Long Shadow of 2011 Riots

It's looking increasingly likely that history is going to record that it was the summer riots of 2011 and Justice Secretary Ken Clarke's response to them that set in train the crisis we now face in pretty much all parts of the Criminal Justice System. It sowed the seeds of the disastrous breaking up of the Probation Service; gave a boost to increasing prison numbers and set in train the waste of huge sums of government money on Louise Casey's 'Troubled Families' project. 

Of course this all happened during a period of austerity brought about by the 2008 banking crisis and the consequential cuts in government spending that had to be endured by the Prison and Probation Service. In a perfect example of what happens when experts are not listened to and false economies are instituted, we now face having to spend huge sums in order to try and reverse the havoc wrecked by some very bad political policy decisions that were supposedly designed to cure the problem, curry public support and save money. And just look where it's got us.  

Here's Ken Clarke writing in the Guardian in September 2011:-

Kenneth Clarke blames English riots on a 'broken penal system'

The justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, has blamed the riots that swept across England last month on a "broken penal system" that has failed to rehabilitate a group of hardcore offenders he describes as the "criminal classes".

Revealing for the first time that almost 75% of those aged over 18 charged with offences committed during the riots had prior convictions, Clarke said the civil unrest had laid bare an urgent need for penal reform to stop reoffending among "a feral underclass, cut off from the mainstream in everything but its materialism".

Writing in the Guardian, Clarke dismisses criticism of the severity of sentences handed down to rioters and said judges had been "getting it about right". However, he adds that punishment alone was "not enough".

"It's not yet been widely recognised, but the hardcore of the rioters were in fact known criminals. Close to three quarters of those aged 18 or over charged with riot offences already had a prior conviction. That is the legacy of a broken penal system – one whose record in preventing reoffending has been straightforwardly dreadful."

He says: "In my view, the riots can be seen in part as an outburst of outrageous behaviour by the criminal classes – individuals and families familiar with the justice system, who haven't been changed by their past punishments."

Clarke uses his intervention to call for the coalition government to adopt a "renewed mission" in response to the riots that addressed an "appalling social deficit". His comments will reignite the debate on the causes of the disturbances, which the prime minister, David Cameron, has said "were not about poverty".

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Five years later and there's now widespread acceptance that we have a crisis in the Criminal Justice System. Here's the latest blog post by Frances Crook of the Howard League:- 

The answer to the prison crisis is simple: less is better

Yesterday, Liz Truss made a statement and answered questions in Parliament following the riot in Birmingham prison.

She reiterated her plan to recruit more staff, although this will only replace a quarter of those who were got rid of by her predecessor-but-one. Other plans involve curtailing the use of mobile phones and testing for drugs. I believe her when she says she is primarily concerned about safety and that her aim is to make prisons places that provide a positive experience. Unfortunately, her plans are far too unambitious and will not have the desired effect.

It is worth looking back at how prisons got into this mess. Labour presided over an explosion in the use of prison, locking up the poor, the mentally ill and the annoying in ever greater numbers. It poured billions into building new prisons to cope with this human flood and invested in basic skills education. The money was never enough to deal properly with the torrent of humanity being crammed into jails but was just about enough to keep a lid on suicides and unrest.

Ken Clarke was genuinely shocked at the size of the prison population when he took over as Lord Chancellor in the Coalition government. He introduced measure to control the magistrates’ propensity to remand to custody and tried to improve regimes. Slowly, numbers went down.

Chris Grayling wanted to be seen to be tough. He closed prisons and crammed people into fewer establishments and drastically cut staff, both officers and managers. The result was an increase in violent assaults on prisoners and staff, an increase in self-injury and an increase in suicides. This year we have already surpassed the record number of people taking their own lives.

Michael Gove undid some of Grayling’s policies but, most importantly, he led a national conversation to try to get a consensus that prison should be a place for the few and even they could be redeemed. Meanwhile, prisons deteriorated.

Liz Truss has only been in the job for five months. She has a stark choice and she has, I think, made the wrong decision. It is simply not feasible to make prisons safe and purposeful by recruiting a few more staff. The only solution to the prison crisis is to have fewer prisoners.

The prisons are bloated with people who are serving excessively long sentences. There has, rightly, been concern about people who are years past their tariff on indeterminate sentences that were abolished years ago, but, there are thousands of others who are the victims of sentence inflation.

Liz Truss needs the support of the Prime Minister to deal with the prison crisis. She needs to reduce the number of people in prison and there are various technical routes to achieve this. But most importantly, she has to take advantage of the ground laid by Michael Gove and the public understanding of the crisis arising from the riots, murders and deaths. This is the time to take control and be bold. She should say she is going to reduce the prison population to what it was under Margaret Thatcher. By halving the number of prisoners, she could make prisons safe and purposeful and she could save public money.

We don’t need to squander more money on building ever more cesspit prisons. The answer to the crisis is simple: less is better.

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Even the FT feels it's time to reduce the number of people incarcerated:-

Britain’s prisons are a national disgrace

The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in 1862. The Russian writer’s words apply directly to the UK, with its overcrowded and increasingly violent prisons. The spate of riots in institutions across the country suggests that the custodial system is close to meltdown.

Over the past 25 years, the UK’s prison population has exploded, doubling to more than 85,000 inmates. Yet staffing has been cut drastically and budgets have failed to keep pace, especially during the era of austerity after the financial crisis. The introduction of private sector-run prisons has not proved a panacea.

The riot at HMP Birmingham on Friday highlights how the authorities have lost control of their prisons. The disturbance, which spread across four wings of the dilapidated Victorian-era prison and involved 260 prisoners, took 12 hours to end. A team of “Tornado” prison guards, specially trained to deal with riots, had to be brought in to regain stability. More than 300 inmates have been moved out of the prison as a result of the damage.

The incident follows a violent outbreak at a prison in Bedford and a six-hour rampage at another in Lewes, East Sussex. These three events have one thing in common, according to the National Council of Independent Monitoring Boards: staffing shortages. Over the past five years, the number of prison officers in the UK has been cut by 31 per cent. The result is that prisoners are being kept in their cells for up to 23 hours a day — a recipe for boredom, frustration and violent conduct.

Liz Truss, the justice secretary, has acknowledged that the dire state of Britain’s prisons is a longstanding problem which will not be solved in a matter of weeks or months. Her response has been to unveil a major investment programme, delivering 2,500 extra prison officers, greater autonomy for prison governors and tougher drug checks (a reflection of how prisoners have compromised security in many prisons).

These reforms are welcome, particularly the much-needed recruitment drive. Unless the government wishes to embark on a significant prison building programme — bear in mind that it is to date seeking planning permission for two new prisons only — something drastic must be done. The answer is a reduction in the prison population.

This may be anathema to law-and-order Conservatives, but Michael Gove, the former justice secretary, has set out a blueprint for reform. In a recent lecture, he said: “Overcrowded prisons are more likely to be academies of crime, brutalisers of the innocent and incubators of addiction rather than engines of self-improvement.”

For too long, successive British governments have focused on punishment rather than rehabilitation in prison. Ever since Michael Howard, the hardline former Tory home secretary, declared in 1993 that “prison works”, sentences have been more severe and conditions have deteriorated.

Mr Gove correctly observed that prisons should focus on detaining the most dangerous criminals. The protection of the public should count far more than the misguided clamour for heavier custodial sentences. If prisoners demonstrate good conduct and self-improvement in prison there is no reason why the nature and length of their sentence could not be commuted in the public interest.

The state of British prisons today is intolerable. It is time for a fresh approach. Ms Truss must show she is up to the job. Without action, the prisons and the public will be condemned to further cycles of violence.

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Meanwhile, here's the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies covering the scandal of Dame Louise Casey's Troubled Families project:- 

Reaction to damning troubled families report

The publication by the influential House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of a report into the Troubled Families Programme is 'a complete dressing down' for the Government, the Centre's Deputy Director has said. His comments came in advance of a summit the Centre is holding next month to assess the purpose and impact of the controversial Troubled Families programme.

