Napo and Sentencing Proposals

Published today and circulated to all Napo members:-

Napo responds to Government White Paper

Last week the Secretary of State for Justice Robert Buckland MP published his White Paper: A smarter approach to sentencing. Napo has scrutinised the document and highlighted a number of concerns we have with the proposals. This briefing has been shared with David Lammy MP and his justice team and Katie Lomas National Chair and Tania Bassett National Official met with him today to discuss them in more detail. Napo will continue to raise these issues across parliament to try to influence the policy further including through our parliamentary networks such as the Justice Unions Parliamentary Group and the Justice Select Committee.

White Paper Briefing: A Smarter Approach to Sentencing 

The White Paper published 16th September 2020 outlines government proposals to reform sentencing and community orders. Below is Napo’s response to the paper and highlights concerns with the proposals as well as unforeseen consequences of the reforms. 

In 2019 Lord Woolfe said that there needed to be a full review of the terms of reference of the sentencing council as well as a full review of the guidelines as he felt it had lost focus of its original purpose, becoming more and more punitive. It is then disappointing that the Lord Chancellor did not undertake this as part of the paper. Napo believes that this is fundamental to any proposed sentencing reforms. 

Napo is also clear that longer periods in custody does not aid rehabilitation and this briefing is written within that context. 

Courts 

Courts have been struggling with listings for some time now as a result of court closures and staff cuts. Covid-19 has further exacerbated this with an estimated 45,000 cases now awaiting court time. As a result, we are seeing trials for even the most serious offences being adjourned to 2022 and beyond. In order for any effective reforms to sentencing to take place this issue needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency by re-opening courts and not closing Nightingale Courts (one of which has closed after just 2 weeks). 

As raised by David Lammy MP, problem solving courts introduced under the last Labour government, have proven themselves to be very effective and as such Napo agrees that there is no need to pilot these. Instead they should be rolled out nationally as soon as possible and courts given the funding required to do this. The closure of smaller local Courts does not create ideal circumstances for the introduction of problem solving Courts which should be connected to the local community. Their reopening (and the commitment to no further closures) could support the introduction of problem solving Courts while assisting in clearing the backlog of cases. 

Pre-sentence reports 

Napo welcomes the proposal to review the use of pre-sentence reports. As part of the last probation reforms an arbitrary target of 80% of all reports to be completed in a short format has contributed in a drop in quality in reports (as identified by HMIP) and therefore significant drop in courts ordering them (as identified by MOJ figures). Napo has opposed this target from day one as well as other stakeholders such as the Magistrates Association.

Napo believes that our members are best placed to determine what format a report should be written on based on the individual they are assessing, their needs and the risk they pose. Therefore, we see no reason to pilot “targeted” reports, simply allow practitioners to use their professional judgement. This would both improve the quality of reports (by allowing sufficient time for pre-sentence reports to be completed) and increase sentencers confidence in the assessments they are provided with. 

GPS, Tagging and Curfews 

Tagging has never really been fully utilised. In part because there is a lack of confidence in how they are monitored by the private sector. G4S and Serco have both been investigated by the serious fraud office for falsely claiming money for tags that have been fitted inappropriately or not at all. Whilst Napo welcomes the powers for probation to alter curfews as and when it is appropriate they have little control over the tagging process itself. For tagging to be both value for money and an effective supplement to other interventions this should be brought in house. Its effectiveness is currently undermined when providers fail to notify of breaches, are difficult to share information with and have little or no accountability. 

Custodial Sentences 

Napo is concerned that at a time when we need to be looking at developing a more progressive justice system the proposals to remove the automatic release at the half way point is a backwards move instead. Automatic release half way through a custodial sentence of 4 – 7 years was introduced by the last Labour government. With the exception of a few, very critical and horrendous cases, this has proven to be an effective way of using the licence period for more rehabilitation and public protection measures. Changing this back to two thirds reduces the amount of time probation have to work with an individual to reduce their risk and help to turn their life around during the resettlement portion of the sentence which can only happen in the community. 

Preventing automatic release for certain prisoners of concern and relying on the parole board to deem them safe before they can be released, appears to similar to the now abolished IPP sentences which proved to have been disproportionate and have left prisoners wallowing in prison way beyond their original tariff. Napo is deeply worried that this measure, which can be imposed even if no further offence has been committed and concerns about risk do not have to be connected to the index offence may be open to abuse. Much more detail is required to reassure both practitioners and prisoners on what exactly these concerns relate to, what evidence is required to support refusal of automatic release and what needs to be achieved for a prisoner to be considered for release by the parole board. There are currently prisoners serving an IPP that have no prospect of release as they are unable to achieve the targets set by the parole board (for example offending behaviour programmes that must be completed for release but are not being offered in the establishment they are held or are not accessible to them because of mental health issues). 

Rehabilitation and resettlement are not the same although they are both important. Rehabilitation can begin while in custody and will continue in the community. It is the process by which people make changes to their lives to enable them to desist from offending. It may include education and training, addressing substance use, changing thinking and behaviour patterns, getting support with emotional wellbeing and mental health issues. Resettlement only happens in the community, although it should be planned while in custody. It is the process by which someone moves from custody to community and reintegrates positively into society. When people are released at the end of their sentence they may have begun their rehabilitation journey in custody but their resettlement will be done in the community with no support or monitoring by Probation as they will have no licence period. This also means that there will be no risk management on release. 

It will also generate a considerable amount of additional work so reassurances are needed that the Parole Board will be adequately funded and resourced to prevent further back logs in the system. 

Wider Reforms 

Extending the victim service in probation is welcomed. However, the role of victim liaison officer (VLO) was downgraded by the Ministry of Justice during transforming rehabilitation. This has left our members feeling undervalued and sends a message to the public that this role is not really seen as critical. The changes will also increase workloads considerably for VLOs, many already working with hundreds of cases, so Napo would like assurances that there will be a targeted recruitment drive to increase the staff resource in this area. Napo welcomes the move to bring all interventions back in house under the NPS and the intention to integrate unpaid work into the wider community. Unpaid work is the most visible role that probation plays in communities. However, under Transforming rehabilitation many CRCs began to charge community groups for this service reducing access by small community groups to utilise it. Napo would like assurances that these charges will stop and that unpaid work can be accessed by all community groups. 

Tania Bassett, Napo National Official 

21 September 2020

Our Prison Disgrace

I resisted for as long as possible, but it seems there is now no option but to use the new Blogger dashboard despite it being much worse than the original. It all takes much longer to navigate, is not user-friendly and will inevitably drive me to distraction. I hate change for it's own sake and especially when not an improvement!

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We didn't cover it last week, but there was a scathing report from the Public Accounts Committee on the state of our prisons which yet again underlines why probation should not be part of the dreadful HMPPS:-   

Summary 

The Ministry of Justice and HM Prison and Probation Service have failed in their attempts to improve the condition and suitability of the prison estate. Despite promises to create 10,000 new-for-old prison places by 2020, just 206 new places have been delivered so far, and prisoners continue to be held in unsafe, crowded conditions that do not meet their needs. Budget cuts imposed at a time of much promised reform across the department have exacerbated the challenges to these ambitious programmes which have been on the cards for over a decade. As we saw with the Ministry’s inability to successfully contract out services during probation reforms, the Ministry has once again exposed taxpayers to higher than expected costs as a result of inadequate planning, unrealistic assumptions and poor performance whilst managing facilities within prisons. HMPPS has allowed a staggering backlog of maintenance work to build up that will cost more than £900 million to address. This means that 500 prison places are taken permanently out of action each year due to their poor condition. Prisons play a crucial role in supporting prisoners to stay away from crime on their release and reduce the £18.1 billion cost to the economy of reoffending each year. The poor condition of many prisons, coupled with high levels of overcrowding, are contributing to dangerously high levels of violence and self-harm in prisons. Despite our recommendations in May 2019, there is still no sign of a cross-government strategy for reducing reoffending. 

