Sunday 28 January 2018

Pick of the Week 40

Has anyone picked up on HDC changes? Those who qualify are pushed out of custody unless exceptional circumstances. Compliance no longer a factor.

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Yes. Madness. Home visits to proposed address no longer a must. Assessment of suitability can be completed by, you guessed it, a phone call. Trained and qualified PO / PSO’s are no longer to make a proposal. Just provide information. More evidence of being de-skilled. It’s all just bonkers!

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Yes - we get the request 3 months before and have a ten day target to return form! Then there is the increasing difficulty to get a breach agreed, the increasing difficulty to get a recall Agreed with the targets for alternative to recall, lovingly recorded by a NSI. It’s obviously designed to alleviate the full to bursting prisons.

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Very well known experiment [Milgram], and a lot to be learned from it. But in the words associated with Jo Cox, prisoners and prison staff have more in common now then divide them. The Tories have created such a divided society, many prison staff come from the same place as those they're locking up. Rented accommodation, no opportunity to buy, same housing estates, financial difficulties and worries. When there's no ladder to climb, everyone finds themselves in a similar place. The Tories have really f****d things up.

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You are absolutely 'on the money',  and have made the point well. My post was a clumsy attempt to say: (1) HMPPS are putting prison & probation management in the role of the original Milgram guards, i.e. that probation chiefs sold their staff down the river, or that prison governors are playing Russian roulette with their staffing complement, and: (2) that HMGovt via HMPPS are expecting prison & probation staff to treat those they are responsible for with increasing levels of contempt. Thankfully this idea isn't taking off, as we see from Bionic's posts & other contributors, plus the independent will of HMI's to highlight & publicly shame HMPPS. Equally 'Hats Off' to Bob Neill for calling "Foul!" & challenging the piss-poor management by Spurr & co.

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Just thought I'd write this for balance because it irks me to hear revisionists unfairly blaming honourable hardworking trade unionists, who are if anything realistic and forward looking, for things they did not do and were not responsible.Blaming Raho and Rogers for the collapse of the National Negotiating Committee and with it collective bargaining is ludicrous. It was a dead duck that has been mythologised by extreme left wingers after its demise as some kind of golden goose that Raho and Rogers jointly conspired to strangle into non existence. It died because it was not fit for purpose and no one wanted to be part of it least of all the NPS and most of the CRCs.

Completely agree with your comment Jim. We need to hear more from those like Rogers and Raho who are undoubtedly influential and willing to engage in a more nuanced debate that might include offering different visions of probation that some other powerful voices wish to silence or do away with completely.

I can tell you that their views do carry some weight where it counts. Napo has lost some respect in recent years as a professional association under a somewhat anti-intellectual leadership however both Raho and Rogers have regained some of this respect in forums where a more nuanced understanding is required and Napo are now gradually being taken more seriously in the debate about the future of probation. This recent progress can easily be stopped.

Any amount of showboating and tub thumping never achieves respect or traction with those in power who are charged with running things and making decisions even if this is more entertaining and satisfying for those concerned. Both Raho and Rogers are in my experience politically moderate but also savvy trade unionists who actually have skills that are needed to deal intelligently with those in power.

The membership of Napo is not left wing and could hardly claim to be militant. Those calling for more radical or extreme leadership are not in touch with the majority of Napo members or how things get done in the real world which is far less exciting and mundane. Both are certainly not crude reductionists by nature (leave that to the angry tub thumpers and fans of RT and Socialist Worker)but I do see them writing in a more appealingly human and less politicised way and not using complex terms and jargon for a closed group on Facebook (3000+ members) in order to have an inclusive discussion with those interested in probation and probation issues. I presume this is why you reproduced some of their discussion on the blog Jim?

Unfortunately if they were to step away then this would be a loss to the probation profession that needs more not less intelligent voices and has been slow to recruit new champions.

Inevitably there are always a few who think that they could do what others do better (with no training or experience) like unfit hecklers at a sporting event criticising much fitter sports people but in reality find that it is a harder to do the do than being an unrestrained armchair performance critic. That said if you think you can do better or make a difference then I'm sure your branch could find something suited to your talents.

By the way Raho is an elected branch chair and my sources tell me that he may well not seek reelection to a second term but will probably continue to work in connection with probation in some capacity. He has done his bit and no doubt has other projects. Rogers is a career trade union official and Napo is actually pretty lucky to have him as an employee.

