Pick of the Week 38

MTCnovo complain in their submission about the NPS aggressively recruiting their CRC staff with higher starting salaries. Isn't this a rather pathetic moan from an innovative company? There is a simple market solution to retention: pay more. This, though, may not work in all cases, as some who leave their CRC and join the NPS do so because they prefer to work in the public sector and not for a profit-driven company. MTCnovo have an innovative idea: get rid of the competition by privatising the NPS - to create an integrated service.

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Loved this indignant bleat from Interserve's submission:

"The current split between the NPS and CRCs is not working. The initial justification for the split – that responsibility for public protection and the management of risk can only properly be discharged by the public sector – is not working out as expected...

... In fact, the NPS, which was conceived as a Probation Officer-led, risk management specialist organisation, in many areas now employs many more Probation Service Officers. It has, in our experience, become the norm for a lesser qualified and experienced PSO in the NPS to take decisions in respect of an offender who has been managed by an experienced and fully qualified Probation officer from a CRC..."

Guess what? You're right! The split isn't working, never was going to work. Further on in their submission their lizard DNA begins to break through the human exoskeleton: "TR has opened new markets". That's all we need to know. New markets to exploit & squeeze dry is what Interserve & their ilk excel at.

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What 'innovation'? It is a total con. There is no innovation in Working Links. How is getting rid of over 50% of staff, losing a brilliant training department, HR and IT plus running BBR groups with a single member of staff as opposed to 2 innovation? Also interviewing in libraries and forcing service users to travel further and further? WL in house training is a joke. Their so called emphasis on women's services is also a joke, 1 additional post! 

Please tell me where the so called innovation is? Introducing targets and the brag system, remote management from a call centre doesn't sound like innovation to me! A few RAR groups that you can't get anyone on doesn't sound like innovation either. Did WL read the inspectors report? You are failing big time because you didn't listen to staff and only listened to the brown nosers who went along with it hoping and expecting for rewards such as promotion! Now some of these brown nosers finally realising there is no reward they will be replaced by cheaper brown nosers from within WL! Genuine staff realise what is going on and are leaving because it is intolerable. No chance of government sorting out the mess because Teresa May is as deluded as Donald Trump. 'NHS crisis...what crisis?'

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And there lays the unsolvable conflict that will always exist private management of public services. The employee measures success by the quality of their work and what they can give. The employer measures success by the quantity of their bank balance and what they can get.

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Working Links do not have the collective intelligence to understand anything decent or appropriate in offending related work and structures. They excel in how to lie about everything, deny the truth, take what they can get, give nothing back. Take advantage of any situation and exploit the weak and vulnerable. They truly are innovative because no one could have imagined their take on offender provision. How to take anything beyond a slump and into oblivion. Working Links Well done you are the worst.

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I entirely agree and that is why I am leaving asap. I cannot work for a corrupt organisation that is not set up to support the needs of staff, service users or the public it should serve. It is no longer a service that I would recognise. It is a business designed to con money from the tax payer to fill its own coffers. That is not what I trained to do all those years ago and I am not going to pretend it is acceptable. The CRC managers who existed pre TR know fine well it is a sham and yet they fail to speak out because they obviously feel they have nowhere else to go. Thankfully I do and I very much hope the situation is not allowed to continue. I am disgusted that MoJ and the probation inspectorate can allow thus truly disgusting and mercenary situation to continue in Working Links. Dame Glenys and her team should not just stop at the report, they should be getting inspection teams in now to cover the whole of WL's in the knowledge that the disease has spread to all areas and there is systemic failure with no chance of any remedy. Working Links LIE and will say whatever they have to to try and convince people that they know what they are doing when they clearly don't. Corruption!

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I have promised myself that I will never work for a CRC again my integrity so challenged by my former experience. Durham does sound attractive, their ethos one that I could align with. The problem I think is the flawed system, the divisions, lack of alignment and purpose. If Durham were able to replicate nationally this would still be the case. TR is fundamentally a flawed design and I think Durham's relative success amongst the general debris and their observations in their submission highlight this.