Although COVID-19 has eased pressure on demand for prison places in the short-term, we are concerned about the Ministry’s ability to both improve the condition of the estate, and meet rising demand through building new prison places in the medium to long-term. The Ministry’s track record does not inspire confidence, and there is limited headroom in the prison estate to allow the space for vital maintenance work. The Ministry is now optimistic about both its capacity and capability to improve the prison estate and its future financial position. But it will need to demonstrate it has learnt lessons from its past failures and that it has a coherent long-term and fully funded plan in order to make genuine progress.

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This from the Guardian on Friday:-

England and Wales' disgraceful prisons expose ministers' refusal to learn from mistakes

The slow-motion collapse of England and Wales’ prison system is a textbook example of the government’s repeated public service failures in the age of austerity.

The mismanagement of the prison estate, exposed in a scathing report from the Commons public accounts committee, is a carbon copy of ministers’ numerous other foul-ups over the past decade. There are starring roles for inadequate funding and disastrous use of private contractors, with supporting parts for squandering money by aiming for unachievable savings, raiding capital budgets to prop up running costs, making big promises with no credible delivery plan, and failing to join up policy. Inevitably, it is all followed by yet more delusional promises of future delivery and the piecemeal populism of ever-longer sentences.

Prisons are the responsibility of HM Prison & Probation Service, an executive agency of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). Its declared aim is to ensure they are decent, safe and productive places to live and work.

But the last annual report from HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales said living conditions for most prisoners were inadequate and some were squalid, including cramped, bloodstained, flooded and filthy cells, rat, flea and cockroach infestations, and broken windows.

Among the 117 prisons in England and Wales, two-thirds are crowded. The 10 most crowded hold at least 47% more prisoners than intended. Today, more than 79,000 people are incarcerated in prisons and young offender institutions. A year ago – before the pandemic caused a backlog of more than 500,000 trials – it was 83,000.

Low-risk prisoners are forced into high-security regimes. High-risk prisoners are inadequately secured. Assaults on staff have doubled since 2015 and around 1,000 attacks a year are classified as serious. There were more than 50,000 incidents of self-harm in the year to September 2018.

Inevitably, incompetent contracting plays its part. In 2015, the MoJ handed management of the facilities to two companies – one of which, Carillion, collapsed within three years – without fully understanding what it was contracting out. The MPs say this failure will affect prisons for many years.

In yet another example of grandiose promises being followed by failure, the government has delivered just 206 of the 10,000 new-for-old prison places promised by 2020.

Five days after the MPs’ report, the government unveiled plans to ram in ever-more prisoners. Its white paper A Smarter Approach to Sentencing is anything but – simply a rehash of the default position of longer sentences, including the ability to sentence people in their teens to life without parole. Other measures such as deferring sentences to give offenders a chance to turn themselves around will do little to ameliorate the increase in the prison population, which could run into thousands.

The long-running disgrace of our prison system betrays a refusal among ministers to learn from mistakes. Every single one of these failures has been seen elsewhere.

Mismanagement of probation and defence equipment exemplifies a strategy of dumping complex problems on private contractors for vast amounts of money without fully understanding the causes of the difficulties or what was required to put them right.

The £1.2bn programme to modernise courts over-promised, failed to get to grips with delivery, and didn’t listen to the people the changes would affect. The quality of NHS hospitals and equipment, meanwhile, has been undermined by repeated raids on its capital budget.

And yet the government’s planning reforms – facing growing opposition from Tory backbenchers – continue to show an inability to join up policy across government, handing massive power to developers while failing to address priorities such as investing in England’s northern towns and cities, providing more social housing and tackling climate change.

This shambolic way of running the country has now reached its nadir in the utterly inadequate test and trace system – incompetent contracting, an inability to understand the problems, overpromising, failing to focus on the detail of delivery, and an pathological refusal to listen to experts. There must be a better way.

Richard Vize is a public policy commentator and analyst

Unfit For Office

It will be apparent to regular readers that I've refrained from too much political discourse of late but I can resist no longer given the increasingly serious situation we find ourselves in with a Prime Minister so clearly unfit for office that even the right are turning against him. This from the Guardian:-

Sinking without trace: rightwing press turns on Boris Johnson

Where’s Boris?” asked this week’s Spectator, the weekly magazine the prime minister once edited and from which Johnson might once have expected a better press had it not been for the coronavirus crisis.

With a front cover image featuring a distant blond dot on a tiny boat bobbing rudderless and oarless on a stormy sea, the message of chaos and drift from the title was emphatic – a criticism of the prime minister’s leadership in the battle against the pandemic that is being replicated across an increasingly sceptical rightwing media.

“The question now is whether he can become a proper leader with a sense of direction and purpose,” said the magazine’s editor, Fraser Nelson, effectively arguing that Johnson’s premiership was at a crossroads, that a narrative was close to being set.

After a week in which Britain’s test-and-trace system – once intended by the prime minister to be “world-beating” – was at the point of collapse, Nelson asked “whether the pattern we have seen in recent months – of disorder, debacle, rebellion, U-turn and confusion – is what we should henceforth expect”.

Others writing in the same magazine put it more idiosyncratically. “What on earth happened to the freedom-loving, twinkly-eyed, Rabelaisian character I voted for? Oliver Hardy has left the stage, replaced by Oliver Cromwell,” said columnist Toby Young, complaining of a “lack of engagement with the detail”.

Earlier on Thursday, the same day the Spectator cover emerged, the Daily Mail had reached a similar conclusion. “Boris: We’ve Failed” the front-page headline blared, with the paper claiming it had warned of a “looming test crisis five months ago”.

The rightwing tabloid highlighted Johnson’s subdued performance the day before in front of parliament’s liaison committee, where he had been forced to admit that “the short answer” was that there were nowhere near enough Covid tests available.

Only a week earlier, the prime minister talked optimistically about a “moonshot” plan to test millions of people a day as way to return to pre-coronavirus normality. Now he had humiliatingly been forced to admit there were nowhere near enough tests for worried parents at a level closer to 230,000 a day.

“Too often the government has over-promised and under-delivered,” concluded a leader in the Times on Friday morning. “Policies have had to be swiftly abandoned after the exposure of entirely predictable problems,” the centre-right broadsheet continued, adding the A-level fiasco and the problems with the contact-tracing app for good measure.

The paper – perhaps with one eye on a promotion for the former Times journalist Michael Gove – argued that Johnson needed to appoint “competent deputies” before “the public come to a settled and unflattering view about his ability to do the job”.

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Toby Young writing in the Spectator:-

I admit it : I was wrong to back Boris

A friend emailed me earlier this week in despair about the Prime Minister. ‘Boris reminds me of a hereditary king — Edward II or Henry VI — who is so staggeringly incompetent that he must be removed before doing too much damage,’ he wrote. ‘I felt the same way about May but Boris is worse.’

