By the way I thought 'leave meant leave'? This announced yesterday:-
Seetec to Run MOJ Commissioned CFO Activity Hubs to Steer Offenders Away from CrimeThe Ministry of Justice has awarded us CFO activity hub contracts in the North West, South East and South West to deliver support to help offenders reintegrate back into their communities.
Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) Co-Financing Organisation (CFO) provision for the European Social Fund (ESF) Activity Hubs will enable offenders to access tailored support, receive advice and guidance and interact with positive role models and peers at a similar stage of their resettlement journey. They will be supported to develop plans to move forward and ultimately be supported into education, employment and training.
We're committed to putting offenders at the heart of their own rehabilitation journey, combining skills training, employability services and practitioner expertise, all of which aims to move individuals into a crime-free life. We're already experienced at delivering probation services and currently supervise and support around 19,100 offenders categorised as low and medium risk in the South of England. In Wales, we deliver programmes that help people to turn away from crime, including community payback.
As an established provider of high-quality public services, we believe that no one should be left behind. Offenders are one group in our society that can sometimes feel they are forgotten. CFO Activity Hubs will aim to deliver targeted interventions to improve the support provided to one of the hardest-to-reach groups in our society.
This opportunity is a key milestone in the development of our public service offering. Alongside the launch of the CFO activity hubs next year, Interventions Alliance will be unveiled to manage the contracts as part of the Seetec group structure.
Our five new CFO activity hubs will work closely with justice partners in the local community. Three hubs will be based in the North West, Manchester, Liverpool and Warrington. One hub in the South East, located in Chatham and satellite provision will be delivered as part of the contract at St Leonards on Sea in East Sussex. We will also run an activity hub in the South West, Bristol was chosen as the operational base for the hub in that region.
There will be a 16-week implementation period starting this month. The CFO activity hubs will commence operations from the 1st of March 2021 and run for two and a half years.
Suki Binning, Executive Director of Justice services at Seetec, said:
“Seetec has a strong track record of delivering localised interventions that help offenders re-engage with their community. CFO Activity hubs are a great opportunity to build on our tried and tested model of support for offenders to achieve their life ambitions and break away from the cycle of criminal activity they pursued in the past.
“The pandemic continues to present providers of public services with unprecedented challenges, but we moved early this year to put in place robust systems, changed the way we worked and provided more support to our staff so that we could maintain the highest standards of support that continue to meet the needs of our service users. This means we have the right support structures in place to commence activity hub operations by the 1st of March 2021.
“Despite the current circumstances, we are looking forward to developing our existing network of operations across the North West, South East and South West to ensure from day one that our activity hubs offer a route for offenders to change their lives.”
--oo00oo--
I've never been a fan of this contract competition game as a way of providing public services and for every winner there are of course lots of losers. This from 3rd April:-
HM Prisons & Probation Service (HMPPS) is commissioning activity hubs in community locations that will offer wide ranging tailored support for offenders – in particular those who are considered disadvantaged, facing multiple barriers to employment and not fully supported by existing programmes.
Achieve North West intends to bid for HMPPS Activity Hubs in the North West contract package area. The organisation is therefore looking for Expressions of Interest from organisations of all sizes, who provide high quality services, to partner with.
Achieve North West is seeking provision that will help participants not to re-offend, increase their access to mainstream opportunities and move them closer to the labour market. Offender participation will be voluntary.
Hubs will provide bespoke support through the provision of activities focused on personal development and citizenship, as well as social and economic integration into the community. The organisation is seeking provision including (please see draft specification on our portal for full details):
- Arts including crafts, drama, media, music and dance; sports; delivery of one off community projects
- Family support, relationship coaching, community development activity, literacy and numeracy, life skills, debt advice, work-related mentoring, accommodation advice and support
Since 2010 the award-winning service has built a proven track record of delivering high impact services to offenders. Through direct delivery and a network of partners and sub-contractors, it provides specialist services in offender focused education, training, employment (ETE) and social inclusion. Achieve North West Connect is a wholly owned subsidiary of Career Connect, a charity providing wide ranging support, information, advice and guidance to people of all ages to help them enter and sustain education, training and employment.