The main criticisms of the programme and the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) are:

• False claims were made about the success of the programme, including the claim that the 99 per cent of families had been 'turned around'.
• The claim that the scheme had saved net £1.2 billion was not true, as it did not account for the costs of delivering the programme.
• The payments by results aspect of the programme 'risks incentivising quantity over quality' according to the PAC chair, Meg Hillier.
• There was a self-evidently perverse incentive for local authorities to claim success, based on the manipulation of national datasets.
• The DCLG had been 'evasive' when explaining the reasons for the one year delay in publishing the commissioned evaluation of the programme.
• The DCLG 'was unable to provide assurance... that it would be able to evidence a statistically significant impact of the programme in the future'.

The Centre's deputy Director, Will McMahon said:

This report is a complete dressing down for those, in Downing Street and Whitehall, who commissioned and led the development of the 'troubled families' programme. In Parliamentary terms, it is about as damning as it gets. The whole programme was born of a shotgun marriage between the need for a government response to the 2011 riots, following the financial collapse and austerity, and the desire to point the finger at the usual suspects. The only mystery is why the PAC did not call for the whole programme to be binned given that there is no evidence that it has had, or will have, any positive impact whatsoever.

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This from Civil Service World website amply demonstrates just how sneaky government is in trying to cover up the bad news:- 

DCLG blasted over Troubled Families report delays and "tick box" approach

The Public Accounts Committee has said it was “unacceptable” for an evaluation of government’s Troubled Families programme to be published over a year after the communities department received a draft copy.

The Troubled Families programme was launched by ministers in 2012 before being granted a £900m extension in 2013, and sees central government give councils up to £4,000 to identify and "turn around" families with entrenched social problems including unemployment, domestic abuse and truancy.

A evaluation of the programme, commissioned by the department in 2013, “was unable to find consistent evidence that it had any significant impact at this stage,” according to a Public Accounts Committee report published on Tuesday.

This evaluation was due to be published in late 2015, and the department received a draft version in October 2015. But DCLG did not publish a final version until October 2016, although part of the report was leaked to the BBC in August 2016.

The report describes this delay as unacceptable, and also criticises the department for choosing short-term measures to track a programme aimed at tackling deep-rooted social problems. Committee chair Meg Hillier said of this focus on short-term measures: "A tick in a box to meet a prime ministerial target is no substitute for a lasting solution to difficulties that may take years to properly address."

Hillier was also clear that officials should not consider the MPs' comments on the delay in publishing the evaluation as a simple “slap on the wrist about Whitehall bureaucracy”.

“Let me assure them that given the ambitions for this programme, the implications for families and the significant sums of money invested, it is far more serious than that," she said. "But it is particularly important with a new initiative that there is transparency so that the government can learn and adapt the programme. The department has undermined any achievements the government might legitimately claim for its overall work in this area.”

The report adds: “The department was evasive when explaining the reasons for this delay, furthering the impression that government is reluctant to be open and transparent about the Troubled Families programme."

A spokesperson for the government said the programme had "enabled local authorities to expand and transform the way local services work with families". But of course, there will always be lessons to learn and we have already made significant improvements to the second stage of the programme," they added. We will look carefully at the evidence to find out how we can improve the programme further to help some of the most vulnerable people in our society.”

DCLG perm sec Melanie Dawes told MPs at an evidence hearing earlier this year that the delay in finalising and publishing the report was due to concerns about data quality. An independent academic was commissioned to review the work before it was published.

The department also told MPs that the evaluation was an ambitious piece of statistical analysis that had not previously been attempted, and that evaluators had to work with poor quality data because the programme was still in its early stages.

The National Institute for Economic and Social Research, which led work on a part of the evaluation looking at the national impact of the programme, disputed both of those assertions. 

The evaluation had six strands which looked either at financial benefits, national impact or changes in the delivery of services to troubled families. Although it found no consistent evidence that the programme has had any significant impact so far, there was evidence of good practice stemming from the programme, including changing the way local authorities work with families and allowing them to support more people.

There was also evidence that families taking part in the programme were more confident, reporting that they felt better about their lives and the direction they were taking. However, the evaluation could not directly link these improved outcomes to the Troubled Families programme, and the department was not able to assure the committee that it would provide evidence of a significant impact in the future.

The report also urges the department to review its payment-by-results mechanism, after the evaluation found evidence that the framework incentivised local authorities to move families quickly through the programme “without providing the support necessary to tackle deep rooted problems.” There were also reports that some authorities had used national databases to identify families who had experienced positive outcomes and retrospectively define these as ‘troubled families’ in order to claim payments.

The committee also criticised DCLG for its use of the term “turned around” when discussing results of the programme, saying this was misleading “as the term was only indicative of achieving short-term outcomes under the programme rather than representing long-term, sustainable change in families’ lives".

MPs said that in future DCLG “should ensure that the terminology it uses to communicate the achievements of the Troubled Families programme gives an accurate depiction of how disadvantaged families make progress”.

News Roundup 6

Three stories worthy of note. This from Civil Service World website:-

Louise Casey: I did not ask DCLG to sit on critical Troubled Families report

The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has denied suppressing the findings of a highly critical independent report into its flagship "Troubled Families" programme, as the scheme's former chief Louise Casey hit out at "unedifying" attacks on its work.

The Troubled Families programme was launched by ministers in 2012 before being granted a £900m extension last year, and sees central government give councils up to £4,000 to identify and "turn around" families with entrenched social problems including unemployment, domestic abuse and truancy. The families then receive a dedicated social worker to coordinate public service support to tackle their problems.

But a report published this week by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) – which was commissioned by DCLG in 2014 – called into question the success of the scheme, saying it could find “no significant or systematic impact” that could be directly attributed to the multi-agency programme.

Appearing before the Public Accounts Committee, DCLG permanent secretary Melanie Dawes rejected suggestions that the department had tried to "sit on" findings it disagreed with, as Dame Louise Casey – who led the first incarnation of the programme – hit out at the NIESR for the way it had presented its own study.

Part of DCLG's analysis was leaked to the BBC earlier this year, prompting questions from MPs on the committee about why the department had taken so long to publish its full study.

Dawes insisted that, although the NIESR's research had been ready in August, it was one part of a wider evaluation exercise commissioned by the department which had not been ready for publication until the "synthesis report" uploaded to GOV.UK this week.

"I don't know what copy the BBC had, of course," she said. "It was a leaked document. What I can say is that the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) bit of the evaluation was finalised at the end of August – that forms part of the overall evaluation. It was big and complex and it did take longer than we expected" – DCLG perm sec Melanie Dawes

Seeking to justify the delays, Dawes said the NIESR's part of the evaluation was based on a "very complicated and quite kind of experimental national data evaluation", and said interim findings from the team had raised concerns in the department that there were "very many data issues" with its initial work.

As a result, Dawes said, officials had "challenged the fundamental basis" of some of the NIESR's analysis, and had called in an academic from the University of Cambridge to review the think tank's findings.

But PAC chair Meg Hillier said it was "extraordinary" that a report initially expected in early 2014 had only been published two-and-a-half years later – and just 48 hours before the hearing by MPs. She asked Dawes what DCLG had been "trying to hide" through the protracted publication process.

The DCLG perm sec replied: "We weren't hiding anything. And, in fact, I should say I think the evaluation is very ambitious – the department invested in a way that no other social programme has invested in evaluation.

Casey, who is now leading a review into opportunity and integration for the government, said there was "no way on god's earth" that it would be helpful for the department to suppress findings. But she attacked the NIESR for publishing its analysis separately of the department's wider report, a move she said had led the media to focus only on its negative findings. "The frustration is that it is one part of a much bigger story," she said.

The NIESR's report found that outcomes for families in the programme were almost identical to those who were not given special treatment, with 45% still claiming jobless benefits a year-and-a-half later, and anti-social behaviour, criminal offences, and truancy levels no lower than for those in the programme.

But while Casey said she did not dispute the central findings of the NIESR's study, she said the negative elements of its work appeared to have been "quite deliberately" emphasised.