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I don't see why the spending of public money must be shrouded in commercial confidentiality. Just as there are calls for transparency in parole decisions, CRCs should not be exempt from freedom of information. It's therefore ironic that DTV complains about Health being difficult to engage in respect of information sharing.

Anyway, I wonder how fair this accusation is in the wider sense. In my experience it was fairly straightforward to set up protocols and of course they are a staple of MAPPAs. They also complain about court assessments lacking information, but instead of blaming the NPS, they perhaps should seek to understand those pressures that force the NPS to churn out same day reports on complex cases.

The root of the problems lie in the split. DTV say sentencers have struggled to understand the split between the CRCs and NPS. As it can be explained how to split an atom, why can't their much-lauded CRC representative in court explain the split to struggling sentences. Really, DTV should be more honest about this issue. It's not a question of struggling to understand in an intellectual sense – it's the fact that the split makes no intellectual sense. Maybe, unlike DTV, sentencers get the gestalt – that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

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We're still all in this together, Tory-style. From C4 in 2012:

"Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude is still claiming thousands of pounds on a second home in central London despite the prime minister's personal pledge Maude would not "claim any money" on his second home. Equalities Minister Helen Grant is claiming £20,000 a year for a luxury London flat despite owning a £1.8m home in Surrey just 19 miles away from Westminster. Treasury Minister David Gauke recently sold his second home in central London which the taxpayer helped buy and has kept a profit of more than £20,000. John Whittingdale, chairman of the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport select committee has moved out of a second home which the taxpayer helped fund and is renting it out for £400 a week. He is now claiming expenses for renting out a property nearby."

Gauke was the MP who said it was dishonest & disgraceful that tradespeople are paid cash-in-hand as it denies the public purse an income from VAT. Not that MPs expenses claims have any impact, eh? They were £90m a year before the expenses scandal & IPSA yet, despite a £15,000 pa pay rise (intended to mitigate expense claims) MPs expenses have not reduced. IPSA have merely kept them wrapped up in special opaque ledgers.

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I think the PI has written sensibly, with obvious knowledge of Probation work and gone as far as it can go, given it's establishment, to say TR has not and cannot work in its present form. Their reasoning reflects all that has been predicted and reported over and over by many. I think the future does not involve CRCs doing Offender Management. Profit operators may have another chance to pick up some important peripherals. However, I still think they will muck up the peripherals.

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Whilst I am no fan of the PI, I am of the view that none of the agencies outside of the MoJ could have stopped the monumental stupidity that was TR. The fault remains with those, including Grayling, who pushed the model through without pilots and against the advice of all of those who opposed it. One more or one less voice would not have made a difference against the ideological impetus from those who wanted this to happen.

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It's a submission grounded in knowledge of probation and puts good emphasis on the fact that rehabilitation must be a collaborative effort with other agencies. The split and profit motive are flies in the ointment, alongside the insistence by CRCs on seeking refuge in commercial confidentiality, a card they play pragmatically and all too readily abandon when they want to complain about their contracts being underfunded. I suspect we wouldn't hear anything if they were making a profit.

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I find it difficult to understand how someone who spent so long as home secretary should have so little interest in the justice system, particularly with the chronic problems it's suffering. It's pretty clear that there's no real interest or motivation to resolve those problems. It maybe that the system is so broken that the problems can't be resolved, and by continually changing the justice Secretary you keep the illusion of interest in the system alive.

I struggle to with some of Mays appointments in the reshuffle. A party well aware of the need to detoxify itself, its beyond belief that Esther Mcvey should be made secretary for work and pensions. That appointment will come back to haunt May I'm sure. Not moving Grayling is also a huge mistake. There's big trouble brewing at the Ministry of Transport. Graylings been summonsed to the PAC over Stagecoach and Virgin, (an estimated 3billion loss to the public purse), strikes are increasing, and even the private companies are now citing Grayling as the obstacle in reaching resolution. I would of thought moving him would have been a given, and again not doing so will come back to bite May. Whether it's transport, housing, welfare, NHS, Brexit, police, prisons, probation, the whole shaboogal is in crisis, total meltdown. It can surely only be a matter of time before it all blows up in the faces of this tory government?

