Charities Subsidising TR - Shock!

I see there's been another report on how the third sector have been royally-shafted by TR. This on the Civil Society website:-

Charities subsidising £900m government rehabilitation programme

Charities providing services for the government’s £900m Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) scheme are using money from their own reserves to deliver contracts, according to umbrella body Clinks. Clinks has been reviewing the programme’s delivery since it launched in 2014. Speaking to Charity Finance magazine this week, chief executive Anne Fox said its latest survey results show an increasingly negative response from charities. 

Fox said half of respondents reported a negative impact on their organisation of the TR programme, up from 40 per cent in a similar survey the year before. She said charities are particularly losing out in procurement of services for high-risk-of-harm offenders through the National Probation Service (NPS). “So few of our members are actually getting money from the NPS, and that is a problem because there is a definite offer in the voluntary sector for high-risk-of-harm offenders.”

Charities subsiding contracts
For lower-risk offenders, services are procured through 21 regional community rehabilitation companies (CRCs) using a mechanism called a rate card. Fox said the rate card causes “confusion and problems” and that CRCs can charge an additional cost to charities for offering the service.

Fox said a third of organisations getting money from CRCs are using money from their own reserves, and a third are using other sources to subsidise services. In addition, Fox said there has been a shift away from local authority funding, with only a quarter of respondents to Clinks’ survey being funded through councils, compared to two-fifths in the previous survey. Fox said it is unclear whether this shortfall has been filled by an increase in public donations or by charities setting up their own social enterprises. She said:

 “We have seen some organisations setting up social enterprises with cafés or different things like that in their area. Often it is to provide training and employment opportunities for their clients that are not being funded in other ways. There is a view that these services should be funded by the public purse, but in reality the majority of funding is not coming from there.”

‘Model needs to be revised’
Fox added: “The general thing is about size. The bigger you are, the more scalable you are, and the more likely you are to get any work in the first place. We’ve seen a driving out of small and specialist providers. The model needs to be revised and one of the first things to go would be the rate card. The Transforming Rehabilitation system is reliant on organisations taking unpaid work.”

Meanwhile, Beth Murray, director of communications and engagement at Catch22, which delivers some services for the TR programme, said her organisation was frustrated with the scheme’s initial tendering process after failing to be selected as a prime provider.

She said: “There was an opportunity for a seismic shift in how the voluntary sector engages with justice, but it simply didn’t shape out like that. Contracts have been designed in such a way that bureaucracy has taken over a little and hitting the target does not necessarily mean you are achieving the best social outcome for the people that are leaving prisons.”

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I'm not sure we covered news of a similar report from last year, but if we did it's worth reminding ourselves:-

Report: Charities exploited in chaotic £900m government programme

The £900m Transforming Rehabilitation programme to reform probation has been chaotic and underfunded, and has allowed large private providers to exploit small charities, according to a report published this week.

Beyond Bars: Maximising the voluntary sector's contribution in criminal justice, a report by think tank New Philanthropy Capital into charities’ role in rehabilitation and prison reform, found that the government’s flagship programme had been chaotic and underfunded.

Transforming Rehabilitation was introduced in 2014 and 2015, in order to be ready for the General Election, and involved simultaneously cutting funding, requiring an increase in provision, and transferring staff and services to new commercial providers.

Charities were encouraged to bid for prime contracts but were largely prevented from doing so because contracts were only open to organisations with a huge amount of funding on the balance sheet. Chris Grayling, then the Justice Secretary, had said he wanted Transforming Rehabilitation to offer an increased role to charities, but the report found it had been harmful to the sector.

Charities asked to work for free
The report found that charities had been used as “bid candy” – when an organisation is involved in a bid to make it look attractive but not offered any work. And it found that charities’ time had been wasted in applying for contracts that they did not win. It found that most charities now involved in the project were not fully recovering their costs. Other charities had had offenders referred to them but were not being paid at all. Yet others were only signing contracts now, two years after the programme launched.

Meanwhile, philanthropic funders were pulling out of the sector because they did not want to subsidise private profit or the public purse. “Chaotic doesn’t cover it,” one charity told the report authors.

Damaging campaigning
The report also found that Transforming Rehabilitation was damaging charities’ ability to campaign, and appeared to have silenced many charities. It found that payment-by-results programmes designed to encourage innovation had had the opposite effect, and driven charities into a risk-averse culture.

“Grass roots organisations feel they are ‘being exploited’ by some TR providers,” the report says. “With services provided through TR thin on the ground and demand increasing, providers refer to local charities outside of the supply chain, who are not only not being paid for their services, but also risk losing other funding sources by engaging. Many charity providers have pulled out over lack of clarity, which has cost them significant resource. It has been two years and some are only just signing contracts now. TR’s payment by results approach risks disincentivising organisations from working with the hardest to rehabilitate.”

IT system still not in place two years later
Separately a Parliamentary inquiry into Transforming Rehabilitation has been told that an IT system necessary to make the service work has still not been delivered, two years late, and that prime providers had received 30 per cent less referrals than expected – making it impossible to hit PbR targets. The committee also heard that rather than encouraging more volunteering and mentoring, as it was intended to do, the programme had actually made it more difficult for charities using these interventions. Dame Glenys Stacey, HM Inspector of Probation, told the committee that the process was “half-baked” and unlikely to succeed.