TR According to Chris Grayling

I notice the Institute for Government have published an interview with Chris Grayling about his time as Minister for Justice and hence responsible for the omnishambles that was TR:-

Tim Durrant (TD): You worked in a number of roles in the shadow cabinet before the 2010 election. Did they inform your time in government?

CG: Yeah, basically the jobs I did in government and the jobs I did in opposition married up almost totally. I was in the Home Office rather than in justice, but basically the jobs I’ve done in government have been the jobs I did in opposition, so there’s been a very close correlation. In none of them have I turned up as a total stranger.

Nick Davies [ND]: In September 2012, you became secretary of state for justice and lord chancellor. Can you talk us through the appointment process, the conversation you had with the prime minister, whether it was something you were expecting?

CG: I thought it was quite a good possibility because there was a lot of commonality with the reforms I’d been talking about [at DWP]. The coalition agreement envisaged a fairly similar approach in employment and in the rehabilitation of offenders. I had not been involved in shaping the justice piece in opposition, but I had been involved in shaping the work and pensions piece in opposition, so there was an obvious correlation between the work I’d been doing in DWP and the work David Cameron asked me to do in justice. And David Cameron gave the standard, you know, “come along, see the prime minister,” and he said, “I’d like you to go to justice.” He gave me two instructions, he said, “firstly, I want you to deliver the rehabilitation revolution commitment in the coalition agreement,” because his view was that it hadn’t really been delivered. Both the Conservative manifesto and the coalition agreement envisaged a significant outsourcing of the rehabilitation of offenders. And he also said, “I want you to get rid of the soft justice narrative,” which had been quite visible in the previous couple of years.

ND: What lessons did you take from overseeing the work programme to the implementation of TR [transforming rehabilitation]?

CG: I think the big difference between the two, both big reforms, both requiring a little bit of tweaking once they got up and running, is that in the case of the DWP, the team who had set up the work programme were still there. Whereas in 2015, pretty much everybody who had been involved in the transforming rehabilitation programme left. The ministers all left, the senior officials all left, and it did not get the tweaking and fine-tuning that it needed. In both cases, in the case of the DWP and the MoJ [Ministry of Justice], the statisticians got their numbers wrong. They misjudged the number of referrals that the third-party contractors would get. In the case of the DWP, they were able to make early adjustments to the contracting structure to make sure that wasn’t an issue, and by the time the programme finished, an analysis in 2016 said it had outperformed the expectations of the department based on previous programmes, and at a lower cost than previous programmes. With transforming rehabilitation, from what I could see, they sat there like rabbits in the headlights, saying: “Well, I don’t quite know what we do about this.” The referrals were much lower than expected to the outsourced companies, whose business models then were fatally weakened from the start, and they didn’t make the adjustments they needed to make earlier on.

ND: Knowing what you know now, is there anything that you would do differently to avoid some of those problems?

CG: Yeah. I think, with hindsight, it’s an interesting problem. Arriving halfway through a parliament with a mandate to deliver major reform sets you, to some extent, a timetable. You might think two years and nine months was more than enough to deliver reforms, and in most worlds it would be. But the public sector moves pretty slowly and there’s huge amounts of process involved. I would probably have done it in stages, I wouldn’t have just done one pilot in one part of the country. Because for transforming rehabilitation there had been a pilot in Peterborough of outsourcing the support of offenders to the private and voluntary sectors, which had a measurable impact on the level of re-offending. But I’d probably have done it in two or three stages.

ND: What was the advice from the civil service like on the programme?

CG: Oh, they were very hard working on it. There is a myth floating around that the civil service advised against it, which is not true. The civil service, at all stages, was very, very engaged in delivering it.

ND: More generally, what are the key challenges entailed by taking the step up from minister of state to secretary of state, and what was the support like for you from the civil service when you moved up?