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I left probation before the split and have frozen local gov pension. I returned just after split to CRC and paid into their private pension arrangements. I wish I had opted out now! What is the point when they are likely to hand the contract back at some point or be liquidated. I am unlikely to get anything back. I went back to work partly because I felt I needed to top up my existing pension so I have enough to retire on. We are all being let down by the current system and I feel really angry. No way could I carry on with CRC until I retire anyway. They don't value older staff and the contribution they make and all their knowledge and experience. They value staff who tow the line and are faster with their IT and less interested in their service users. Maybe I should just cut my losses and stop paying into their pension?

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I find the idea of private companies such as G4S, Serco or Interserve being sanctioned by the state to enforce debt collection and even arrest very sinister indeed. Not least because there are various private companies that can now impose fines through fixed penalties for parking offences, littering etc. It's Orwellian and another demonstration of Tory party oppression. It'll cost money not save it, but it doesn't matter as long as the private sector are doing alright from it. How much has the MoJ saved the taxpayer through its outsourcing projects, digitalisation and court closures?

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To be honest, that all sounds reasonable, I wouldn't have had my chance if at the time the net was not cast wide. I always enjoyed the diversity and more often than not passion for working with people that I met amongst my former colleagues.

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It's not the diversity that causes me concern, its just symptomatic of the headlong rush everybody seems to be in, "never mind the quality, feel the width!" (Originated from unscrupulous London backstreet tailors palming you off with cheap material instead of the good stuff for your suit.) A 3 year degree course (4 years if studied to a masters) was first compressed to a 2 year diploma & is now reduced to 15 months' PQiP. Where's the space to learn? When will the students have time to reflect, to discuss, to explore? And where have they hidden the news that you'll have a caseload of 60, plus court duties & a VLO caseload to boot?

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Everyone remembers the great outsourcing scandals. The Olympics. Tagging. Transporting prisoners. Emergency service phone services. All big news stories that somehow get lost in other news stories a week later and dragged up again when the next outsourcing scandal breaks. But there's other important issues that don't really resurface that should be considered within the Carillion debate. Athos for example walked away from its disability assessment contract about 2 years ago at a cost of over £100m.


There was the outsourced education, training and apprenticeship company, that went belly up without warning about 18mths ago costing £10s of millions, (I can't remember their name, but was noted on this blog.) It's important too to also consider the governments argument that Carillion went bust not because of its public sector contracts, but it's private sector ones. That begs the question of how much money from public sector contracts is being used to subsidise private contracts? Will Interserves portion of the governments £342m go on making probation services better, or be used to subsidise private loss making contracts?


The big accountancy firms like PwC and KPMG have rightly come under the spotlight since Carillion collapsed. But they are also the companies the government use, and pay millions to each year in consultancy fees. The incestuous nature of the relationship between these companies need to be broken up.


It's almost amusing to hear ministers like Grayling when they're asked about why Carillion were given multi billion pound contracts after continued profit warnings. It was a joint bid they say, it was given on the understanding that the other two companies would step in and absorb Carillions obligations if Carillion went bust. Isn't that also an admission that they knew Carillion was on the brink?


So too the finger pointing at KPMG by the government for giving Carillion the thumbs up. But isn't that what Grayling did by giving them Hs2 contracts? With such large contracts it gave Carillion the opportunity to extend its credit notes to its sub contractors and even run up bigger bills. The Carillion collapse is huge, and likely to headline for much longer then other outsourcing scandals, which is a good thing.


Not many of the general public paid much attention to Carillion, many probably had never heard of them. Yet there's other giant companies with large government contracts that are creeping very close to the same page as Carillion who are even less well known. The Labour Party need to grab the Carillion fallout and shake the bones out of it, expose its seedy relationships with government and other outsource companies, it's conflicts of interests, and remind the public that the new buzz word being used by local councils is insourcing.

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"Scandal-hit Concentrix adjusted or terminated around 108,000 cases of claimants' tax credits - nearly a third of which were overturned at appeal." The taxpayer foots the bill for 108,000 'outcomes' and then the taxpayer picks up the bill for 90% of those decisions going to appeals, with nearly 40% of them being successful appeals? Is austerity only necessary because of botched outsourcing?

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Black Rock were responsible for managing Carillions pension fund, yet astoundingly made millions betting against their demise. Does George Osborne have questions to answer? As an adviser to BlackRock, the former Chancellor may have questions to answer after it emerged it is among group of investors to have made millions from Carillion’s demise. If he has shares in BlackRock, the world’s largest fund manager, then he is set to personally benefit from last week’s liquidation, which has put thousands of jobs at risk. Mr Osborne has sought to distance himself from the troubled construction giant.

