Here is the latest blog post from Napo:-
Staff transfer negotiations stall
Negotiations between the unions and HMPPS to reach agreement on the terms for transfer of Offender Management work and CRC staff to the NPS in Wales in December this year, and the NPS in England, and other future probation providers in 2021 (should new contracts emerge) have stalled. It was hoped to finalise a staff transfer and protections agreement last week to provide the best possible terms for members to move from their CRCs to the NPS/other providers.
However, we have not been able to reach agreement on some key elements of the transfer arrangements. As a result, HMPPS has indicated that it will need to refer these outstanding issues for further consideration within government.
UNIONS ASK FOR TRANSFER DELAY IN WALES
The outstanding matters will take a number of weeks to resolve. In the meantime, and despite our strong objections, HMPPS has confirmed that it intends to proceed with the transfer of offender management staff from the Wales CRC to NPS Wales on 1 December 2019 as planned. We have therefore written to the Welsh Government and to the Justice Minister Lucy Frazer to urge them to intervene. The unions want the transfer delayed to at least 1 February 2020 to enable the transfer negotiations to be satisfactorily concluded.
Another reason for demanding a delay is that, until the negotiations have been completed and CRC members have voted on the final package, the option for CRC staff in Wales to transfer onto NPS pay and conditions at the time of the intended transfer (1 December 2019) and 2021 for CRC staff in England, will not be available. This will mean that Wales CRC staff will transfer on their existing CRC pay and conditions to NPS Wales until such time as we have balloted CRC members on a package of measures that we want to see retrospectively applied for staff in Wales to 1st December 2019.
This situation is regrettable and certainly not the fault of the unions. We have prioritised and applied ourselves to the negotiations in good faith and have not been able to close the gap between us and HMPPS in relation to the full package of measures that will be needed to underpin the overall transfer of OM staff to the NPS.
Unions agree employment protections for non-transferring staff in KSS (Wales) CRC
Meanwhile our union reps in Wales have worked to secure an agreement that staff who are not transferring with OM work to NPS Wales, and who are remaining with the above employer, will be matched to jobs in the new operating model being introduced across the whole of that CRC until the end of its contract in 2021. This is a significant achievement, but it does not give the longer term protection that the unions are seeking for all of our members who remain with their CRC until these contracts end in Wales and England in 2021, and who will then transfer to new providers of Probation as per the government’s plans.
Consultation with members
The unions are now considering how and when we should consult with our CRC members in terms of the ballot on the outcome of national negotiations. Please look out for further updates as soon as more news becomes available.
Our pay should be matched to nps pay from when we split. TR failed and staff transferred to crcs lost money etc through no fault of their own.
ReplyDeleteIts ok - PM Johnson stated in HoC today that workers rights are of the highest quality in the UK & will be protected by his Brexit Bill.
ReplyDeleteYou're all safe.
(hahahahahahahahaha)
Hmmm, "highest quality", eh?
DeleteSo in 2014 the UK govt off-loaded thousands of staff into the private sector with promises of a golden future, a time-limited no redundancy clause & an enhanced voluntary leavers' scheme. Only months later hundreds of jobs were axed by the privateers & the EVR scheme was not honoured, despite the govt gifting the entirety of EVR monies (estimated at £80m) to the private companies. Most leavers ended up with less than 50% of their EVR entitlement.
And will Boris honour any of his own words? No. He doesn't regard the spoken word as a straitjacket or a binding arrangement. They're just noises which serve the purpose of the moment:
In 2018, Boris Johnson, told the DUP "no British government could or should" sign up to putting a border in the Irish Sea between mainland United Kingdom and Northern Ireland - less than one year later Mr. Johnson put a border in the Irish Sea.
Boris Johnson said Britain’s continued membership of the EU would be a “boon for the world and for Europe”...
"I would vote to stay in the single market," Johnson told Sky News in 2013.
In 2012, Johnson called for a referendum on staying in a reformed EU, which was "boiled down" to the single market... "We need to stay in the council of ministers of the internal market. In my view, the British have done good things for Europe."
Boris Johnson said he will withdraw the bill and seek a general election if he lost the vote (on the timetable).
He lost the vote.
Mr Johnson then announced the legislation would be "paused", meaning that the EU will now have to grant an extension to Brexit in order to avoid the UK crashing out with no deal in nine days' time.
