Victory and Demands

To coincide with the launch of the new Probation Service, Napo published a bumper 'Reunification Special' and this is what the leadership has to say:-

 

Reunification leaves little time to look back

A new era for Napo 

In decades to come let us hope that the 26th June 2021 will be writ large in the annals of Probation Service history. It’s a date that signifies the final victory over a disastrous privatisation policy perpetrated by a Government whose Ministers believed that they knew the price of everything but, in reality, appreciated the value of nothing. The egregious politically driven attack on a gold standard public service against all conventional wisdom, was destined to cause our members much pain, the British taxpayers a fortune, and see the fragmentation of Probation into a parody of its former self. But it’s time to recognise that the brave campaign by Napo members is over; now recent history that we will celebrate one final time when we hopefully meet in Newcastle at our 2021 Annual General Meeting.

A new build in progress 

That is why this special edition of Napo Magazine will rightly focus on the long road ahead for Napo and our members as we take the rebuilding process that has been underway for nearly two years into its next phase. Putting the new foundations in place will be no easy task; as we seek the necessary investment in people and training, and the money to pay Probation service staff the salaries that properly reflect their professionalism. In the many engagements to come with senior leaders and politicians on these and many more issues you can be assured that we will never lose sight of our ultimate objective: a fully funded public Probation service, freed from the constraints of the Civil Service and restored to local control and accountability. As the next big campaign goes, it presents something of a test; sadly, it will not end in another victory any time soon, or before a great deal of hard graft has been put in.
Given that Napo and our loyal members, have come through the right side of the biggest challenge that any of us could ever have imagined, you can be rightly proud of what your collective efforts have achieved. It’s now time to look forward and embrace the future.

Ian Lawrence

Napo General Secretary

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NAPO’S DEMANDS FOR THE FUTURE OF PROBATION

In July 2019 Napo, following the first announcement about reunification (which still allowed for letting of contracts for the provision of unpaid work and programmes) Napo set out our demands for the future of Probation. Now that we have moved even further than this we re-visit those demands to see what has been achieved and what we have yet to work on. 

Fully integrated service provision 

Reunification delivers on this demand; core functions needed to deliver and manage the sentence of the Court will be now contained within one unified service. Let the folly of TR be a salutary lesson to guard against any future attempts to split the service and make profit from this vital area of work. 

In the public sector and never for profit but out of the civil service and released from prison

Removing the profit motive is a crucial step for Probation but the contracts for ‘commissioned rehabilitation services’ retain a risk that some of the organisations losing CRC contracts will see the new contracts as a way to recover losses. 

The new unified Probation service will be in the public sector but remains in the Civil Service and deep in the shadow of the Prison Service. Being in the Civil Service brings its own challenges, as does the seeping across of the prison service ‘command and control’ operational style. In an organisation with a strict hierarchy this may well be warranted but Probation people should be constantly questioning and be free to criticise the system in which they work. 

Most crucially Probation people need to be able to take an approach to work with their clients that recognises and names the structural inequalities that they face – including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism and all other forms of oppression that exist in all of our societal structures. Unless we can recognise the oppression that our clients face, and unless we can work with them to understand it’s impact on their lives, we are doomed to perpetuate that structural oppression. Being Civil Servants limits freedom to criticise the state and the command-and-control hierarchical structure places all of the power in the centre with those on the frontline unable to question why they are being instructed to work in a certain way. Add to this the endless bureaucracy that frontline workers face for even the most simple of tasks and Probation work becomes more about ‘feeding the machine’ than working with people. 

Being part of HMPPS is a little like having a very famous sibling. When people talk about your family your name is forgotten and everyone wants to know more about them than you. How many times do those working in Probation mutter “and Probation” when HMPPS is described as “HM Prison Service”. How many times to we shout “and Probation” when the Minister tasked with overseeing Probation is described as “Minister for Prisons”. How many times do we despair when senior appointees to the department have to start from scratch to learn about Probation because they have come from a Prison background.

Probation is a key part of the Criminal Justice System (CJS) and works in conjunction with other departments such as (and not limited to) Police, Courts, Prisons, Youth Justice, Secure services, the OPD pathway and the Parole Board. Our work with each element is no more or less important than others. The work that Probation staff do has a positive and beneficial impact on all of the other elements of the CJS but should never be seen as part of any one of them. Freedom from the prison service would not diminish the important link between the two services or the value that each brings to the other. Instead separation of the two services would enable Probation to have a voice and profile distinct from prisons ensuring that each organisation has the priority and focus needed. 

Built on evidence based practice 

Sometimes developments are based on evidence of best practice, sometimes they are based on saving money, sometimes they are based on a whim. It will come as no surprise that the first of these options is preferred. In the first version of Napo’s Demands we noted that staff were leaving due to pressure to work in ways they felt were wrong or even dangerous. We highlighted that the Offender Management in Custody (OMiC) model builds in multiple changes of ‘Offender Manager’ contrary to everything we know about consistency of worker relationship being key to desistance. Similarly recent changes outlined in the new Target Operating Model (TOM) for the unified Probation Service appear to be contrary to what evidence suggests is best practice, especially in terms of work with people convicted of sexual offending. 

It is yet to be seen if the new commissioned rehabilitation services will adopt models based on evidence and if they will integrate with the new Probation Service in a way that supports best practice throughout the system. It is crucial that all future plans are developed with evidence based practice at their heart. 

Rooted in the local community and partnering with local specialist providers 

The move to a regional structure is a step closer to a local focus. Splitting some of the largest divisions down into smaller chunks is welcomed however many regions are still very large, with one (Wales) covering an entire nation. While contracts for Commissioned Rehabilitation Services (CRS, the new name for the dynamic framework providers) are split down into PCC (Police and Crime Commissioner) level some organisations have contracts for several services across much larger geography. Letting contracts centrally does not meet our demand for partnership with local specialist providers and so far there is little sign that Probation regions will be rooted in local communities. 

We have a long way to go to rebuild the connection to community that is so important for Probation practice. This goes much further than the contracts for the CRS providers. The Probation Service must become a service which is visible to the communities we serve. We must break out of the centralised structure and make sure we are accountable to those communities. Probation practitioners work to support people to change their lives, and by doing so to protect the public and prevent further victims. All of the parts of the Probation system should be working towards this aim, whether they are working with people on probation or with people who are victims, whether they are in support functions or leadership and management functions. If you have no connection to the community you serve, how do you know what they need? How can you support someone to change their lives if you have no understanding of the context in which they live? This demand is possibly one of the most difficult to move forward on. Perhaps if we move out of the Civil Service and away from our colleagues in the prison service we will have more success at re-localising? For now there is much more work to do to repair the Probation system, and more work for Napo to do as the voice of the profession.

Katie Lomas 

National Chair