CG: Pretty good. I think the key difference is you suddenly take on financial responsibility in a way that you don’t necessarily as minister of state. The financial position at the Ministry of Justice was very challenging. We had to take out something like a third of the budget over a three-year period. That was implementing reforms that Ken Clarke [the previous secretary of state for justice] had legislated for but not done, so most of the cuts in legal aid had been legislated for before I arrived but came into force on my watch. So, the budget pressures were enormous. Actually, one of the great hidden facts about probation is that the probation reforms insulated the probation service from what would have been significant budget cuts, because we were looking to expand the remit of the probation service to incorporate all the short-sentence prisoners. The Treasury did not insist on significant cuts in the way they did with the prison service, legal aid and the courts. So, I think the dominant feature of my time as secretary of state for justice was huge budget pressures. One of the great ironies, which wasn’t spotted at the time, was that because Michael Gove [Grayling’s successor as secretary of state for justice] was due to be George Osborne’s campaign manager in his leadership bid, when Michael took over as secretary of state the department’s budget went up by £500m, which took away a lot of the budget pressures we’d been dealing with in the last 12 months.

ND: Given those pressures, what was your approach like in managing a team of ministers and how did you go about identifying priorities for the department and the team?

CG: Well, the first thing I did was decide to not privatise the prisons. What I inherited from Ken Clarke was a rolling programme of prison privatisation but, looking at the plan, it was very clear to me that whilst it theoretically delivered savings, those didn’t arrive until the mid-2020s, which wasn’t a lot of use for us back then. I had bids from the private sector, but I also had a counterbid from the in-house team, from prison governors and prison unions, to run the prison service according to a different template. They took what they saw as best practice from across the estate and applied it to the prisons that were in line for privatisation, saying: “We can deliver for you.” The savings were smaller, but they were more immediate. So, the decision I took was to stop the privatisation process of the prisons but to say to the governors, “what I need you to do is to put in place the benchmarking that you’re talking about for these prisons more broadly across the estate, because that’s the only way I can meet the financial targets without really driving aggressive privatisation,” which I didn’t think was right.

ND: You mentioned the injection of cash the department received under Michael Gove. Can you describe what relations were like between you and Number 10, and the Treasury, during the time you were at MoJ?

CG: Generally, pretty good. Probation reform, as far as Number 10 and the Cabinet Office were concerned, was a priority. I mean, Nick Clegg described it in one cabinet meeting as one of the most important reforms the coalition was doing. This was a fairly fundamental part of the coalition agreement, the rehabilitation revolution, and so Number 10 was always very keen and positive about it. The Treasury was fine and helpful but process; everything takes a very long time.

TD: What would your advice be for ministers dealing with those two parts of government, the Treasury and Number 10?

CG: Try and remain friendly with everyone. I don’t believe great bust-ups in Whitehall help. Understand where they’re coming from, have good relations with the other ministers. Although it does annoy the civil service sometimes when ministers phone each other up and agree things without the civil service being present! But just maintain good relations all around, would be my best advice.

TD: You mentioned earlier you’d visited a large proportion of the prison estate. What can you take from those visits as a minister, how does it inform your decision making in Whitehall?

CG: Well, what it does is it shows you the reality of life on the ground. For example, you are always dealing with accusations that the prison estate is overcrowded. I mean, in all the briefs I’ve had there’s usually a relentless attack from the left, who want the world to look very different. If you’ve done a walk around the prisons to see what it’s like and you’re told the prisons are hideously overcrowded, well yes, it is true that we did not provide a single cell for every prisoner, but it would have been impossible to do so. So, the question is, are we putting people in completely inhuman conditions, given these are prisons? And most of the estate was, in my judgement, sufficiently okay to be justifiable. Some of the older estate improved very little. In fact, I closed more prisons than any other justice secretary has ever done, or home secretary has ever done, and some of the ones I closed were a problem. There was one on the Isle of Wight in particular that I went around and thought: “I’m glad I’ve closed this because it’s not fit for use as a prison.”