The newspaper he edits last week ran a leader column criticising the Government for awarding Carillion £1.3billion in contracts after it issued its first profit warning in July last year. The editorial read: “Why has the state found itself so dependent on a few very large outsourcing firms? “The failure to use a variety of smaller, mid-size companies undermines innovation and leaves services hostage when things go wrong.” But when he signed off a Carillion contract as Chancellor in 2014, Mr Osborne declared: “It’s great to see successful companies like Carillion winning contracts around the world.”

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George gets paid £650,000 a year for one day's work a week. It not hard to see how the Oxfam report published today puts 82% of the world's wealth in the hands of 1% of the population, or that half the worlds wealth is held by just 42 people.

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Michael Spurr and RH full of s.... The MPs understand very little of the TR system, of its contracts and of the nonsensical answers they are given to their questions. When one of the questioners is closing in on MS his reply is that her demand for a precise answer is unreasonable without preparation. The whole thing is very yes ministeresque, farcical, and sadly probably fairly inconsequential. Nice to have it all recorded, but parading the failures is not the same as addressing them. They will be allowed to continue. Something stronger than the PAC is needed to bring this farce to an end.

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We hope. We think. We would like. We anticipate. We didn't expect. And..RH said there was another round of negotiations to come. They did not want to pay more than they had to but they did want to ensure the services continue. The PAC asked when this would be? RH said the key date would be when the PbR reoffending statistics come out later in January. That will cost! People might be forgiven for thinking that the drugs drones and mobile phones issue in the prisons is really MoJ racketeering to raise funds to pay the ever increasing costs of the CRCs!! Putting more money in will only improve the shareholder dividend not the services. Renationalisation is the only way to improve the services and reduce costs.

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Could it be true that Grayling & the Right are intentionally erasing Probation from the face of UK politics? I have noticed that Rory Stewart uses either Minister of State or Prisons Minister, not Prisons & Probation Minister. Its neither petty nor pedantic - language is important. Still, I guess young Rory knows more than enough about the subtleties of expediting regime change after his stint in Afghanistan.

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I agree the lexicon matters and it would be easy, if you were following the language, to wonder why Probation is a yesterday term of reference. In part it is because the subject rarely reaches the higher strata of general newsworthiness despite its obvious calamity. There may be other reasons too.

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The Tories just continue to lie and lie and absolve themselves of any responsibility at all about the monumental mess they’ve made of Probation. They just can’t admit they got it so very wrong. Oh wait we run programmes for that — oh hang on not enough staff to run said programmes!

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It is an alarming trend that politicians all over the world have apparently realised that lying to get out of a question no longer even requires the skill of avoidance, distraction and sleight of hand. A perfectly placed lie will suffice. More disturbing is that fact that the lie no longer needs to be credible. Any old nonsense will do.

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"The Ministry over-estimated the number of people who would be subject to tagging. The number of offenders who are subject to tagging orders has been falling and is now well below expectations, which could suggest that confidence in electronic monitoring has been undermined." Luckily the MoJ has come up with a wheeze to deal with the under-use problem - remove all professional assessment from HDC decisions and shove as many prisoners out on tag as possible, suitability be damned! So what if it leads to more offending, breaches and recalls? Can't have the contractors' volumes hit!

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Get something wrong in work and there is usually some accountability. For the governing classes there are, however, different norms – from John Prescott getting a peerage for his sexual dalliance with his secretary, to wasting millions of taxpayers' money – money which could have been spent on useful things. While we constantly hear about vital support services being cutback or closed, we also constantly read about government departments' profligate spending on ill-thought-out projects. And departmental leaders later sit in front of select committees and harp on about their prudence, value for money and departmental expertise. It's no wonder the populace become disillusioned with leaders who have the look of self-serving elites, who prosper no matter how often they do stupid things that harm the public interest.

This government rants on about the need to increase productivity while it fritters away money. The message that gets through is that our rulers have feet of clay – they are out for themselves and their friends in business. Their governance has more in common with the mafia than democratic accountability.

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I don't want to come across as misty-eyed about the new prison minister, but I thought Rory Stewart intends to be hands-on and ensure that where HMIP recommendations are made, they are implemented and identified individuals in the bureaucracy are held to account. It's early days but he doesn't spout the usual defensive bullshit.

