On a significant day that saw TR consigned to history and a major government u-turn, a typically coruscating piece from Ian Dunt on the politics.co.uk website:-
It was a ruinous idea from the moment it was born, in Chris Grayling's head, back in 2013. And it remained one until the moment it died, last night, in the pages of the newspapers.
The privatisation of probation simply made no sense. No-one supported it. No-one wanted it. But the then-justice secretary went ahead and did it anyway. Now, after hundreds of millions of wasted taxpayer money and God-knows-how-many needlessly broken lives and additional victims of crime, it is being brought back into the public sector.
It is hard to fully describe the wastefulness of this debacle. Probation is the system that monitors offenders when they leave jail and tries to ensure that they do not reoffend. It is the harsh and unloved wing of public services. It isn't exciting, like the armed forces. It doesn't win public sympathy, like schools or hospitals. Most people don't even really know what it is. But when it goes wrong, we all suffer, because we all become less safe. There is a direct causal line between someone stealing your phone on the street and this service.
Grayling shattered the system then tried to rebuild it according to the profit motive. He split low, medium and high risk cases and put the former two in the private sector, with the latter retained in the public sector. Then 21 seperate companies were given the contracts.
But there was a problem. Probation does not correspond to the profit motive. Even if Grayling was less biblically foolish, this system could not work. The concept of privatising probation was wrong, as well as the mechanism used to do so.
Over a third of offenders have mental health problems, although some estimates put it as high as 90%. Suicide and self-harm rates are extremely high. Fifty per cent are functionally illiterate, meaning they have a reading age of 11 or lower. Many are completely illiterate. They are disproportionately likely to have experienced unemployment, drug use and trauma.
It's hard to turn that kind of situation around - to get offenders into work, to help them maintain relationships. And there is, in truth, no profit to be made in it. It costs lots of money and most of the time it doesn't work. Repeat offenders are hard to change.
There should be one question above all when people talk of privatising a service: What is the contract? On what precise basis does the company get paid? Where this is unclear, or if payment seems unlikely, then privatisation is the product of ideological zeal and not reason.
The end result is clear. The National Audit Office found that probation companies had much lower business volumes than the Ministry of Justice had modelled, underinvested in their clients and didn't meet performance targets. They failed to work with charities, or develop appropriate supply chains, or provide innovative changes to the service, or meet contractual commitments, or help offenders with accomodation, employment, finance, mental health or drug problems. In repeated checks, they were found to be inadequate, particularly in the area of public protection. After the reform, there was a 22% overall increase in the number of proven re-offences per re-offender.
The commercial approach was shown to be "inappropriate" for probation services. The fear of failure meant that risks were not encouraged, as they might be in a normal company. Contracts were "lightly specified", which meant the government could not hold providers to account. And payment-by-results proved impossible, because data on reoffending only comes out two years later and it is impossible to say if it is the result of the probation agency or some other variable, like welfare provision, or drug services, or something completely outside of government control.
But instead of asking about contracts, or exactly why we think the profit motive would function in an individual case, we just split into these incredibly tedious ideological tribes. On one side, the free market fundamentalists, like some crazed tribe of mouth-frothing Bacchic Hayekians, who think profit acts as some sort of magic wand fixing everything. And on the other the Corbyn disciples, whose only answer to any problem is to nationalise it, in as crude a way as possible, more to make themselves feel like they're getting revenge for 40 years of policy defeat than because they really believe it might help anyone.
It's all so boring and inadequate. We need rational case-by-case assessments of public benefit. What we get instead are massed ranks of zealots.
It's easy to turn this into a Grayling story. He is demonstrably inadequate and should have no role in any sane British government. The duration and extent of his political success is a vivid test of how badly our political system is malfunctioning.
But this is a much bigger story than just him. It's about how simple-minded our debate on privatisation and nationalisation is and what the consequences of that are for all of us. If you can only think in terms of 'good' and 'bad', with no nuance or judgement in between, don't be surprised when you get terrible results.
