Former PO Speaks For Many

Continuing to plunder the formidable mountain of evidence provided to the Justice Committee TR Inquiry, this forensic piece of work speaks for many I suspect:-

Written evidence from a former Probation Officer (TRH0004) 

This is a brief summary offering but a tiny glimpse into the impact of the Transforming Rehabilitation project from a personal perspective. 

1. After a variety of experiences in sport, economic development, advertising and media, I started my Probation Service apprenticeship, aged 28 years, as the first accredited Probation Volunteer with a pioneering scheme in the east Midlands. I was guided & supervised by an experienced Senior Probation Officer which led to a chain of events including my employment as an Assistant Warden in Approved Probation Hostels… as a Probation Services Assistant in a tough city centre team… and eventually to be accepted as a mature student on the Home Office sponsored scheme to study for the Diploma in Social Work, ‘Probation Pathway’. 

2. I qualified as a Probation Officer (and Social Worker), was immediately appointed as a First Year Probation Officer and the journey got ever more exciting… 

3. Over my 20+ years within the Probation Service my experiences were many and varied; no two days were ever the same. My places of work included prisons, courts, universities and community offices; I was involved in the early development of a common risk assessment tool (i.e. OASys, a laudable concept that became corrupted & misused); I delivered accredited programmes to individuals and groups; lectured and assessed Trainee Probation Officers; designed protocols with mental health professionals for co-working cases with severe and enduring mental health issues, including personality disorders; developed co-location community schemes with drug and alcohol teams; co-worked with Police Officers in an Integrated Offender Management team… 

4. I worked with some very high risk cases and fielded the brutally devastating consequences of a perpetrator’s actions – events that happened regardless of the timeliness, clarity or quality of any risk assessment. 

5. In the course of my work over the years I have been spat at, hit with furniture, bitten, followed home, received death-threats and had to face angry people wielding various weapons. I have had to cope with the sudden deaths of people I worked with; often through substance use, occasionally through violence. I have also been offered appreciative thanks by those I’ve worked with and/or their families, and/or their victims. 

6. Almost all of my working days during those 20+ years were in excess of the paid, contracted hours because I enjoyed my work, I valued the opportunity to make a contribution and I believed my caseload on any given day deserved the maximum effort I could give. I am not a martyr to lost causes, nor am I flawless or altruistic; I have screwed up many times, both personally and professionally. 

7. In November 2013, based upon some mythical algorithm, I was told I had been allocated to work in the privatised Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC). I appealed this decision only to be told it was non-negotiable and any further challenge would be regarded as tendering my notice. 

8. This was the second time in six years I had been forced to accept non-negotiable changes to my contract of employment; the previous occasion being the shift to Trust status. That does not include the numerous other contractual changes since 2007 including reduction or complete loss of in-service benefits (e.g. subsistence allowances, essential car user, etc.) or the loss of 3 days’ leave from my annual entitlement as part of some ham-fisted ‘pay harmonisation deal’. 

9. My working days were increasingly spent inputting data to an unreliable computer system when it should have involved face-to-face work with my caseload; or liaison with the Benefits Agency, with Social Workers and NHS staff. And whilst I was making myself unpopular fighting to get funding for the long-overdue assessment of an undiagnosed & untreated paranoid schizophrenic to facilitate transfer to a high secure hospital, or trying to organise a Circle of Support for a sex offender in the community, I was aware of the ‘noises off in the corridors of power’, e.g. Dame Ursula Brennan in her evidence to the Public Accounts Committee, 12 March 2014: 

“What I am trying to say is that we are not saying, “Here is how we do it now. We are going to do something that adds cost to it.” We are saying, “Here are all the costs now. They are going to lie in different places, and the procedures are going to look different.” So we are not simply saying, “Here is a process, we are adding cost to it.” We are saying, “Here is a process that is going to operate in a different way.” 