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I know what you mean about McVey, but she could end up as another national treasure like Anne Widdicombe, who saw nothing wrong with chaining pregnant women to hospital beds. And in terms of Works and Pensions, her New Labour predecessors were of a reactionary bent. And of course there was May's billboard vans telling immigrants to go home or face arrest which was a stunt worthy of the far right.

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Whilst I have huge respect for Rory Stewart's past achievements in & his informed views about Afghanistan, I fear his determination to become a Cabinet Minister means he will doggedly pursue Party politics in regards to probation matters. Sadly this blinkered eyes-on-the-prize partisan approach will only diminish an otherwise decent human being.

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E3 dictated that AP work could be done by Band 2 staff. The building is staffed 24/7 365 but only under the direction of a manger on Mon to Fri 9 to 5 (minus, training, meetings, AL, vacancies and sickness). This building houses only those deemed the highest risk. Most of the offenders have finished lengthy sentences and have not been tested in the community. Offences generally sexual and/or violent. High risk to known and/or public.

E3 has seen many experienced AP staff leave because a) due to worries regarding the new structure. b) moved due to new structure or c) the prospect of transfer to private security company. Many areas have had difficulty recruiting the new replacements for the loss of experience which in turn has meant APs running on agency staff and thin air. It will blow at some point. The model is similar to how prisons are managed, young inexperienced staff with good intentions working without oversight or alongside experience. Expected to manage those who have just been released form an environment of violence, fear, intimidation and bullying. Who are damaged emotionally, mentally or physically. Who require support, guidance, monitoring 24/7.

APs are a very demanding environment, dealing with those who were recently behind bars who now have access to bars, and drugs, and the many frustrations of transitioning from prison to the community. Only 2 staff (now one of those is to be a private security guard) and up to 35 offenders resident in the building. APs deal with overdose and death, self harm, violent outbusts from a group who in most cases have been victims themselves often growing up in deprived and violent circumstances.

By entrusting the welfare of this group to one staff member, recently recruited and a private security guard we fail not only them in their reintroduction to society but to the local communities as the potential risk of harm is increased. This is a very sad state of affairs.

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The outsourcing of night waking cover started a decade ago with some probation trusts, so it's nothing new. There was no great resistance or campaigning at the time and what happens is these practices spread piecemeal and then along comes the MoJ to standardise practice. They could go for an in-house model, but lo and behold they choose outsourcing.

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Government wont own up to the mess that Probation is in and the risks this poses after TR. Rapid turnaround in the MoJ tells me they have absolutely no intention whatsoever to address this, we just get the leftovers - and even worse, the young inexperienced and ambitious, to wallpaper over the cracks. The cracks are too deep the paper too thin, and the blue flashing light is shining through.

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Three days into my NPS working week and I am exhausted and tearful. Nothing works, not the IT, the processes, the communications with CRC, the effing heating. Spending all of my time pounding a keyboard to hit targets, while our equally stressed managers blow around like straws in the wind, bickering with each other, forwarding on emails to us which we wont read and wringing their hands over whatever target is flavour of this month. Am I making a difference? Don't know, past caring.

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"Hostels Run By Cleaners"! What a ridiculous and misleading headline. Fake News. Oh, and it is also not true that the location of Approved Premises are not made public. There is a legitimate debate to be had about the skills required to work in a residential setting and the training required, but this sort of hysterical naysaying does not help. The NPS may not be the best people to run Approved Premises at all - maybe the whole operation should be outsourced to organisations with a track record in residential social work. The MoJ are interested in moving elderly prisoners out in to 'secure care homes' - so maybe that is the future direction of travel, with specialist residential units for mental health, infirmity, addictions etc.. rather than generic NPS run hostels.

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I think the point that is being made is that these management companies that have moved into Probation work have a background in catering (Sodexo) and cleaning and that their lack of corporate expertise in working with offenders in the community is apparent in the ongoing CRC debacle. I don't think it was meant to imply that all the staff had walked out and left the cleaner in charge. For a start, most NPS staff I speak to would love to see a cleaner actually coming to CLEAN their buildings never mind to run their approved premises.

