Third Sector and CRCs

As the Third Sector busy themselves preparing to get a big slice of the new probation contracts, it's worth taking note of the two HMI reports published last week on CRCs run by the Reducing Reoffending Partnership. This of course is a company comprising two charities, St Giles Trust, CGL (Change, Grow, Live) and Ingeus, a company started in Australia and now a subsidiary of US-based Providence Service Corporation. 

This from the Guardian:-

Midlands probation firm rated inadequate over high workloads

Inspectors say routine checks missed for child safeguarding and domestic abuse

One of the largest private managers of offenders in the community in England and Wales is failing to protect the public as mounting workloads have become unmanageable, inspectors have said.

Routine checks for child safeguarding and domestic abuse are not being undertaken by probation officers at the Staffordshire and West Midlands community rehabilitation company (CRC), which supervises 12,600 low- and medium-risk offenders, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP) said.

In one case, it took seven months for police and safeguarding checks to be undertaken for an offender subject to a court order, which then revealed a history of domestic abuse, and nothing further was done. The officer responsible told inspectors home visits would have been beneficial but the pressure of caseloads made this difficult.

The chief inspector of probation, Justin Russell, said: “The management of risk of harm was not good enough at every stage of supervision. Therefore, we have rated all four aspects that we inspect ‘inadequate’ – our lowest possible grade.”

CRCs were formed in 2014 as part of disastrous changes to the probation sector in England and Wales spearheaded by the justice secretary at the time, Chris Grayling. The privately run groups are responsible for low- to medium-risk offenders, while the most serious criminals are managed by the publicly run National Probation Service (NPS).

The eight private firms that run the 21 CRCs in England and Wales are to have their contracts terminated this year, two years earlier than agreed. The supervision of all offenders in the community is to be brought back under public control by spring 2021.

At Staffordshire and West Midlands CRC, which is owned by the Reducing Reoffending Partnership, a private limited company, inspectors found there had been a deterioration in the quality of case management.

At the time of the inspection, probation staff managed an average of 64 cases each. Almost 70% of staff interviewed said their workloads were unmanageable.

The report said: “In this CRC, there has been a marked decline in the number of assessments we deemed to be sufficiently focused on the risk of harm to others. In too many cases we found that routine checks for child safeguarding and domestic abuse had not been undertaken, or had been initiated and not followed up, or that the available information received had not been incorporated into the assessment of the case.”

The inspectorate found that in 37% of cases, the necessary checks for the sharing of domestic abuse information had not been undertaken.

“Too few cases were reviewed adequately in relation to risk of harm,” the report added. “This is attributable to inadequate attention to the acquisition and use of critical information concerning, in particular, child safeguarding and domestic abuse. There was an absence of professional curiosity in too many cases.”

The Reducing Reoffending Partnership has been approached for comment.

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RRP may have decided not to go public with a response, but the keen-eyed will have spotted that a reader posted the content of an internal memo:-

Dear Colleagues,

This week our inspection reports for both DLNR and SWM will be issued. DLNR CRCs report is published today, Tuesday 3rd March. SWM CRCs report will be published on Thursday 5th March and until then, SWM details should not be shared outside of our organisation. In both areas we received the rating of requires improvement, the same rating we received last year.

Under organisational development we were rated as requiring improvement in both leadership and staff areas and good in services and information and facilities.

In CRC specific work we received a rating of good for community payback and outstanding for Through the Gate which was previously rated inadequate in SWM.

Women’s services provision, our range of interventions and our partnership work was praised.

In case supervision however we were rated as inadequate in all four areas of assessment, planning implementation review. This is a big disappointment and concern that our considerable efforts between the last two inspections to improve case supervision has not resulted in an improved rating for these services. It should be noted that some aspects of case management did receive more favourable ratings such as desistance and engaging service users. However, in all geographical areas how activity to keep people safe was rated as inadequate, therefore, the overall rating for this domain was moderated down.

Please take the time to read the reports as this will give you the best sense of the findings. Many of you will have attended a local briefing to discuss the reports and the ratings. It is acknowledged that we have had many challenges but our absolute priority moving forward is to maintain our positive ratings whilst in case management it will be ‘Improving our practice to keep people safe to a sufficient HMIP standard whilst achieving the supporting performance targets’.

We should also note that due to the timings of our inspections, improvements we have been busy making may not have been evident in the cases that were inspected.

Nonetheless we must accept the findings of HMIP and take actions to address our case management deficits and learn from our successes in our other areas. Public protection and keeping all people safe has to be our priority focus moving forward, building on our strengths where we are doing the right thing currently.

We now have finalised improvement plans and will communicate further on these in the next couple of weeks. Some of our plans include :

• Raising quality in public protection – making time and space for professional discussion and learning from real examples of good practice
• Refocusing with PDMs their current responsibilities to help them to support teams to achieve
• Additional resources from the national probation service ( in quality oversight and learning and development ) reviewing opportunities around secondments in line with transitions planning and posts focused on safeguarding work
• Revising and relooking at administration processes and support
• Reviewing our operating model

It’s been encouraging to hear your feedback so far at briefings, as part of our work we will be setting up meetings with staff groups so please continue to talk to your managers about ideas or solutions that can help in your area.

There were some very positive areas highlighted in these inspections so whilst we have work to do in this critical area we should also look to where we have succeeded knowing that we can achieve this and build confidence in our delivery.