Justice Committee Hears From Justin Russell

On Tuesday, in connection with its inquiry into the future of the Probation Service, the Justice Committee took oral evidence from HMI Justin Russell, together with representatives from several CRCs. I've waited until written publication of the exchanges as I suspect there is much that will be of interest to readers. A long but important first part:-   

Q1 Chair: Our first witness, who is with us in the room, is Justin Russell, Her Majesty’s chief inspector of probation. Welcome, and it is very good to see you again, Mr Russell. 

Justin Russell: Thank you and thanks for having me. 

Chair: Thank you very much for coming to help us. Perhaps we can cut to the chase because we have seen a good deal of written evidence, of course, about the inquiry, and your work is familiar to us in any event. 

What a lot of people might be thinking is this: the probation service now is going through its second major reform in five years. The first was pretty substantial, with the CRCs and so on—a major reform; and now another major reform is going in the opposite direction. I suppose people might ask what confidence we can have that the new model will stick and that we are going to get a lasting solution that we can deliver on. As the person who is charged with inspecting the service, what is your take on that? 

Justin Russell: You are right to say that a lot of people hope that this new model will stick. It is the fourth major restructuring in over 20 years, following previous restructurings, so it is very important for everyone working in the service that they get some stability going forward. 

I do not think structural reform by itself will necessarily bring that stability. It is very important that it is backed up with real resources, strong leadership and the right performance framework. All of those elements have to be in place. Merely shifting boundaries around while changing the structures will not by themselves necessarily bring substantial improvements in quality. 

Q2 Chair: Some of the Committee’s findings and reports were quite critical of the previous structure and the fragmentation. Did that fit with the evidence that the inspectorate found? 

Justin Russell: It did, and I think the findings from the inspectorate over the five years of Transforming Rehabilitation matched what your Committee and the National Audit Office have been saying. From quite early on in our inspections, we were finding, as you say, a fragmented and two-tier service with some quite serious flaws in the way the structure had been set up. 

The most serious flaw of all was the commercial contractual mechanism, and the way that that meant some very serious underfunding of the CRCs. I think the Lord Chancellor came to your Committee and said that potentially there was a £700 million underspend on CRCs compared with what was expected to be spent on them over the seven years of the contract. That gap in funding has had a deleterious effect on the quality of service that they have been able to deliver. 

Q3 Chair: That is something you were able to pick up from your inspections. 

Justin Russell: It certainly is, and we have been picking it up since we started doing inspections after TR. There are some areas of good practice: some services have done well. We have seen some areas of improvement. London CRC, for example, has improved over the years, and South Yorkshire has scored well over the years. 

In our most recent round of inspections, we re-inspected nine CRCs and compared our results with our previous set of standards; three of them we now rate as good, so there have been some signs of improvement. The remainder are still in need of some improvement, particularly around the basics of offender management and managing risk to the community. 

Q4 Chair: That is very helpful. When you said, as you fairly did, that there are other things beyond purely reunification that were required, are there particular areas of the topics you highlighted to us that you think should be given the most focus? 

Justin Russell: In terms of what our inspections have found over the last two or three years, it is the focus on public protection. Actually, the CRCs have not been bad at looking at desistance and at reoffending. That has been very much where their focus has been, and they have introduced some interesting innovations around that; they have introduced new rehabilitation programmes and some quite sophisticated data tools to see what the needs of offenders are. 

We consistently score them down on the management of risk. Over half the cases we inspect in CRCs are not satisfactory in relation to protecting the public—assessing risk, planning for it and then reviewing it. That needs to be a key focus going forward. 

It is not just CRCs. It is the weakest area of performance for the National Probation Service as well. They score a bit better than CRCs, but it is still bringing their scores down. They all need to improve in that really critical area of public protection. 

Q5 Chair: System wide. 

Justin Russell: Yes. 

Q6 Dr Mullan: I want to pick up on a couple of those points. It is a really difficult thing to weigh up the extent to which you might attribute the factors, but would you say that the reorganisation was a small factor or a big factor versus the other things you talked about? 

