An Inspector Calls 2

8 - OVERALL RATINGS ROUND ONE 

Our results 

So, what were the key findings on our first round of inspections last year? First, you won’t be surprised to hear, we found a significant gap between the performance of National Probation Service divisions and CRC services. Of the 7 NPS divisions, we gave an overall rating of ‘good’ to five – although we found real issues with probation officer vacancies and facilities management contracts where our ratings were lower. 

By contrast, only 1 out of the 21 CRC services got this rating, with 19 rated as requiring improvement. Whilst we often found good and committed leadership in CRC services and a commitment to investing in decent accommodation and IT and other equipment for staff, this was all too frequently undermined by what we regarded as unacceptably large caseloads, which too often made good quality casework all but impossible. 

9 - CASELOADS 

Whereas two thirds of NPS responsible officers had a caseload of 40 or less – the situation was exactly the reverse for the CRC staff we spoke to – two thirds of whom had a caseload of over 50. Forty two percent had caseloads over 60 and significant minorities over 70 and into the eighties. 

10 - IMPACT OF CASELOADS STORIES 

The impact of this on some of the staff we spoke to was clear. Some were in tears as we spoke to them. Others spoke of being burnt out and of having to work evenings and weekends to keep their head above water. 

11 - CORRELATION OF QUALITY RATINGS AND CASELOAD

Not surprisingly, we found a clear correlation between size of caseload and our rating of the quality of work done. As caseload increases, the proportion of staff saying their caseload is manageable sharply declines and our judgements on the quality of supervision also drops. Whilst this may not have amounted to a crisis – and we only gave one CRC a rating of inadequate in our first set of inspections – it certainly indicates a service that in places was under great stress. 

12 - IMPACT OF TRANSFORMING REHABILITATION 

And that stress was becoming greater as the flaws in the CRC funding model started to play out over the past couple of years. As a result of fundamental flaws in that model – in particular very flawed assumptions around the ratio of fixed to variable costs and of the income that would flow from payment by results - CRCs have received far less funding from MoJ for each case they supervise than the NPS. 

The NAO calculated in March last year that the MoJ will end up paying CRCs £822m less over the 7 year lifetime of the contracts than it had originally forecast it would (and that the Treasury had been willing to spend). That has meant that some CRCs have fallen far short of what they need to provide a decent service. 

The issue for me, is not that staff working for a private company or non-profit provider, can’t deliver a decent service – I’ve met many talented and very committed managers and staff on my visits to CRCs. It’s that they can’t do this if they’re not receiving the funding they need to make caseloads manageable and to recruit and retain the skilled probation officers needed to manage the more complex work. Two other inherent aspects of private provision, add to the problem. 

First, in order to outsource probation, a very complex business with many hundreds of moving parts, has to be turned into 21 different contracts. And if any of the assumptions underlying these contracts are wrong, as they’ve turned out to be, then it can take months, if not years to renegotiate the necessary changes – if indeed these changes can be made at all under contract law. In the meantime, performance and the income needed to support that, continues to be problematic. 

And second, because the great majority of the CRC contracts are owned by large parent companies – some of them with multinational interests –they can be brought crashing down by the wider failure of the parent company – as happened at the beginning of last year when Working Links, the owner of three large CRC contracts, went into administration. 

These challenges around the contracts have affected different providers in different ways. Whilst some were cautious in their initial bids; took action early on to rein in costs and have seen their financial position stabilised by contract changes in 2018 – others have been in a much more perilous position and even with the contractual changes have seen significant cuts in their operating budgets this year compared to last which has had a real impact on the quality of service we are finding they’re able to deliver. 

When you add the impact of Covid into the mix, on top of these major challenges around outsourcing, it’s perhaps not surprising that the Government has now decided that the safest way forward is to abandon the planned re-procurement of unpaid work and behavioural change programmes and return delivery of these to the public sector from June 2019. 

As I said on the day this was announced, whilst this is likely to be welcomed by many, it is not a magic bullet for improving performance by itself. The probation service must be properly funded. The quality of probation supervision will not improve merely by lifting and shifting large volumes of cases from CRCs back into the NPS next year. Vacancies for probation officers must be filled and staff properly trained for their new responsibilities. The positive innovations that CRCs have brought with them – must not be lost.” 

Year two of inspection 

In the meantime, while we wait for next year’s reforms and almost one year on from our first round of inspections, is there any sign that things have improved? 