He is not the only person feeling like this. It pains me to say it, but I too have given up on Boris. The final straw was hearing him talk about his plans to create an army of ‘Covid marshals’ last week — Britain’s very own, curtain-twitching version of the Stasi.

What on earth happened to the freedom-loving, twinkly-eyed, Rabelaisian character I voted for? Oliver Hardy has left the stage, replaced by Oliver Cromwell. His government has even said it wants to lower the speed limit on motorways to 60 mph. Didn’t Boris once say that voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3? Where did that guy go?

Some people think it’s all to do with his bout of coronavirus. As one person put it to me, surviving a near-death experience can affect people in one of two ways. Either you become more devil-may-care, thinking it could all end at any moment so why not live life to the full; or you become super-cautious, having been left feeling vulnerable by your brush with mortality. According to that armchair psychologist, Boris has gone through door number two. A less generous theory is that the disease actually damaged his brain in some way — and there is some evidence that cognitive decline can lower your appetite for risk. Whether the damage was psychological or physiological, the implication is clear: he’s no longer fit to be prime minister and should step down as soon as he’s got Brexit done.

This explanation is attractive to  former Boris enthusiasts like me because it lets us off the hook. It’s not that we overestimated him; rather that he’s changed in a way we couldn’t have anticipated. But the difficulty with those theories is that his mishandling of the crisis predates his battle with Covid-19.

Few would dispute that he failed to give the pandemic the attention he should have done in January and February, time he could have spent devising an effective containment strategy. Come March, he was just buffeted by events, one minute saying we should ‘take it on the chin’, the next imposing a full lockdown. His lack of engagement with the detail, both before and after his spell in intensive care, means the government’s response has been led by others around the cabinet table, like Matt Hancock, who seem to be wholly captured by a small coterie of scientific advisors who decided early on that Sars-CoV-2 was ‘the big one’ and have been unwilling to abandon that hypothesis in the light of all the evidence to the contrary.

Boris’s supporters cannot claim they were unaware of this risk. His inability to focus on anything for very long was constantly flagged up by those who’d worked closely with him, most recently at the Foreign Office. My response when this was put to me by his detractors was that he had been preparing for the role of prime minister all his life, had a heroic conception of himself as a world-historical individual and wanted to be installed in the pantheon of immortals as one of Britain’s greats. So even if it was only for vainglorious reasons, he would apply himself in No. 10 in a way he never had before. Hal would become Henry V, not Henry VI. 

Unfortunately, Boris’s critics have been proved correct. Funnily enough, one of the most prominent, Michael Gove, is now de facto deputy prime minister. Four years ago, when justifying his decision to knife Boris in the Tory leadership contest, Gove said it was because, having seen him operate up close, he’d concluded he lacked the character for the top job. Not lazy exactly, but not serious enough. At the time I took this with a pinch of salt, thinking Gove was exaggerating to make it sound as if he was motivated by public-spiritedness rather than personal ambition. Now I think he was right.

Hope followed by disappointment is a familiar story in politics, a cycle as old as history itself. I should have been better prepared. In future, I will not be so naive.

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

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Finally Ian Dunt writing for inews:-

Boris Johnson’s campaign to undermine objective truth stops him from being held accountable

Without it, the Government can keep on lying – and keep on operating with impunity

On 19 October 2019, Boris Johnson told the House of Commons that the deal he had agreed with the EU was “about as perfect as you could get”. It was “excellent”, “great” and “very good for this country”. There would be no border in the Irish Sea. Anyone who opposed the deal was standing with the EU over British interests and trying to undermine Brexit.

In the Commons this week, that message was inverted. The deal was now portrayed as a disaster which had to be dismantled through mechanisms contained in the Internal Market Bill. The Prime Minister’s spokesperson said it “contains ambiguities, and in key areas there is a lack of clarity”. There will in fact be a border in the Irish Sea. Anyone who defends the deal is standing with the EU over British interests and trying to undermine Brexit.

In speech after speech, Tory MPs rose to attack the deal, seemingly without recognising that their contribution was fundamentally incompatible with the speeches they had been making over the course of the previous year. When Labour opposed the Government, the official Conservative Twitter account put out a message saying the party had “just voted to side with the EU”.

What we’re seeing here is not standard-issue political cynicism. It is something qualitatively different: a conscious effort to eradicate the notion of objective truth as an operating principle in British political life.

It involves a three-stage process: the willingness of the Government to produce disinformation, the undermining of independent fact-checkers who might assess it, and an audience so blinded by tribalism that they will willingly receive it.

The first aspect has been present in the Johnson administration from the beginning. After all, the recent mutation over the EU deal is just the latest reversal he has engineered on the topic. Back when he was foreign secretary under Theresa May, he insisted that “no British Conservative government could or should sign up to” a deal which put a border in the Irish Sea. He then reversed his position before now reversing it again. His public utterances on other policy issues, including the response to Covid-19, follow the same pattern.

The main threat to this approach comes from independent journalists, who might call out the rewriting of history. This is why reporters and media outlets which ask tough questions of ministers are sporadically blacklisted, including Channel 4 News, senior figures from the BBC and Sky, Radio 4’s Today, ITV’s Good Morning Britain and a variety of smaller outlets.

None of these tactics work if you have an electorate which still retains the capacity to assess government messaging on the basis of its objective validity. That’s why a concerted effort is made to frame information instead on the basis of tribal identity.

This is an old phenomenon. The philosopher John Stuart Mill recognised people’s tendency to prioritise their tribal identity over objective reasoning in the 19th Century. A hundred years later, the journalist George Orwell wrote about how people were prone to evaluating new information on the basis of their allegiances.

The only thing which has changed is the advent of social media, where behavioural algorithms allow the Government to deliver a bespoke message, tailored to people’s emotional instincts, in an attempt to create closed-off information ecosystems. Technology has tapped into a human vulnerability and the Government is exploiting it.

That’s why the Conservative party sent that tweet after the debate. It’s why Tory MPs this week claimed the EU wants “to see our country fail” and was trying to turn the UK into an “enslaved economic satellite”. As Conservative MP Lee Anderson said on Monday night: “Members of this House need to decide where their loyalties lie. Is it with the EU or with the United Kingdom?” Once the tribal viewpoint is secured, people stop looking for the truth and instead seek out that which supports their world view.

This approach is not happening by chance. It is followed by nationalist governments around the world, including the US, Brazil, Hungary, Poland and India. It is a very old story: the purposeful expansion of executive control. If nationalists can lie without consequence, then there are no limits on their power. They cannot be scrutinised on the basis of their record.

This story will continue until people recognise it for what it is. The first stage in that recognition is to think rationally on the basis of verifiable information. To even retain the capacity for memory and objectivity, is, in this period, a radical act.

We need to remember that Johnson once insisted he would never sign a deal like the one he accepted, and that he is now attacking the very document which he once celebrated. It’s only by retaining that capacity for objective truth that this Government can be held to account. Without it, they can keep on lying – and keep on operating with impunity.

Ian Dunt is the author of How to be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for its Life, published by Canbury Press hardback, £25 (also available as ebook and in audio).

World Class Probation Service?

Having done the rounds of media outlets yesterday morning spreading misinformation about the number of Covid-19 tests being carried out daily - but not on Good Morning Britain and Piers Morgan - the Justice Secretary Robert Buckland gave a speech about the latest sentencing plans and here are some highlights:- 

Protecting the public from serious offenders

The White Paper focusses firstly on the most serious offenders. Because we believe it is crucial that sexual and violent offenders spend as much of their sentence behind bars as possible. This is what the public wants, and victims should be able to expect.

