Pick of the Week 19

Bizarre offering from Phil Andrew, Working Links CEO today on the WL Justice website! Biggest heap of shite I have read in a long time! Says absolutely nothing yet he seems to think it is somehow important! Can't trust a thing WL say. John Wiseman should be keeping his staff in the loop but WL have muzzled all the managers, the ones that might have been prepared to speak out and the spineless arse lickers that have only been interested in their own self serving vanity don't give a monkeys anyway and can toddle off for salsa classes without a hint of guilt and pretend they are actually doing a good job as they get pissed every night!

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Wasn't it just! I was intrigued at how the loss of the DWP contract could be spun into such a monumental success story of prudent redirection and corporate reinvention. There was so much 'sparkle' it made my head hurt!! Meanwhile, on Planet Earth, Paul Hindson was due to meet with the Unions and ACAS today...

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I hope they gave him a good roasting! When will we get the feedback on that? I hope they are recording all these discussions and not relying on the WL spin-doctors to report back on how brilliantly it all went for them. Must have been 3 or 4 farewells I read about only today, so many good staff have already left yet continuing with 40% cuts. The maths doesn't add up!

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As played out in my head over & over during the last month, the meeting between the 20-something CRC Operational Manager & 50-something PO.

Mgr: So I've completed your appraisal & it's been scored Poor in all areas. You'll get a copy when we're finished today. Record keeping is especially low scoring, which as you know is critical to the CRC's future development.

PO: You know its been difficult to keep up with the IT constantly crashing & the sky-high numbers on my caseload

Mgr: You were given clear guidance on how to address that

PO: To cut and paste stock phrases to fill any gaps?

Mgr: No, it was to improve efficiency using approved concise entries that met the CRC's clearly defined requirements. Your reluctance to comply with company policy features throughout this appraisal; as are your explicit attempts to frustrate the purpose if the CRC by being outspoken, critical & obtuse. If you were in a union I'd think you were being subversive.

PO: There are hardly any staff, dangerously high caseloads, unstable IT systems & we can't get NPS to take cases that are plainly High Risk. I'm doing sixty hours a week, I'm exhausted and have already spoken to you several times about needing some time off next week but you haven't responded.

Mgr: There you go again. I'm surprised that someone of your experience keeps making excuses for their poor practice. How can I approve time off when all your records are out of date? And I note you've expressed an interest in redundancy, well, there's no way I can recommend that to HR either. Once you're up-to-date we can revisit that. If you want out you could resign. Oh, and you are not being recommended for an increment on the payscale. Last year's appraisal was similar in tone and I see no attempt has been made to effect any improvement. 

Finally, I need to allocate three new DV cases. They were High Risk initially but NPS have recently reassessed them as Med to Low. I've had a quick scan through the paperwork - its all in good order, every box has been completed, so I'm allocating them to you. I don't want to see the records in a mess when I check up next month. All three have been instructed for appointments next week, so there's your answer about leave! Okay? Your Appraisal will be in your in box by 3pm today. Just sign it & send it back please. I won't be available except by email for the next three weeks as I'm at meetings in London, Paris and Birmingham, then I'm working from home during half-term. Got to dash now. See you next month.

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Anyone who breaks the perfectly good laws of this fine upstanding country should be forced to wear an electronic device which law-abiding folk can access via an App on their mobiles (except when they're driving) in order to instruct the law-breakers to complete useful tasks for the benefit of the community. The requests would stack at a G4S comms centre & be distributed according to whichever crim was next available. Control & Command at its most efficient. (NOMS please note this is not a serious suggestion; its just a pisstake).

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Tagging, labelling, branding or simply segregating 'them' from 'us' is just fine & dandy, isn't it? Some don't think so... R4's Analysis programme broadcast last night:

"Should we place more trust in prisoners to help them change their lives? "Trust is the only thing that changes people," says Professor Alison Liebling, the director of the Prisons Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. But, asks Lucy Ash, how can we encourage trust in prisons that are overcrowded, often understaffed, and blighted by rising rates of violence? Prisoners are locked up because they broke trust, and on the wings distrust, rather than trust, is an essential survival skill.