10. Or hollow promises from the ‘great and the good’: 

The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Faulks) (Con), 11 March 2014: 

"The efficiency savings that these reforms will generate will be reinvested in two major prizes that many noble Lords have long argued in favour of. The first is a through-the-gate system of support for everyone released from prison... The second is the extension of supervision after release to short sentenced prisoners," 

11. My union, the National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO), told us they had signed a national agreement protecting our terms & conditions, securing an Enhanced Voluntary Redundancy (EVR) scheme & confirming NO compulsory redundancies for the first seven (7) months of new ownership, i.e. until end August 2015. 

The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Faulks) (Con), 11 March 2014: 

“It is difficult to understand why there is apparently—so the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, says—discontent among the staff, because a deal has been negotiated with the unions. We have been undertaking negotiations with probation trade unions and the employers’ representatives over a national agreement for staff transfer that will protect the terms and conditions of staff transferring to the CRCs or the NPS. Probation trade unions and the Probation Association, which represents trusts, ratified the national agreement on staff transfer on 29 January 2014. Trade unions have also withdrawn all local trade disputes. 

The national agreement* offers a very good deal for existing staff, and demonstrates our commitment to fairness by going much further than we are legally required to do. Staff will transfer to the new probation structures with their existing terms and conditions in place. The additional protections set out within the 

11 Mar 2014 : Column 1694 

agreement include a guarantee of employment in the new probation structures from 1 June 2014, no compulsory redundancies for a period of seven months following share sale and an enhanced voluntary redundancy period of up to 67.5 weeks.” 

 (*There was a subsequent document – The Offender Management Act 2007 (Probation Services) Staff Transfer Scheme 2014, signed off by Chris Grayling on 29 May 2014.) 

12. In 2014 we were briefed locally to the effect that these were “exciting times” and “it was a great opportunity with lots of scope for innovation.” 

The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling) HoC Hansard, 18 March 2014, Volume 577 

“The guarantee I can give the hon. Gentleman’s constituents is that we are not removing the people who are doing the job at the moment. We are freeing them operationally to innovate, and we are bringing new skills to the task of rehabilitating offenders.” 

13. On 1 February 2015 the new owners moved in. The CEO who was so unbearably enthusiastic about the CRC retired on 31 January 2015. 

14. At this point (i.e. February 2015) I applied for the nationally agreed EVR scheme (closing date for applications was 31 March 2015) only to be told by my new employer that my role as a PO was “not at risk” and I was “not eligible”. 

Andrew Selous MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice):

“Under the enhanced voluntary redundancy scheme opened in advance of the transition of the Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) to new providers, probation staff were able to apply for voluntary redundancy on the basis that they would leave the service by 31 March 2016.” 

15. In July 2015 I received a letter from my new employer telling me I was at risk of redundancy. We were eventually to lose 65% of staff in our area team. 

16. In refusing to honour the agreed EVR scheme the new employer asked for expressions of interest in Voluntary Severance on their terms (estimates on social media put the offer at about 40% of the nationally agreed EVR arrangement). 

17. No guarantee could be given as to where the remaining staff would be based which, given the vast geography involved in the region, effectively required me agreeing to drive (at my own expense in my own vehicle) for up to two hours to a designated place of work, then two hours’ home again after a seven hour day (with no option of public transport as there wasn’t/isn’t any). With the commitments I had in my personal life I was faced with Hobson’s Choice. 

18. On 31 August 2015 my career as a Probation Officer came to an end. I am unable to elaborate further due to contractual arrangements linked to the severance agreement. 

19. I am still grieving for my loss and can find no reason or motivation to forgive the self serving ideologues who facilitated the travesty of TR. 

20. My submission to this Committee is that Parliament and the country were misled over the purpose of the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) project; that it was fatally flawed from the start; that it was wholly motivated by a blinkered political ideology to privatise public sector services; and as such there was no regard for the cost to the public purse or the jobs of existing staff. 

21. It most certainly was NOT based upon any relevant pilot evidence for a TR model. The Leeds model was abandoned… 

Oral evidence: Transforming Rehabilitation HC 484 Monday 4 July 2016, HMP Hatfield Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 4 July 2016. 

“Q10 Chris Evans: How much did the abandoned Leeds programme cost? 

