A Surprising Turn

What Is a Revolving Door?

The term "revolving door" refers to the movement of high-level employees from public-sector jobs to private-sector jobs and vice versa. The idea is that there is a revolving door between the two sectors as many legislators and regulators become lobbyists and consultants for the industries they once regulated and some private industry heads or lobbyists receive government appointments that relate to their former private posts.

Wikipedia notes:-

The movement of senior civil servants and government ministers into business roles is overseen by the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA), but it is not a statutory body and has only advisory powers.

Well spotted by a reader yesterday:-

Appointment of Ian Porée, Executive Director at Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service.

Seetec Group, the UK’s largest employee-owned provider of justice, employability and skills services, announces that it has appointed Ian Porée, currently Executive Director for Community Interventions at Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS), as its new Chief Executive Officer. Ian will take up his position on 1 June 2020 and will report to Seetec’s Group Chief Executive Officer, John Baumback.

Ian has a wealth of experience in executive leadership, gained in both the public and private sectors. Before taking up responsibility for Community Interventions at HMPPS, he did a secondment as the director of Strategic Commissioning for the National Citizen Service Trust and was the Director of the [Transforming] Rehabilitation Programme at the Ministry of Justice. He has held senior commissioning and operational policy roles with the National Offender Management Service and HM Prison Service.

Commenting on the appointment, John Baumback, Seetec Group Chief Executive Officer, said:

“I am delighted that Seetec has been able to attract someone of Ian’s clear capability and experience. He is passionate about improving social justice, unlocking people’s social and economic potential and is determined to help those who need it most.

“This appointment is another important milestone as we continue our recent transition to employee-ownership. We know that as shareholders in our collective success, attracting the right talent into our business will help us realise the opportunity we have to create greater social value, not just as employee-owners but for the communities and clients we serve. I look forward to working with Ian and our newly established employee council to shape the next chapter of the company’s future.”

Responding to his appointment, Ian Porée, said:

“As the largest employee-owned provider of skills, employability and justice services in the country, Seetec has a unique opportunity to develop an alternative supplier model to the public sector. Where the traditional outsourcing model has at times fallen short of expectations for our public services, I am excited by the potential Seetec has to embed a values-first and innovative approach to supporting some of the most vulnerable in our communities.”

Ian Porée’s appointment has been approved by the Department under the Government Business Appointments rules. He will continue to support HMPPS until June 1st as it deals with the operational challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

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So, where did Mr Poree come from and what mark has he left on the once proud gold standard public service we used to love and cherish?

Ian is the Director, Rehabilitation Services – Commissioning & Contract Management for the National Offender Management Service in the UK. He was recruited into the public sector in 2007 specifically to apply his experience having served in executive leadership positions in several private sector business services organisations across various industries and markets, led significant market development activities across national and international markets, led mergers and acquisitions and major service transformations. Ian studied as a research scientist and completed an Honours Degree – Bachelor of Science (cum laude) in Chemistry from the University of Natal, Durban, and has a business management diploma. He also has an MSt Applied Criminology, Penology and Management from the University of Cambridge. He also served as a 2nd Lieutenant in the South African Defence Force.

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This is from LinkedIn:-

An experienced strategic executive director with a proven track record of leading innovation and change, shaping markets and making an impact through leading technology enabled change in complex operating environments across geographies. Successfully delivered national scale transformation programmes to challenging timescales. Executive and Ministerial level stakeholder and partner management skills across public, private and not-for-profit sectors. A resilient, values-based leader who is passionate about serving and investing to make a positive difference to people's lives. A unique combination of commercial, digital and innovation skills used to effectively change and shape sectors and markets. Currently leading work on the application of machine augmentation and Artificial Intelligence to public services.