Justin Russell: A big factor in terms of the poor performance? 

Dr Mullan: Fragmentation in terms of performance. 

Justin Russell: It was a big factor, but it was not necessarily the split, although that was a factor. The under-resourcing was a critical factor because so much of the probation budget goes on staff; that is the biggest element. It had a real impact on case loads and on the manageability of what staff were doing. We were consistently finding staff saying, “I’ve got too big a case load. I can’t manage that.” We were finding probation officers with 70 or 80 cases, and you cannot manage risk effectively or do a good job by the people you are supervising if you are managing that many people. That was a direct result of the lack of resources, and that, in turn, was a reflection of the failure of the funding mechanism. 

Q7 Dr Mullan: I assume that the funding mechanism is the same funding mechanism for the three that you found to be good performers versus the ones that were not. What do you think is the difference within the same framework and budget, the same contracts, for those to be good when others are struggling? 

Justin Russell: The overall shape of the contracts is similar, but they all went in with different bids and different tenders. Some of the providers were more ambitious in their assumptions about what they would get from payment by results in the later years of the contract, and those are the ones that are really suffering now and have the biggest holes in their budgets. What we actually see now is almost a three-tier probation system, where we have the National Probation Service, we have maybe three or four decently performing CRCs and then some that are really struggling because of the holes in their budgets. 

As we have gone back into those CRCs in the last year, they are still having to cut budgets; they are still cutting probation numbers. Particularly, Purple Futures and the RRP services in the east and west midlands are where we see those real issues very much at play. 

Q8 Dr Mullan: Did you notice any difference between whether they were perhaps a private sector provider or a non-profit provider? Did you see any pattern in that regard? 

Justin Russell: Not necessarily. There are good providers, both private and of a more mutual arrangement. Durham and Tees Valley is the best-known example of the more mutual arrangement. MTC is the provider for Thames Valley, and we have rated them good. Sodexo is the provider for South Yorkshire and we have rated them well. 

Private providers can do a decent job, but they are in a very different position financially and there are risks. Once you start to outsource something and you have large providers moving into the market—large parent companies—you are also at risk of what is happening to the owning company as well. If they get into trouble, the justice subsidiaries may struggle as well. We had that issue with Working Links at the beginning of last year when they went into administration. That caused all sorts of problems in the south-west and Wales.

Chair: That is very helpful. We have the new model; it is still in draft form, of course, at the moment. February 2021 is the time when I understand the final model is expected. 

Justin Russell: We are still waiting for the detail in the target operating model, and the detail behind the transition plans. 

Q10 Chair: We are about four months before it goes live at the moment. Do you have initial views as to the progress on that? Are you concerned that we are that close to going live? 

Justin Russell: It is an ambitious timetable. The clock is ticking, and they have eight months to go till June next year. My own experience of leading big transition programmes is that there is an awful lot of detail that you have to get right. If you do not get it right, you have people turning up to work on day one whose IT systems are not working, who maybe cannot even get through the door and who do not have half the cases they are supposed to be bringing with them. 

The critical things are that you need to make sure the people are coming across, that you have everyone in scope, and that you have sorted out terms and conditions, pensions and vetting and all the rest of it. You need to make sure that the IT and the data systems are right, because we are talking about 130,000 cases transferring into the National Probation Service, and you do not want to lose any of them on the way. 

You need to make sure that you have sorted all the buildings and the accommodation. Purely sorting out the leases on tens or hundreds of buildings is a detailed and difficult task. There are some big things that need to happen between now and June. We are going to do our own inspection of transition planning and readiness, starting at the end of November, and we hope to report in the new year on how we think that is going. 

Chair: That is useful, thank you. 

Q11 Rob Butler: I would like to continue talking about transition, if I may. Let us get to the nub of it: do you think there is enough time to transfer successfully by June 2021?

Justin Russell: Potentially. It partly depends on how much you can derisk what you have to do and the mitigations you have if things aren’t right. If you are trying to do everything on one day, there are huge risks attached to that. It is how much you can mitigate. 