Automatic release and parole board oversight

Offenders who have committed serious crimes and who are assessed to be dangerous at the point of being sentenced can receive either a life sentence or an Extended Determinate term. This means there is no automatic release and these cases go to the Parole Board to assess whether it would be safe to release offenders.

But there are small number who, for particular reasons, are assessed as posing a serious threat to the public, for example through terrorism, when that is not the crime for which they are serving a sentence. At present, these offenders will be eligible for automatic release from prison and will not fall under Parole Board oversight.

By introducing a new power for the Justice Secretary to prevent their automatic release and instead refer their cases to the Parole Board, we will now ensure that these offenders are properly assessed before being released – to determine whether or not they do pose a threat to the public, or if it would be safer for them to serve the remainder of their term in prison. This represents a major change and will reassure the public that dangerous criminals will be properly assessed before release.

Around 2,000 more serious and violent offenders who receive a standard determinate sentence of 7 years or more will now spend at least two thirds of their sentence behind bars, thanks to legislation already brought in by this government. We are going to widen that approach, so that offenders serving a fixed sentence of 4 to 7 years will also spend longer in prison.

Sentence lengths for serious offences

The public rightly expects child killers to feel the fullest and the harshest extent of the law. We will therefore ensure a Whole Life Order is not just available to sentencers in these cases, but that it will be their starting point. In exceptional circumstances we will also give judges the discretion to impose a Whole Life Order on those aged 18 to 20, where currently only those aged 21 or over may receive this severest of punishments.

Adult offenders who are given life sentences in other circumstances often do not serve enough of that sentence before they come before the Parole Board to consider their release – certainly not as much as the public rightly expect.

We will now ensure that these offenders spend longer behind bars before they can be assessed for release. By changing the way in which discretionary life sentences are calculated, we will see to it that judges base the minimum tariff to be served on what two thirds of an equivalent determinate sentence would be, rather than half, as they do at present. We will also increase the time that must be served in prison for those who commit sexual offences against children and receive a “Sentence for Offenders of Particular Concern”. At the moment such offenders may be considered for release by the Parole Board after serving half their custodial term, but we will up that to two-thirds before the Board may look at the case. There exists in law a minimum custodial sentence for those who commit key offences, including a “second strike” for possession of a knife or offensive weapon and a “third strike” burglary of someone’s home. These are serious crimes that put the public at risk of both physical harm and deprivation of their hard-earned possessions, and of their wellbeing when it comes to safety at home.

But too often these types of offenders receive sentences below the statutory minimum, failing to properly punish or act as any kind of meaningful deterrent and protect the public. We are proposing therefore to modify the criteria for passing sentences below the statutory minimum, making it less likely that a court would depart from the minimum term.

The public want to know that custodial sentences for these sorts of crimes do what they say on the tin. They want to know that when serious and violent offenders go to prison, that’s where they’ll stay for as long as possible. These reforms will restore their faith that the system will keep dangerous criminals off our streets for longer.

Supervising offenders in the community

It is imperative that judges and magistrates have the power to impose short custodial sentences, where they are appropriate. I have seen first-hand on many occasions cases where this is the right and frankly the only sentencing option that is realistic for the court to hand down.

But protecting the public is also about making sure that we make smart interventions to prevent low-level and repeat offenders from going back and forth to prison, for short custodial sentences that hold little rehabilitative value for them.

Offenders in this category often live chaotic lifestyles, sometimes driven by drug and alcohol misuse, or poor mental health. Their backgrounds are often characterised by entrenched poverty, absent role models, and a lack of any decent education. This makes for bleak prospects and many offenders believe that they have few options but to get involved in criminality.

There is no doubt that they deserve punishment but, if we are to have any chance of turning their lives around – and in the process preventing crime – then we need to divert them towards lives that hold the promise of the things we all want from life – a place to call home, meaningful work, a future that’s better than the past.

If we’re going to offer offenders opportunities to work hard towards those things, then we must identify their individual needs and ensure that the sentencing toolkit is able to meet them.

High-Quality Pre-Sentence Reports

Pre-sentence reports should give crucial insights into the individual needs of offenders. These are often complex but with an accurate picture of the offender’s history, a court has the best opportunity to pass a sentence likely to drive better outcomes. More information being available also reduces the space for assumptions to creep in, which, too often, can be the entry point for stereotyping.

Evidence suggests that some offenders are sent for short custodial sentences without a PSR ever being produced. I know from my own experience as a practitioner that PSRs can be an invaluable tool, but two questions would always cross my mind in court: will a PSR even be available; and, perhaps more importantly, will it be of any use?

We will now pilot new ways of delivering high-quality PSRs, identifying the offenders who would benefit most.

Other alternatives to custody

At the same time, we will encourage courts to look at other alternatives to custody, such as. deferred sentencing. These can make use of services such as NHS Liaison and Diversion, to divert offenders away from criminal justice, into services that can support them to address mental health problems or substance misuse, with any breach of conditions imposed by the court potentially putting them into custody.

We will also simplify the out of court disposals framework so that low-level offenders can be dealt with quickly and effectively, by avoiding court and saving the taxpayer valuable money but still preventing ongoing crime. This will require a mixed framework of legislation, with community resolutions and conditional cautions used to modify behaviour.

In one of the most innovative ideas in this White Paper, we will also pilot 5 “problem-solving” courts, which will take a completely new approach to dealing with low-level offending. Utilising the most up to date evidence, these new courts will use elements such as judicial monitoring and graduated sanction incentives for those who have high needs or prolific offending histories, to look at innovative solutions to their offending without taking them into custody.

Empowering Probation

Something that will be vital to these reforms is a world-class probation service.

At a minimum, probation ‘manages’ offenders through their sentence, putting in place requirements from the courts as part of licence conditions and checking compliance. But when probation is at its very best, it goes much further. It is in the proactive ‘supervision’ of offenders, by dedicated probation staff, that lasting change can happen. By influencing the way sentencing works throughout the process, adjusting to the unique journey made by each offender under supervision, and having the professional discretion to tighten up restrictions, we can better protect the public and address underlying offender behaviour.

In order to do that, probation practitioners must be able to build meaningful relationships with offenders – to understand the risks they pose and their individual needs, so that they can put in place not just what is required by a court or licence, but what is most likely to drive successful rehabilitation in each case. Ultimately, that is the best way to reduce the number of victims.

In recent years, the probation service in England and Wales has come under significant scrutiny and last year we announced large-scale changes to improve the way the service operates, bringing the system under a unified National Probation Service, to be responsible for the delivery of community sentences, licences and other forms of post-sentence supervision.

Improving the way probation interacts with sentencing starts with how it informs the way sentences are handed down. Under the new system we propose, we will unify sentence management under the National Probation Service – growing confidence with sentencers, with whom they have a much closer relationship than they did under the previous Community Rehabilitation Company model, for example, to compile the crucial high-quality Pre-Sentence Reports that I talked about earlier.

The 12 new probation regions will create a unified approach, as well as working more closely with local justice partners, meaning they can commission and deliver solutions based truly on local needs. A new Dynamic Framework for rehabilitation will enable these services to be more easily delivered by voluntary and specialist organisations that can really get results – particularly for vulnerable offenders and those with complex needs. More than 160 organisations have already signed up to bid for contacts, of which 60% are from the voluntary sector – an excellent start.