Director : [Transforming] Rehabilitation Programme 

HMPPS Oct 2012 - Nov 2014

The Ministry of Justice set up a major reform programme, the [Transforming] Rehabilitation Programme, to deliver the Secretary of State’s priorities in relation to rehabilitation of offenders, and appointed Ian Poree as the Programme Director to lead this work. The role was to design, manage and lead this major government priority. This is a large scale programme reforming around £1bn of annual expenditure, impacting over 18,000 employees, 250,000 offenders and the outcomes directly affect the lives of citizens in England and Wales.

The purpose of the programme was to design and deliver major reforms to the way in which offender management services are delivered, including the detailed design and delivery of a model in which services are delivered on the basis of payment by results, ensuring that the market and delivery structures were in place to support the model. The reforms did not seek to only drive costs but also to continuously improve public protection and reducing reoffending outcomes.

The Director had responsibility for all elements of the programme including the restructuring of the Probation Service, the market competition of offender services in the community, the new commercial and service models including payment mechanisms, the commissioning and procurement process and engagement of the public, private and voluntary sectors to ensure a robust market was put in place.

The Director was the primary contact for the Secretary of State, the Departmental Board and other senior officials in the Ministry for all aspects of the programme. This Director was the Secretary of State’s principal adviser on this programme. This was a cross-Departmental programme and the Programme Director was required to work closely with colleagues in Procurement, Operational Delivery, Finance, Legal, Strategy and Policy, to deliver the reforms.

The Programme was successfully delivered within the tight timelines set by ministers and was delivered within the approved budgets.

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Director : Commissioning and Commercial
NOMS June 2007 - Nov 2012

On the Board of NOMS, this role had responsibility for commissioning adult offender service across England and Wales. This included developing and overseeing the implementation of the Agency’s commissioning and commercial strategy, which deployed evidenced based, outcome focused, costed service specifications, to protect the public and reduce reoffending while delivering the orders and sentences of the courts.

The Director had responsibility for NOMS commercial and market development activities encouraging innovation, efficiency and effectiveness across public, private and voluntary sectors, and leading the NOMS Competition Programme competing over £2.5bn of business. This included leading the major programme specifying, benchmarking and costing all services across prison and probation.

The Director had responsibility for leading the implementation of key Governments reforms known as the “Rehabilitation Revolution”, which include introducing Payment by Results for offender services, growing work in prisons, intensive and competed community payback, transformed electronic monitoring and restorative justice services. The Director tool the lead for the Agency’s relationships with key co-commissioners where other government departments commissions over £1bn of services for offenders. These key relationships resulted in considerable improvements in services for offenders in the areas of employment support (DWP), skills (BIS/SFA) and health (DH/NHS).

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Just a quick reminder from the BBC website in 2017 as to how things were going at NOMS:-

The man in charge of prisons and probation in England and Wales received a bonus of up to £20,000, it has emerged. Michael Spurr was given the payment in 2016-17 on top of his annual salary of around £150,000. The bonus was "awarded" the previous year when the chief inspector of prisons said many jails were "unacceptably violent and dangerous".

The Prison Officers Association (POA) called it "scandalous and shameful". Steve Gillan, general secretary of the POA, told BBC News: "It's absolutely disgraceful that those who are overseeing a crisis in the prison service have been rewarded with performance bonuses. "It's scandalous that they're being rewarded for failure."

In his latest assessment of prisons in England and Wales, released this week, chief inspector of prisons Peter Clarke said he was "appalled" at conditions in many jails and said there had been a "staggering decline" in standards in youth custody centres.

Justice Secretary David Lidington also admitted in an open letter that the probation system was "falling short" of expectations and that measures designed to support prisoners on release did not "command the confidence" of the courts.

The bonus payment is disclosed in the annual report from the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), which was published on Thursday. Mr Spurr was chief executive officer of NOMS until April, when the government agency was re-named HM Prison and Probation Service, which he now heads. The report revealed that in 2016-17 the 55-year-old was paid £145,000-150,000 and received a bonus payment of £15,000-20,000, along with pension benefits of £25,000. 