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The Ministry of justice clearly doesn't have a clue. It's failed across the board to deliver anything that could be described as remotely success and wasted eye-watering amounts of public finance. Should it not just be disbanded? Put everything back under the remit of the Home Office?

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"They've never understood us and were always nervous and irritated by our proudly independent voice and notorious historic resistance to all attempts at imposing command and control." I'm not sure that the Tories don't understand probation. I think it may be more that they view it almost as an extention of the welfare state. Extending support and assistance to the undeserving who don't pay for that support and assistance must stink of socialism and is offensive to their capitalist neolibral ideology. I have no doubt they'd wipe probation out completely if they could, and replace it with G4S truncheon wielding security guards, and charge those under their watch for the privilege. Because neanderthal neolibral ideology knows that the only way to solve social problems and enforce conformity is to not spare the rod.

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Carillion have left our prisons in a terrible state. It's reported that the need of essential repairs doubled under their watch. However Interserve are also in considerable trouble. They have many projects experiencing severe delays, all of which incur financial penalties.
In a statement last week the Government said Interserve are not the next Carillion but today their shares have fallen another 10% and a warning of hard times to come. They might not be Carillion, but neither are they secure my any means.

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Has anyone else noticed that not a single part of the prisons crisis, NOT ONE THING, is the responsibility of Michael Spurr, CEO HMPPS? Reminds me of my dear, dead mother's account of her driving experiences after finally passing her test on her 19th attempt: "You know, its funny, but I've seen loads of accidents and yet I've never been involved in one." (I was a passenger just the once. Never again!)

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"the obvious disappearance of a Minister for Probation"..Oh God, first they stick their fingers in their ears, now they have just walked away. Bastards.

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They haven't walked away - Spurr is dancing merrily on Probation's grave. If Spurr has to leave his job tomorrow, he can rest easy in the knowledge that he has single-handedly killed off the pinko arse-wipers, the soft liberal do-gooders & the middle-class spoon-feeders. All that's left is for Gauke to delete the second 'P' in the departmental moniker & its a wrap! Well done, Michael. I hope you're feeling smug & self-satisfied in your mean, bitter, negative little fascist fantasy-world. And please don't worry about me. I can sleep at night. I don't have to spend hours in the shower trying to scrub the bloodstains off my conscience, because I tried to make a POSITIVE difference. At least I did that.

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It has to be said that our so called leaders have made it easy for them thus far. Not a word, not a peep from those who are supposed to be at the helm. Chief police officers and chief fire officers have recently been in the news demanding greater resources, our CEO parasites are nowhere to be seen or heard! Speak, say something....say anything, prove you are not simply a hologram!

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I expect the challenge for Rory Stewart is of the Sisyphean variety. He may well turn out to be another glib politician, but there was something refreshing about a prison minister who readily accepted some operational accountability. His JSC appearance was specific to the conditions at Liverpool prison and back to basics was specific to physical conditions in prisons. All he was saying is that there is no excuse for tolerating squalor and infestation - having a clean environment without broken windows are basic requirements for decent regimes – you don't have to be an advocate of the broken window theory or feng sui to know it makes good sense. Extrapolating from 'back to basics' or criticising his use of military analogies should not be used to detract from the simple point he was making: there is no excuse for turning a blind eye to squalor and allowing it to become the norm.

32 comments:

  1. CEP values state: Work with offenders by probation services should involve research-based methods which have demonstrated effectiveness. Probation Services have a professional duty to contribute to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge about the delivery and effectiveness of the services they administer. The delivery of effective services is supported by being carried well qualified and appropriately skilled staff to carry out probation work.

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    1. I think there is a good debate to have about qualification for Probation work. A broad foundation study aligned with practice that integrates theory and allows for reflection on practice seems fundamental. I feel I benefited from that with DipPS which was as a result of BA and NVQ in Community Justice. However, I think that provided a foundation from which to build. I was glad of further ongoing training but surprised that this was not better integrated into practice and a formal record of my continuing professional development was not encouraged or required. I realise people will cry out that time and resources do not allow for such luxury in the present. Where does that leave the Probation profession if this remains the case? In decline, lacking currency and open to question regards its efficacy I would suggest. I do not know what the answers are in a fragmented and under resourced system, much of which is struggling to profit from its activities.