Ian Dunt is editor of Politics.co.uk
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This from Frances Crook of the Howard League:-
Reunifying probation is a bold and sensible step
I warmly welcome the plan to reunify probation into a national public service and the aim of promoting confidence in community sentences to replace prison terms of under a year that are known to be counter-productive. I commend the justice secretary for taking this bold and sensible step and I hope he will go on to embed the reform by introducing legislation to abolish short prison sentences.
I am also pleased that there appears to be a division between prisons and probation and I hope that the director in charge of probation will be a national strategic voice. It is important to know who is in charge.
There are plans for legislation to introduce a professional framework for probation. I hope this comes with a beefed-up probation institute that should provide ethical oversight, promote research and best practice. The College of Policing offers a model for this.
This endorsement comes with a some caveats, provided in a positive and constructive sense, as we all want this reform to work well.
I hope that the director in charge of probation will be a national strategic voice
Giving unpaid work to the private sector will not work. It never has. Private companies do not have the local links with small voluntary groups, charity shops, faith groups who are the very people to provide the unpaid work opportunities. When unpaid work in London was outsourced to Serco it was a disaster – and a risible one at that. When an opportunity to do some community payback was found, for example cleaning up a small graveyard, twenty or thirty men were sent along from all over London and most were sent away again, to spend the rest of the day going round and round on the Circle Line in order to complete their specified time.
This leads to another structural problem. The plan is to divide probation into eleven areas, which means they will be regional and not local. Most of the people serving community sentences are tied to local communities, as are most of the people coming out of prison. We are all bedded and tied to small local areas. Having a regional office trying to manage staff, community ties, several local government areas and health services, simply will not work.
I’m not a fan of the commissioning model. It is structurally stultifying and inhibits good practice and experimentation. Whoever is commissioned, whether it be the voluntary sector or the private companies, they work to the contract and not much else. I hope to see grants being given to voluntary organisations instead of commissioning as that model works best.
Overall this announcement was framed firmly in the exhortation to stop using prison sentences of under a year, which is exactly what the Howard League has been demanding.
Frances Crook
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Guardian letters today:-
Probation service will take years to recover from Chris Grayling’s privatisation fiasco
For probation to provide the range and quality of services it once did will be a major undertaking, writes Mike Worthington; Grayling was told in no uncertain terms by Napo that his reforms were destined to fail, says Pat Waterman
The government’s decision to restore the probation service to the public sector is good news (Probation will be renationalised after disastrous Grayling reforms, 16 May). However, it is only the first step. For probation to provide the range and quality of services it once did in the justice sector will be a major rebuilding undertaking. Who will deliver the complex and skilled supervision of offenders that justice secretary David Gauke talks of? It is my understanding that the size of the probation service staff has been halved since privatisation. Significant numbers of qualified and experienced probation officers have been lost. And the qualifying training which was in place in the heyday of the service was abandoned some time ago.
To recruit, train and retain the numbers of staff needed by the service will take years to achieve. And if this succeeds, where will they be housed? In my area, like most, we developed a network of district offices and units to accommodate staff and deliver services locally. In Northumbria, we had 41 offices and units. Since 2014, 35 have been closed and are now either sold or rented, or up for sale or rent. To achieve the kind of probation service Mr Gauke intends will require major planning and resources. It will demand sustained political will. I hope that his intentions do become reality.
Mike Worthington
Former chief probation officer, Northumbria
I was the chair of the London branch of the National Association of Probation Officers (Napo) from 2012 to 2016. As Chris Grayling’s reforms destroyed the probation service, I watched as careers were destroyed and the health of some of my members was ruined. I watched as my members did everything they could to bring the government to its senses. But I also watched as some senior managers pocketed large payoffs, at public expense, having done and said little to contradict their political masters. Grayling was told in no uncertain terms by Napo that his reforms were destined to fail. But he did not listen and his arrogance has cost this country a fortune. So although I welcome the news that probation is to be renationalised, it is with a heavy heart.
