Ben Priestley: I am Ben Priestley, national officer with Unison.
Q96 Chair: Thank you all very much for coming to help us with your evidence, and thanks for the written evidence that your organisations have put in. I go back to what I asked the first panel. This is the second time we have had a major reform of the system in five years. This Committee concluded, as I think you agreed, that the first one did not work out too well. Do you think this one will be better?
Ian Lawrence: We obviously welcome the prospect of a reunified service, and so do the members we represent, but we cannot gloss over the impact that two major reforms have had on all staff across the NPS and CRCs in terms of stress, high workloads and, as we have said to you before, the fragmentation of services that occurred from the start of the TR programme.
On support for staff generally, despite the positive outcomes of the staff transfer and protection agreement that will underpin the reunified model, and the excellent engagement we have had with senior management, there is still uncertainty for many staff and a lot of work to do as well. We have not had time to celebrate the reunification; we have been too busy working on the future programme.
To alleviate that, we think it will be useful to see more consistent communications from the CRCs—we know they are trying their best and we understand that—and staff being provided with clear answers from their senior leaders going forward about what the transition means for them, in the lead-in to the unified model and the publication of the revised operational blueprint, which we understand is due next spring. Ben Priestley wants to add to my answer, if possible.
Ben Priestley: It is very clear that the vast majority of our members support the unified model. It is clearly a step in the right direction; 86% of the members we surveyed recently in support of our submission to the Committee’s inquiry said they support the unified model.
To pick up on one of Ian’s points, there is a worryingly large minority of members in both the CRCs and the NPS who simply feel that they do not have enough information about the new model to say whether they think it will work. The Committee asked whether the unified model would improve the confidence of sentencers in community sentences. A large proportion of our members—41%—said they did not know whether that was the case, and 38% said they did not know whether the unified model would improve and strengthen collaboration and integration between prisons and probation. Fairly fundamental claims are being made for the unified model, which we support, as our sister union does, but on which staff do not feel they have the information. It goes back to Ian’s point that we need much better communication between HMPPS and the workforce in both the NPS and the CRCs in order that the staff can really get engaged with the project and throw their weight and support behind it.
Q97 Richard Burgon: We know that the transforming probation privatisation was driven by ideology, not evidence, and that it was opposed by Napo and Unison. I have two questions. First, how confident is the panel that this new programme of reforms is going to repair the damage done to the probation service in the long term? Secondly, what broader lessons does the panel think the Government should learn from the failure of probation privatisation?
Katie Lomas: One of the key things when thinking about whether it will work is, are we setting it up to work? The previous model, Transforming Rehabilitation, did not work, would not work and could never work. We think that a unified model can work, given the right amount of resource. When we talk about resource we do not mean just putting money into budgets, but making sure that we have the right number of staff, and that right across the system it is properly resourced, not just probation employers but all the other parts of the system that feed into probation and positive outcomes for probation clients. It is not just about saying, “Okay, we’ve tried it one way and it didn’t work. Let’s try it another way.” It is about saying, “This is the model we are committed to and we’re going to resource it properly.”
I want to say a couple of things about the unified model. The model that is currently being pursued is unified in many parts, but not all. We still retain the dynamic framework for the provision of some services. While we are not opposed to having local providers of specialist services involved in the system, doing their best with their skills and experience, it is not clear that the model actually delivers that. I listened to the evidence of colleagues earlier who expressed exactly the same concerns. The way the contracts for the dynamic framework are being set up removes them from the local focus and means that it is far more likely that larger organisations that can provide a national spread will be given those contracts, rather than genuine smaller local organisations.
There are lessons to be learned from what happened in Transforming Rehabilitation. The key lesson that we do not believe has yet been woven into the current design is local focus and local responsivity. We need to be able to work in a way that suits the needs of clients and communities in the area where we operate. It is no good doing the same thing in London as you do in rural areas of Lincolnshire. The two approaches need to be completely different, and they will involve different partners and different ways of working. The big lesson not yet learned is localism.