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  2. The demise of Carillion has been discussed at some length this week on this blog. It's been headlined on every media platform and took up many hours of Parliamentary debate.
    Carillions collapse has impacted hugely on vast areas of society.
    But what I find most disturbing about massive multi national private companies like Carillion, Interserve, Sodexo etc is that they are allowed to trade as limited companies.
    It cannot be right that any company that can post £100s millions in annual profits, and pay shareholders millions of pounds in dividends, can hide behind limited liability status.
    How far should you be allowed to trade beyond your asset value before you should lose your limited liability status?
    Barring a few IT systems, these multi national outsourcing companies have no assets at all, so why should they be allowed to trade in £billions?
    I'd like to run up a £100thousand bill with william Hill hoping I'd win enough to pay the debt and win a few quid for myself. If I failed, I'd also like to be able to say my plan didn't work out, and I'm really sorry but I only own a fiver!
    I have no issues with limited companies, but come on, if you allow companies with no assets to trade in £billions under limited liability status then someone is going to get significantly burned.

    'Getafix

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    1. Its a priveleged position reserved for a priveleged few. All you need is a membership card & you can help yourself, taking advantage of anything & everything.

      Everyone else, as you rightly point out, gets torched.

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    2. I could not agree more with you about limited liability. It encourages the spendthrifts and the corrupt. It would have been a different set of risks for the executives in Carillion – and the banks - to have considered if they had known that in going bust their personal assets would be seized to pay creditors. As it is, they can be as reckless as they wish with other peoples' money, because they know their homes and personal wealth is protected by the law. The same applies to all the fraudsters who rack up dissolved companies, leaving debts, but then going on to their next reckless venture. Making them personally accountable for losses would change corporate behaviour across the board.

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    3. It concerns me that working people are having their pensions plundered. Carrillion paid share dividends that equated roughly to the pensions deficit or liability. If I understand correctly this means that workers will likely receive 10% less than they had imagined under a state sponsored guarantee scheme, which if I understand correctly means the tax payer assures them a pension of 90% of what they they anticipated. It shocked me that one man, Philip Greene (BHS) who took hundreds of millions out of that company did so whilst the workers pension fund was similarly in deficit. And, with a stroke of a pen paid back a few hundred million to prop up the fund. One man! I remember Robert Maxwell robbing the Mirror group pension fund of a huge amount. I know that there are many other company pension funds languishing with huge liabilities. I still remember Vince Cable saying about the financial crisis that the 'profits were privatised and the debts nationalised.' How do we bring about better governance, shine a light into outrageous profiteering, averice, by a few at the expense of the many? I am simply not seeing the answers being presented or the arguments substantially made. It is wrong and noone ever seems to be held to account.

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    4. https://www.ft.com/content/be0b8104-042c-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5

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    5. Thank you. Very interesting and informative. I note FT article just published that I am unable to access but no doubt an interesting read.
      UK Business & Economy
      Carillion accused of ‘wriggling out’ of pension funding

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    6. Read it and implications truly shocking!!!

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    7. Excerpt from IPE magazine, March 2017:

      "Robin Ellison, chairman of Carillion Pension Trustees, tells Carlo Svaluto Moreolo about the scheme’s approach to de-risking and regulation

      Pension scheme de-risking can be a thankless job. Robin Ellison, chairman of Carillion Pension Trustees, put it succintly in a recent article published in IPE (September 2016): “It doesn’t create actual money to pay actual pensions; it simply protects company accounts against disclosing higher increases in deficits.” Furthermore, de-risking is expensive, particularly when done through government securities."

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    8. In the early 1990s, two American economists, George Akerlof and Paul Romer, wrote an academic paper with the eye-catching title: “Looting”. Its subject was the Savings & Loan crisis of the 1980s, which ended up costing the US taxpayer some $132bn in a string of bailouts. What intrigued the authors was the way some S&L owners ran their failing real estate lenders into the ground, wholly focused on value extraction and without a thought for the losses that they would leave behind. They displayed a “total disregard for even the most basic principles of lending”, failing to verify the most basic information about their borrowers or, in some cases, not even bothering even to ask for it. Why, the economists asked, had they behaved in so cavalier a way? One reason, they concluded, was the existence of a government backstop. The state stood behind deposits that the S&Ls had taken.