"I've got nothing to lose in a scenario like this," she said. "I think lots of comment made by those closely involved with the evaluation – who have been leading on the press in the last few days – has been unedifying. They didn't wait until the rest of the evaluation was out. I'm sure they feel suppressed but that simply isn't true."

Asked by PAC chair Hillier whether she was "unhappy" with the way the NIESR had conducted themselves, Casey replied: "I am, I'll be honest about it. I don't want to make it a personal thing, because actually I accept that this – within the strictures of this one piece of work, it doesn't prove what I hoped it would prove. But did I ask the department to sit on it? No I didn't. I think it's better to have that stuff out and washed out in the public domain so you can have a discourse about it. My frustration, if I'm honest, is that we haven't had a chance to set the record straight."

The former Troubled Families chief said "no one" would dispute "the fact that 116,000 [families] had problems and now have less of those problems". But were you to have read some of the publicity in the last few days and indeed what's been put out by this organisation you would think 'oh, the whole programme's useless'," she said.

Writing on Twitter during Casey's evidence, NIESR fellow Jonathan Portes said his organisation's press release promoting its findings had "simply reproduced" the executive summary of a report signed off by DCLG itself.

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This from the BBC website:-

Prison reforms 'simply not achievable' amid 'loss of control'

The government's ambitious prison reform plans are "simply not achievable", the former chief inspector of prisons has warned. Giving a lecture in London, Prof Nick Hardwick said rising suicides, assaults and murders in jails were proof of the "loss of control". His comments come days after a prisoner was stabbed to death and two others injured in London's Pentonville prison.

The government says it will set out prison safety and reform plans soon. It has already announced an extra £10m to be spent on prison safety, and 400 extra staff are due to be deployed by March next year.

In his speech, Prof Hardwick - chief inspector of prisons from 2010-16 - said homicide in prison had previously been rare at between one and three a year, but had risen to seven in 2015 and five so far this year. "I don't believe this recent increase is a coincidence," he said.

"It is the most extreme example of the decline in safety that I... have been warning about for years." Given the loss of control, "ambitious plans to improve rehabilitation and education or tackle extremism are simply not achievable", he said.

"I see no sign that the number of homicides, self-inflicted deaths, self-harm incidents and assaults will not continue to rise. Politicians, policy-makers and senior managers need to think through very, very carefully and honestly the consequences of further deterioration and how this might end up," he added.

He went on to say that the Prison Governors Association's call for an inquiry into the state of jails in England and Wales was "the last thing we need", as it would take years before any action was taken. Instead, he said safety in prisons would only improve if there was "a very substantial increase in staffing levels".

Prof Hardwick became chair of the Parole Board in March this year, and was the first chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission from 2003 to 2010.

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This from the Guardian:-

How management consultants are cashing in on austerity

Since 2010, when the coalition embarked on austerity, one profession has turned cuts to the public sector into a business opportunity: management consultants. How did they get the gig? Are they doing essential work for beleaguered services or are they charlatans with a PowerPoint presentation?

You might ask why Whitehall and councils can’t make these decisions for themselves, but the severity of the cuts has meant that the people who normally make the cuts have themselves been cut. An entire strata of bureaucracy has disappeared, and management consultants have filled the hole. They advise on decisions that will profoundly alter the shape of public services in Britain, and so how they make these judgments is crucially important.

David Craig, a former management consultant with 30 years’ experience, explains that their aggressive business plan involves a problem-finding strategy. “What you’re looking for is something that gives a big emotional shock to the client. We want to take them to what we call the ‘valley of death’.”

The “valley of death” is the apocalypse scenario, telling the troubled organisation that if they don’t do something huge and expensive to change quickly, it’s going to fail, fast.

Very few organisations need a complete overhaul; they need sensible tweaks. But this, Craig says, doesn’t sound dramatic. That’s why you hear consultants refer continuously to “transformation programmes”.

“Once we’ve taken them into the valley of death, it’s time for salvation. Now we go to the sunny uplands: it’s bad, it’s really bad, but working together we can save the situation. It’ll only cost you two or three million, or maybe you need to buy a computer system for another 50 million.”

This strategy of finding things to fix once you’ve got your foot in the door is known in the trade as “land and expand”. “You start to uncover issues in an organisation and put them under pressure,” says John Bennett, a former management consultant to the public sector. But is this cynical or just good business?

In Wales, PricewaterhouseCoopers rolled out a template called an “operating model assessment” across numerous councils, pocketing more than £5m. But this initial work, Bennett says, was to land bigger money with something called a “risk and reward” contract. Instead of accepting a fee upfront, the consultancy firm takes a percentage on any savings it can find. The more cuts that are made, the more money it takes.

One council in south Wales entered into a “risk and reward” contract that reportedly netted PwC 16% profits on all cuts made. This might seem outrageous, but it’s a neat solution to a tricky situation. Councils accused of hiring expensive consultants can use a contract that avoids upfront money. And consultants have a stake in working hard to find new savings rather than rolling out a template.

PwC says: “It is important that our work delivers a tangible return on taxpayers’ investment. Our fees are often – and increasingly – dependent on the performance of our services, whereby we are only paid in full if we deliver the full benefits agreed.”

But is it morally right that management consultants are making a profit from cuts to public services? “I think it’s absolutely right that they should be rewarded for achieving what the public sector wants to achieve,” says Alan Leaman, chief executive of the Management Consultancies Association.

Anthony Hunt, the leader of another Welsh council, Torfaen, says that if the advice leads to some services being protected, then it’s a price worth paying. The danger comes when “strategic partnerships” with consultants create a dependency on consultants.

Consultants have been at the heart of government since the late 60s. Under Harold Wilson’s technocratic revolution, the civil service wasn’t trusted to deliver radical reform. The then minister of technology, Tony Benn, believed outside experts were the only way to make change happen. And so the allure of the “expert” was cemented in the minds of politicians of all political persuasions, and parts of Whitehall’s civil service were sidelined.

Some accountants and IT managers turned consultants, became outsourcing suppliers, running everything from prisons to road maintenance. They had figured out that actually running a contract worth billions was more lucrative than advising on who should run it, for mere millions.

McKinsey & Company has advised and restructured everyone from the White House to General Motors since the 1920s. But it has also been entangled in Enron and John Major’s privatisation of Britain’s railways. Firms such as McKinsey have been at the heart of government for so long, they arguably now provide the continuity and in-house knowledge the civil service once did, so the question is: what’s the problem?

The answer might be lack of transparency, which creates suspicion, even if it may be unfounded. There are good consultants out there, doing valuable work helping public services in critical condition stay alive. Their work is focused and necessary but here’s the key thing: they walk away when the job is done. It’s just the other kind we should worry about.

Pick of the Week 12

I heard some worrying news on the grapevine. Something this newsletter would not be keen to advertise is that the long term facility time agreement in London that allowed elected Napo officers to support staff facing possible dismissal as a result of sickness management proceedings, discrimination, disciplinary proceedings, health and safety issues etc etc has now been terminated without consultation. The ability of London CRC employees to be effectively represented by Napo representatives in the CRC has been ended. 

Apparently MTCnovo think this is a deathblow to the trade unions but have not considered the backlash from staff that will now have nobody at all available locally to represent them. Staff are starting to get very angry indeed as the reality of working for a really really awful employer begins to sink in. This coincides with a steady increase in proceedings against staff that is likely to result in dismissals. 

MTCnovo think they have hobbled the union as much as they can and when they come for their employees there will be considerably less support available (they were so crap that they were ignoring their own policies to dismiss people) and what support there is will now be severely restricted. What hope have this lot got of transforming rehabilitation when they treat their own staff as if they are worthless.

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In the words of one of our offenders who has attended the hub: “It’s brilliant. If I’d been able to access somewhere like this before, I think I’d have had a better chance of staying out of prison.”

I find it quite sickening to read carp like this, and I'm not entirely sure who it's trying to convince. Staff? Offenders? Or just those that provide the funding streams? It's the same type of language that a newsletter from the DWP would use. All's great. If only you'd brought in the private sector long ago we could have had a zero percent offending rate by now! The truth is though, it's all very superficial and interlinked to extract maximum profit. The rhetoric is great but the reality sucks!