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Outsourcing of Facilities Management was an unmitigated disaster for Approved Premises. Cooking, cleaning & repairs and maintenance of the fabric of the buildings went to pot and destroyed community links with local traders and the opportunity to develop activities around resident involvement in cooking, cleaning and decoration.

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Having worked in an AP (which is not a bail hostel for the last 10 years). I can say with some authority that it will not take long once the New way of working that things deteriorate. For years they have been working to prepare APs for total privatisation. The TR and E3 process is financially driven. There will be no benefits from these changes and will only drive down remaining staff morale. The new shift Rota means you only get 2 complete weekend free out of 7. I could go on and on about the proposed regime but very few are interested.

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Some Probation Trusts ran some excellent APs, others not so great. E3 was a rushed affair that came up with a standardisation based on those who shouted loudest rather than objective evaluation. The adoption of 'enabling environments' as some sort of valid standard is a prime example. Purposeful activity has been dumbed down and operational expectations mainly adopt the lowest common denominator rather than any concept of excellence. Outsourcing staffing is part of this.

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All go for staff in London CRC:

• Electronic diaries must now be used by all. All appointments to be recorded and shared calendar shared with SPO / Admin / Team. As of his Friday.
• All must now print out their caseload and record reporting frequency along with rationale as to why. Must be passed to SPO to sign of by 31/01.
• Where BitPort has registered 3+ acceptable absences or 2+ unacceptable absences - feedback must be provided to SPO on circumstances and enforce. Feedback on this task to SPO by 15/01.
• A deadline was set this week to feedback to SPO on all cases with a CIN register.
• All out of date registrations on Delis must be updated and cleared by 31/01.
• Prior to supervision with SPO, Standing Agenda Supervision Form must be competed by OM and submitted (it’s a long form!).

All while majority of staff are holding in excess of 65+ cases, with approx 90% of these on community sentences. With limited intervention support. Lack of resources. Non existent management support. Staff are literally drowning. Stress levels at an all time high. Some having anxiety attacks and in tears. Staff in genuine long term sick are being called by SPO’s and informed if they do not return, they will be discipline or relived of their job.

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When you say "all go for CRC London" do you mean all the staff should all go, i.e walk out? These new measures, they are entirely in keeping with the methods and tone in the London CRC hitherto. Namely utterly pointless because they take my attention away from the service user and places it squarely upon the paranoia and mistrust of the organisation I work for. How to reassure MTC I am "doing my job", whatever THEY think that job should be. Motivating staff through terrifying them. Counterproductive nonsense. How can staff respond in these circumstances ? What is being asked of them is impossible for them to achieve. How would you respond?

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London CRC Team meeting called his afternoon. SPO delivered the following:

1. All calendars are to be shared. They will be spot checked by management.
2. Plan, Meet & Record. It is a new directive that a Delius entry is completed within 30 minutes of Service User appointment. Will be spot checked. Any longer, accountability sought.
3. Service Users are not to be seen weekly. Any case seen weekly, escalation should be sought to NPS as this would imply an increased risk.
4. Not a new directive, but an expectation that each Officer should be submitting at minimum of one breach each week.
5. Staff should not plan an ‘admin day’. By following Plan, Meet & Record, this should not be required.

In other news - Harrow CRC are now a week into their new home at Denmark House. No induction to the office. A massive decrease in reporting frequency from service users (my caseload - 1 out of 12 appointments attended). That breach target will be a walk in the park.

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Your place of work sounds awful too. Also the situation you are describing is not where Probation should be at all. Good to read you bringing these issues out. However, what have you or your union area actually been doing to highlight the plight to Parliament? Is there a submission. Has your Union done anything locally and involved your members. The SW team are clearly organising and working to promote their best interest with and for workers. The report is strong and evidence of the TR debacle yet they are contributing to the efforts to defeat the TR agenda. It is all very well to make comments of local issue today today but clearly your activity is of no use if not part of a coordinated and national strategy to change and reverse the situation, which all staff face. Focusing on your own window is a shame when you have missed or failed to contribute to the parliamentary process with all those brave contributors who are challenging the appalling situation of privatisation.