At the true heart of a successful probation system is its practitioners. Something I saw time and again in my career was that a really good probation officer can make all the difference. Through the Workforce Programme we launched in January this year, we’ve set ourselves an ambitious target to recruit 1,000 new probation officers and to train probation staff to be better equipped for the modern demands of the criminal justice system.

Building relationships with offenders is critical to influencing rehabilitation, but we also want probation staff to have the powers necessary to do their jobs where other methods fail. We will now legislate to give probation officers greater flexibility to take action where an offenders’ rehabilitative needs are not being met or where they pose a risk to the public, meaning that they will be able to act swiftly, using their professional judgement to warn offenders about their behaviour and to advise courts to take enforcement action.

Taken together, these changes will empower probation services to be more dynamic in the way they operate and more useful at every point at which they interact with other criminal justice agencies – informing better sentencing and carrying them out to much better effect.

Reducing reoffending

Too often it is sadly the case that offenders find themselves back within the criminal justice system over and over again, with rates of reoffending remaining stubbornly and disappointingly high.

More than three-quarters of people convicted or cautioned in England and Wales already have at least one other criminal conviction or caution to their name. What this demonstrates is that the criminal justice system is too often unable to rehabilitate offenders the first time around. If we are to bring down crime rates and stop individuals from posing a menacing and continued threat to our communities, there are a number of options we must now consider.

As I have mentioned, technology already plays a role in sentencing but, for offenders who blight our neighbourhoods and burgle homes for example, it’s time we looked at how electronic monitoring and GPS tagging could better protect the public and drive offender behaviour change.

For some offenders who are stuck in cycles of crime, not being able to get a job can be both a major driver in their offending, but also a major barrier to their rehabilitation. Evidence suggests that offenders who find P45 employment in the twelve months after release from prison have one-year reoffending rates that are 6-9 percentage points lower than similar offenders who did not find employment. It doesn’t sound much but literally we are talking about thousands of crimes, thousands of lives, thousands of victims we can safeguard.

We want to now reduce the time period after which some sentences can be considered spent for the purposes of criminal records check. This will enable offenders who do not pose a risk to the public to finally get a job that could be a significant milestone on their route away from offending once and for all.

Prisons and probation must provide the opportunity for individuals to rehabilitate, so we will also deliver a Prison Education Service, focussing on getting them the skills and training to re-join society as contributing, law-abiding members – that helps to bring down crime too.

Robert Buckland QC MP

--oo00oo--

This from  Frances Crook, Howard League, via Twitter yesterday:-

"Good to hear the Justice Secretary promising a 'world class' probation service after the years of Grayling's failed restructuring. But, haven't we heard promises of world class services recently that have not delivered!" 

"We had a world beating probation service, so much so that people from across the world would come to copy and learn. Then it was dismantled and destroyed by Grayling. Now it is being rebuilt, but will not be properly independent, local or resourced. So not really world beating."

"Justice secretary announced problem solving courts, seven years after closing the problem solving court."

Cliche Irony

Remaining on the theme of sentencing and politics, I guess we need to note the irony of the Centre for Justice Innovation publishing its Smarter Community Sentences report last week calling for an end to cliches, just before Boris Johnson indulged in classic cliche gesture politics of tougher sentencing. Politicians have learnt that it's a popular card well worth playing especially if you're not very popular. This from the Law Society Gazette:-

Thinktank backs smarter community sentences to cut reoffending

The government has been urged to move away from the old clichés of tough and soft justice and focus more on making community sentences ahead of a sentencing white paper due to be published shortly.

The Centre for Justice Innovation says in its latest report that evidence clearly shows community sentences reduce re-offending more than short custodial sentences. However, there has been a 46% decline in their use over the past 10 years in England and Wales. Those advocating for short custodial sentences as opposed to community ones ‘are, in short, recommending that communities and victims suffer more from crime, not less’.

The centre believes the forthcoming white paper and ongoing work to reform the probation system provide the government with real opportunities to reform community sentencing, and highlights successul initiatives in other jurisdictions.

Describing unpaid work as the ‘backbone’ of community sentences, the report cites 2016 inspectorate findings that 35% of probationers had not started their unpaid work within two weeks of being sentenced. The centre says reforms in Scotland to unpaid work within their Community Payback Orders have focused on improving the speed with which placements are commenced and completed. The report recommends ‘short, swift’ unpaid work orders and empowering courts to set time limits.

The ministry and probation service should shorten the overall length of community sentences given to low-risk offenders. This would free up time for probation staff to concentrate on supervising higher-risk groups. The report says the ministry could learn lessons from Northern Ireland’s Enhanced Combination Order, which includes psychological assessments in respect of mental health issues and family support work. The offending rate of ECO participants in the six months following sentence was 17.3% compared to a 57.7% re-offending rate in the six months prior to sentencing.

Probation officers should be given powers over electronic tag monitoring, including the ability to vary hours. The report says in the Netherlands, the private sector provides monitoring equipment but public sector agencies are responsible for installation, maintenance and decision-making.

A smarter approach to tagging would enable victims to have a say on restrictions. In the US, GPS tagging technology has been used to give domestic violence victims more control over their own safety.

The centre, which has supported the expansion of family drug and alcohol courts, also suggests the government implement a problem-solving suspended sentence for those with substance misuse issues as an alternative to longer prison sentences. It says Scotland, Northern Ireland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US actively involve the courts in efforts to strengthen the accountability of community sentences.

Under the new suspended sentence, probationers would be required to comply with a 'demanding' order of treatment, supervision, monitoring and reparation. The same judge would regularly review progress. Non-compliance would result in prison.

The report concludes: 'We believe it is time to reform community sentences. In doing so, we need to move away from the clichés of the past about tough or soft justice.'

--oo00oo--

We believe it is time to reform community sentences. In doing so, we need to move away from the clichés of the past about tough or soft justice. Instead, the unification of the management of offenders within the National Probation Service and the forthcoming Sentencing White Paper are real opportunities for this Government to make community sentencing smarter.

Smarter community sentences mean giving probation practitioners the powers, the freedom and the flexibility to do their jobs. Smarter community sentences mean ensuring victims and communities who suffer from crime have more of a voice to see reparation done. Smarter community sentences mean leveraging the full resources of the Government, from the police, the courts, through to drug treatment and employment services and others to work with probation to deliver punishment and to give offenders the chance to turn around their lives.

Summary 

Effective community sentences are a vital part of a justice system in which crime is proportionately punished, the harms it has caused repaired and the underlying factors that lead to offending addressed. Moreover, the evidence is clear that community sentences reduce re-offending more than short custodial sentences. Those who advocate for offenders to receive short custodial sentences as opposed to community sentences are, in short, recommending that communities and victims suffer from more crime, not less. 

Yet, there has been an 46% decline in the use of community sentences over the past ten years in England and Wales. At the same time, the quality of supervision delivered by our probation services has deteriorated. We believe it is time to reform community sentences. In doing so, we need to move away from the clichés of the past about tough or soft justice. Instead, the unification of the management of offenders within the National Probation Service and the forthcoming Sentencing White Paper are real opportunities for this Government to make community sentencing smarter. 

Smarter community sentences mean giving probation practitioners the powers, the freedom and the flexibility to do their jobs. Smarter community sentences mean ensuring victims and communities who suffer from crime have more of a voice to see reparation done. Smarter community sentences mean leveraging the full resources of the Government, from the police, the courts, through to drug treatment and employment services and others to work with probation to deliver punishment and to give offenders the chance to turn around their lives. 