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    9. Its subject was the Savings & Loan crisis of the 1980s, which ended up costing the US taxpayer some $132bn in a string of bailouts. What intrigued the authors was the way some S&L owners ran their failing real estate lenders into the ground, wholly focused on value extraction and without a thought for the losses that they would leave behind. They displayed a “total disregard for even the most basic principles of lending”, failing to verify the most basic information about their borrowers or, in some cases, not even bothering even to ask for it. Why, the economists asked, had they behaved in so cavalier a way? One reason, they concluded, was the existence of a government backstop. The state stood behind deposits that the S&Ls had taken. But that was not the only thing encouraging the owners to loot their own operations. There was another big factor: poorly framed regulation. Easy-to-arbitrage rules and sloppy accounting standards kept S&Ls nominally afloat when in reality they were not viable. That created the circumstances in which owners could plunder dividends out of capital, as they either prayed for a miracle, or prepared to cast the depleted creditors into the taxpayers’ lap. Echoes of this unsavoury situation can be found in the case of Carillion, the British outsourcing and construction group that has just collapsed owing more than £2bn to its banks. Once again, the government bobs up on the periphery, in this case chucking out state-funded contracts like confetti that appeared to underwrite the group’s viability. Carillion’s board may not have looted, but it does seem to have practised what one might call “reckless abstraction”. It sucked out cash to placate stock market investors even as executives wrote the mountain of under-priced contracts that ultimately buried the business, triggering a £1.2bn writedown in the second half of last year.

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  3. Grayling last week at the PAC was evasive, smug and dishonest. He was also accused of withholding evidence regarding his deal with Virgin/Stagecoach franchise.
    He may now find himself in more trouble then if he'd just been honest.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42851274

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  4. The decision to allow two firms operating the East Coast Main Line to cut short the contract is being looked into by the public spending watchdog. In November, the Department for Transport said Virgin and Stagecoach could withdraw from running the London to Edinburgh service three years early. The National Audit Office will now investigate the government's handling of the £3.3bn franchise. Ministers said any suggestion taxpayers would be out of pocket was wrong.

    It comes after critics of the decision, including Lord Adonis, former chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, said the move could eventually cost the taxpayer billions of pounds.

    In 2014, Virgin and Stagecoach signed a deal to run the East Coast line until 2023, promising the government £3.3bn in premiums.

    However Martin Griffiths, chief executive of Stagecoach, which owns 90% of the joint venture, admitted last year that it had overpaid for the contract. He said the business had been affected by delays in upgrading the UK's rail infrastructure.

    David Horne, managing director of Virgin Trains East Coast, also said last week that the delay meant plans to introduce a new fleet of high speed trains on the route by 2019 "were no longer deliverable". Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson has said the deal had cost Virgin and Stagecoach £100m.

    Transport Secretary Chris Grayling announced last year that the deal to operate the line would be replaced by a new model which would be "a joint venture between the public and private sector, operated by a single management, under a single brand and overseen by a single leader". Mr Grayling said: "It means when things go wrong, there's one team to sort it out."

    But the government has been accused of "bailing out" the franchise by Labour peer Lord Adonis, who nationalised the East Coast Main Line in 2009 when its then operator National Express was unable to make its payments. Mr Grayling said earlier this month: "It's much more complex than that. Lord Adonis is not involved in this; he's got his facts wrong."

    The NAO now says it will examine the decision to cut short the contract, as well as the new East Coast Partnership which will take over its running in 2020. The NAO said: "We expect to examine the [government] department's management of the franchise to date and the implications of its plans for the new partnership."

    A spokesperson from the Department for Transport said: "The government has been very clear - no one is getting a bailout and Virgin Stagecoach will continue to meet its financial commitments made to the taxpayer on the East Coast rail franchise, as it has done since 2015. Premium payments continue to flow to the taxpayer, as they currently do, and any suggestion that the taxpayer will be out of pocket is completely wrong."

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  5. What a fucking racket. Bid high or bid low, whichever is the best criteria for securing the contract, then cry "Foul!" when its hitting your profits, and whichever corrupt weasle is running the relevant government department (preferably Chris Grayling) will make sure you aren't out of pocket, courtesy of the UK taxpayer.

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  6. If you look at Rory Stewart's wikipedia page you may think he could be a very different Minister than his predecessors, none of whom have had anything like his career experiences

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  7. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/28/gps-offender-tagging-farce-tied-to-privatised-probation

    'Getafix

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    1. Chris Grayling pushed both of these schemes through and both have been expensive failures, but the former justice secretary has not been called to account for either, says Mike Nellis...

      The Commons public accounts committee report on the Ministry of Justice’s electronic monitoring fiasco is still not the full story (New tags for offenders ‘waste of money’ - MPs, 24 January). Notwithstanding the ministry’s secretive approach, plans for the mass expansion of GPS tracking, the absence of an evidence base, and the futility of developing a bespoke “super tag” were all discernible in 2014, and it is unclear why no one was able to halt such a misguided programme well before £60m had been wasted.