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The challenge currently is being managed by fear. Staff genuinely are fearful of being disciplined or dismissed. As has to be respected, speaking out / challenging decisions is therefore reduced by this fear. Sadly, managers with Probation backgrounds, seem to have forgotten the true identity of a successful probation service. Forgotten are the core principles of what makes the service work for service users. Service Users are bottom of the pile now, very closely followed by Probation Officers in the CRC.

Staff are being disliked at an alarming rate. There is no effective management supervision. No training provided in any areas. MTCNovo are very quickly turning CRC Probation into one big call centre set up. Any advice on how to escalate the hideous mismanagement occurring daily I am aware of would be greatly appreciated.

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Thanks for this comment it makes the others stand out as a similar situation faced by those in the SSW reporting above. You should contact the obvious activists who are clearly maintain their positions and readers realise just how little is being done in your branch by the union? It reflects on the failings of those in roles at branches level. You have made references to the very same experience of fear and management adoption of negatives views against staff. POs are being left fallow and many non qualified staff are in control of the developing crisis.

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SWM Branch & East Midlands Branch
Dear Members

Below is a joint statement from Napo SWM and East Midlands Branches

CRC colleagues will have received an email this week from the CEO of RRP- Adam Hart. There was reference in this email to the ‘Delivery First’ consultation and the proposed strategy in relation to the future of HR and Learning and Development within RRP.

Napo want to advise you that this proposal was only shared with the recognised TU’s after the Christmas break and has previously not been raised during any of the consultation meetings. Due to this and recent job adverts for PDM (SPO) and deputy Regional Head Roles being shared internally and externally Napo requested an urgent meeting with Senior management to share our concerns. This meeting happened on the 09.01.18 and we felt that we needed to share with members the issues and action Napo will take in response on behalf of the membership.

Napo discussed the impact of the announcement around HR and L&D upon our members and the recognised TU’s in terms of future engagement and that it has undermined confidence in the consultation process. Furthermore, those directly affected by the redundancy consultation feel that they have been misled. Napo are seeking advice from out national officials about the legality of such a move and will continue to reinforce the significant detrimental effect that this has had on our members and confidence and trust in negotiations with RRP.

Members may be aware of two recent job adverts for PDMs and Deputy Regional Heads. Napo were aware of the potential for these adverts to be shared in the New Year. However, we requested that these jobs should be advertised internally prior to external applications being sought. This was so that RRP employees felt that there was still an opportunity for career progression within the organisation and to motivate RRP to use the significant skill set already available to them. Unfortunately, RRP have disregarded this request and have gone external immediately. Napo have also noted that the qualifications for the jobs have been changed, without consultation, to allow those without a Probation qualification to apply – stating that a “related criminal justice degree or other relevant degree” would be considered. Napo have asked what degrees would be considered for these roles and have received an ambiguous answer thus far.

At the meeting on the 09th of Jan Napo advised senior management of our concerns about such a move citing the following:

• Potential de-professionalization of the organisation and staff.
• The detrimental impact of this on public protection.
• Recruitment of managers with no knowledge of managing / reducing risk of reoffending, OASys, nDelius and Probation processes who could be managing a team of professionals who have more knowledge and understanding of the key role of probation services and public protection. This could lead to increased potential for professional conflict.
• Reinforced recent HMIP inspection reports which raised significant concerns about public protection and management oversight of cases. 

Unfortunately, RRP appear to be of the mind that Napo and its members concerns are less of an issue than “getting the right person“ for the job as they see it. As a result Napo will be notifying interested parties of the developments within RRP and our significant concerns around how the organisation are progressing their recruitment strategy. There is a meeting with Adam Hart organised for the 23rd of January where Napo intend to reinforce our members concerns and if required seek members views on if and what further action may be warranted. Napo will keep you advised.