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What a bag of shite. In reality London probation Community Rehabilitation Company is struggling to stay afloat. Look past the glossy brochures and 'bionic' badges and you'll find one of the most stripped down probation set ups in the country. It's packed with agency staff as so many people have left, and it's disproportionate and ever-changing set of managers don't know if they're coming or going. Risk assessments without any data, offenders never seen, breaches and risk increases ignored, and every offender is assessed as low risk and Tier 1. Through the Gate, Penrose, Catch 22, these are all stocking fillers that are worse than doing nothing. If the probation inspectorate sprung an unannounced inspection they'd have to close it down.

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This is what happens when the workforce doesn't support a trade union. Before I left Probation, and I did because what is happening was always the only way that this was going to go, we saw minimal support for industrial action. Those who did not stand up for themselves are in the only position they were ever going to be in; the victims of oppressive employment practices.

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If the workforce in London do not rejoin Napo and start supporting their recognised trade unions, then when Helga wields her axe they will have no one to turn to. It's simply a financial operation and nothing to do with delivering services. Information leaking from the accounts department estimates that in order to balance the books MTCnovo will have to lose 50% of current staffing starting with those who cost most, the sick, the disabled, trade unionists etc. If they fail do cut staff then they will have no money to pay the wages of those who remain. If the cuts happen as planned, then an effective probation service in London will cease to exist. The architects of this transformation will simply move on to other lucrative projects leaving the train crash behind for others to deal with.

******

I recall the days when I used to bring half a dozen problems to my PO on appointment days with the hope of getting some help with maybe 2 or 3 of them. You'd sit and discuss them quite often with a cup of tea. Now the last thing a client wants to do is own up to having any problems at all for fear it may impact on their risk assessment or get them signed up to a program that may have consequences for them with their expected hours of job search at the job centre.

Recent experience with Probation leaves me feeling that signing on at a police station once a week or even reporting once a week to a kiosk would see me no less disadvantaged or assisted then a visit to my local probation office. I therefore have come to the conclusion that maybe it's time to loose the title "PROBATION" and use a name that's more descriptive of the functioning of, and services provided by the current probation model.

Post custody supervision services or perhaps licence enforcement agency would be more appropriate, and dispatch the expectations of and general assumptions held by many of what the probation service actually does. Just a thought, but I wonder when the last time a client was offered a cuppa in the office by any contributed to this blog?

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Oh yes we still work like this but the perverse culture of risk management and public protection over rehabilitation is phasing it out. Many come in with problems, ideas, plans, plots and scheme to discuss. You won't get a cup of tea, but this is because probation doesn't provide facilities for this any more, and that goes for staff too. You will get a cup of water, bus fares and foodbank voucher, and I'll even share my lunch with you if you're hungry. You won't get a lift though, even if we're going in the same direction, carrying passengers in cars is on the banned list too!

'Probation' is our brand but for starters the Community Rehabilitation Companies and Victim Liaison Units should lose the name. This is not to say the National Probation Service is much better, but we're still able to work as we always did and supervision sessions are not on a time clock YET!

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I made a cup of tea for a homeless client last week and gave him some biscuits supplied by our admin staff after he had been out all night after being released from prison at teatime with no discharge grant! I also bought another client some bread and milk who had not eaten for 2 days and had no food in the house when I went to visit. I will probably be an ex PO soon if I'm discovered to be too "soft".

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I am a CRC manager's nightmare, because I do make tea, I spend time with the service users discussing the issues and looking for a way forward with them. I allow them to use the phone to make calls to other agencies in order to improve their chances of settling in the community, and if needed I will advocate. All time consuming stuff, leaving little or no time for the endless round of tick boxing accountability exercises and yes, the risk assessments and sentence plans. Pre split, I viewed the bureaucracy as a price I had to pay to be able to practice. Now I have to choose. I can't do both. How am I still working? I will be caught up with I know. Managers appear to have a big drive on one thing for a few weeks, then abandon one issue in favour of another. If I can keep up with the "concern of the moment " I can just about get by without crashing too obviously. But I am sure I am on borrowed time.

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Glad to hear it and yes your card is marked! We are pitted in a battle against the tick boxing, streamlined, process driven culture they've long been trying to create. The direction of travel seems to be that they don't want probation practitioners doing proper probation work any more.

******
I’m one of the ‘old lags’ who began posted here a couple of days ago, and the phrase “can’t do the time, don’t do the time” is something I also subscribe to. My least favourite inmate type was the ‘moaner’ – the guy who never seemed to understand that every other prisoner endures lukewarm showers, lumpy custard, underwear which has been masturbated into by several thousand previous owners etc, without complaint, mainly because we are (mostly) guilty and all in the same boat. Jeffrey Archer wrote three volumes of similar banal HMP self-pity and made millions though, so perhaps I missed a trick.

I agree with pretty much everything written in the post regarding resettlement. A phrase I’ve commonly heard in HMP was something along the lines of “I can do the jail, it’s the licence which is the hard bit”. I don’t doubt that on many occasions the individual concerned was greatly responsible for making his own licence period more difficult than it needed to be, but I can also attest from experience that rebuilding a life outside is very difficult and utterly dispiriting in a way which is completely different from the structured, systematic debilitation involved with the custodial element of a sentence. 

HMP still carries a bizarre form of hope – we look forward to getting out, we toughen ourselves up to survive the ‘regime’ and most of us try and make the best of it and find ways to fill our time constructively. There is always that prospect of release to keep us going, and we generally know where we stand. Then we get out, we hit the pavement with ill-conceived optimism but little in the way of a concrete plan, and after that it generally goes downhill. 

Every single person I’ve had to disclose my history to has treated me very differently because of it, and I’m regularly asked for an explanation of how I ended up in prison in the first place, and I suspect this is expected to be delivered in a remorseful and apologetic way to appease professional people who are essentially just a bit nosey and want gory detail. I don’t expect to be given a high-powered job and live in a swanky apartment, or even that there should be a greater deal of ‘help’ provided exclusively to the offender base, but there is a general air of “this is all you’re getting, and be fucking grateful for that. Now sod off”, whenever I put myself forward for anything. 

I look forward to my licence ending, for the simple reason that I’ll no longer have to disclose anything about my history unless directly requested. I still have a date to look forward to, just as I did when inside, but this does not apply to the ISP population, and I dread to think of how difficult it will be for those people upon release.

******
Yes the Jeffery Archer factor! Every now and then I think about writing a book too as I could probably do a much better job. It'd be a better chance of making millions then writing anonymous blogs. I hold out on the basis that I'm doing good work in the day job, so maybe I'll save it until it's time for my memoirs.

I'm glad we seem to agree on our postings. I've always thought that with a good probation officer /social worker the licence is much less of a chore.

******
I agree with what you are saying. It is why with sadness I am leaving the profession. The whole point of Probation Officers was to ensure that people did not enter 'the system' and were diverted to probation. However, due to the meddling of politicians, Probation has become part of the system and is used increasingly to be punitive. The public protection guise is just a smoke screen for social control. Probation officers are now joining straight from university with no life skills. There is a severe lack of male probation officers to become role models. Probation is dead, it is just now another department of law enforcement. People who are outside the system are not going to engage and trust someone who is part of the system.

******
A great read that serves well to give insight into the criminal justice system to those that have no direct involvement with it. Having recently been released from a period of custody (my umpteenth since the mid 70's), I can't agree that the CJS can become a better entity or more functional by a process of reform. It's broken far too much for reform. It's a very sick animal that's reached its end and needs to be put to rest.

There needs to be inquiries, think tanks and investigations as comprehensive as that done on Iraq, and a whole new world of delivering criminal justice developed and implemented. Trying just to reform the existing system will only make things worse. It's a train crash where ever you look. It needs cleaning up and a whole new type of train put back on the tracks.