Some of the obvious things are being done. They are lifting and shifting people’s case loads, so probation officers will move into the new structure with their existing case load, and will carry on supervising that so that people do not get lost in the process. They will carry on having the same line management. 

Ironically, one of the failures of TR was around encouraging innovation in IT systems, Because that did not really work out, quite a few of the CRCs are still using the NPS case management system, so they will not have to transfer that, although London and Thames Valley have their own case management, so that will be an issue. 

Q12 Rob Butler: That is a very pertinent point. I happened to visit Thames Valley CRC a couple of weeks ago and they are very proud of their IT system, which they would say is rather more sophisticated than that of NPS, particularly, for example, in being able to track their service users, as they call them, in real time, which the NPS system apparently does not. They are not going to be able to use that system, so they expressed concern that there is almost going to be a backwards step in some elements of supervising offenders once they go back to the unified model. Do you have concerns about that? How are you going to inspect it? 

Justin Russell: Yes. I have been to the Bicester office for MTC and looked at that case management system, which is called Omnia. I sat with a probation officer and they were really pleased with it. We have had very positive feedback from probation staff in both Thames Valley and London about that new system; it feels much more intuitive, and it is quicker to do assessments. I hope there are elements that can be transposed. 

That is an issue you need to talk to the Department and HMPPS about, but it is those sorts of innovations that TR was all about in some ways, and you need to make sure that some of the learning is brought along. It is not just IT: there are other things that they have been doing around community hubs and service user engagement as well. 

Q13 Rob Butler: If I quote you correctly, I think you said that you encouraged the NPS to capture what works in CRCs and transfer initiatives or ideas to the new service once it is a unified model. Will an element of your inspections be monitoring that to make sure that the advances that have been made, in an albeit flawed system, are not lost? 

Justin Russell: We will keep inspecting against our core standards around quality and management services and facilities; where we spot good practice, we will continue to flag that. We have been doing that with CRCs, and we will be looking to see whether they have brought that in with them. I have written to the Minister to talk about what I see as some of the positive things that CRCs have been doing. When we do a report, we flag up those initiatives as well. It is important to bring those over where they can, yes. 

Q14 Rob Butler: But do you have confidence that the transition can take place by June 2021, and that that is not overly ambitious? 

Justin Russell: Until we have done our national inspection in December, we will not have the evidence one way or the other, so I am happy to come back to you early in the new year and report on what that shows. 

Q15 Andy Slaughter: On transition, what effect is it going to have in relation to the existing workforce? I think you also have an ambition to recruit 1,000 new officers by January next year. 

Justin Russell: HMPPS have that ambition, yes. We will be holding them to account on whether they meet it as part of our inspection. 

Q16 Andy Slaughter: Yes. Do you think it is realistic? 

Justin Russell: I spoke to the director of the workforce programme last week, and we are very carefully monitoring what is happening with staffing numbers. We see signs on the ground that probation officer numbers, in the NPS at least, are starting to increase. We inspected the north-west NPS at the beginning of this year and were pleased to see that they have had 153 new trainees come into the north-west. I hear similar things from other regional directors. 

The last published figures showed that probation officer numbers had gone up by about 200, by about 6%, and the gap in the number of unfilled probation officer vacancies is coming down. It is still above 400, so they still have some way to go. I think the number of trainees, on the latest published figures for the end of June, was above 500, so there is a gap between that and 1,000. I am told that there were 9,000 applications for the most recent round of PQiP recruitment—the new trainees—so there is a pipeline, and obviously, as the job situation starts to tighten and people are looking for opportunities, that, to some extent, may help them to get bigger application fields as well. 

Q17 Andy Slaughter: It is perhaps not surprising in the current climate that there are a lot of applications for jobs, but this is becoming quite a familiar story. You could say the same thing with prison officers or indeed police officers, where the service has been cut back to the bone and there have been huge reductions over 10 years. Now some compensation is being made for that, but you have the situation where you are trying to recruit people, who perhaps have no background, and train them. In some cases that makes it worse for a period of time, because the existing service has to switch its resources to that sort of induction process. Given that we have very high case loads anyway, are you concerned about that process? What do you think can be done to mitigate the problems with it? 