      Justice secretary Chris Grayling pushed all this through in tandem with the privatisation of the probation service, and in his mind’s eye the upgrading of electronic monitoring was the counterpart of downgrading the status and skills of probation officers. Both programmes had commercial rather than penal rationales. Both have been expensive failures, each in their own way, but Grayling has not been called to account for either of them.

      The over-complex, outsourced infrastructure set in place to manage the mass expansion of GPS tracking is no longer needed and should be dismantled. A modest and sensible use of tagging will not happen until electronic monitoring has been properly integrated into a restored, publicly owned probation service, as it mostly is in mainland Europe.

      Mike Nellis
      Emeritus professor of criminal and community justice, University of Strathclyde

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    2. Well spotted! Excellent letter and analysis from Mike Nellis.

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  8. Oh no reading the Sunday best of the week and we get a love in for Raho and Rogers. Really Jim have you just announced the run for national chairs here and the general secretary election. I doubt the technocrat will have the backbone let alone the real potential to lead and be followed. Neither have done anything remarkable than acquiesce the whole side into a local arrangement for which has destroyed the union and left all open to local pay and down grade. No fools that pair. A clever move wrapped up in explanations by their support club. Where will they be when the truth of their disaster comes home. In power probably blaming someone else. It is a danger to all the union to allow the management friendlies any free hand. Keep up the good work Jim and let them pair get another PR agent we thought you were independent.

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    1. I thought you'd not noticed that's why I re-published it!

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    2. Thanks you may not realise it yet but they have contributed to damage that whatever happens has put the union and the movement back many years. It can only be repaired if the Labour government get in and truly repeal 2016 trade union legislation.
      Corbyn “That means new trade union freedoms and collective bargaining rights, of course, because it is only through collective representation that workers have the voice and the strength to reverse the race to the bottom in pay and conditions.” Unlike Mr Raho and it is well known that Mr Roger is anti Corbyn and somehow the duo think they know better than the Party Come on Jim help the membership. It is not a game.

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  9. Justice Committee - TR inquiry
    Next meeting(s)
    30 January 2018 10:45 am
    Oral Evidence Session
    Transforming Rehabilitation
    View details
    Witness(es)

    Ian Lawrence, General Secretary, NAPO
    Ben Priestley, National Officer, UNISON
    Location

    Room 6, Palace of Westminster

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    1. Also on Tuesday, but in the afternoon:

      2.30 pm - 4.00 pm


      Westminster Hall debate

      Treatment of adults with autism by the criminal justice system - Kevin Brennan

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  10. Napo need to get their act together over Carillion & pensions. Yes, we are ALL being put at risk by these bastards:

    The Greater Manchester Pension Fund (GMPF), the pension scheme for the 10 local authorities in Greater Manchester and other bodies such as schools and charities, is to invest in Manchester Airport’s planned £800m (€944m) Airport City development, with a 10% stake in the project.

    The development will form the core of a government-designated enterprise zone surrounding the airport, the third-busiest in the UK.

    The development – the largest development project in the UK since the Olympic redevelopment in East London – is a joint venture between Manchester Airports Group (MAG) with a 50% share, Beijing Construction Engineering Group and support services company Carillion (20% each) and the GMPF.

    Peter Morris, director of pensions at the GMPF, said: “It’s a good investment opportunity. The airport is an international gateway to Manchester, and the scale and location of Airport City is attractive to occupiers, particularly as this development could not be built next to other large airports.”

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  11. And also...

    A number of UK public sector pension funds could face shortfalls following the collapse of construction company Carillion.

    The group was placed into liquidation on 15 January with a reported debt burden of £1.3bn (€1.5bn) and cash reserves of less than £30m.

    At the time of the collapse Carillion had more than 400 outsourcing contracts in place, according to media reports, providing services to local authorities including facilities management, maintenance, road building, library services and delivering school meals.

    Many of these contracts included cost-sharing agreements related to pensions provided by the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) to staff transferring from the public sector to the private sector, meaning Carillion was registered as an employer contributing to 13 LGPS funds.

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  12. A 2009 view of PPF

    "Under the PPF arrangements, the trustees of a pension fund tied to a crashed company must apply for protection. As a creditor of the collapsed employer, trustees often expect to top-up their assets with leftovers from the insolvency. Next, the PPF spends two years assessing the value of the fund's assets and liabilities before allowing it to join.

