TR - 'Read All About It!'

With perfect timing given that the CRC contracts are about to be torn up, re-designed and re-tendered, the Probation Journal has published a special edition that casts a forensic eye over the whole sorry saga called TR. 

Of course this blog has seen the whole thing through from the beginning and forms part of the historical record so thoroughly discussed and dissected here. For all those wanting to know how and why we've ended up in the current unmitigated mess, it's all in black and white in one slim volume. I'm particularly enamoured by the notion of practitioners indulging in 'principled infidelity'. 

Five years of Transforming Rehabilitation: Markets, management and values

This special edition on Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) appears at a timely moment, five years on from the beginning of TR reforms, and following the release of a series of censorious reports from a Parliamentary committee (Justice), the National Audit Office and the Probation Inspectorate. All of them concurred with respect to the inadequacies of the financial model for TR, its logistical malfunctions, wastefulness, and most of all, failures towards those caught up in the criminal justice system. Moreover, these could hardly be dismissed as the predictable polemics of critical interest groups. This special issue, therefore, appears as the wider probation community has had an opportunity to digest the scale of the current situation, as well as consider what the next phase of development might be.

A second aim is to provide a further point of reference from the previous special themed issue of this journal, ‘Transforming Rehabilitation: Reflections Two Years On’ (63:2), by updating the prescient concerns originally raised in that issue, some of which remain salient, while other predicted outcomes did not materialise as envisaged. Thirdly, we aim to document the implementation and practice of TR in its particular historical space, in the awareness that this knowledge and institutional memory might otherwise fade from the record as the next iteration of probation evolves. Accordingly, the articles here are written by researchers and practitioners whose work offers contemporary insights into the experiences and perceptions of those directly involved in implementing the programme. Fourthly, the collection offers a kaleidoscopic view of TR from the diverse vantage points of stakeholders, demonstrating the practical complexities of implementing TR at different interfaces. Finally, these accounts offer rare insights into otherwise opaque spaces of authority and decision-making, especially at higher reaches of political, executive and managerial authority whose activities are least well-documented in the literature.

The special issue is also part of a wider endeavour to address empirical holes and narrative gaps in the TR story (appreciating that some questions may never be adequately answered). The order of the articles thus follows the direction of responsibility for decision-making and implementation as they flowed through different agencies, from the government in Whitehall to Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC) level management, through to specific sites such as prisons, community settings and probation. Each individual article illuminates the dynamics of TR in operation in a particular space. They show the compromises and tensions (and creative adjustments and improvisations) that people made at each juncture or level of practice. Taken together, though, they also create a bigger picture of the interrelated consequences of TR as it affected not just individual services or sectors, but disrupted relationships between agencies and across networks. This reminds us that while TR primarily targeted the probation service, it instigated a chain reaction across the whole resettlement and integration landscape. Moreover, the emphasis on inter-dependence clarifies something distinctive and important that is absent from other collections and discussions about TR: that is, it ultimately rose and fell on the basis of agency, i.e. what people did. Indeed, references to emotions pervade the articles – anger, regret, stress, anxiety, sadness, frustration, and also optimism, determination, pride, pragmatism, and creative freedom. These bring TR back to a human scale.

This issue is not designed to be either an exercise in retrospection or a catalogue of ‘we told you sos’ (although see back issues of the journal both pre- and post-TR for extensive comment). Rather, at this stage it is instructive to take stock of what TR was intended to achieve and what has actually transpired, to view the current situation from a range of perspectives, to identify lessons learned and where we might usefully go to from here, albeit without glossing over the damage that has occurred and the scale of the job at hand.

In this approach, we underline the point missed entirely by TR: that resettlement and probation are best undertaken as collective, public responsibilities. Accordingly, several essays consider structural reforms (as distinct from cosmetic changes) which might anchor the next phase, including: justice reinvestment; genuine local responsibility; accountability and transparency; limits to marketisation; plural service communities (across public, private, voluntary sectors); co-produced solutions and proper accountability to the public and service users; clearer lines of responsibility among commissioners; and genuine localism underlined by democratic accountability.

The collection opens with the question: ‘What conditions enabled the emergence of the idea and form that TR eventually took?’ These are by no means straightforward issues. In the first article, John Deering and Martina Feilzer make the case that TR was less of a departure from, than a continuity of, previous decades of policy. Taking the longer view, they contend that the roots of TR grew from a number of transitions since the 1970s, such as greater state control, loss of local autonomy, divestment in the name of marketisation, attacks on a rehabilitative ideal and the depletion of a public service ethic. This was not about natural decline, however, but the outcome of a determined agenda to politically control and tame the unified base of the probation profession. In an admittedly ‘bleak and pessimistic’ conclusion, they survey a service which ‘has become organisationally, structurally and ideologically divided’.

In the current climate, the political economy is intrinsic to any analysis of what has happened to probation. Kevin Albertson and Chris Fox argue that TR ‘makes sense’ within the ideological parameters of what might be called ‘neoliberal’ political thinking. Neoliberalism, dedicated to instituting market-based solutions to complex social challenges, permitted the policy agenda to be dominated by the logics of supply and demand, alongside claims that markets freed up service providers, created greater accountability and thereby protected the public interest. That these beliefs were resoundingly brought up short by deficient outcomes, they contend, demonstrates the deep flaws both in thinking and implementation, to the degree that TR has failed the public interest test.