Justin Russell: You are right to say that in the short term there are certainly pressures that come with recruiting new trainees: they have to have a reduced case load while they are training; you have to have someone mentoring them; and you have to have a trained assessor who is assessing them as well. All of that affects productivity, although in the long run, once they have the hang of the job, it goes back up again. They need to keep the numbers coming in; they need to keep recruiting. 

The other factor is that you have potentially 20,000 extra police officers coming downstream who will be putting more business into the courts and on to the probation service, and they will need to keep recruiting to meet that requirement as well. They will need to go beyond 1,000, I would have thought, to start to meet those extra demands as well. 

Q18 Andy Slaughter: It is a perfect storm in a way. We are transitioning from one system to another because the previous system failed; the service is trying to make up for the lack of numbers and deal with what are perceived to be the current problems of excess case load, which have caused some pretty distressing events to happen. Obviously, you are aware of all that, and it is your job to monitor, criticise and so on, but, going beyond that, do you have any insight into how the service should be operating? Do you have any advice, or do you not see that as your role? 

Justin Russell: I have been talking to quite a few regional directors over the past few weeks. They have to balance both recovery planning from Covid and preparing for this major transition next year. That is a big demand on them. They need support teams around them; they need support from the centre to be able to do that, and they need resources. I was encouraged that an extra £150 million went into the probation service this financial year. It is really important that that gets baked into the baseline going forward, and that they have a decent settlement in the spending review to support all of that work going forward. It will be very challenging for those leaders, particularly those who may be new to the NPS. 

Q19 Andy Slaughter: We all know that the MOJ has received probably the highest cuts of any Government Department, and this is only mitigating that to some extent. Do you see there being a risk to the public in what is happening at the moment, and do you think any steps should be taken on safeguarding in terms of the way that the service operates during the transitional period?

Justin Russell: As I said, our biggest areas of concern in our quality standards are around risk of harm and whether they are getting the risk assessments and the planning and reviewing right. That has consistently been unsatisfactory. We will continue to focus on that in all of our inspections relentlessly and check that lessons are being learned. 

There are some signs for encouragement, in that some of the scores have started to improve a bit. What I hope is that they do not start to go down again as we get nearer to transition. Keeping the service’s eye on the ball of delivery, as they also prepare it, is really important. As the CRCs head towards the exit door, it may become more difficult for them, particularly for their parent companies, to stay focused on delivery. A lot of CRCs are starting to lose their leaders, as senior leaders are now moving into regional director and heads of operation jobs in the NPS and leaving the CRCs, so there are real vulnerabilities around that which the service needs to look out for. 

Q20 Paula Barker: There is just one question from me. In respect of the workforce strategy and the transition, do you know whether the trade unions will be fully engaged, on behalf of their members, in the whole process? 

Justin Russell: I don’t know. I certainly hope they have been, and we will be checking on that in our transition planning inspection when we start it in November. That is certainly one of the questions we will be looking at. 

In the Wales example, where Wales went through the transition a bit earlier, there was, certainly in the offender management function, a lot of negotiation and liaison with the trade unions. I think that is still going on. I am not sure that they have yet settled the terms and conditions around the Welsh probation service, so there are lessons from that exercise for the rest of the country as well. 

Paula Barker: Great. Thanks very much. 

Q21 Dr Mullan: I have a couple of questions. In terms of the 1,000 figure— although this might already have been covered—as the companies are wound down and we move back to a single model and their staff transfer over, I assume it is clear that that 1,000 will be on top of any people who transfer in, because you are not really creating a bigger workforce if you are just bringing in-house existing people. Is that part of how you understand it? 