Ben Priestley: To return to Katie’s point, which David also made in respect of the APCC submission, Unison supports the localisation of probation services, and the role of police and crime commissioners is absolutely integral to that. We certainly favour the devolution of political control to PCCs. I appreciate that is not within the bounds of this particular inquiry, but I want to put it on the record because there is a great deal of support for it in the sector.
How confident are we that the reforms will work? It comes down to the points Katie mentioned around resourcing. The unions have written both to the Minister and to senior leaders in HMPPS to get a guarantee, as far as we can, that the CSR submission that the MOJ is making and the probation programme budget for the unified model are adequately resourced. We know that probation lost money during the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, and it is absolutely critical that the service gets the funding from the Treasury in the forthcoming CSR and in the probation programme budget for it to work. It is about staffing, pay and the quality of the estate that probation staff have to work in.
If we go back to the HMIP report delivered in January this year on NPS central functions, with which I know colleagues on the Committee will be familiar, there was a long list of deficiencies identified by the inspectorate about poor-quality offices, staff not being paid correctly, difficulties in training, access to IT and a failing facilities management contract. All those issues need to be addressed.
On the issue of future procurement, what we know about procurement for the dynamic framework is that it is complex. There are four key strands, with which I think the Committee is familiar. The contracts will themselves be divided up in relation to a locality. For our members who are transferring potentially to a dynamic framework, it is very important to keep in mind that not all CRC staff will transfer to the National Probation Service. Admittedly, a small proportion of our members, but a proportion none the less, will go to the dynamic framework. At this point in time, because of the staggered nature of the procurement process and the award of contracts, those staff do not yet know where they will be working. That is a major cause of concern for us.
There must be a question mark over the track record of the Ministry of Justice commercial department in specifying and managing contracts. Clearly, that has not been a success story over the last five years, and there must be some real question marks over that. I emphasise that it is about funding. If the NPS and the dynamic framework do not get the funding they need, I do not think any of us can be confident of the success of the unified model.
Q98 Miss Dines: I am the MP for Derbyshire Dales. I am fairly new on the Committee, since the December election. Probation officers are clearly a huge national asset, and I have every confidence that you will make this transfer work. What challenges do you see and how can they be overcome to make sure that we have an effective new regime in place?
Katie Lomas: Welcome to the Committee, and thank you for your question. We have to look at a couple of things. Obviously, the timescale and the timing of the reforms are key. On the timescale, we are making big changes to the probation system, again, in a relatively short space of time. On the timing, it comes in the midst of the response to a global pandemic, with our exceptional delivery models in place to make sure that the service can continue to run while keeping everyone as safe as possible. There is a chance that we can make it work, but there are various things we need to be mindful of and on which we need progress in order that the transfer happens.
Staff who transfer next year from CRCs to the National Probation Service will face some challenges, such as vetting processes. We have serious concerns already about some of the vetting processes our members have to undertake. It is not employment vetting. There is a new requirement for staff in the National Probation Service to undergo police vetting in order to use a police computer system to record and share information.
While we have no issue with recording and sharing information, which is a huge part of the probation job, the vetting process is quite different from the vetting process we have in our employment. For example, it discriminates against people who have lived experience in the criminal justice system. People with those experiences are important in the probation system and have a real role to play in the future of probation. We have concerns that staff who are currently working in CRCs and have the lived experience of being in the criminal justice system will be frozen out through the vetting processes as they transfer over.
We have even seen examples of people failing the police vetting on the basis of their family connections, in some cases because they were a victim of crime. We continue to raise serious concerns about that, and it will become even more apparent when the CRCs transfer in. A lot of the work, for example providing peer mentors, is done through the CRCs, and those people will be transferring to the National Probation Service next year.