Not a single mention of withdrawing the Bill & going for a GE. The man's a serial liar, a chancer. And so are all of his ministers & party members as the DUP have only just found out - abortion law change, gay marriage - but at least they have £1bn of taxpayers' cash to soothe their wounded souls.
Independent Political Sketch piece today 23/10/19 - Tom Peck must read JB's blog
DeleteBoris Johnson turned up at PMQs, but how do you interrogate someone who's not even pretending to tell the truth?
His second Prime Minister’s Questions was the now traditional festival of lies. Get ready for a deluge when the election is called
A novel experience, on Wednesday at noon, when the prime minister rose at the despatch box for what is known as Prime Minister’s Questions. Boris Johnson is over three months into the job but has only got round to doing it the once.
The last time it happened, technically, was three weeks ago, at the precise moment he was giving his party conference speech, an unfortunate timetabling clash that was the direct consequence of his having tried and failed to shut down parliament.
That was considered a democratic outrage, at the time, but anyone tuning in today could hardly fail to see the upside in such a strategy.
The purpose of these occasions, we are led to believe, is for the whole house and, in particular, the leader of the opposition, to scrutinise the government by asking the prime minister difficult questions.
Traditionally, Johnson’s tactic in such situations, over many years in public life, has been to create what he calls a “blonde wall of noise” – to just overwhelm all would-be challengers with a tornado of bluster.
That doesn’t work so well in the House of Commons as it does in television interviews, but he has a new tactic, which is equally effective. And that is just to lie.
It really works. How can anyone hope to land a blow on you when you’ve liberated yourself from even the most basic requirement to say anything that anyone might conceivably think to be true.
There he stood, stating with complete clarity, on many occasions, that the government is still committed to “leaving the EU by October 31st”. As he spoke, the Conservative Party was sending out a little tub-thumping email to all its members, saying “Labour has delayed Brexit again”. He also spent the morning both in a meeting with Jeremy Corbyn, where the two of them failed to agree on a new timetable for Brexit, and on the phone to EU leaders, discussing the request for a delay to Brexit he had personally sent them, in a letter he had refused to sign, like an unimaginably petulant toddler.
It was, in its way, Prime Minister’s Questions in the style of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. That movie loses much of its dramatic tension once death stops becoming an obstacle to life. How much edge is there to be found in a sword fight, for example, when the vanquished party just pops over the edge of the world and then comes back reborn?
DeleteAnd so it is, for us, forced to listen to or otherwise analyse the words of Boris Johnson, when none of them can have any meaning at all, because he knows and we know and absolutely everybody knows that they slipped the surly bonds of truth so very long ago.
That he’ll say absolutely anything, at all.
It is like watching a man delivering election slogans the day after the election is lost. He is, at time of writing, “still committed to leaving the European Union on October 31st” even though he knows it can’t be done.
And now that that can’t be done, even though he’s still claiming he’s going to do it, his and his No 10 pals’ next ruse is to claim he will be “calling a general election before Christmas”. He’s already tried and failed to call one of those. There’s absolutely no reason at all to imagine anything has changed that means he can just call one now. He can’t.
It’s all just noise and shouting. Say whatever you like in the hope that someone’s listening. Doesn’t matter that none of it’s true because the person who hears it probably won’t know that.
There will be a general election, at some point, and we know that this will be the strategy. Dominic Cummings has done it before and he’ll do it again. Already we have seen the Conservatives’ posters, pumped out on Facebook on Tuesday night and already shared 17,000 times.
“Boris’s Brexit deal has passed parliament, but Labour have now voted to delay it,” it says.
It is painful to have to point out that if it had passed parliament, it would already be law. It hasn’t even come close to passing parliament. They know it, but they also know the people they want to lie to don’t.
It’s clear, right now, in late 2019, that big electoral events in big democratic countries happen at the mercy of social media, which nobody has yet worked out how to regulate or control.
No one quite knows when the general election is happening, but there is one thing we do know for certain. It will be yet another thermonuclear explosion of fear, lies and loathing. It is the Cummings way. The rest of us just have to live with the consequences.
11 October 2017: "Government plans to shut down old and "dilapidated" prisons in England and Wales have been suspended due to a sudden rise in the jail population.
ReplyDeleteMichael Spurr, head of the Prison and Probation Service, said no closures were planned in the next five years.