******
Unfortunately Grayling wasn’t as unpopular with the general public as he was with those of us who lived/worked in the CJS. When the Tories came to power in 2010 and Ken Clarke was in charge of the MoJ, his initial observations were that the UK was imprisoning far too many people at great expense, and set about dismantling the IPP and making loud noises about how too many people were needlessly remanded, or serving prison sentences as a result of a dearth of MH facilities in the community. 

This wasn’t very popular with the right-wing press, and Clarke was often fielding ignorant questions about how he planned to deal with dangerous offenders without the IPP. The necessary removal of the atrocious IPP system was seen in many circles as being a ‘soft’ move. Grayling’s attack-dog rhetoric about austere prisons has a tabloid appeal, and if a government ever needs to make swingeing cuts, the CJS is the place to do it – it’s an invisible cut, a system which isn’t noticed by wider society unless you are in the tiny minority who are caught up in it.

I remember watching an episode of Question Time when I was in prison, and an exceptionally moronic audience member frothed about how prisoners were given a PlayStation, and if they smashed it up it would be replaced at taxpayer expense because of the emphasis on ‘human rights’ in prisons. Rather than shout this ignorant baloney down, the panel took turns to address this as a serious question, and each pontificated on how their law and order stance would be a strict one, and that such non-existent luxuries would be removed from serving prisoners under their watch. 

So long as the public remain happily ignorant about the realities of living and working within the prison system, and these myths are happily promoted by mainstream media, there will always be a place for dull-witted blusterers like Grayling in British politics.

******
Hurrah for the new CSA Inquiry Chair... "Alexis Jay spent over 30 years in local government in deprived parts of Scotland, including as Director of Social Services and Housing. In 2005, she was invited by the Scottish Government to set up the first independent inspection body for social services in Scotland, and in 2011 she became the Scottish Government 's first Chief Social Work Adviser. She retired from that post in 2013. She is Chair of the Life Changes Trust and also of the Centre for Excellence for Looked After Children in Scotland, based in Strathclyde University, where she is a Visiting Professor. She is the author of the Independent Inquiry report into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham, and is now a member of the statutory inquiry panel into child sexual abuse in England and Wales, chaired by Justice Goddard. Alexis was awarded an OBE by the Queen in the 2012 Birthday Honours List, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Strathclyde in 2015."

Thank God they never asked Casey. By way of proof I'd encourage anyone to read the scathing critique by Community Care of Casey's Rotherham report - prepared at the request of her boss, Pickles - which highlights Casey's lack of rigour or recognised methodology, i.e. well-meaning but not fit-for-purpose.

******
Oh Yes Our Louise!!, the 'Justice seen Justice Done Tsar', employed by Blair to look at CP. Remember in 2009 she wanted Orange Jump suits USA Style for CP. We settled for orange H&S Vests with Community Payback and the "Frog" Payback logo. She slagged us off as too liberal and no community involvement in projects. Now CRCs cannot involve communities as it's too costly to deliver a service which is localised. In Purple Futures areas they will have PRCs running CP across 5 very large areas of England, not very local, but safe in the knowledge that they will still be wearing orange Hi vis Tabbards. Justice seen Justice Done.... Then our Louise moves to Victims Tsar (To be continued)....

******
Deliberately misleading the public (usually for personal advancement) is all that most politicians & civil serpents concern themselves with these days but as the blogger points out, "Much of the press [are] too supine and lazy to bother to question this, so many stories simply copied the press release. Sadly, that’s pretty typical..." There are exceptions & some exceptional journalists but presumably their editors/owners veto the truth to keep their political bedfellows sweet. Meanwhile La Casey joins the ranks of pantomime dames, alongside the dreadful Permanent Secretary (Brennan?) who fucked up at the MoD, got shifted to MoJ, talked shite about TR & retired into well-heeled obscurity. Oh to be in England...

The Wider Context

It's the weekend and time to reflect a bit. I think there's been some good discussion of late, particularly regarding prison and looked at from a prisoner's viewpoint for a change. The following came in yesterday and posed a question, but as yet has had no response:- 

As the poster of the original prison-related comment the other day, I can say that most of these post-release issues have been problems I've also faced, but to be honest many of them (housing, benefits) are beyond the scope of the CJS. These are societal problems which have been neglected for a generation, but seeing as comments along the lines of "jeremmy corbin is bad 4 dis cuntry lol" continue, that discussion is quickly killed.

I do feel that the Probation Service public protection remit takes precedence over and above all else, though. For example, someone I knew was released to an AP as his home town was essentially an exclusion zone. He finds himself in a new town, gets on the housing list, tries to get suitable private housing with no luck. He is under 35 and is only eligible for 'single room rent' Housing Benefit. In short, he can't find a flat, and soon enough the hostel want to kick him out because they need space. 

His OM, well-meaning but seriously misguided, assures him everything will be OK because he can find him a place in a homeless hostel in yet another nearby town. Not good. Now I can see the OM's perspective, he has no clout in benefits or housing but does have an obligation to protect the public. Nonetheless, nobody should be made homeless in the interests of public protection, after consultation with some shady and mysterious MAPPA group who have decided that this is the best option, in spite of the fact that this person is only homeless because he can't enter the town where many willing and concerned friends and family members would be more than willing to accommodate him. 

This individual is now living in shared housing, despite being recommended an IPP at PSR stage by his OM, having done no OB programmes and being 'single cell only' in prison due to risk he is able to live in a multi-let which he found off his own bat, at the risk of being homeless otherwise. Many prisoners would find their relationship with their OM to have been broken beyond repair at the mere suggestion of a Salvation Army type hostel as a means of protecting the public. I certainly would.

I don't know how you probation officers feel about this, but it's for things like this that you're often considered a law enforcement agency with a phoney, chummy facade amongst prison inmates. Whilst even as an offender I can see the reasons behind making public protection a priority, so long as it's at the exclusion (and occasional detriment) of the offender's day-to-day well-being nobody is benefiting.

--oo00oo--

It certainly reminded me of the astonishing journey many of us have been engaged in over the last 20 years or so, ending up with what some see as a lingering and painful death of the probation ideal here in England and Wales. But of course I'm also reminded that our predicament must be viewed within a much wider context. 

As all long-termers know full well, there was a time when probation was able to respond to the various failings of social policy by developing in-house initiatives that in my personal experience pretty much knew no bounds. But sadly, that flexibility and freedom to innovate and develop pioneering housing, training, support, recreational, practical and therapeutic projects was knocked out of us as we slept-walked into bureaucracy and managerialism. 

Ironically, there's never been a greater need for flexibility and innovation, but orthodox political dogma dictated this was impossible for a public service and government has yet to accept that a market economy can sort it out. Meanwhile, here's some recent reminders of the wider context the newly split and part-privatised service is expected to work within. This from Community Care:-

Dear ministers, this is why social workers quit child protection

In its focus on attracting new entrants to child protection, the government is overlooking the support needs of practitioners already doing a taxing, traumatic job

During her time as education secretary, Nicky Morgan said that social workers should be tested to give them the same professional status as ‘surgeons and lawyers’. She cited the example of Peter Connelly (also known as ‘Baby P’) as social work failings.

In speeches Morgan was complimentary about social workers. She described us as unsung heroes “completing thankless work”. However, the underlying message delivered was that current social workers are not meeting the expected practice level – which is a significant generalisation.

I have the same aspirations as Morgan and the government that social workers should be admired, trusted and respected. However, the government’s solution to the debate about the perpetually corroded reputation of social workers is based on future aspirations, rather than on considering the skill set that already exists in abundance within current social workers.

High fliers

The government consistently says it wants to make improvements by attracting ‘high-flying’ graduates into the profession. Over the past year, it has repeatedly backed and expanded the ‘Frontline’ graduate programme to achieve its aims.

I consider myself to be the very graduate that the government would like to recruit. I obtained grade As in my A levels; attended a ‘top 10 university’ and achieved an upper second class degree. I read newspaper articles, am politically aware and sometimes, when time permits, I write poetry.

Yet the model of looking at future high achievers insults the substantial amount of bright; analytical; passionate and dedicated workers that I have had the pleasure to work with. The simplicity of future plans for testing seeks to find fault in individuals rather than assess the role of child protection social work in greater detail.