When compared to Seetec, Achieve North West clearly don't have the magic ingredient, that 'je ne sais quoi', the 'edge', that USP which makes all the difference.
ReplyDeleteNPS Regional Director North West - Andrea Bennett
Seetec Group Justice Director - Nigel Bennett
Jus'sayin'
Fair point but to add some of those seetec senior management are genuine able and have genuine intention. Free of probation seetec will do well .
DeleteMebbe so... just a pity there's an accompanying stench, the tainted miasma of cronyism & corruption; that deeply unpleasant odour which emanates from the depths of government; a fetid malodor that sticks to their chums.
DeleteDo you mean Ian Lawrence by all and any similarity.
DeleteNo. Absolutely not. As a matter of fact I thought he'd left; to be honest, I thought Napo had given up & disbanded. Heard nothing from or about them since the online rave.
DeleteAnon@08:21 - are you suggesting they are related just because they have the same surname? Isn't that a bit daft?
DeleteThe surname 'Cummings' and the word 'cronyism' have the same number of letters in them, but I'm fairly sure they're not related.
Exposed: Dominic Cummings's links with two of the four companies detailed in damning PPE report
Fourth firm with links to Dominic Cummings awarded £640,000 in government work without an open tender process
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/2020/09/22/evidence-of-johnson-governments-covid-cronyism-and-incompetence-laid-bare/
Online rave do mean the AGM virtual. I understood that was made up of just 40 or so online members. Hardly an AGM. What with tech fails and delays the top table outnumbered watching participants. Hardly a rave was it more Napo spaffing the beans as usual.
DeleteNAO putting govt on the spot over covid contracts. Wonder if they'll re-visit the TR/MoJ contracts?
ReplyDeleteLooking at the deaths linked to the pandemic, Johnson's ineptitude in responding to the covid crisis and Trump's dereliction of duty, led me to thinking about the level of response by a govt relative to the numbers of deaths resulting from whatever might be the cause.
OK its a bit of a thin idea but I thought it might allow for consideration of what constitutes the politically acceptable cost of a life in differing circumstances.
+ UK spending on covid crisis to date is estimated to be £210bn, with around 63,000 related deaths.
= approx £3.3m per death
+ UK spending on Iraq war is estimated to have been £4.5bn, with 179 UK troops killed, and 67 who lost thgeir lives in the twin towers atrocity: 246 souls.
= approx £18m per death
+ US spending on the covid crisis to date is estimated at $6trillion, with around 250,000 related deaths so far.
= $24m per death
+ US spend on Iraq is generally estimated to be somewhere around $2trillion, with the loss of 2,605 US citizens on 11 September, and a further 4,424 lost in action during the war in Iraq. Tot of 7,029 souls.
= $284m per death
IMPORTANT NOTE: there were, of course, the deaths of many thousands more civilians & others during the Iraq war. Iraq Body Count suggests a figure of 288,000:
https://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Simply put, it seems governments are so much happier spending the public's cash on arms & war & killing others than on providing healthcare for their own citizens...
... unless they're chums of the government, in which case they can have as much dosh as they like via contracts to provide anything.
Its almost as if it were scripted...
Delete"The largest military investment in 30 years is set to be announced by the prime minister - an extra £4bn a year over the next four years.
The money will fund space and cyber defence projects such as an artificial intelligence agency, and could create 40,000 new jobs, the government said.
Boris Johnson said it would help the UK to "bolster our global influence".
The Ministry of Defence's annual budget is around £40bn, so the £16.5bn over four years is about a 10% increase."
Trump on the rampage again:
ReplyDelete"Donald Trump has fired the director of the federal agency that vouched for the reliability of the 2020 election and pushed back on the president’s baseless claims of voter fraud.
Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), in a tweet on Tuesday, saying Krebs “has been terminated” and that his recent statement defending the security of the election was “highly inaccurate”."