Mr Spurr said it had been an "incredibly difficult" summer after an unexpected surge in prisoner numbers with further rises forecast.
But he said plans to provide 10,000 new prison places were still on track.
Speaking at the Prison Governors' Association conference, near Derby, Mr Spurr said he had "never known" the jail population to increase by so much in such a short space of time as it did between May and August, when it went up by 1,200."
22 October 2019: "Plans to close Victorian-era jails in England and Wales and sell them for housing have been scrapped.
The government proposed shutting the "most dilapidated prisons" with hopes of building more than 3,000 new city centre homes on the old sites.
But the move has been scrapped after Prisons Minister Lucy Frazer told MPs that ageing cells were still needed to house increasing numbers of offenders.
Ms Frazer said Downing Street remained committed to building the extra places because more offenders would be locked up after police forces begin recruiting an additional 20,000 officers by 2023.
And she said a further 2,000 places would be required by 2030 as a result of sentencing changes for violent criminals and sex offenders."
Ohhhh, the hokey-cokey...
The MoJ continue to spin the news:
ReplyDelete"A scheme giving vulnerable ex-offenders stable accommodation to help them rebuild their lives and stay away from crime is now up and running, Prisons Minister Lucy Frazer announced today (10 October 2019).
Prisoners due for release from Leeds, Pentonville and Bristol jails, but who are at risk of homelessness, have been the first to benefit from the trailblazing £6.4 million pilot."
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/scheme-giving-ex-offenders-a-stable-place-to-live-up-and-running
Also, feel free to look at HMPPS spending on a month-by-month basis here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/her-majestys-prison-probation-service-spending-over-25000-2019
As far as I can see, in Jan 2019 HMPPS gave approx £40m in payments for "probation services" to the CRCs (only covering transactions that exceeded £25k).
Equivalent to £480m a year based on one month's declarations...
https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/call-for-regulator-with-teeth-to-tackle-outsourcing-fiascoes/5101906.article
DeleteAn independent regulator with fines to impose penalties and binding obligations could help cut the cost of public procurement fiascoes such as the offender tagging contract, a thinktank has proposed. Reform says that while scrutiny of public-private partnerships has increased since the collapse of outsourcing giant Carrillion, bodies such as the National Audit Office and parliamentary select committees lack power to enforce change.
Delete'By having a complete overview of outsourcing contracts from signing to completion, a new regulator would be able to intervene and prevent bad deals spiralling out of control' the report, The Price of Poor Procurement, concludes.
As examples of bad deals, the report identifies five contracts which incurred heavy additional costs - ranging trom 81.9% of the contract value in the Seaborne Ferries procurement and 81.9% in the project to decommission nuclear submarines to 46% in the offender tagging contract. Reform says that investigations into such fiascoes should be driven by evidence rather than politics. 'Dogmatic beliefs – in either the value of public-sector markets or the benefits of in-house provisions – risk poor policy making'.
The collapse of Carillion in January 2018 marked a turning point in the scrutiny of public-private partnerships, Reform states. In the 19 months following Carillion’s demise, 41 official investigations were carried out, producing an average of one report every two weeks. The bodies behind the investigations include the Justice Committee, Financial Conduct Authority, Home Affairs Committee, and Serious Fraud Office. In all, it identifies 11 official organisations, bodies, or watchdogs involved in examining procurement or outsourcing issues.
Although the National Audit Office does 'sterling work', neither it nor parliament's Public Accounts Committee has the ability or authority to enforce changes to the extent that regulators and watchdogs such as the Competition and Markets Authority or Ofcom can.
'The NAO’s and PAC’s bark needs to be accompanied by a body with more bite: an independent regulator,' the report concludes. An Office for Public Procurement (Ofpro) could either be a non-ministerial government department or an independent regulator like the Financial Conduct Authority. It should have a 'substantial, statutory ability to intervene and respond to issues that pose a financial, political, reputational, or physical risk to either citizens, a public sector market, or a public body'.
This would include powers to impose penalties such as fines and enforcement orders on individual and to bar companies from bidding for contracts if found guilty of failing to adhere to guidance or best practice.
Ofpro would cost between £30m and £90m a year, a sum that would be far outweighted by the procurement savings, Reform claims.
Another resounding NAPO success ... not!
ReplyDelete