And yet Professor Liebling's latest evidence surprisingly shows that ultimately it is only staff-prisoner relationships built on trust that ensure better outcomes. "Values grow virtues", she argues. Treating prisoners with the same values as other people - dignity, respect, trust - will help them turn their lives around."

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Exactly, good support and supervision is what works well, but the MoJ killed that when they did away with 'supervision' with the new Offender Management Act.

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When the government imported Lie Detectors, they where seized be the customs because they were not CE approved. The MoJ retrieved them arguing that they were Defence Equipment not subject to CE approval. The truth is that they are Non Intrusive Medical Monitoring Equipment and need CE approval as such. If anyone is using one the CE mark should be on page one of the manual.

Probably GPS tracking equipment used to monitor the location of an individual is Non Intrusive Medical Monitoring Equipment, the ones that measure alcohol in perspiration certainly are.

The official guidance says GPS-tagged offenders will be banned from “unsuitable activities”, including water sports such as diving and surfing, as well as contact sports such as football, rugby, hockey and kickboxing, because they risk hurting themselves or damaging the tag.

This implies that a Lithium Ion Battery is in use, intrinsically very very dangerous due to their combustibility, attaching one to a persons ankle, probably breaks health and safety law, its foreseeable that you are fixing a firebomb to their ankle.

The Samsung Galaxy fires where not caused by a failure in design, but a very very small oversight in quality control specification. Incredibly microscopic particles of metal in the electrolyte caused the fires. The more modern higher capacity batteries all fail the nail test, drive a nail into them and they catch on fire. Banning certain activities does not lead to safety. My local roads are so full of potholes it's only a matter of time before one causes me to crash on my bicycle. Imagine picking yourself and finding your ankle is on fire. No one is above the law including the MoJ, if they fail in their duty of care they must be prosecuted.

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Having been involved in junior and open age football for 18 years now, I have on many occasions felt I did my best social work with the men and boys I have coached. So, it fills me with horror to hear those subject to these tags will not be able to participate in football, rugby, hockey or kick boxing, 'for their own safety' as for many of the young men I encounter, this is the only pro social, healthy activity they engage with; where they get praise and get to do something they are good at! I've coached many lads on tags, or who are only available to play alternate Saturdays, as the Attendance Centre calls them in on the others. Removing their capacity to achieve and mix with non offenders, ex offenders, just alienates them all the more!

Also, I don't see magistrates, judges or governors buying into this, save for a small group of people for whom it would be the right and proper response, to protect people. I fear it'll be used as an add-on to the sentences they already had in mind.

Then there is the MoJ/Noms! I rang them a few weeks ago, to check that it would be deemed proportionate and necessary to include a total of 14 hours in a licence? The general rule, not exceeding 12 hours doesn't apply to ROTL! Why? I was advised that overnight ROTL is to rehabilitate, to provide opportunities for clients to take part in purposeful activity. I was told in no uncertain terms that if my lifer is a high risk of harm, he shouldn't be eligible for ROTL, and if restrictive licence conditions were required, he should not be deemed safe, for any type of release. 

I found this to be an interesting point of view, so described where I was coming from. Parole Board at last oral hearing asked that I provide opportunities for client to demonstrate through ROTL his capacity and willingness to comply with supervision/licence conditions and Mappa and VLU insisting on all manner of restrictions and exclusions! The representative of the MoJ/Noms was clear in his response 'ROTL should not be used to satisfy the requirements of Mappa or the Parole Board or the Governor when assessing risks when approving ROTL? I put the phone down and laughed out loud, what planet are they on? My colleague had no idea, as far as he was concerned, until a prisoner achieved low risk, he should not have access to ROTL, he should not require ANY bespoke licence conditions!

Sorry, I digress, my point is that this GPS sentence is not the panacea being peddled, and as long as there is no joined up thinking in Noms/MoJ, I can only ever see it as the belt to match the braces of existing sentences, which is little more than a money making exercise. If, following the pilots, there is any positive outcomes I will pickle my walnuts!