Pat Waterman
London
The Guardian view on privatising probation: a disaster ignored
ReplyDeleteEditorial
Probation services are intended to help those who have fallen foul of the law. They ought to change the lives of some of the most marginalised people in our communities. That the government thought it possible to make a profit for shareholders from this process seems beyond satire. Yet the joke was on the voters. Against repeated warnings from civil servants about the potential risks to public safety, the then justice secretary Chris Grayling rushed through a botched partial privatisation of the service in 2014.
Mr Grayling’s idea was that the rehabilitation of low-and medium-risk offenders could be done more cheaply and more effectively by the private sector. The result was as bad as many predicted. The numbers recalled to prison for breaching licence conditions skyrocketed; the taxpayer lost out to the tune of £500m; some private providers gamed the system while others went bust. The level of distrust between the judicial system and the probation service is as bad as anyone can remember.
The current justice secretary, David Gauke, made headlines on Thursday for repudiating Mr Grayling’s disastrous legacy. That is far from the reality. In the Commons, Mr Gauke made it clear that every one of the proposed 11 new regions of the National Probation Service will be “expressly required to buy all interventions from the market”. While some of these might be charities, experience suggests that most will come from big companies. It looks as if ministers are trying to recycle the ideology in a new form while pretending to be doing something more strategic.
Over decades, both Labour and Conservative governments combined to discredit the probation service’s professional ethos of “advise, assist, befriend” to such an extent that those words became despised by much of the public. Rather than encouraging voters to see that reintegrating prisoners back into the communities they lived in would be better for everyone, politicians from Michael Howard in the 1990s onwards preferred to retail inanities about how “prison works”.
This political culture has been overlaid on an administrative one which encouraged the replacement of professional judgment by a jungle of performance indicators. It is now difficult to accurately measure the reoffending rate, rather than the reconviction rate. It is unforgivable that Mr Grayling was willing to judge and pay private companies on unmeasurable results.
The government’s retreat bodes ill for a service that badly needs a strategic plan. Every offender has different needs, which must be assessed and assisted properly if the public is to be protected. A criminal record is another life sentence, crippling employment and housing opportunities.
Ministers ought to take up the approach set out by Lord Ramsbotham, the former chief inspector of prisons, who has produced an excellent roadmap for the Labour party. The crossbench peer correctly insists that probation should not have been centralised as a societal curative service. Instead it belongs at a local level and ought to be re-established in the communities it serves. His idea is to help offenders find a direction and purpose in their lives in the neighbourhoods they live in. This would bring the probation service into closer contact with other arms of the state such as the NHS. It could be directly responsive to concerns about crime in their communities. The private sector’s role, if any, could be then confined to limited tasks commissioned by the new probation authorities.
Excellent from The Guardian but where is this Labour report by Lord Ramsbotham please?
DeleteYes, once the dust had settled we may see that the Cons have have given the market, outsourcing behemoths, another go at extracting some liquid from the already semi arid rehabilitative landscape. These markets are illusions. A bit like the market in the water supply to my house.
ReplyDeleteThe Justice Committee Chair comments on the model for probation.
ReplyDeleteChair of the Justice Committee, Bob Neill MP, said:
“We are glad to see that the MOJ has finally made a decision about the way forward on probation. This is well over-due.
David Gauke told us last month that Transforming Rehabilitation had ‘clearly not delivered in the way we wanted’. I agree. In fact, the evidence for this has been increasingly clear for some time.
We said back in June last year that the probation system was a mess. Staff morale was at an all-time low, offenders weren’t getting the support they needed, magistrates were losing confidence in supervision and the voluntary sector was being pushed out.
I am glad to see that the Government has finally listened to my Committee’s concerns about the model for probation. We were unconvinced that the model of splitting offenders by risk could ever work.
The HMI Probation told my Committee on Tuesday that it is impossible to reduce probation relationships to a set of contractual requirements. What is important now is that there is a smooth transition from the current model to the next.
Hard-working probation staff have suffered enough change- now we want them to be able to get on with their jobs. We now look forward to receiving the Government’s full response to our July 2018 report on Transforming Rehabilitation, and to questioning the new Prisons and Probation Minister (Robert Buckland) on the detail as soon as possible.”