Trump on twitter:
"The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud - including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, “glitches” in the voting machines which changed votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more. Therefore, effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency."
Wayne county certifiers refused to sign off on election result, leading to this:
Trump: "Flip Michigan back to TRUMP. Detroit, not surprisingly, has tremendous problems!"
The Reverend Wendell Anthony, a well-known pastor and head of the Detroit branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), called the Wayne county board of canvassers a “disgrace”:
“You have extracted a Black city out of a county and said the only ones that are at fault is the city of Detroit, where 80% of the people who reside here are African Americans. Shame on you!”
The board then backed down & changed course after the outcry from Democrat counterparts and public gallery.
Nothing as yet from the racist in the Whitehouse.
sources: guardian, cnn & others
He's woken up, had his cereal & a nappy change, and is back to spitting venom. Firstly about the Wayne County decision:
Delete"Wrong! At first they voted against because there were far more VOTES than PEOPLE (Sad!). Then they were threatened, screamed at and viciously harassed, and were FORCED to change their vote, but then REFUSED, as American patriots, to sign the documents. 71% MESS. Don’t Harass!"
And then in general:
"AND I WON THE ELECTION. VOTER FRAUD ALL OVER THE COUNTRY!"
There's a huge amount of SMEs and not for profit organisations that rely entirely on funding from the EU. Many are organisations that the big outsourcers subcontract to.
ReplyDeleteLeave does mean leave, and leaving means losing €billions of EU funding. Government promised to replace what was lost, but to date haven't even began to consider how this will be done let alone begin any process of designing policy to support those about to loose that EU funding.
Farmers too are about to loose the subsidiaries they receive from the EU, and also face 50% or more inport/export tariffs with no idea of how or when the governments promise of replacing that loss will begin (if it ever does).
Leave does mean leave, and I'm baffled when I read articles that seem to suggest that all the funding streams that flow from being part of the European Union will still be available post Brexit. They won't be, and it'll be a painful loss for many.
'Getafix
I enjoyed reading this:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/17/donald-trump-king-george-iii-sequel
uk lets-get-together-for-xmas-because-its-the-most-wonderful-time-of-the-year-govt weds 18 nov 2020
ReplyDeletenew cases: 19,609
deaths (usual rules): 529 in 24 hours/ 1,508 Sun-Weds inc
testing: 283,000 yesterday : 530,000 capacity
ventilators: 1,420 yesterday / 1,391 on Monday
in hospital yesterday: 16,271 / in hospital Sunday: 15,830
FranK.
This is what being president of the us really means to Donny:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2020/09/11/trumps-businesses-raked-in-19-billion-of-revenue-during-his-first-three-years-in-office/?sh=7e360bc81e13
Trump receives more money from properties he sells. The president ditched his 4% stake in a Brooklyn housing project for an estimated $33 million in 2018. He sold 11 oceanside lots outside of Los Angeles for another $23 million. He offloaded about 100 units inside the Las Vegas tower, generating $17 million. A single condo on Park Avenue in Manhattan, dealt to a woman who publicly boasts about her connections to government officials, brought in $15.9 million. A mansion in Beverly Hills, sold to a company connected to an Indonesian tycoon, produced another $13.5 million. Trump’s team promised he would do no new foreign deals while in office, but then he sold $3.2 million worth of land in the Dominican Republic. And on and on. Added up, all those transactions produced an estimated $118 million over three years.
DeleteThe flow of money has likely slowed down in 2020, thanks to the coronavirus. But the spigot hasn’t shut off completely. Day after day, new visitors arrive at Trump’s hotels, dine at his restaurants, golf on his courses, and rent his buildings. It’s difficult to put precise figures on all of that without seeing more documentation (which won’t be available until next year). But it seems certain that Trump’s businesses will accept more than $100 million in 2020. And that means that, even if his tenure ends in January 2021, Trump should still be the first president to literally rake in billions of dollars while serving in office.