Specifically, we urge the Government to create smarter community sentences by: 

• Improving the delivery of unpaid work by giving victims and communities a stronger voice in choosing what work is completed so they can see that justice is done, and by delivering standalone unpaid work orders swiftly, so probationers get the punishment done and can move on with their lives, and so judges can see their rulings carried out. 

• Improving the delivery of supervision by working briskly with low-risk probationers, thereby freeing up probation to both deliver high-quality community sentences and to work with police in the management of probationers who pose a higher risk of re-offending, through a reinvigorated Integrated Offender Management (IOM) strategy. 

• Improving rehabilitation so that people have the best shot at turning their lives around, by increasing the overall level of funding available for drug and mental health treatment for probationers in the community in the next Spending Review. 

• Improving information to victims about community sentences via the court reform programme so victims are informed about what is being done in their case. 

• Improving tagging of probationers by giving probation officers powers to flexibly vary the monitoring of tags without having to go back to court and by giving victims of domestic abuse a voice in setting the restrictions on perpetrators to better guarantee their safety and the safety of their children. 

• Improving collaboration between the court and probation to divert vulnerable offenders away from court where necessary, to use judges to monitor repeat offenders and be more responsive to their behaviour, and to change the enforcement system so it responds more swiftly to failure and better rewards compliance.

The value of community sentences 

Criminal justice systems around the world use community sentences to deliver punishment, reparation and rehabilitation. Punishment - inflicting some form of pain or loss (‘harsh treatment’) and the communication of disapproval (‘censure’), because doing so gives voice to the standards we honour as a community. Reparation to ensure that victims and communities that suffer see and experience offenders’ atonement for their wrongs. Rehabilitation because it embodies our belief in the possibility of redemption for rule-breakers and our commitment to keep communities safer by reducing reoffending. 

Community sentences play a vital role in keeping the public safe. There is considerable evidence that community sentences are an effective means of reducing re-offending. Previous studies by the Ministry of Justice in England and Wales, which control for the differences in the offender characteristics of those on community sentences and those receiving short prison sentences (those that are less than 12 months), show that the proven reoffending rate of offenders on community sentences is consistently lower than for those who had served short-term prison sentences. A 2019 study found that “sentencing offenders to short term custody with supervision on release was associated with higher proven reoffending than if they had instead received community orders and/or suspended sentence orders.” It also found that “the average number of re-offences per sentencing occasion was also higher following short term custodial sentences of less than 12 months than if a court order had instead been given (by around 65 re-offences more per 100 sentencing occasions).” Those who advocate for offenders to receive short custodial sentences as opposed to community sentences are, in short, recommending that communities and victims suffer from more crime, not less. 

The deterioration of community sentences 

However, in England and Wales, the quality of the supervision of community sentences has deteriorated over the past decade. In 2018, the Chief Inspector of Probation found that, due to the Coalition Government’s Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, which split probation provision into a public-sector National Probation Service (NPS) and privately-owned Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs), probation services “are failing to meet some of their performance targets… In too many cases, there is not enough purposeful activity… the probation profession has been diminished… There is a national shortage of qualified probation professionals, and too much reliance on unqualified or agency staff…. in the day-to-day work of probation professionals, there has been a drift away from practice informed by evidence.” 

Moreover, there are fewer community sentences being given out by courts. There has been a 46% decrease in the number of community sentences in England and Wales over the past ten years. Our research into why this has found that it is, in part, because the relationship between courts and probation has been buffeted by a number of reforms in the past six years, most notably the split of probation, the underinvestment in probation by the CRCs, and the disruptions caused by court closures and court service efficiency reforms. 

The reality of community sentences Community sentences provide proportionate punishment for lower level offending through restrictions of liberty like curfews and electronic monitoring. They can provide reparation through things like unpaid work and restorative justice. They can also address the underlying issues behind offending, like drug addiction, through supervised community drug treatment. Yet these purposes of punishment, reparation and rehabilitation are not clean and separable: in practice, community sentences are a mixture of all three. Probationers can often feel that parts of community sentences that are intended to be rehabilitative are intrusive, even painful, while others experience ‘punitive’ sanctions such as unpaid work as motivating and even enjoyable. It is also worth remembering, for example, that individuals serving a community sentence can experience additional pains, such as restrictions on their ability to travel abroad, or the impact on their lives of a criminal record on their employment. These punishments, which often get forgotten in discussions about “the toughness” of community sentences, can often be experienced as far greater hardships than the terms of the court order itself. 

This means that the reality of community sentences as experienced by probationers is often different from what is intended by judges and lawmakers, and what is expected and imagined by the public. Moreover, probationers are not a homogenous group: community sentences are given to a wide spectrum of individuals, from affluent motorists who repeatedly speed to homeless people with complex substance abuse and mental health needs. Strengthening community sentences, therefore, requires us to grapple with the complex realities of how probation functions in practice.

Tough On Crime Again

Politicians, especially those in trouble, just can't avoid the temptation of using the populist 'tough on crime' card and Boris Johnson is in a great deal of trouble. Here's Rob Allen's take on this particular No 10 distraction tactic:-   

The Impulse to Punish

Depressing if predictable trailing of the forthcoming Sentencing White Paper today, with Justice Secretary Robert Buckland telling Sun readers “it’s time for a tougher criminal justice system” and the Prime Minister writing in the Express that “some individuals are so dangerous or their crimes so abhorrent that they should never be released”.

Some comfort I suppose that after explaining his plans to lower from 21 to 18 the age at which people convicted of murder will be able to be sentenced to spend their whole life in prison, Johnson clarified that he wasn’t “talking about permanently locking up young people who make teenage mistakes or commit youthful indiscretions”. Thanks for that. And maybe some promise in his view that “we need more and better rehabilitation behind bars, improved monitoring of and support for ex-prisoners and more effective non-custodial sentences for low-risk offenders”. But all in all while the numbers directly affected by his draconian measures may be relatively small, there’s a real risk of an inflationary knock on effect on sentencing levels for less grave crimes.

It’s possible that courts may re calibrate their sentences downwards in the wider range of cases where two thirds rather than half will be spent inside. But for some reason I’ve never understood, they are not supposed to take too much account of what a sentence means in practice. More likely that some will take their lead from Johnson’s idea that public protection should be the single most important principle of sentencing and impose yet longer terms. Of course, public protection is important but the experience of the IPP sentence – widely acknowledged to be basically unjust -should serve as a warning against ignoring other purposes of sentencing.

Johnson may be surprised to know that he has some support in international law. The Nelson Mandela Rules say that the purposes of a sentence of imprisonment are primarily to protect society against crime and to reduce recidivism. They go on to say that those purposes can be achieved only if the period of imprisonment is used to ensure, so far as possible, the reintegration of such persons into society upon release so that they can lead a law-abiding and self-supporting life. And that's a problem.

Last week’s Public Accounts Committee Report showed the government’s abject failure to make progress on David Cameron’s 2016 vision of “a modern, more effective, truly twenty-first century prison system." Given the financial constraints facing the government in coming years its hard to see much in the future. We have heard about better rehabilitation in prisons for a decade but it seems much less capable of being delivered than are longer sentences.

Maybe the White Paper will have something more positive to say but I am not holding my breath. As Nietzsche said, “ Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful".

