An Inspector Calls

For those who still enjoy listening to the radio, and to be honest lockdown has been a revelation as to the breadth of material produced by the BBC, the latest edition of Analysis examines the Post-Pandemic State. Basically we are at a watershed moment similar to 1945; 1979; 1997 and 2008. Nothing is going to be the same, including probation, so it would seem a good idea to take a close look at the thinking of Justin Russell, HM Chief Inspector of Probation. I intend to cover the whole lecture over the next couple of days.      

ACADEMY FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE LECTURE – TUESDAY 30th JUNE – JUSTIN RUSSELL, CHIEF INSPECTOR OF PROBATION 

PROBATION - IN CRISIS OR ON THE ROAD TO RECOVERY? 

Many thanks to the Academy for the invitation to speak to you today. Glad that we’ve been able to find another way for me to deliver this lecture. 

1 - THEMES 

I want to cover three things today. First, some reflections on the current situation and the impact of Covid on the CJS generally and on probation more specifically. Second, to talk a bit about our probation inspection programme and some early results from the second round of inspections we completed before the lockdown against a new set of inspection standards. What do they tell us about whether probation performance is on the road to recovery after the impact of TR? And third, I want to say more about a key area of probation practice that we focus on during our inspections – the management of risks of serious harm to the public – which we’ve consistently found to be the weakest area of performance over the past couple of years – including what our recent review of the processes around serious further offences have told us. 

2 – COVID & PROBATION 

The Covid crisis and probation 

As an inspectorate, we announced that we were suspending all of our inspection work on 17th March and the following week, from 23rd March the probation service itself announced that it was switching to a radically different set of operating assumptions – what they call the exceptional delivery model. 

I pay tribute to the speed with which the probation service adapted to the new world. Changes which would normally take months, if not years to implement were brought in overnight for the 180,000 or so people under supervision in the community rather than in prison. 

So, we saw, all but the highest risk offenders switched to phone rather than face to face supervision; door step checks for the highest risk cohort; all unpaid work and most accredited programmes halted and major changes to the way that court teams and approved premises have had to operate to fit with public health guidelines.

HMIP is currently carrying out a thematic inspection to look at what these arrangements have meant in practice for a sample of cases and probation areas. We’ll be interviewing staff and service users to see how the new operating model has felt to them and what it has meant for the quality of work that offender managers have been able to do with their caseload. And we’ll publish our findings in the Autumn.

3 – DOES FACE TO FACE MATTER? 

Probation work is all about building and sustaining relationships. There is good evidence that the quality of the relationship between a probation officer and those they supervise, can have a significant impact on promoting desistance from crime. And the assumption up to now has been that this relationship has to be a face to face one – either one to one or in groups. And it’s only fairly recently that all CRC contracts were amended to insist on monthly face to face contact with everyone under supervision. 

That assumption is being severely tested by Covid. For the probation service, as for everyone else working in the public sector, the switch to remote contact by phone or video link is completely uncharted territory. As we found, when we did an evidence review two years ago, there has been no robust research into the effectiveness of phone based rather than face to face supervision. 

It’s essential therefore that these new arrangements are tested and adjusted where necessary. There will be important learning to capture for the future – for example, in relation to the way that offending behaviour programmes are delivered and the potential for a more online and one to one approach. This may be something that many service users themselves may actually prefer – given how lukewarm, I know some are about group programmes, which I suspect have always been more popular with probation services than with service users themselves. 

4 – CHALLENGES OF RECOVERY PLANNING 

As attention starts to switch to recovery planning and the Ministry of Justice published its route map for recovery recently, I know the focus will now be on how far and how fast (if at all) probation services can return to normal over the rest of this year. It’s likely to be far more difficult to come out of lockdown than it was to go in. There will be ongoing impacts on staff availability as staff and their families come in and out of self-isolation. Ongoing rules around social distancing will severely restrict the volumes of staff and service users that can be accommodated in probation offices There will be major challenges around how unpaid work can be restarted in a way which sticks to social distancing guidelines and deals with the considerable backlog of community payback hours that will have built up? And there will be large backlogs also of breaches and trials to deal with. 

5 – CORE PRINCIPLES REMAIN 

Lessons from inspections to date 

While Covid may have changed the operating model of the probation service radically overnight, the core responsibilities of the service remain the same – to deliver the sentence of the court; to support those under supervision to turn their lives around and to protect the public. And as the service returns to something more like normality over the coming year, it’s important that the lessons of our recent inspections aren’t lost in delivering this core business. Since September of last year, we’ve embarked on a second round of inspections of every probation service against the new set of standards and ratings we launched in 2018. And I want to bring the data from those together for the first time this afternoon to identify key findings. 

6 – HMI PROBATION INSPECTIONS 

Before that, a quick reminder about how our inspections work and what our first round of inspections showed. 

HMIP’s inspection methodology 

We currently inspect every probation service every year– though Covid has significantly delayed many of the second year of inspections. So, between summer 2018 and summer 2019 we inspected all 28 local services looking at over 6000 individual cases and conducting over 1900 interviews with individual POs and PSOs. 

7 – OUR METHODOLOGY 

Our methodology is a very thorough one. We spend three weeks visiting each service; interviewing staff at every level. We ask for a wide range of supporting data and written evidence and take a detailed look at a wide range of cases. We interview POs and PSOs about the cases they supervise but also their more general views on workload and the support they get to do their job. And we are increasingly asking service users for their views too – a big priority for me since I started in post. 

We make judgments about the overall leadership and management of each service – including staffing levels and the range and quality of services provided. But we also take a very detailed look at individual cases, to check on the quality of initial assessment; of the sentence plans; on how well these plans are delivered and reviewed on an ongoing basis. 

For each case we look at how well the person being supervised is engaged in the process and at whether all of their needs are identified and met. We look at the protective factors in their lives and at whether these are spotted and strengthened. And we look at the risk they may pose, both to their immediate family and the wider public – and at whether these are properly assessed, managed and reviewed. And we do the same for samples of unpaid work and through the gate cases. 

We then combine the qualitative and quantitative data from this process, to reach judgements on 10 different quality standards which are then added together to produce an overall rating on a four point scale from inadequate to outstanding. For each of the standards relating to individual casework, two thirds of the cases we inspect have to be satisfactory for the service to be rated as ‘good’ against this standard.