Justin Russell: The big problem we have is that there are no national figures on the CRC workforce; we do not know how many probation officers or PSOs they recruit, so it is very difficult to know how big the hole is that needs to be filled as they transfer over. We have been collecting that data as we do inspections. The data from the services that we have inspected shows that probation officer numbers have come down by about 10% across those we inspected over the last financial year, as resources have got tighter, so that is increasing the hole that needs to be filled. 

There are very few CRCs, if any at all, that are now starting to train new probation officers—it is not in their interests—so it is very much on the NPS to make good that gap. I am sure they take account of what the potential gaps in the CRCs are, as well as the NPS gaps, when they decide how big the recruitment cohorts should be going forward. 

Q22 Dr Mullan: I guess what I am getting at is how you are going to be able to draw a firm conclusion as to whether the overall workforce of people working on behalf of Government in probation has gone up by 1,000, versus people who have just come in from the companies. How will you know? 

Justin Russell: That is a very good point, and I will be asking the very same question as they continue to pass statistical bulletins, because the statistical bulletin, as you have probably seen, is purely NPS staff. We have never had a bulletin on CRC staff. There will at some point be a number of people who are in scope for the transition to CRCs and we will know that number, but, as you say, we will not necessarily know what the gap in that number is. 

Q23 Dr Mullan: I am interested in the vacancies in the sense that it is all very well to talk about lack of budgets, lack of money to hire people, and so on, but when you cannot hire people within existing budgets, it demonstrates that it is not just a matter of the overall money available to the services. Why do you think they are struggling to recruit? Are there not suitable people? Is it salary, or work environment? What do you think means that they struggle? 

Justin Russell: As you might expect, the biggest struggle with vacancies is in London and the south-east; and in the south-east it is the bits of Kent and the home counties that are closest to London. That has been a real issue. In our Joseph McCann review, we found staff shortages in the Hertfordshire office that had been supervising him. Some of our inspections have shown vacancy rates in the NPS of up to about 20%. They are being plugged with agency staff at the moment. 

What I am often told is that agency staff are quite happy to do long-term placements; they do not particularly want to go for permanent probation officer jobs because they find that reduces their flexibility. There needs to be some combination of thinking about what flexibility or work-life balance they can offer within the service, or if it is the salary. There was some language in the workforce strategy about looking at pay and conditions, which I hope indicated that they are considering what might need to be done on that, in particular in areas of high vacancy. 

Dr Mullan: It is interesting what you say about the number of applications and what they are applying to do, so maybe there is a more positive future. Thank you.

Maria Eagle: Briefly, before I move on to Covid, there is one thing that strikes me about the reason why the CRCs were set up and split away from the NPS. They were going to deal more with minor offenders who could be turned away from repeat offending more readily perhaps, and the NPS was going to stick with dealing with some of the very serious and dangerous offenders. Have you any view about all these challenges coming at once—the high case loads, the organisational change as the two organisations are put together, the lack of staff and the recovery from Covid—and what impact they are going to have, if any, on the ability of the service as a whole to deal with the high end, more serious and dangerous offenders? If they are not supervised properly and if they are not properly dealt with, the consequences of things going wrong can be much greater for those who end up being victims of perhaps further offending. Do you have any handle on that, and whether or not during this transition there is going to be an issue in dealing with the serious and dangerous offenders at the toughest end of the scale? 

Justin Russell: What we are finding is that supervision of the higher risk offenders who are in the case loads of the NPS has been rather better than the lower and medium risk offenders. Because those offenders will stay with their NPS probation officers as they go through transition, there should be continuity of supervision through that process and, hopefully, people’s eye will stay on the ball with them. 

Interestingly, when we did our study of serious further offences, two thirds of homicides committed by people on probation were people who had been assessed as low or medium risk, so it is not people at the high end who are offending. What we find as we look at CRC case loads is that they are pretty chaotic people: they are quite likely to have a drugs problem, and 40% of them are domestic abuse perpetrators. Calling them low risk is not necessarily always the case; they might be homeless and, quite typically, have issues with accommodation. 

We find that that population has huge needs. They are quite chaotic and need particular interventions and support, maybe different from supervising a lifer coming out of prison or someone convicted of a serious sex offence. They need the right sort of supervision and services going forward. It is important to make sure that that happens as they move over to the NPS caseload next summer. 