Rob Allen

Carrying On

Unless something extraordinary happens later today, at some point a visitor to this corner of the world wide web will lift us over the line representing the seven millionth 'hit'. Quite a milestone for any publishing endeavour I think, it just takes longer nowadays for all sorts of reasons that will be very well-understood by those connected to the probation world. 

Readership and contributors have been declining over recent years, but here's a funny thing - if I don't publish anything, we tick over with about a thousand to fifteen hundred 'hits' daily, but it rockets to between three and five thousand if anything kicks off. It still seems to fill a need and is possibly some kind of comfort blanket, especially during troubled times. 

Certainly this appeared to be the case during the early days of lockdown and sadly is proving to be the case as we inevitably head into a new period of 'shafting' brought about by TR2:-

"The NPS will not match all CRC job roles, as some jobs do not exist in the NPS and some CRC qualification criteria are insufficient."

"My reading is that "Employment protections" apply for those transferring to NPS only. HMPPS cannot possibly offer a guarantee for those poor souls cast adrift who are deemed unsuitable, unworthy, not in the clique, unable to pass vetting, etc. Back to 2015/6 & throwing staff under the privateer bus."

"Stories of staff being marched out of offices. Others unable to apply for other jobs like OM, AP and OMiC. All unions will do is ask for transfer into a non-frontline role. Usually it’s due to past convictions (both major and minor) already on DBS, links to family members with criminal records (or under investigation) and bad credit. Can’t believe unions didn’t oppose vetting."

This was always likely to happen as a result of vetting and civil service command and control and was certainly flagged-up and discussed on here ages ago. We all know CRCs made use of volunteers, many of whom were former or even current clients and a significant number were put on the payroll. HMPPS and NPS don't believe in volunteers and vetting makes it almost impossible for any employee with 'lived experience' to transfer over. In essence a disgrace going against as it does the very essence of probation's ethos. 

People who know me are aware I often say 'it's all been said'. Nobody likes repetition and surely there's nothing new to cover? Especially when contributions dry up, I've considered packing it in many times, but I've come to appreciate it's actually quite hard to do when something has become such a significant part of your life for so long. Each time I tend to think I'll just see us through this crisis and then stop. 

Thing is, we seem to have those fairly regularly and deep down I still want to see probation regain its identity and independence. I guess whist ever I'm speaking to like-minded refuseniks, dissidents, contrarians and remaining 'old-timers', we carry on.    

In the very early days I offered a bottle of a favourite tipple to any person providing screenshot evidence of significant milestones and I have fond memories of hand-delivering a litre of gin to a very keen reader in Newcastle several times! They may still be reading, but the offer remains open to all, Covid-19 and appropriate social-distancing permitting. 

Thanks for being part of the journey and making the blog what it is. Take care, stay safe look out for each other and cheers! 

Ballot Background

Yesterday's Napo mailout gave news of a ballot being held for CRC staff on the Collective Agreement to support the transfer of staff to the NPS or a provider of Dynamic Services. This is the supporting material referred to in that communication:-

A ballot for Napo CRC members
10th - 30th September 2020

Probation Reform -the story so far

Napo members have been at the forefront of their unions long running campaign to restore all Probation services to public ownership and control. The historic U-turn in Government policy announced by the Secretary of State for Justice on 11TH June followed the previous decision last year that 80% of probation work would transfer to the National Probation Service.

While the 2019 announcement of partial unification was welcomed at the time, Napo have maintained pressure in and outside of Parliament to press for the total reunification of Probation to bring certainty over the future of the service. Ministers have taken a courageous decision to fully reverse the disastrous Transforming Rehabilitation reforms that were implemented in 2014 and which we opposed from the start. These have also been widely and continuously criticised by politicians, the Justice Select Committee and HM Inspector of Probation. Reunification of the service also signals the early termination date for the existing Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC) contracts in June 2021. These contracts were expected to last for at least a decade and despite the best efforts of staff working within the system they have failed to deliver the promised service improvements and innovations.

This has been an immensely difficult time for all Probation staff, and especially those who have been working tirelessly against the odds to maintain services in the private sector. Our members have had to contend with unrealistic workloads, a fragmentation of services and, in some cases, seriously dangerous operational models which contributed to the demise of the former Working Links CRC in February 2019.

The new plans will see the National Probation Service take full responsibility for Sentence Management, Unpaid Work and Programme delivery with Dynamic Framework (DF) Providers being commissioned to offer additional support services. This is similar to the arrangements that existed under many of the former Probation Trusts prior to the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms.

Why this ballot is taking place - an overview of the Probation Reform negotiations

Napo negotiators were quick to move to the next stage in our campaign and engage with senior HMPPS and NPS leaders on the immediate challenges before us. These included the transfer of staff in June next year, the need to start to repair the massive damage suffered by the service and the need to achieve some short term stability. Just as important has been the re-opening of the debate about the long term future of probation where over the recent years we have mapped out our vision for the future of Probation:

• Fully unified service provision delivered within the public sector and never for profit
• Removal of Probation from the civil service and release from the prison dominated culture which means that Probation is the forgotten ‘P’ in HMPPS
• A service built on evidence based practice
• A service rooted in the local community and partnering with local specialist providers

Negotiations on the Probation Reform programme have actually been taking place for just over a year. The talks have covered the earlier decision to transfer Sentence Management work and staff from the Wales CRC to the NPS (which took place last December), the announcement in May 2019 that all Sentence Management would transfer to the NPS, and the subsequent decision in 2020 that Unpaid Work and Programmes would also be brought back into public control and ownership in June 2021.

Our most recent work has included finalising a new Staff Transfer and Protections Agreement to support the transition, a new Voluntary Redundancy /Voluntary Severance scheme, and the terms and conditions for staff transferring into the NPS. Napo’s ideal outcome would have been to see all directly employed CRC staff transferred into the NPS especially in light of the continuing staff shortages but this is not possible because in legal terms the principle is that the workers transfer with the work they do. We have been consulted on the assignment process that is being used to ensure this principle is adhered to.

Assignment

The CRCs have until the end of September to complete the assignment process which includes an appeal stage. All directly employed CRC staff will transfer to either NPS or a Dynamic Framework (DF) provider. They can object to the transfer but this will have the effect of ending their employment. Numbers are not yet certain but early estimates suggest that there are likely to be a very small number of staff transferring to DF providers. This will apply to those staff where their current role entails 50% or more of their time providing services such as Education, Training and Employment (ETE), accommodation and wellbeing support.

It is the role and not the person which is assigned, if a member of CRC staff moves to a new role before the date of transfer, that can change their assignment. For example, if they are currently in a role assigned to DF and they move to a role assigned to NPS they will transfer to NPS. Each CRC will (on HMPPS instruction) set a date after which no more recruitment (or level moves) is allowable. This is usually around 6 months prior to the transfer.

Napo Officials are encouraging CRC owners to do all that they can to enable their staff to move to their preferred future employer. This is especially important if their current CRC employer is successful in bidding for DF services and need staff who are sufficiently motivated to work for them. Napo are also maintaining pressure on CRC employers to ensure that their staff are paid the equivalent of existing NPS pay bands by the time of transfer to the NPS or DF provider.