We have some questions about probation qualifications. Some CRCs made different decisions about which qualifications were appropriate to which role. There will be members of staff working in CRCs now who do not have the qualification that the National Probation Service will expect them to have to carry out their role. We think it is important that staff placed in that position, through no fault of their own, have the right kind of support and guidance either to gain an appropriate qualification or to move to an alternative role that allows them to use their skills and experience.
We have concerns about the ability of the shared service contracted-out HR system in the National Probation Service to manage the transfer in of almost 7,000 staff. When staff transferred in Wales, the transfer went relatively well on a process level, but that was a couple of hundred staff and this is almost 7,000. What we learned from the original transfer into the NPS from the probation trust in 2014 was that shared services do not manage difference well. If there is any difference in people’s terms and conditions, job title or anything like that, we have a real concern that shared services will not be able to cope and adapt, which means months, potentially years, of misery for our members, if their pay is incorrect and they are hounded for repayment of overpayments and things like that.
We have concerns about information that might be transferred from the CRCs to shared services and whether it will be properly stored, transferred and kept. We have gone through a process in the National Probation Service where all staff had to re-evidence their qualifications because, even though it was evidenced to the probation trust prior to TR, the National Probation Service did not have those records. They were either never transferred or transferred in a format that it did not recognise, which has meant that some members have even had to pay for new certificates so that they can evidence a qualification, sometimes from decades ago. We have a lot of concerns about the practical issues.
Members need to be able to ask questions about what will happen to them when they transfer. They need to ask questions about what role they will have. What will it feel like? What will it look like? Will they be working in the same way with clients? Will they be doing different tasks? At the moment, it is very difficult for them to get reliable answers to those questions, and they end up relying on things they hear from other people that may have more or less basis in truth. There are a great many challenges in the move to a brand-new way of working right across the probation system.
Q99 Miss Dines: This is a question to Ben in relation to the Unison report.
You reported that there was very much the existence of an us and them culture between CRC and NPS staff. How do you think that can be addressed? Is it really a significant problem? As you are all professionals, won’t you be able to work together for the national good?
Ben Priestley: That would be everyone’s wish. I am sure that there are no members of the probation workforce who do not share that aim and objective. The difficulty is that Transforming Rehabilitation took a single, unified service that was working well, was a local service and had good local links, and broke it apart. Obviously, putting back together something that has been broken is a lot more difficult than would have been the case had it not been broken in the first place, and a lot more costly, to come back to the cost issue.
One of the key issues that we identified in the recent survey that we did in support of our submission to the Committee’s inquiry this time, to find out exactly how members were feeling four or five years after the split in 2014-15, was that it is very clear that there is a two-tier feel about the workforce now. Some of the testimony that we put into our written submission to the inquiry sets that out very vividly. There are many more examples that we can certainly supply to the Committee, if necessary.
We did not have any sense that it was going to be an easy or quick fix. Staff in the CRCs feel that they have had a sort of second-class status foisted on them, through no fault of their own, clearly. They are doing the same professional work as our members in the National Probation Service. However, the decision under the previous Government to separate the service into a service dealing with high-risk cases, the NPS, and a service dealing with medium and low-risk cases and interventions, the CRCs, created the sense that the CRCs were somehow less important and less valuable. Their staff were deemed to be less qualified, less trained and so on. Of course, as trade unions, we know that that is not true. Our members in both parts of the service are doing an equally difficult job, in very demanding circumstances, but the testimony is clear to see.
What do we need to do about that? There is an understanding among HMPPS senior managers that there is a problem. The first step that you have to take to resolve an issue is to accept that there is a problem that needs to be dealt with. I think there is willingness on the part of senior managers and leaders to do that, but it will not be an easy task. We had testimony from staff who came over from the Wales CRC into NPS Wales on 1 December last year, who said very clearly that, since they came into the NPS in Wales, they feel that they have not been treated with the professional accord and respect that they would expect. There is clearly a problem.