Q25 Maria Eagle: Can you let us know what your initial findings are on the inspection of probation services during the Covid-19 period? Obviously, that has changed how everybody does things, so do you have any initial findings from your inspections? 

Justin Russell: Yes. We have finished the fieldwork and have been writing up our findings. We looked at six local services, and in detail at 60 cases, in June, and we interviewed some service users about their experience and interviewed probation officers. 

We found that the probation service had done, in some ways, a remarkable job at completely changing their operating model overnight to one of remote supervision, so that 80% to 90% of people were receiving phone supervision rather than face to face. Some critical services had to be stopped altogether. They had to stop doing unpaid work; they stopped doing accredited programme delivery, or at least the new programmes. They necessarily, I think, focused on risk, on doing risk assessment, and on people’s welfare. In general, looking at the cases we inspected, they did a reasonable job of that. We did not have to raise any urgent alerts about people who had gone missing or were not properly being managed. It was by phone, but it was reasonably consistent contact; 75% of them had had a contact every week from their probation officer by phone. 

There were a variety of views from staff about having to work from home. The majority welcomed the flexibility it gave them and the savings in travel costs and all the rest of it. Some of them struggled a bit to find the space to work at home. In the probation service, there are some pretty challenging conversations with some difficult people; in front of your kids in your living room, that is quite a tricky thing to be doing, and people felt a bit stressed by that sometimes. 

We also talked to some service users. Where they were in a stable situation—a stable family life and somewhere to live—some of them preferred being remotely supervised; they preferred phone contact. It meant that they did not have to sort out childcare and worry about going on public transport. They said they felt they could be more open sometimes with their probation officer when they were doing interventions. With service users who were more vulnerable and might have a mental health problem and other welfare needs, some of them really struggled quite a bit and missed personal face-to-face contact with their probation officer, who could be quite an important person in their life sometimes. 

Q26 Maria Eagle: Having done some of that work, what is your sense of how the Covid-19 challenge and this period has changed priorities for the probation service? 

Justin Russell: One of the positives is that it has given the CRCs more experience of particularly focusing on risk, on risk assessment and getting that right. They have done a reasonable job of that, so those staff will be taking that into the new arrangements next year. People have got the hang of doing other forms of remote supervision, and, longer term, there will probably be a move towards some supervision continuing to be online or over the phone, but in a mix with face to face. 

One of the interesting things is improved multi-agency relationships. Probation officers have struck up good relationships with the police in particular and with social services. They are communicating more; they have daily conversations about who may have been arrested or flagged on social service systems, and more people are turning up for multiagency meetings—MAPPA meetings and MARAC meetings. Because it is much easier to dial into a virtual meeting, they are getting quite good attendance, and that is a positive. I would expect that maybe some of those will continue to operate like that going forward. 

Q27 Maria Eagle: Do you think that new priorities for the service will come out of this period that will continue, or will there be a shift back to old ways of doing things? 

Justin Russell: I think the priorities will remain reoffending, desistance and steering people away from crime, and the public protection role. Those are not going to change. The way they deliver those services may change to reflect the use of new technology. Necessarily under Covid, the focus was very much on risk and public protection. There was less delivery being done on offending behaviour programmes or interventions. Those are now being switched back on and people are starting to come in. That is the gap at the moment that will need to be filled; there are far fewer people doing accredited programmes at the moment than there were before Covid, and that number will need to go up. 

Unpaid work is quite interesting as well. The old model of doing unpaid work was that you put a lot of people in a minibus and took them off to do litter-picking or other work. It is quite difficult to keep social distancing, so they are having to find different ways of doing it. People are having to make their own way to work placements. There are fewer people on placements and there is more focus on individual placements. There are some quite big challenges around that as well. 

Q28 Maria Eagle: You recently launched a consultation on the future of adult inspections. Do you have any initial findings in respect of that work? 