13 - YEAR 2 OVERALL RATINGS TO DATE 

Well there are some grounds for optimism but it’s still a pretty mixed picture. Since September 2019, we have been re-inspecting the services we visited in 2018 and 2019 – starting with the CRCs and using broadly the same methodology. So far we have published the results of nine of these local inspections and I wanted to give you an overview of what this is showing so far. 

In terms of overall ratings, all 9 of these CRCs were judged to be requiring improvement in our first round of inspections against the new standards. Our year two ratings, show that three of these nine have now improved their overall rating to ‘good’. One other was just one point off being rated ‘good’. Whilst the remaining four have seen little shift in their scores and remain a concern. 

14 - STANDARDS BREAKDOWN 

Across the nine services, we assigned ratings to 90 individual quality standards – 10 at each service. Looking at the distribution of markings across these 90 standards, we see an upward trend in performance with a majority of standards – 48 out of 90 – now rated as ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ compared to 35 previously and a small drop in the number rated as ‘inadequate’ from 22 to 20. 

15 - SHOWING YEAR 1 VS YEAR 2 – AVERAGE STANDARD SCORES 

We can also compare the average scores for each quality standard to last year. First, the good news. Comparing this year’s average scores for each standard with last year’s we see that these services continue to be rated reasonably positively on their overall leadership; on the menu of services they offer and on the quality of facilities and IT for staff. [A score of 2 is equivalent to a ‘good’ rating]. 

On through the gate services, we are seeing positive signs that the investment of an extra £22m a year by the Ministry of Justice in supporting prisoners being released from custody, is paying real dividends, with 6 out of 9 CRCs we’ve inspected so far being rated as ‘outstanding’ on this aspect of their work. 

With the extra money, CRCs have been able to put significantly more staff into prisons and to strike innovative deals with voluntary sector partners to provide more specialist help with accommodation and mentoring services, so that more (though still only a minority) of the highest need individuals can be met at the gate and supported through the first days after release. 

16 - SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENTS IN TTG – DTV EXAMPLE 

Durham and Tees Valley CRC, for example, has seen its rating for through the gate work improve from ‘requires improvement’ to ‘outstanding’ over the past year, with much better and more personalised resettlement planning. 

17 - DTV EXAMPLE – ‘MARY’ 

And this fed through into the individual cases we inspected as well – like this one for someone we have called ‘Mary’. And we found similar examples in the East and West Midlands, South Yorkshire and Thames Valley, even where other aspects of these services gave cause for concern. 

Offender management 

18 - AVERAGE STANDARDS SCORES 

But the picture on core offender management is less positive. Across the four key stages of the supervision process that we inspect – initial assessment; sentence and risk planning; sentence delivery and ongoing review – we’ve seen little shift in average scores. In four of the CRCs we inspected, we found more than half of the cases we inspected to be ‘inadequate’ in terms of core supervision – with five out of nine CRCs being rated ‘inadequate’ across all four case supervision standards. 

A clear gap has started to emerge between different providers, with some continuing to invest in trained probation officers and manageable caseloads and others going backwards. Once again, we seem to be finding an association between workloads and quality. All of the CRCs we’ve given a rating of ‘good’ to, for example, report caseloads for both POs and PSOs of 50 or less – with probation officer caseloads in South Yorkshire and Durham and Tees Valley, now under 40. 

19 - SHOWING ‘MANAGEABLE CASELOAD %’ 

But overall, we haven’t seen a shift in the average proportion of responsible officers telling us they feel their caseloads are manageable – if anything this has got slightly worse, particularly for PSOs with over half of probation officers and PSOs now saying they think their caseloads are unmanageable – though this hides a wide variation between services. 

In one service we found almost 70% of POs were struggling; in another, 83% of PSOs told us their caseloads were unmanageable . Although at the opposite end of the range, in one of the best performing areas only a third thought this was the case. We were worried to see that in a few of the services we have re-inspected, there has been an increasing shift of caseloads from more skilled and experienced probation officers – whose numbers are declining – to recently recruited and less highly trained PSOs – who have been easier (and cheaper) to recruit. It was particularly concerning to find PSOs, some of them only recruited in the previous 6 months, being expected to take on more complex, medium risk domestic violence cases, which up to now had been reserved for experienced probation officers. 

CASE OF PAUL 

And as in our first round of inspections, the impact of all this on the individual cases we inspect was often very evident – as for example with this complex IOM case being supervised by a PSO whose caseload was still in the high seventies, having been over 90 at one point.