Phil Copple, the chief operating officer and interim director of probation, Colin Allars, director of probation, and Ian Porée, director of commissioning, were given bonuses of £10,000-15,000.

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So, what was Mr Poree doing before he joined the MoJ and proved so attractive to them in their desire to improve a gold standard public service? This again from LinkedIn:-  

Client Executive Medas

1998 - 2007 

Ian represents the new breed of leader in this fast changing world of collaborative business. He leads with authenticity and integrity, focusing on trust, transparency and the relentless pursuit of mutual value with his clients, partners and colleagues. He is an innovator with a passion for change. His life was deeply influenced by the radical social transformation in South Africa through the 1980's and 1990's.

Ian has a track record of deep innovation in business and technology services. He holds a patent in environmental recycling technology and has developed highly successful industry shaping supply chain partnerships.

As part of the EDS UK Public Sector client facing leadership team, Ian has been directly engaged in developing and communicating the new UK Public Sector Strategy.

The company Ian leads, Medas, is one of the UK's largest providers of outsourced financial transaction processing. Medas has been providing this service to the BBC for more than 7 years. Medas was established in 1997 as a jv between PwC and EDS to streamline finance processes across the BBC.

In early 2003 Ian successfully lead a small team to complete the acquisition by EDS of the PwC share of Medas. In his time at the helm of Medas, Ian and his team have successfully exceeded annual targets for 3 consecutive years.

Ian has worked at EDS for 6 years during which time his primary focus has been on the BPO market. He has been responsible for developing complex growth opportunities, aligning the internal focus and developing solutions that advance the client's strategic objectives. Ian is based in London and has operated across the UK, Europe and South Africa. The primary industries he has worked in have been Govt, Fin services and manufacturing.

Ian also jointly lead the successful EDS bid for the Post Office Card Account opportunity: an 8 year BPO contract (electronic benefits payments - card services, transaction services and customer interaction centres.

Specialties: Business Strategy, Business Innovation, Outsourcing, Business Process Outsourcing, Change, Alliances/Partnerships/Collaboration.

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We'll end this round-up of Mr Poree's biography with an interview with Civil Service World from January 2019:- 

The Executive Director of Community Interventions at HM Prison and Probation Service talks to EY's Radhika Chadwick about the challenges facing the MOJ and its approach to Big Data and technology

Ian Porée: As with most public services, we have some common pressures. The first is the continued demand for and increasing complexity of our services, and the second is the ever-increasing expectation of those who receive these services and on whose behalf we deliver them, the public.

We also have the challenge that we are still trying to deliver better outcomes for less with rigid, bureaucratic organisation. Our Victorian buildings are a good metaphor for our information infrastructure. We collect enormous amounts of information about the work we do, the services and the people in our care or under our supervision. But despite having this information, we have a considerable way to go to extract the full value and insight embedded in that information to help us make better decisions and to help us deliver better outcomes for citizens.

We feel the increasing pressures on our system, but we aren’t yet unlocking the enablers and tools which could help us better adapt to the ever-changing circumstances we face, and make more cost-effective use of the public money that we have available. Our physical and information infrastructure requires significant modernisation.

Do you see technology and data playing a role in the preventative agenda in the social justice space?

The simple answer is “yes I do”. Typically, when someone finds themselves in our part of social justice system, there are so many practical things in their life that haven’t worked very well. They are likely to be unemployed, homeless, in debt, suffering with mental health conditions, and struggling with addiction. We could offer insights from our data that could help people navigate a path out of social exclusion. We could help people reintegrate into society by designing services with enabling tools that work for each person in the local community they live in. We would make better use public money, and essentially keep society safer by preventing harm.

If you look back on the government use of technology, it hasn’t always been an easy journey. What are the challenges in actually getting this part of the public sector to embrace the potential of new technology in different ways?