Justin Russell: We are just going through our consultation responses at the moment and we will publish our way forward on that. There is broad support, I think, for two or three of the key things that we are going do. 

One is that, as CRCs and the NPS come together, we will no longer need separate inspection teams for the two different sorts of service, so there will be single inspection teams. They will be able to look end to end at every case they look at, right from the point when the initial court report is done through to planning assessment and on to review and through-the-gate release. Then we will aggregate all that data. 

A key thing we are going to do is start looking at a much more local level. Our inspections will look at local delivery units, which might be a single city, a unitary authority or a single county. That will give the probation service itself much more granular detail, so you will know how probation is performing in Newcastle, Leeds or Bristol, and not just the whole of the south-west or the whole of the north-east. That will be important to the public, so there will be more transparency to the public. I will be able to go on the radio and tell Radio Leeds listeners, “Here is how your local probation service is operating.” I find that difficult to do at the moment when I am reporting on the whole of Yorkshire and Humberside. That is important. 

Another key thing is that I have always been keen to look at the outcomes of the probation service. Is it making a real difference to the people being supervised? Are they getting into accommodation? Are they getting off drugs? Are they getting into employment and training? Is their health improving? We will be looking at how we can measure those outcomes, as well as process, in our inspections. We are doing some pilots in Wales this autumn to see how we can measure those sorts of things in practice in a local service. 

Maria Eagle: Thank you very much. 

Q29 Dr Mullan: While we have you here, I want to ask you about the proposals in the new White Paper around probation, particularly the use of more tagging and home detention. I don’t know if you have seen anything about them and I know it is perhaps not strictly under this remit, but have you had any initial thoughts as to whether you think that is going to work and what you think the challenges might be? Do you think the probation services will be in a position to monitor and go after people who breach their tagging, in collaboration with the police? Do you think it is going to make a difference to people’s compliance? What would your thoughts be?

Justin Russell: There was a whole range of proposals in the White Paper around community supervision, many of which I think the probation service will welcome. There is obviously the tagging stuff. There is improving the quality of pre-sentence reports, community sentence treatment requirements and the courts to supervise people— problem-solving courts. There is plenty there. 

On electronic monitoring, I think the GPS technology is potentially a game changer in being able to monitor people’s movements, as well as whether they are just at home or not. We will need to see what difference that makes. There has been a new systematic review of the evidence on electronic monitoring published, and I was reading it last night. It varies according to who is being supervised, so there is good evidence that sex offender reoffending rates reduce under electronic monitoring, and there are certain other groups of offender where it has a positive effect. 

For others, it may not have such a positive effect. It partly depends on how you manage it, but there are signs that it has an impact on reoffending rates, and that is a positive thing, but it needs to be used in the right way. When it is used for people coming out of prison for home detention curfew, you have a very strong stick for people to stick to their curfew because they will be called back to prison if they do not. If it is a condition of a community sentence, the breach proceedings may be a bit longer, so part of the success of it will be how quickly you can act on that, and people realise that there are real consequences from breaking the tag.

The longer you have someone on a tag, the more, potentially, they could breach and, therefore, the implications on the Prison Service downstream start to flow from that, but I am sure they will have done the modelling on that going forward. 

Q30 Dr Mullan: Do you think people being in their homes and confined in that way is going to make it easier for probation supervisors to meet them and engage with them, or does that not tend to be a challenge in their engagement with the people they are supervising? 

Justin Russell: At the moment, the static electronic monitoring tends to be about curfewing people at night-time, which is not when you would be having an appointment anyway. One of the interesting proposals in the White Paper is that you would have variable curfew hours, maybe longer at weekends than during the week, and that probation would have more control, potentially. There is some very interesting language in the White Paper about giving the probation service more discretion, and more flexibility to vary the conditions and requirements relating to supervision. I would certainly welcome that and think it would be a positive development. 

Chair: Mr Russell, thank you very much indeed. It has been very helpful and informative, as always. We look forward to hearing from you again with the updates that you so helpfully give us. Thank you for your time and for your evidence to us today. We are grateful to you.