It is widely known that there is a shortage of child protection social workers. This does not mean that there are not enough people qualified to complete the work, but there is certainly a shortage of people willing to do it.

Expiry date

The reason for the shortage is that there is a clear expiry date. Some practitioners will progress up the ranks to management, while others flake away to emotional despair, a change of career or an area of social work which they consider less demanding.

I am baffled why more focus is not applied to the emotional impact of the work rather than looking at systemic failings or processes. Child protection social work is unique, disparate and taxing. You will always have a changeable day, which requires you to adapt to so many circumstances.

Social work is an isolating profession with work completed by individuals without the support of others. You are expected to complete your visits solo, without the emotional fortification of others. Referrals are made with minimal information, sometimes just an address, child’s name and date of birth.

I have faced real risk during my time as a social worker. I have stepped over a dead body whilst I discussed with the potential killer where her children should sleep that night; I have been held in a house with a machete; been spat at; had a window broken over my head; hid under a desk whilst a service user destroyed my office and had more death threats than I could count.

Emotional framework

Police officers generally visit in pairs, with crucial intelligence relating to the home address; weapons at their disposal and the power of arrest. Police officers also receive ongoing support from psychologists to manage the recognised trauma that they face.

Whether it is funding cuts, a lack of awareness or malaise into the traumatic working life of a social worker, the emotional framework is not there for even the most robust individual to cope with each harrowing episode.

I will always remember the time that the police refused to attend a property due to the risk of firearms. My colleague ensured she filmed me on camera: her car engine running. At least then, the potential murderer would be captured in evidence, if the worst case scenario came to pass. This dice with death was to ensure that a father had the correct court documents and a right to participate in care proceedings.

Not only overt risk takes place but other situations occur that gnaw away at social workers’ psyche.

Try being the person who takes a brand new baby away from the hospital ward. Try sitting at the back of a ‘riot van’, waiting for the scared little ones to be brought to safety, screaming for their mother. Walk from a court when a Judge agrees with your plan of adoption, watching the families you have destroyed react to the desolate news.

Chilling

Frequently, with each chilling event, appropriate support is not readily available. Although, this is entirely dependent on the resources available within each local authority. Generally, there is simply not the time, the structure or the knowledge to manage such traumatic events.

’Firefighting’ is a term often used within social work and this is a live issue within many local authorities: emotional protection is the last possible priority.

Recruitment and retention within social work will continue to be a theme until there is wider appreciation of the demands of the profession.

The solution appears to be so apparently obvious that I am dumbfounded that it has never been progressed. Why look for the perceived intelligentsia or seek accredited professionals from abroad? If only we could nurture those fabulous beings already in existence: waiting for more cohesive emotional support; appreciation or awareness of the daunting task of everyday social work.

If only the government could start to understand the formidable and monumental task that social workers face every day: perhaps appropriate funds could be delivered to secure better working conditions to maintain the talented, diligent and creative workforce that is already in place. Hopefully the profession’s faith will be restored by Nicky Morgan’s successor.

Sophie Ayers is a child protection social worker

--oo00oo--

This from the BBC website:-

Youth services heading towards collapse, says union

UK youth services are heading for collapse, research into the scale of council cuts since 2012 has suggested. Some 600 youth centres have been shut, 3,650 youth staff have lost their jobs, and 139,000 youth places have been axed, the report for Unison says. And information from 180 councils warns of more cuts ahead, and suggests the youngsters most in need are being left with nowhere to turn for support.

The government urged councils to "look at new ways" to secure youth services. The minister for civil society, Rob Wilson, said local authorities needed "to make sensible savings while protecting frontline services such as youth services. While it is a matter for Local Authorities to decide how best to meet the needs of young people, I urge them to look at new ways to secure youth provision now and long into the future," he said.

Unison sought information from all UK local authorities with responsibility for youth services on what happened to funding between 2014 and 2016. It received responses from 180 out of a total of 210 authorities and added this to earlier similar research dating back to 2012.

The report, A Future at Risk, said an estimated £387m has been cut from youth service budgets since 2010, adding there is "more of the same for youth services in the years to come. Already we can report that in the year 2016-17 and beyond, there is likely to be at least £26m more cuts in youth service spending, the loss of around 800 more jobs, more than 30 youth centres closed," it added.

Unison general secretary Dave Prentis said youth workers were tireless in the support they provide to young people, helping them find work and educational opportunity. He said: "It's youth services which prevent problems happening in the first place by reducing feelings of isolation among young people and helping teenagers to lead positive lives. But they've been relentlessly cut and undermined at a time when they are needed more than ever. Youth services are heading for collapse."

This was "damaging life chances", he said, especially for poorer youngsters, and he called for the provision of youth services to be required by law.

Unison also surveyed its members working in youth services for the report, on how they saw the changes affecting young people and communities on the ground. It reported: "Most strikingly, the overwhelming majority (91%) said the cuts were having a particular impact on young people from poorer backgrounds. More than half said there were particular problems for young black people, young lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and young women. So it appears that the cuts have hit precisely those who often need youth services the most."

One member paints a picture of "increasing isolation and lack of support for young people", while another reports "an increased risk of young people being caught up in gangs". The report said: "Increases in mental health, substance abuse and anti-social behaviour are bound to increase the pressures on statutory services like social care and child and adolescent mental heath services. These are added burdens which could be avoided - or at least mitigated - if youth services were maintained."

The Local Government Association, which represents local authorities in England and Wales, said: "Councils have faced the largest budget cuts in the public sector since 2010, and despite doing all they can to protect the most vital services, it's impossible to protect everything." It highlighted that the government was planning to spend £1.1bn on the National Citizen Service over the course of this Parliament.

But it added: "While this is a good scheme that provides positive experiences for many children and young people, given the scale of cuts to youth service spending highlighted in this report, it is vital that money to run the NCS should not be at the expense of restoring and supporting local services for young people."

Greet Party leader Natalie Bennett said these findings laid bare the very real damage austerity had done to our communities. "As a society, we should be prioritising giving young people the best possible start in life. But our government has shown it is willing to slash vital youth services for the sake of short-term cash savings - which is both reckless and short-sighted."

--oo00oo--

And finally, especially for our regular reader who gets bored easily, a few more observations from the Guardian regarding Troubled Families:- 

The troubled families scheme has failed – this is the folly of payment by results

The government’s £1.3bn troubled families programme was always a dubious enterprise.

Launched after the 2011 riots, the scheme aimed to “turn around” the lives of nearly 120,000 families. The first wave paid all 152 local authorities in England to identify and then turn around families deemed “troubled”, at a cost of about £400m. Councils received up to £4,000 per family if an adult got a job, children were truanting less or if antisocial behaviour and youth crime were reduced. The programme is being rolled out to a further 400,000 families with a wider range of problems by the end of 2020, at a further cost of £900m.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with experimenting with different ways to intervene early and help families. But this programme was built on several flawed premises.

Many of the families that the government identified as “troubled” were merely multiply deprived households. Eligible families were chosen if they met five out of seven measures of disadvantage, including one or both parents out of work, living in poor quality housing and having a parent with a mental health problem.

Then there were the ludicrous claims of the scheme’s success. David Cameron said last year that the first wave of the troubled families programme had been a “real government success” which had saved taxpayers £1.2bn by turning around 99% of the families worked with. A near 100% success rate? During a period of swingeing cuts to public services?

In fact, my investigation into the first wave of the scheme last year found that more than 8,000 families in more than 40 local authorities were deemed to have been “turned around” solely through data-matching exercises. Data on employment, youth crime and truancy, say, could be used to identify eligible families and find out which, with no input from the troubled families programme, met the criteria for being turned around due to the children going to school more often or a parent finding a job. Only 79,000 families had a “family intervention”, a key plank of the scheme. Others have found few of the government’s claims of success stand up to any form of scrutiny.

So the revelation on BBC Newsnight on Monday that the official evaluation of the trouble families programme (still yet to be published) found “no discernible impact” on employment, school attendance or offending is no surprise.