To deal with that, there needs to be a clear culture reset from the top of the organisation. We hope that that will be done. Staff need to be brought together. It relies on the recreation of a distinctive, definitive probation culture, resting on the values of the profession, which have got lost in the five years of the Transforming Rehabilitation experiment. It is the culture of a unified workforce, with professional colleagues working together as a team in one particular direction.
If we can get that culture re-established, through that kind of investment, we have a fighting chance, but it will rest on the terms and conditions being reunified. That is what the staff transfer and protections agreement that Ian mentioned at the outset will do. Our members have now voted for a package that will put all staff coming into the NPS from the CRCs on to National Probation Service terms and conditions from day one. That is obviously an important first step. Of course, it needs to be funded properly.
It is also very important from the probation culture aspect that probation is not subsumed and swallowed into a general HMPPS culture. We as unions are always having to take a stand against attempts to dissolve some of our practices and procedures into HMPPS practices and procedures. As long as we can hold those off and maintain the distinctive probation culture, we have a real chance of getting everyone working together to reset the culture, to welcome colleagues from the community rehabilitation companies and, in effect, to create a new organisation going forward.
Q100 Miss Dines: Can you expand on that briefly? What do you think is the culture of probation officers? You are all professionals. You can work together, I hope. What is the culture you are looking back at and want to recreate? Why not create a new culture?
Ben Priestley: Everyone is open to the potential to create a new culture. This will be a totally new organisation. It will be a much larger organisation, not quite doubling, but nearly so.
You are absolutely right. All probation staff, whatever their role, are working in a professional field, to a set of clearly established probation values. Our expectation is that, with the right message from the top of the organisation and the right funding to ensure that the service has the wherewithal to do what it needs to do, we can put the cultural differences aside and recreate the single workforce. That cultural change is something the organisation needs to invest in. Our understanding is that senior managers are alive to those issues and will want to work with the unions and staff to put that right.
Q101 Miss Dines: What are your views on the probation workforce strategy? Do you think that it addresses staffing issues with the probation service adequately?
Ian Lawrence: As I said earlier, we are working extremely positively with senior leaders. In the run-up to reunification, we worked with them on the staff transfer agreement you have heard about. We are now working on the crucial workforce strategy, which we are absolutely committed to. Within that, we hope to encompass all the key issues we have talked about thus far this afternoon. From the very positive engagement that we have had and the messages from people such as the director general of probation and Sonia Flynn, we are sure that we can move forward.
A word of caution, though; I have been around for quite some time, and I must have seen any number of workforce strategies launched by employers. Eventually, they go into the dust or get diluted down the track. You have heard enough from us already to understand how committed we are to seeing this new organisation prosper. We will do all we can, alongside our members and leaders everywhere, to imbue a new, refreshing culture and to see whether we can put some of the main focal points of the workforce strategy into operation.
It is a promising blueprint. There are a lot of promises, but, as people have said, staff need clear commitments and clear directives from the centre about what will be delivered for them, what their role will be going forward and what type of support we will get. In answering the question, we need to look across at the blame culture that, sadly, still exists in areas of probation. Katie wants to add something on that.
Katie Lomas: Over recent years, we have seen a blame culture developing, particularly around the process of learning lessons from serious further offences when they happen. We must move away from a process by which blame is assigned and back to a genuine learning opportunity, to understand what happened and why it happened, and to find anything that we can do to focus on change in the future.
That is not to say that we do not think that anybody should ever be called up on anything that they have done that is wrong, but when it is approached as a genuine learning opportunity—learning for individuals, as well as on an organisational level—we all get a better outcome. What is happening at the moment in too many cases is that there is a move first to a disciplinary investigation and we ask questions later. We would far rather move back to its being an opportunity for learning.
That moves us into thinking about and considering some of the things that we have mentioned around developing professional competency across the probation system. We have been working with HMPPS on this for some time. We have recently been consulted on moving away from the SPDR appraisal process to a much more supportive performance management system, but none of that is integrated with the current system of probation supervision.