The next article documents what happened to these ideological agendas when they met political realities. Based on ethnographic research and interviews with senior politicians and civil servants, Harry Annison’s article takes us directly to the architects of TR, allowing us to follow TR as a ‘policy disaster’ in the making. Ministerial hubris was a key factor in destabilising the normal policy-making equilibrium that ordinarily provides insulation from policy shocks. The ‘monomanical fervour’ through which Chris Grayling in his role as Justice Secretary pushed through TR is noted. The rush to speed up implementation led to the abandonment of Payment by Results (PbR) pilots and rapidly enacted legislation and contract agreements, laying the basis for later system failures.

The remaining articles explore the rhetoric to reality gap by unpacking what happened when a deeply flawed policy was handed to responsible agencies to operationalise. Turning to the ‘privatisation journey’, Matthew Millings and colleagues recount the decision-making process at senior levels in one probation trust during its transitional period to a Community Rehabilitation Company. Here, the authors identified four phases of transition – absorbing, adapting, owning, and relinquishing. Despite commencing with high ambitions and expectations that they could leave a legacy of probation culture and professional standards, ultimately, the outcome was not only intensely draining for the individuals concerned, but also resulted in many of their good intentions being ‘lost in transition’.

Turning to prison resettlement: Stuart Taylor and colleagues remind us that that the implementation of Through the Gate (TtG) services was the defining test against which TR was to be judged. Their article documents the structural flaws in how TtG was delivered. CRCs were tasked with providing a service despite lacking a detailed specification as to what such a service would entail. In the case study considered in their article, the CRC sub-contracted out provision to a third-sector provider who seemed ill-equipped to deliver resettlement services within the prison setting. This was compounded by a failure of all parties (from commissioners downwards) to institute ‘a fully cohesive notion of resettlement’. Prisoners (and their families) struggled ‘to know what was offered them and who would provide the service’. As a consequence, the article paints a damning indictment of the absence of resettlement as prisoners experienced ‘dysfunctional induction processes’, reported sporadic engagement with rehabilitation services and had minimal support in returning to the community.

The article from Mary Corcoran and co-authors adds another side to the fragmented relations across the different sectors which were purportedly delivering services in partnership. Drawing on interviews with senior figures from charities, policy-makers and the CRCs, they explain why the much-vaunted role of the voluntary and community sector in delivering resettlement under TR did not materialise. Despite paternalistic promises about the indispensable value of charities in creating a truly mixed supply chain, the CRCs behaved like monopolies, placing commercial self-preservation ahead of collaboration. This revealed ‘the systemic bias’ of the funding model of TR, which ‘structured the market in favour of large commercial bidders’. Voluntary sector providers occupied unequal positions of negotiation with the CRCs and commissioners. Their workforces confronted the devaluation of their skills and experience. This produced misunderstandings and frustrations on the part of providers who were either left to struggle or exited from their contracts.

Several authors highlight the personal consequences of the demise of probation as a public institution. Samantha Walker and co-authors liken the personal and professional struggles of probation staff in their study to the widespread existential insecurity and precarity of late capitalism. They apply zemiological ideas about the harms of marketised practices of which the demoralisation and hollowing out of probationary identities and principles are symptoms. Further, Walker et al. locate this fallout within a wider experience of ‘the violence of work itself’ in late capitalism, experienced as a ‘pervasive form of systemic workplace harm, resulting in mental health issues, stress, and professional dissatisfaction’.

Which returns us to Deering and Feilzer’s initial question: why was there such limited ‘concerted resistance’ to the TR proposals, implementation and aftermath? They conclude that probation resistance had less capability to galvanise political momentum, because the probation profession is less publicly visible and the nature of the work does not appeal to public legitimacy or consensus to the same degree. Of course, much of this hinges on how one frames and understands ‘resistance’ and what constitutes ‘opposition’. Several contributors identify a spectrum of efforts to engage, ameliorate, outwardly resist, or manage change. Other contributions insist on vestigial forms of resistance in retrieving a different tradition of fairness, or in carrying the torch for probation as a continuous and still evolving practice and occupational culture. Hence, Walker et al. discuss how individual workers struggling with heavy caseloads and formulated ‘tick box’ regimes engage in ‘principled infidelity’ to retain meaningful relationships with service users and peers. Resistance might be seen in the withdrawal of the voluntary sector from what they perceived to be a rigged contract market which devalued their contribution. Resistance is discernible in the efforts of probation managers in CRCs to make space for continuity (albeit admitting defeat in many instances).

The final consideration must go to future developments. In his contribution Jim Barton from the Ministry of Justice outlines some of the current thinking from the MoJ after the Strengthening Probation consultation. The article summarises current priorities and a programme of ‘improvements’, which largely entail technocratic adjustments to existing mechanisms. These target areas for reform had already been broadly signalled in the consultation and it would therefore be interesting to note to what extent the responses to the consultation have shaped the thinking further. Reading between the lines of the careful, understated language of civil service code, we might reasonably anticipate a minimalist approach (‘limiting the scale of any future structural overhaul’) sufficient to make the next iteration of TR as roadworthy as possible, prior to any future election, contracting round, or reform. Some of the target areas for action include the proposed introduction of minimum standards to specify the form and frequency of contact with service users; revision of practice guidance and national standards for unpaid work; a clearer specification of Rehabilitation Activity Requirements (RARs) and a ‘re-design’ of Through the Gate provision towards an ‘in-reach’ model. At the broader institutional level there are plans to re-organise geographical boundaries of probation services and re-integrate NPS and CRC provision in Wales. There is also a commitment to the development of a workforce professional strategy and a professional register ‘to ensure that staff are appropriately qualified to deliver probation services’.

As a point of reference and a survey of different perspectives on TR, we hope that the articles in the special issue stimulate debate. As ever, we welcome your feedback.

Mary Corcoran (Guest Editor)
Nicola Carr (Editor)