This programme was bound to maximise waste. Some councils have undoubtedly done good things and the scheme provided a vital cash injection into town hall coffers reeling from swingeing budget cuts, but the troubled families programme is a salutary lesson in the failings of payment by results. Much of the blame for this surely lies with Louise Casey, who, as director general of the troubled families unit until last summer, was responsible for the programme and claims of its success.

You cannot design a programme that pays local authorities for turning around families’ lives and allow them to self-certify that they have met the criteria. Cash-strapped councils understandably had an incentive to identify the exact number of “troubled” families the government told them they had on their patch and work out ways to claim that they had been turned around.

Some local authorities will have done good work, but even where families received intensive help, it is impossible to know that they would not have turned themselves around anyway.

It is time to call time on awarding public contracts which pay out for results, especially when the evidence for those results is so easy to manipulate.

--oo00oo--

I thought this comment on the article was particularly interesting:-

Any initiative that is headed by Louise Casey, a woman that honed her skills administering benefits payments to the homeless before moving on to greater things, will always ensure that creative results juggling is given greater precedence than actually trying to effect change. This after all was the person who, chosen personally by Blair, was to lead the crusade to eliminate the scourge of rough sleepers; her chosen strategy was to lambast charities for providing hot food and clothing changes and to urge the public to stop giving homeless people money directly but instead to put into the official collection boxes where it would be spent by those who knew the best way of helping the homeless. Her motivation was of course, that her targets would be much easier to achieve if she could stop people from giving directly to the homeless. This callousness she defended by calling the public's generosity "misguided goodwill" and there you have it in a nutshell; she knows what's best and the rest of the world is misguided.

She knows that the problems of dealing with issues that are lumped together and used to brand people, many of whom are living in the direst poverty, as being "troubled families" a term that many tory and labour supporters regard as being a euphemism for scum, are complex and it is very difficult to do much to improve the situation. So her preferred and tried and tested approach was to develop ways to cherry pick and massage metrics and statistics to allow the TFP to issue statements proclaiming enviable success rates. Casey is no fool however, she is on record as stating that it is her belief that young tearaways have trouble in their heart, probably stemming from a lack of love during their formative years. However she also believes that money or more correctly a lack of it is not a factor in this, which is nonsense.

Those on the right love to point out that not all families living in poverty and deprivation fail their children, they love to point out that some will succeed against the odds. It is curious that they are less keen to publish figures that would put these successes into statistical order so we may see what percentage of those that have deprived upbringings manage to escape the trap.

Marking Your Own Homework

It looks as if David Cameron's legacy has started to unravel quite quickly with yet more bad news concerning his poor judgement skills that have echo's of the money he was persuaded to throw at failed charity Kids Company. It's also a perfect example of the flaws inherent in Payment by Results scams. We start with a comment from this blog on 3 June 2015 at 07:38

"no link between performance and bonus"?

I watched with interest an article on Newsnight this week about the governments Troubled Families project. Local councils were given considerable funding on a PbR basis for successful outcomes in turning troubled families around. There was apparently 120,000 families requiring intervention, although no one could identify how this figure was reached. The councils were left to determine what interventions were necessary, and also left to their own determination of what a successful outcome would constitute, (marking their own homework was the phrase used). 

Amazingly, all 120,000 families had their lives successfully turned around! Not one failed which was 'lucky' for the councils as they could claim the maximum amount available under their PbR contract for their success. No doubt some got pretty good bonuses, and no doubt CRC owners have learned a lot about how to make a PbR model really pay dividends - and achieve a 100% success rate!

--oo00oo--

Well, like a dog with a bone, BBC's Newsnight have returned to the subject. This from the BBC website:-

Troubled Families report 'suppressed'

An unfavourable official evaluation of the government's flagship policy response to the 2011 riots has been suppressed, BBC Newsnight has learned. The analysis found that the Troubled Families programme had "no discernible" effect on unemployment, truancy or criminality. The initial scheme sought to "turn around" 120,000 households at a cost of around £400m. The local government department has been approached for comment.

The report, which the government has had since last autumn - and seen exclusively by BBC Newsnight - is embarrassing for ministers, who not only implemented the scheme, but have since decided to extend it. They had trumpeted previous assessments of the scheme, which had suggested that 98.9% of families participating in the scheme had been "turned around".

Furthermore, a second wave of the Troubled Families programme was announced in June 2013, and began to roll out in April 2015. It covers another 400,000 families at a further cost of £900m.

The "troubled families" programme was aimed at those affected by high unemployment, truancy and anti-social behaviour. The scheme was intended to save money and prevent future rioting by reducing the problems of this group of disadvantaged families. A senior civil servant told Newsnight that the report is "damning", and attacked the scheme as "window-dressing".

Troubled Families was a project pushed by the last prime minister. In August 2011, shortly after the riots, David Cameron announced that he would "put rocket boosters" under existing plans being drawn up in Whitehall "with a clear ambition that within the lifetime of this Parliament we will turn around the lives of the 120,000 most troubled families in the country".

In December 2011, the then prime minister added: "Some in the press might call them 'neighbours from hell'. Whatever you call them, we've known for years that a relatively small number of families are the source of a large proportion of the problems in society." The government also committed that the effectiveness of the policy would be measured by a consortium of analysts led by a consultancy called Ecorys. The evaluation was expected to be published. But the document has been kept under wraps in Whitehall. An official who had read the report told Newsnight that it was being suppressed because of its findings.

No measurable impact

This official analysis of data from 56 local authorities covering the first 18 months of the programme states: "The lack of obvious effect from the programme across a range of outcomes indicates that the programme did not have a measurable impact on families within the time-frame over which it was possible to observe its effects."

It found "no discernible impact on the percentage of adults claiming out-of-work benefits" and "no obvious impact on the likelihood that adults were employed" 12 or 18 months after starting on the programme. The analysis also found it "did not have any discernible impact on adult offending" seven to 18 months after the family was booked into the programme.

They added: "Whilst it was more difficult to match the treatment and comparison groups when looking at child outcomes, the findings suggested that the programme also had no detectable impact on child offending." Their analysis of truancy got different results depending on how the data was analysed, leading analysts to conclude that "any impact that the programme had on the absence rate was not robust".

The researchers reported some problems with data quality and representativeness. "The sample sizes that the national administrative data provided meant that it was feasible to detect impacts which were relatively small in magnitude," they wrote.

The trouble with Troubled Families

The Troubled Families programme always had strange design features. Each local authority was given a target number of families to identify and recruit for the scheme - getting a payment of £3,200 for each household that they signed up.

The choice of families - households with some combination of factors such as truancy, anti-social behaviour and adult joblessness - did not seek to identify people involved in rioting. The ambition of the scheme was that the family would be assigned a single, co-ordinating key-worker who adopts a "persistent, assertive and challenging" approach and can "get to grips" with the whole family and look at the family "from inside out rather than outside in".

But the success criteria were very vague - families could be deemed "turned around" even while the children were still persistently truant or committing crime, just so long as they did so less frequently than they had done before. And councils received a further payment of £800 when the family met certain criteria that meant they were deemed turned around. Local authorities, therefore, had strong incentives to declare successes: lots of councils claim to have had 100% success rates.

Nationally, 98.9% of the 118,000 families in the scheme were deemed "turned around" - a remarkable success rate in any policy, let alone one working with people who have complex and multiple disadvantages. These figures were taken as proof of the success of the scheme.

Speaking in June 2015, Dame Louise Casey, until recently the civil servant in charge of the scheme, said: "It's fantastic news that the programme has now turned around the lives of so many troubled families. That's almost 117,000 families where kids are back in school and youth crime and anti-social behaviour has been cut, and in more and more of these homes an adult has now moved off benefits and into work."

Stephen Crossley, a researcher at Durham University who has been examining the scheme, has described the success rate as "unbelievable". A civil servant involved in the Troubled Families scheme, however, argued that while the programme might not work effectively "more money for social work probably can't be a bad thing right now".