All probation staff, particularly those who work on the frontline, need supervision that is not just about meeting the targets and fulfilling the requirements of their job description, but about the shared responsibility for risk with those who manage them. It is also about developing best practice and getting support when staff are working on the frontline in very trying circumstances, with clients who often display difficult behaviour and struggle to engage with professionals. Staff need more support in managing those working relationships. The fact that the performance management framework does not acknowledge that supervision requirement and reduces supervision or one-to-ones simply to talking about whether someone has achieved the requirements on them if they want to move on in their career is really disappointing.
A recent HMIP report told us that SPOs—senior probation officers—were managing between 11 and 20 people at any one time and were able to spend only 20% of their time focusing on their case load. That shows you where support for those frontline staff is lacking in the system. Even if an SPO is only managing 11 people, that is 11 people they need to make time for every day, every week and every month of the year, to make sure that they are fulfilling all of those functions for them.
We have an urgent need to review the role of the senior probation officer/team manager in the support, supervision and management of frontline staff. We have been seeking to engage with HMPPS on that for some time. The problem is exacerbated in environments like OMiC, in prisons; managers working in prisons often have even bigger teams to manage. Those are teams of people from a probation and a prison background, so there is much more complexity, because they have different terms and conditions and are subject to different policies and procedures. The SPOs seem to be the forgotten few in the system at the moment. They desperately need a focus in order for the transition to work.
Q102 Chair: Are there any other observations?
Ben Priestley: Can I add a couple of things to what Ian and Katie have said? The probation workforce programme has a number of headings in it, one of which is around attracting and retaining a talented workforce. Of course, we are all in agreement with that. That will require a decent pay and conditions package. You would expect us as trade unions to say that, of course, but it is worth remembering at this point that in the last 10 years the monetary value of the pay points in probation pay scales has gone up by only 1%. That compares with 12% for police staff, 9% for health workers and 9% for local government workers.
Yes, we have had a number of pay awards where staff have progressed up their pay band. That is what generally happens to most public sector workers, so police officers and staff, health workers and local government workers will also have been progressing up their own pay bands, but they will have had an actual pay rise, in terms of the value of their pay points. The fact that probation staff have had a 1% pay rise over the last 10 years tells us just how far probation staff have fallen behind professionals in analogous contexts, such as social work, police work and work in the health service. That really will need to be put right.
Recently, the unions wrote to the Minister, Lucy Frazer, to ask for reassurances that the bid that is going in for the CSR will ensure that future pay reform is fully funded in the probation service. There are other pay reforms that we need to see through in probation. We probably do not have time to go into those today, but we are in discussions with the probation employers about them at the moment.
Another section heading in the probation workforce programme is around wellbeing. We touched on some of the issues that are relevant to that in previous remarks by myself and Napo colleagues. A workload management tool that covers the entire workforce has already been identified by HMIP as a real need for the organisation. Until that is provided, there is a real danger that talented, qualified, ambitious individuals will come into the service and find, as Katie said, that the spans of control of managerial staff are just too high at the moment. You will get burnout and people not being prepared to stay in the organisation.
We need inclusive and supportive managers. Ian and Katie mentioned the blame culture. The organisation needs to find out what the lived experience of its staff is. At the moment, we are working with the organisation on a survey of black, Asian and minority ethnic staff in the service. Find out what your staff actually feel and think about their work. Listen to them. It is a simple lesson for employers to learn: listen to your workforce. The trade unions are here to enable the workforce to have a voice and to channel their views to the employer, so support for trade unions will be an integral part of the workforce programme going forward. Support unions to be the voice of the workforce. If you listen to staff, hear what they have to say and consult them before you make changes, you are well on the way to a successful workforce programme.
Q103 Andy Slaughter: Good afternoon, everyone. Talking about new probation officers coming on stream, HMPPS said that there will be 1,000 new officers in training by January. Do you think that is realistic? Do you know whether it includes the 600 existing vacancies or whether it is additional to that? Do you think it will address the excess case load problems? What are your answers to any or all of those points?