Michael Spurr: 

I don’t have that figure. I am sure we can find it and write to you. You say, “abandoned”, but we were looking at different approaches to payment by results — the point was that it was a pilot opportunity and we took learning from the pilot. It was not quite abandoned: we sought to see whether anybody was prepared to run that project on a payment-by-results basis and we got an outcome from that, which was that they were not.” 

22. In Doncaster it was soon realised that providing a universal service was inefficient; and Peterborough was based entirely upon voluntary involvement by prisoners whose average length of stay was just seven weeks… 

The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling) HoC Hansard, 30 Oct 2013 : Column 986: 

“The shadow Justice Secretary talked about piloting, but the pilot programme delivering clear improvements in the level of reoffending that is closest to what I want to achieve around the country is in Peterborough.” 

23. And from the transcript of evidence given to the Public Accounts Committee on 12 March 2014: 

Margaret Hodge: But the Peterborough model, as I understand it, is voluntary. 

Antonia Romeo: That is correct. 

Margaret Hodge: And the model that you are designing is not voluntary. 

Antonia Romeo: That is correct. 

Margaret Hodge: Is there any international evidence on this payment by results stuff? Antonia Romeo: Very little actually. 

24. It was nevertheless crashed through Parliament; and it has since cost the taxpayer many, many unnecessary (and undisclosed) millions of pounds – monies which seem to have simply vanished into the pockets of the private companies. 

25. In a Civil Service World interview with Antonia Romeo, Senior Responsible Officer for TR, 24 April 2014, she notes there was… 

“… a timing issue, because the government’s policy is to roll it out by 2015, so we can really start feeling the effects in reductions to reoffending… NOMS has a business assurance board designed, she adds, to “give me, the senior responsible officer, the assurance that this is going to work and isn’t taking on any unnecessary risk.”

26. Concern at the speed of the implementation was widespread: 

The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Faulks) (Con), 11 March 2014: 

“I want to deal with the anxiety about the pace of these reforms. It is said that they have been going too quickly, although we say that that is not the case. We have drawn significant learning from earlier initiatives and have tested aspects of the reform programme. For example, our experience with the payment-by-results pilots at Her Majesty’s Prisons Peterborough and Doncaster has increased our confidence about designing robust payment-by-results contracts that drive the required behaviours and help generate improved value for money.” 

27. So at a time of so-called ‘austerity’ when we were “all in it together” the Government gave vast sums of taxpayer cash from the ‘Modernisation Fund’ (allegedly £80m, although no figure has ever been disclosed) to private companies - who had submitted £multi-million costed bids for CRC contracts – to cover the costs of pre-planned job losses. On this basis it could be argued that the Government were so determined to make the TR project work that they gave the private-sector bidders a publicly-funded ‘sweetener’ to cover the costs of making hundreds of Probation Service staff unemployed. 

28. When it subsequently became clear the EVR scheme was not going to be honoured by the private companies and staff would not be paid what had been nationally agreed, the Government confirmed the CRC owners could keep the money for themselves. The highlighted text below is my emphasis: 

Andrew Selous MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice) in a Written Answer, 15 June 2015: 

“Under the enhanced voluntary redundancy scheme opened in advance of the transition of the Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) to new providers, probation staff were able to apply for voluntary redundancy on the basis that they would leave the service by 31 March 2016. The total cost of these redundancies was £16.4m. All remaining Modernisation Fund monies were awarded to CRCs. Redundancy funding was allocated prorata to CRCs based on their size and estimated future staffing requirements.

As stated in my answer to questions 900, 898, 902 and 901, we have no plans to reclaim any monies allocated to CRCs from the Modernisation Fund; and consequently there have been no discussions with CRCs about this. Contract Management Teams are embedded in each CRC, closely monitoring how all monies are used and robust processes are in place to ensure all expenditure is correctly spent.” 

29. I remain angry, distressed and dismayed by the politically motivated, ideological vandalism that has not only cost hundreds of jobs and careers, but has sought to eradicate the nomenclature, professionalism and ethos of The Probation Service. 

October 2017

(Ed - the links have been removed for clarity)