This from the Guardian:-

£1.3bn troubled families scheme has had 'no discernible impact'

The £1.3bn government “troubled families” scheme to tackle entrenched social problems following the riots in 2011 has had no discernible impact on unemployment, truancy or criminality, an unpublished Whitehall report has found. The official evaluation of the programme launched by David Cameron has not been published because it would be embarrassing to ministers, it has been claimed.

A senior civil servant, interviewed for an investigation by BBC’s Newsnight, described the report by independent consultancy Ecorys as damning.

The initial troubled families scheme, launched by Cameron in 2012, sought to “turn around the lives of the 120,000 most troubled households in the country” at a cost of about £400m. A second wave of the scheme has since been launched to cover another 400,000 families at a further cost of £900m.

Cameron said he wanted to put “rocket boosters” into the system to underline the importance of strong parenting in preventing the kind of social problems that led to the riots in London and elsewhere. It aimed to break the cycle of problems such as poor parenting, domestic abuse and other issues including institutional care identified by Dame Louise Casey as contributing to the transmission of problems through generations.

Last year Cameron pronounced the scheme a runaway success with 117,000 families “turned around”, saving £1.2bn in the process. But a separate government-commissioned audit of the effectiveness of the programme has concluded differently. According to Newsnight, the Ecorys report examined data from 56 local authorities and concluded there was “no discernible impact on the percentage of adults claiming out-of-work benefits either 12 or 18 months after starting on the programme” and “no obvious impact on the likelihood that adults were employed 12 or 18 months after starting on the programme”.

“Participation did not have any discernible impact on adult offending” seven to 18 months after the family was booked into the programme, it said. Ecorys added: “Whilst it was more difficult to match the treatment and comparison groups when looking at child outcomes, the findings suggested that the programme also had no detectable impact on child offending.”

They also identified problems with the data quality and representativeness. “The sample sizes that the national administrative data provided meant that it was feasible to detect impacts which were relatively small in magnitude.” It said the success criteria were also vague – families could be deemed “turned around” even while the children were still persistently truant or committing crime, just so long as they did so less frequently than they had done before.

Councils were paid £3,200 for each family they signed up to the programme with a further payment of £800 when the family met certain criteria. Nationally, 98.9% of the 118,000 families in the scheme were deemed “turned around” by the government.

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So, yet another social problem sorted by the 'Tsar for all seasons' the now handsomely-rewarded Dame Louise Casey, DBE CB. We all remember her famously getting to grips with homelessness by discouraging soup kitchens and criminalising thousands with ASBO's. She's moved on again of course and this from the BBC website explains what she's up to and the secret of her success:-

Louise Casey: The Asbo tsar set to tackle extremism

Louise Casey is to lead a review into improving the integration of Britain's minorities as part of a broader effort to tackle extremism. Why do prime ministers keep coming back to this most unorthodox of civil servants?

Call Casey - that's the cry that seems to go up in Downing Street whenever there is a hot button social issue to be tackled. For nearly two decades now, she has blazed a trail through Whitehall, charming Labour and Conservative leaders alike with her blunt, no-nonsense approach to complex problems.

She is the social worker who doesn't sound like a social worker, the policy expert who doesn't send you to sleep. As a result, she has collected more titles than a member of the Russian royal family. She was Tony Blair's Anti-Social Behaviour tsar, and then his Respect tsar and then - as the Labour government gave way to the coalition - the first Independent Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses for England and Wales (or Victim's tsar).

She gave up that role to take charge of an inquiry into the 2011 London riots. Then, in September last year, she was appointed by former local government secretary Eric Pickles to head the independent inspection of children's services at Rotherham Council in the wake of the child sexual exploitation scandal and examine whether it covered up information about the abuse.

Since 2011, her main job has been director general of the government's "troubled families" unit. She has her critics - she was once branded the "punitive face of Tony Blair" by probation officers' union boss Harry Fletcher, who took exception to her work on anti-social behaviour. But politicians seem to value her because, in the words of former Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in a 2010 Radio 4 profile, she can "really cut through the bureaucracy and Blarney" and get things done. In a world of cautious, politically correct, hedge-betting civil servants, 50-year-old Casey has always stood out.

'Yob culture'

Casey was born in Cornwall and grew up in Portsmouth in a working class household - she and her brother were the first members of her family to go to university. She studied history at Goldsmith's College, London, and threw herself into student activism, marching against student loans and becoming a member of Amnesty International. Friends recall a big character, funny and charismatic, who loved making speeches and could not resist a karaoke night (Billie Holiday and The Beatles were favourites apparently).

Her first job was as a benefits clerk for the DHSS but she soon moved into the charity sector, with the London Homeless Network. By 27, she was deputy director of homeless charity Shelter. She was drafted into government in 1999 as the head of Labour's Rough Sleeper's Unit and ran into immediate controversy by suggesting that homeless charities were making it too easy for people to sleep on the streets by providing soup runs and top-of-the-range sleeping bags.

In 2002, Tony Blair made her head of the government's Anti-Social Behaviour Unit, with a brief to tackle "yob culture". She almost came unstuck three years later when she was secretly recorded making an expletive laden speech to police officers and senior civil servants in which she appeared to mock her own department's stand on alcohol abuse.

"I suppose you can't binge drink any more because lots of people have said you can't do it. I don't know who bloody made that up; it's nonsense . . . Doing things sober is no way to get things done," she told her audience.

'Sleep with the devil'

She also took a swipe at one of the favourite Whitehall obsessions of the era: "If No 10 says bloody 'evidence-based policy' to me one more time, I'll deck them." She came close to being sacked over that incident but was cleared by an internal civil service investigation. She became a little more guarded in her public statements after that but still managed to grab headlines on a regular basis.

"The Daily Mail don't like me 'cos I'm female and fat and lefty. Other people on the left think I sleep with the devil," she told The Guardian in 2013. The problems Casey has been asked to tackle during her career are often hard to define and even harder to measure.

Is there less anti-social behaviour in Britain and more "respect" as a result of Casey's work? Anti-Social Behaviour Orders were hugely controversial, with critics claiming they were too punitive and arbitrary. Casey claimed they transformed lives and they have survived, in modified form, to the present day. The troubled families unit was meant to "turn around" the lives of 120,000 families by May this year.

'Shame and guilt'

"We are not running some cuddly social workers programme," Casey told The Daily Telegraph when the scheme was launched. "We should be talking about things like shame and guilt...we have lost the ability to be judgmental because we worry about being seen as nasty to poor people."

The idea was to ditch the patchwork of different agencies in favour of a single, dedicated intervention worker, who would effectively take over the chaotic lives of those identified to be causing the most problems in their area. Casey ordered them to go where other social workers feared to tread.

"Some of these women are on child protection plans because of the men they insist on living with. Family intervention is about getting in there and saying 'actually, you know your kids are going to be taken away if you don't do something about this fella - I'll help you do it'. And they do," she told BBC News in 2013. Local authorities were paid by results, such as getting a child back into school, reducing crime or a family member getting, and keeping, a job.

In November last year, Eric Pickles said that more than 69,000 families had turned around their lives according to this criteria and the government was well on the way to meeting its target - but some wondered whether the improvements to the families in the programme would last.

'Crack alley'

Perhaps Casey's real value to politicians - and the reason she keeps being asked to produce reports on difficult social problems - is that she say is able to say things in public that they think privately (that social workers are too "soft" for example). She has the authority of someone who has got her hands dirty - she would go down a "crack alley" to find out why someone was taking drugs, a friend told a BBC Radio 4 profile - and the sort of drive to get the job done that is highly prized in the civil service.

But she also appears to have a handle on the emotional lives of those she is trying to help. "They've got trouble in their souls, trouble in their heart, troubles in their head," she said of the young single mothers who were the focus of the troubled families unit, arguing that their problems stemmed from "not having enough love or of having too much pain".

Her latest role - to produce "a comprehensive review into boosting opportunity and integration to bring Britain together as one nation", which David Cameron hopes will lead to more people from ethnic and minority backgrounds feeling they have a stake in society - must be her toughest, most wide-ranging and politically sensitive challenge yet.

One thing is certain though - she won't sugarcoat her conclusions.