Katie Lomas: This is a really important question. It is easy to say, “There are 600 and something vacancies. We are bringing in 1,000 staff, so great—job done.” But it is never that simple, is it? There were around 600 vacancies on one particular day. However, the vacancy rate goes up and down, as more people are recruited and more people leave. Since 2014, in particular, we have seen a greater number of people exiting before their ordinary retirement age than we saw previously, so we are losing more experienced staff than we are gaining.
Having 1,000 new probation officers sounds amazing, but they are not sitting in a cupboard somewhere just waiting to be brought out and into service. They have to be recruited, trained and developed. Probation training takes anywhere between 15 months and two years, depending on your prior qualifications. Once you have qualified, there is a need for you to be developed and supported in your role.
We have real concerns that the 1,000 new recruits who are coming in will face a difficult time as they try to establish themselves, both throughout their training and after their training, as they take on their first qualified role. The reason we have those concerns is that there is a lack of experienced staff to support them, and the experienced staff have massive case loads. It is not uncommon to see people working at 140% of their capacity. That eats up any capacity that they have to help, support, mentor and guide new staff in their role and to help people’s learning and development.
In addition, it is important to note that the only place the practice training assessors who support people through their probation, training and qualification can come from is the pool of qualified probation officers. When you bring in 1,000 new recruits, you have to have more PTAs to support them. Those PTAs further diminish the number of qualified probation officers who are able to manage the workload. It is a further drain on the manager resource. Again, senior probation officers can only come from the pool of qualified probation officers.
There is a need to stretch an already very thinly stretched resource even further in order to mend the situation, which is really difficult. That is why we have such a focus on the SPO role in particular. We recently restarted a consultation with HMPPS on the PTA role itself, looking at ways we can make sure both that new recruits are supported and helped during their qualification period and that that does not unduly stretch the already stretched resources working with clients at the moment.
We continue to see the longer-term knock-on effect of what happened in 2014. When the transfer-in happens in June next year, there will need to be a further reckoning on vacancy rates, because we are aware that many of the CRCs are carrying high numbers of vacancies. They will be transferring a group of staff, but also a group of vacancies, which will add to the problem. It is a very complex situation. We have serious concerns that mending the problem will exacerbate it at first.
Q104 Andy Slaughter: That is a common experience—with the police and the Prison Service as well—where there has been a massive loss of jobs over a period of years. Those are the most experienced people, on the whole, so at the moment you have novices coming in and then taking resources. Do you think that the employers appreciate that? Can they do anything about it, or are we going to see things get worse before they get better?
Katie Lomas: On the whole, the employers appreciate it, but there is very little they can do about it. It is something that we will feel as pain before it starts to get better.
There are some things that can be done. We can create additional resource among the staff group that exists. If you have the funding to do it, you can offer people currently working part time the opportunity to increase their hours. If you have a pool of probation officers who have that capacity, they can do that.
In many areas, agency staff have been used as mentors. It is very inefficient to use agency staff to carry case loads, because turnover of worker is really damaging to our clients, but you can bring them in and use them for a year to two years to mentor a group of new recruits. That is far more effective than using agency staff to hold case loads or to backfill for people doing other work. There are some things that can be done, but you are absolutely right. We are going to feel this as pain and difficulty in the system before we see any of the beneficial effects of the 1,000 new recruits.
Chair: That is very helpful. We have talked generally about the challenges that your members have been facing with Covid-19. That has been an additional burden for everybody at this time. Before we conclude, we want as a Committee to put on record our appreciation of the work that all probation staff—members of both your unions—have been doing under particularly stressful and challenging circumstances. We are grateful to them. I hope you will pass on to your members our thanks for what they are doing.
Thank you very much for your helpful evidence and your time this afternoon. The evidence session is concluded.