I think it’s fair to say, e are a good example of a part of the public service who have found technology-enabled change both slow and expensive to deliver - but this does not need to be the case. It’s just that in the past when we have deployed technological change, we have made it very complicated and have delivered it in very traditional, large-scale technology programmes that often end up taking a lot longer than we thought.

We need to re-engage our staff with tools and technologies that make a difference to their day-to-day ways of working. Then in the background we need to refresh and modernise the technology infrastructure that we are using. One of the things we have been doing is engineering our data in a way that makes it accessible to whatever tools and technologies we want to use. The data can then be used to solve business problems. This is user-driven digital design.

One large scale deployment we’ve undertaken is augmented decision support. This is a predictive algorithm which effectively makes a judgement about the level of serious harm that someone is likely to present. It is deployed to over a quarter million people and supports decisions made by front line professionals. It gets to the very heart of what we are here to do, which to is to protect the public. We are very alert to the important ethical considerations of using algorithmic decision support because these tools are built from our historical data. We don’t forget the fact that we are making judgements based on the learning from some historical data that includes unequal treatment or bias.

How are you approaching Big Data?

We haven’t historically regarded our very large data sets as being valuable assets. We’ve considered the data as something we have to archive somewhere. We need to rethink what these huge data sets represent. A large private organisation would think of this data as an incredible asset and that would allow them to serve their customers even better. We have an opportunity to use this data to help us make better decisions for the citizens we serve.

I also strongly believe that more of this data should be more publicly available. This is public data and we should be more open and more transparent. If our data sets were more available to a much broader range of people, they could help us solve some of the complex problems in our system. We should be treating this data strategically, it’s a valuable asset and we should make it more available (obviously taking appropriate care to anonymise the data) to organisations and people who want to come and help us improve.

Why is diversity and inclusion important to you personally?

On a very personal level, I grew up in South Africa where I saw an extreme example of how unequal treatment had damaging consequences for society. But the country, under the incredible leadership of Nelson Mandela, took the view that it could be a different kind of a place, a “rainbow nation” as he described it. It could set a direction for the future which meant all people could be given equal opportunity to be who they want to be. Celebrating people’s differences but working to a common future for all.

I have been working within the prison and probation services for over a decade now, I have seen some real improvements. At a very practical level, the board that I joined 10 years ago was underrepresented by women. But now we have many more women and we are a better board because of it, we have better conversations, we have different perspectives applied to the complex work we do.

Why is diversity and inclusion so important to your organisation?

There has been legitimate criticism that criminal justice system has unequal treatment at all stages of the system, from when people first encounter the police and courts, all the way through to the prison and probation services. We as an organisation pay a lot of attention to this inequality. We have significant work underway, to understand every point at which there is a possibility that our system, may make a decision which would treat people in an unequal way.

We are a large scale employer of over 45,000 staff and thousands more in our supply chains, and our staff should be representative of the people we serve. That matters in so many different ways in terms of the legitimacy of our authority. We have quite an ambitious program to continue to align our workforce over time, so we look a whole lot more like the people we serve.

How are you making sure that your organisation pays enough attention to these issues?

We’ve set up a new governance which is specifically looking at the interface between the new digital tools and data. We have specifically started conversations about the ethical standards we will set for any of the big augmented decisions. That’s a really important way of making sure we effectively govern decisions which ultimately will affect citizens.

What would you like your legacy to be from a diversity and inclusiveness perspective?

If we continue on the path of remaining open to diverse views and opinions, if we are willing to suspend our predisposed view of how things should work, and see things from new perspectives, being open and transparent, if we continue to be humble and to properly listen to other’s points of view, then that’s the space that we will learn and grow from – and I will continue to be very proud to be part of it.

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Ed : It's probably noteworthy that such is the contempt and derison in which the Transforming Rehabilitation Programme [TR] is now held, there are clearly attempts to re-write history by referring to the epic omnishambles merely as the 'Rehabilitation Programme'. For clarity and historical accuracy I've amended the text.