The Framework for Transfer to the NPS or a DF provider

There is an important distinction between the transfer processes to the NPS or a DF provider. The CRC to NPS transfer is a Staff Transfer Scheme under COSOP (the code of practice governing transfers of staff into the public sector). The staff transfer scheme will include the Staff Transfer and Protections Agreement (STAP) and if CRC members agree to it then transferees to the NPS will be harmonised to new terms and conditions and the NPS pay scales that exist at date of their transfer. If the agreement is rejected, then staff transferring into the NPS (and those staff in NPS Wales who transferred prior to the end of the STAP negotiations) will do so with their existing CRC terms.

In the case of a CRC staff transfer to a DF provider, this will take place under the TUPE regulations because it is a transfer of a private sector employee to a third sector or private sector employer. There is case law to support this position. This means that those transferring to a DF provider will have their existing CRC terms and conditions protected.

Employment protections

Napo and our sister unions have secured a commitment from HMPPS to no compulsory redundancies for two years from the date of transfer and enhanced voluntary redundancy/severance terms if these should be necessary for the same period of time.

Is Third Sector Probation's Saviour?

It was reassuring to see that the recent lively discussion about OASys and its part in the demise of probation generated some heavy weight contributions from at least two former CPO's, one of whom having had the distinction of being an HMI. It will be appreciated that there's always the danger of over-egging negative discourse about anything, but it seems the OASys situation really is irredeemable and getting worse. 

Given that the MoJ and HMPPS remain keen to carry on digging an ever-deeper hole, this from the area manager of London CRC via Twitter highlights the issue of genuine innovation and enlightened practice development being extinguished shortly with the demise of the CRC's:- 

"We need to look at the evolution of oasys. Originally designed to be used as a dynamic tool to remove bias from assessments. Yes it’s now unwieldy and far from user friendly. It’s a shame that innovative tools like omnia used in London and Thames valley are likely to be lost"

Make no mistake, probation as many of us know it should be is being strangled by the ever-tighter command and control structure of the NPS and whilst it disappears into a black hole of government spin and depressing diktat, in stark contrast the 'third sector' clearly has a spring in its step and may yet ironically prove to be probation's saviour. This from the official cheerleader Clinks:-

Today Clinks is launching a new online evidence library for the criminal justice voluntary sector. The project was born out of one of the key pledges in our current strategy: “To support the sector with access to evidence and provide support to develop and utilise evidence”.

We set out to produce a far-reaching and accessible evidence base relating to the most common types of activity undertaken in the criminal justice system.

We were clear that this was not an academic exercise; rather we were motivated to make it easy for voluntary sector providers to access the most up-to-date evidence around what works in order to improve their practice and increase their chances of being commissioned. We hope that, over time, commissioners of services for people in contact with the criminal justice system (and their families) will also become familiar with the resource and base their service specifications on the latest evidence. We commissioned Russell Webster to develop the online evidence base on Clinks’ behalf.

The first article in the series is published today. Patrick Williams has written a concise, authoritative evidence review which provides an in-depth look at the growing rates of racial disparity in our criminal justice system and highlights key principles for effective interventions with people from Black, mixed, Asian and other minority ethnic backgrounds in contact with that system.

Patrick reviews the current evidence-base, to which he is an important contributor, and covers a number of key issues:

Racial disparity within the criminal justice system
The multidimensionality of social inequalities experienced by minority groups
The lack of a clear strategy and officially approved programs to tackle racial disparity
The criminal justice system’s preoccupation with risk, as opposed to need
Principles to govern minority ethnic interventions
The importance of acknowledging racialisation and racism(s)
Community empowerment models
The argument for paying participants to engage
The importance of the voluntary sector.

Over the next few months, we will be publishing a number of new evidence reviews. The next one to be published is by Mary Corcoran who examines the use of cost-benefit analyses of service provision in a number of different contexts, all of them particularly relevant to voluntary sector organisations working in the criminal justice system. This will be followed by Patricia Durr’s review of the evidence of the growing field of trauma-informed practice and its application to the criminal justice system, in particular prisons.

Evidence reviews on a gendered approach to working with people who have offended (by Loraine Gelsthorpe) and the desistance model (by Hannah Graham) will follow later this year.

The topics for this first tranche of evidence reviews were not selected by chance but were the result of a poll of Clinks members undertaken at last year’s conference.

All these evidence reviews have been designed to be up-to-date, authoritative and accessible − in the sense that they are both free to download and have been written in plain (non-academic) English. They are all between 800 - 2,000 words long and include a short reading list linking to key texts for people who wish to explore the topic in greater detail. Wherever possible, we have sought to locate free-to-access versions of these key texts (hosted on such sites as ResearchGate).

Like everyone else, our plans have been somewhat influenced by Covid-19. For this reason, these first evidence reviews are being published as stand-alone documents. However, we hope to work on a new section of the Clinks website to host what we hope will become an extensive library of evidence for everyone in the field to use.

We will shortly be consulting with Clinks’ members again for suggestions on the key topics which you would like to see as the subjects of forthcoming evidence reviews. If you have any immediate thoughts on this or would like to share your views on the library in general, you can contact Russell Webster – who is co-ordinating this work on behalf of Clinks – at solutions@russellwebster.com

We would like to take this opportunity to publicly send our heartfelt thanks to all the contributors who found the time to share their expertise by writing a review. Please get in touch and share your feedback on this new resource and let us know how we can make it better.

In a Hole? - Stop Digging!

Since starting this blog many moons ago, ranting about OASys has been one of my core missions, so I'm always up for the topic whenever the opportunity arises. As a consequence and especially as ever-larger numbers of brand spanking new probation officers are being trained up, it's a pleasure to see my ire is still as keenly felt by subversive elements within the increasingly authoritarian NPS. This from yesterday:-

"Every probation officer worth their salt knows that OASYS is not fit for purpose. That's not to say that writing an assessment, identifying a plan of action to address the issues concerned both from a "risk management" and "rehabilitative" perspective does not have any place - but WE ALL know that OASYS is clunky, repetitive and frankly doesn't make sense. So rather than admitting this, the service constantly invests more time and effort into it - tweaking little boxes here and there, constantly forcing staff to complete more and more of them, and then recruiting armies of QDO's to monitor it's completion to exacting standards which themselves make absolutely no sense.

Frankly if someone gave me an A4 piece of paper, I'd be able to write a good assessment, identify the issues, and structure a risk/sentence plan - I'd be able to update this easily, and would have the time to engage my service users in that process. But no! Fearful that we can't be trusted, the service has chosen to continue to invest in a difficult to use system - even writing a sentence plan with all it's ridiculous drop down boxes and meaningless/crap non-SMART drop down objectives, takes absolutely FOREVEVER (constant error messages if an old sentence plan action is not closed down etc.)

And yes, as per the comment in this blog, the skills, time and effort and frankly professionalisation it takes to develop those skills over time with the service users, has no priority at all. London NPS solution to this? Chuck a whole load of resources on a website and constantly tell us to complete the WEB (which is basically another sentence plan). The Head of Operations briefing the other day was embarrassing - being told "complete a WEB, it improves engagement", "use all these resources, and do exercises", and "use CRISSA recording convention" was frankly so embarrassingly out of touch it actually made me angry. I'd love to hear what others thought of that?"

--oo00oo--

A reminder:-

"So much emphasis is put on OASys and not enough on rehabilitation. We rush supervision because of the paperwork and high caseload. Our cases outweigh the hours. An offender can’t expect an hour from his officer. To get a hour, others have to suffer. I joined to make a difference. But I can’t make a difference... the service won’t let me."

"The whole OASys & endless paperwork is now a joke. No business could operate efficiently like this."