    Politically, it has proved a huge success for the government. At a time when companies are going out of business at an increasing rate, it has in place a scheme to protect more than 12million people who, for at least some of their working life, have acquired guaranteed pension rights. Without the PPF, it is certain thousands of workers, who value their pensions almost more than they do their jobs, would be protesting outside No 10.

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    That was the case following the collapse of steel maker ASW, which went under at the beginning of the decade, long before ministers began preparing for a crisis in final salary schemes. Workers, who were resigned to losing their jobs, led a long campaign for safeguards and can be credited with helping to create the PPF. Eventually, a £400m scheme became a £2.9bn scheme and the problem, at least for ASW workers, went away.

    But there are increasing misgivings about the mounting cost to employers of standing by the guarantees. Ostensibly, the PPF is an industry scheme that will look to employers to make up any shortfalls. However, the 7,000-odd private sector final salary schemes are more than £200bn in deficit and the PPF deficit is growing. Pension experts are increasingly concerned how confidence can be maintained in the new system without a government guarantee.

    Ros Altmann, former adviser to No 10, says the situation is desperate. She, and others, argue the PPF is a sticking plaster that avoids a more fundamental look at retirement. It addresses the so-called­ pension promises offered to a proportion of the workforce, but ignores that the rest have either little or no pension savings and will most likely rely on the state."

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  13. 20:45 I appreciate that you do not understand that distributive rather than centralised collective bargaining was the only viable option post TR. it was the employers that did not want to talk to each other that was the problem. These myths that those hard left wingers are peddling of a sell out by Raho and Rogers are are groundless and suppose the pair are far more powerful than the entire Napo leadership and spineless NEC. The Napo far left would presumably compel employers to meet with them in some centralised Stalinist committee and then force them to do everything they want with the power of their Neo Marxist rhetoric. Let us not forget that the candidates of the left in Napo are Lawrence and Berry. Lawrence has already declared he wants to stand again. If anything they were the ones together with Winters and Pattison who were dealing with the national collective bargaining situation and must bear some responsibility. However it would be unfair to blame Lawrence as he is largely impotent in his dealings as the employers ignore him as someone beset on all sides and has a glazed expression when matters involve anything complex or strategic. There was an attempt to get things sorted at the Napo AGM before last with an enabling motion that was never heard as the left wingers voted to support the already dead NNC that had Lawrence et al looking like rabbits frozen in the headlights of an oncoming juggernaut as they were forced to appear to support the unviable. Raho and Rogers were the only ones who came up with a practical alternative to the nothing the leadership were left with and I suspect Lawrence has been secretly glad of those who blame everyone but him. If he he had not had at least a couple of pragmatists in Napo then they would not have any formal mechanism through which to speak with employers and his showboating days would have been sunk months ago. Let us see if modern local distributed collective bargaining delivers anything. If it fails as the NNC did consistently to achieve pay increases for all including those at the top of the scale then the far left wingers can say that they were right but before then they might do well to remember that they have no viable alternative and little to offer but a fading dream of trade union power that has no basis in reality. I would always invite people to deal with things as they are.

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    1. I would be the first one to look at all sides and see what might happen but you are and still hold a position that capitulated a major issue. The matter was subject to a protection under the transfer arrangements. There was no defence or claim on this by any party who should and ought to have challenged. Failing that is a clear signal to the future of how things will be managed. Your post well written and to some degree inclusive of the wider views is still disparaging towards the left in the union and this is not helpful. The NEC will not welcome the views either.
      While your descriptors are sort of funny on one level on another they do not adequately deliver appropriate respect towards people who may or may not have some ownership of the failings. You do make your sides story more credible and interesting but the claim it was pragmatism is not what anyone wants to hear. Cutting staff reducing costs shaving of professional top earners reducing management oversight losing flexi time arrangements changing hostel night staff the list goes on. Rationalising cuts as pragmatic that's no position so your team offer nothing and in fact have made it worse.

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    2. This has to be my pick of the week. Nothing to do with probation, but a fascinating read if a very long one.

      https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/adam-ramsay/tory-ministers-taxpayer-cash-hard-Brexit-erg

      'Getafix

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    3. You seem to be denigrating the left wing somewhat ! And making huge generalisations.
      This usually comes from the right wing

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    4. Yes I agree 8:48 is generalising and denigrating the left and everyone else in that post thanks well pointed out.

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