circa 10 months, with one person having taken a WHOLE YEAR. We are considering a formal awards ceremony, with the "Waiting for Godot-ful Shared Services" Trophy. At least one recruited, experienced PO just gave up and walked away. So treating your recruits in a professional courteous way, and not treating your existing staff like shit, might be a good starting place.

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O how true. I was recruited for NPS. Nearly a year on and still not in place. 17 years qualified. I withdrew my application this week because I need to get on with my life. I am agency and valued by colleagues for my knowledge and skills and I value them as colleagues. What an absolute crock of s**t the recruitment process is now it is in the hands of civil serpents. Never experienced anything like it. They couldn't even get the advert right on the website and none of the candidates realised there would be a test prior to going before the board and that was the start. I could go on but I wont. The sooner the recruitment process is devolved back to the NPS Local area the better.

My colleagues and our senior are disappointed I will not be on permanent staff but completely understand my position and are highly pissed off with the recruitment system. The absolute killer is the 'no-reply' emails you are sent. How disrespectful is that? No facility to ask a question or to have diversity respected just upload this and that...a disgraceful way of treating professionals. The civil serpents employed by shared services are a lottery. If you get a helpful one. Great. But most of them could not find their own backsides with both hands and as for the vetting process, the cause of all this. Don't get me started.

--oo00oo--

Thanks to regular reader 'Getafix for spotting the following exchanges in the House of Lords and brought about by the redoubtable Lord Ramsbotham, a true friend of our profession:-

Lord Ramsbotham Crossbench 2:39 pm, 31st October 2017

To ask Her Majesty’s Government when the review of probation contracts, due for completion in April this year, will be published.

Lord Keen of Elie The Advocate-General for Scotland, Lords Spokesperson (Ministry of Justice)

My Lords, we undertook an internal review of the probation system and, as a result, made changes to community rehabilitation company contracts in the summer. Details of these changes were contained in a Written Ministerial Statement from Minister Gyimah on 19 July. We are continuing to explore further improvements that could be made to the delivery of probation services and will set out at a later stage any changes that are made as a result of this work.

Lord Ramsbotham Crossbench

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. Clearly, all is not well with probation. Following a whole series of disappointingly and devastatingly bad reports by the chief inspector, the Justice Select Committee launched an inquiry. Following the bad contracting, during the summer the Ministry of Justice had to bail out community rehabilitation companies to the tune of £277 million, which it can ill afford. Many of the warnings in the official impact assessment that the rushed Transforming Rehabilitation agenda had a higher than average risk of failure have been proved correct. Can the Minister tell the House what the Government are going to do about probation? Will they make time for a debate on the subject before the end of the year?

Lord Keen of Elie The Advocate-General for Scotland, Lords Spokesperson (Ministry of Justice)

On that last point, I cannot say that the Government will be able to make time for a debate on the subject before the end of the year. On the suggestion of bad contracting, I would point out that contracts were entered into with 21 CRCs, and that those contracts encountered some financial difficulty for one particular reason—namely, it was originally anticipated that some 80% of those undertaking probation would be referred to the 21 community rehabilitation companies. In the event, only about 60% of those subject to probation supervision were referred to the companies, and that impacted directly upon their financial model as determined under the original contracts. For that reason, interim arrangements were made with the CRCs in the year 2016-17, and in the current year. However, the figure of £277 million referred to by the noble Lord is not a fixed figure: it may have to be met, depending on the performance of the CRCs.

Lord Beecham Shadow Spokesperson (Housing), Shadow Spokesperson (Communities and Local Government), Shadow Spokesperson (Justice)

My Lords, morale in Northumbria’s probation service and CRC is at a low level because of understaffing, with 50% of officers leaving the service, excessive workloads, less supervision and the need to concentrate on high-risk cases at the expense of other cases. This is exemplified by case loads of 40, including four to five high-risk cases, now being replaced by much higher case loads, with a greater proportion of high-risk cases and problems with escalating cases from the CRCs to the National Probation Service. What do the Government regard as a satisfactory case load for officers to manage in terms of overall numbers and the balance between high-risk and other cases?

Lord Keen of Elie The Advocate-General for Scotland, Lords Spokesperson (Ministry of Justice)

There is no fixed proportion as between officers and the number of persons being supervised. That will depend upon the particular CRC and the circumstances in which it is engaged with the individual. The National Probation Service is in the course of recruiting 1,400 additional staff. In addition, the CRC contracts require providers to ensure that they have sufficient adequately trained staff in place. Indeed, results tend to bear that out. Nearly two-thirds of CRCs have reduced the number of people reoffending in the past year, according to statistics up to June 2017.

Lord Trefgarne Chair, Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee

My Lords, is it not the case that the probation arrangements relating to those prisoners serving indeterminate sentences need to be brought up to date as a matter of urgency, since many of those prisoners should have been released long ago?

Lord Keen of Elie The Advocate-General for Scotland, Lords Spokesperson (Ministry of Justice)

Clearly, there is an issue over the supervision of those subject to IPP sentences. The circumstances in which they come before the Parole Board are determined under existing rules. Those are always under consideration.

Lord German Liberal Democrat

My Lords, just last month, the Chief Inspector of Probation laid out two conditions that she thought ought to be in the review: first, the community rehabilitation companies should have their finances put on a stable basis; secondly, these companies should be incentivised for success. Will the Minister heed the advice of his chief inspector, and will the Government meet this requirement as urgently as possible so that these companies can get on with the job of reducing reoffending, getting people into work and making sure that our prisons are not so overcrowded?

Lord Keen of Elie The Advocate-General for Scotland, Lords Spokesperson (Ministry of Justice)

We are of course conscious of the recommendations made by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Probation, which is why we undertook the task in the summer of ensuring that the CRCs were properly financed. As a consequence of that, during the year 2016-17 an additional £37 million was made available, and in contract year four—that is, the first three months of this year—a further £22 million has been made available for the CRCs so that they can meet their commitments. Over and above that, I can confirm that the CRCs are incentivised under the terms of their present contracts to achieve results, and that will remain the position.

Lord Laming Chair, Accommodation Steering Group Committee, Chair, Services Committee

My Lords, the prison population has never been as great as it is today. Is it not therefore a serious matter that the Government should ensure that courts have available to them a robust, rigorous and serious range of non-custodial penalties? The probation service is central to that.

Lord Keen of Elie The Advocate-General for Scotland, Lords Spokesperson (Ministry of Justice)

I agree with the noble Lord’s observations. In that connection, I would observe that, since February 2015, statutory supervision has been extended to a further 40,000 offenders who are otherwise sentenced to a period of imprisonment of less than 12 months—so that has increased the numbers subject to supervision. But clearly, we have regard to the extent to which community sentences and suspended sentence orders operate effectively. It is noted in the statistics published—

Too long.

Lord Keen of Elie The Advocate-General for Scotland, Lords Spokesperson (Ministry of Justice)

I am obliged to the noble Lord. It is noted in the statistics published on 26 October 2017 that the extent of further offending is lower in the case of community sentences.