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Two hours charging time means the technology being used is cheap crap. Offenders already have an excuse to go under the radar, "my battery ran out when I was sleeping". This is why previous pilots failed because offenders have to voluntarily agree to keeping it charged and know they cannot be penalised when it is off unless somebody physically visits their house to check in they're in.

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This is about the government rehashing old news in a bid to earn revenue from tagging. It doesn't work because the technology is not advanced enough and this is common knowledge. A quick google and here is a probation pilot of GPS tagging in 2012 which obviously didn't continue for the same reasons of cost, technology and practicality. 

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Never mind all this. Bigger things are occurring as E3 spreads it's cancerous claws. In our office, PSO's with no experience at all have pinched our caseload. They have had NO training at all and will not have any for months aside from online workbooks. They are out of their depth completely and working with medium risk cases, who were all high risk cases up to very recently. SFO responsibility should this occur, which it almost certainly will, is left ambiguous. Meanwhile we are being flooded with brand new cases from another office. No workload for ARMS assessments or address checks. 

Now extra hidden workload as we have been told we need to oversee and train the PSO staff but the case points go on their workload. We are being expected to mentor them as well. What can we do? Train others to take our roles over eventually. They are trying to kill PO roles in my view over time. No PSR's as all done in Court. No longer supervising cases in prison soon, hardly any new cases aside from online sex Offenders who don't have any chance of completing Programmes. It's all going to hell in a handcart before our eyes. E3 will do for the NPS what TR has done for CRC's.They are planning the demise of Probation Officer's I am sure.

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It's happening in SY, the view from management is let them get on with it and us hard pressed POs don't care anymore. We just do what we can in an impossible situation dictated by Noms. It's dreadful.

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With all responsibility, including, typing, administration, for both NPS and HMP - those damn ROTL 007,008,009, our job to send for and collate responses from VLU and police. Responsible for our own development, which requires a log into Equip every day, at least to soak up new information, and hear of changes in how we do things; in addition, we are being asked to train PSO's and co-work with trainees! I'm good, but I'm not f**king Paul Daniels!

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Refuse to train or mentor PSO staff. This is not in your contract and unless you are a probation trainer it cannot be a "reasonable instruction". Hand them the case file and let them get to work, and if they ask for help tell them to go to their managers.

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'A voice for Conner'. I wish the family success in their fight and will donate to this cause, we all should. And let's be clear about who 'Wales CRC ' are. This is CRC contracted out to Working Links who in turn were bought by another company called Aurelius! They run all CRC's in Wales and South West. BGSW CRC, Devon and Cornwall. A very large area! Despite this appalling situation they are right now ignoring union advice and making sweeping cuts to 40% of staff across the board, experienced managers, PO's and PSO's. losing our most experienced staff will only increase risk of further SFO's. We need to retain experienced staff but WL prefer staff who tow the line, can be manipulated, put up and shut up and this is dangerous for the public.

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Look we know they're dumbing down probation officers. The training is now slimmed down to about 16 months or less and there's no degree or guarantee of a job at the end of it. The CRC is filled with agency temps and the NPS is replacing qualified staff with unqualified PSO's who are either former admin staff or anyone off the street that applied. Everyone does the same work and professional status/qualification means nothing any more.

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The NPS encouraged its admin staff to apply for the PSO jobs because nobody else was applying. The funny thing is that the NPS was designed for the "high risk, MAPPA and dangerous offenders". What a croc of shite because now this work is to be done be untrained admin staff and the qualified probation officers will be transferred elsewhere or made redundant.

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I am sure that I am right in remembering that in the one of the first Home Office inspections after the split (possibly here in Dorset or did I read it elsewhere?) Inspectors queried why PSO' s had been sifted into the NPS when, according to the forward model, there was no role for them as all only cases coming into the NPS were those deemed high risk.

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I currently have an SFO as does my colleague on the same team - NPS. I welcome the review. I have 45 cases with more coming in all the time I am almost 130% in the red WLMT and 3 parole hearings this month. I feel confident that I did everything possible in the case including arguing to keep it a MAPPA case and high risk. Unfortunately, I can't say the same amount of time is going to all cases it feels like a game of roulette.

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You need to focus on managing your cases and less so on your perceived workload. You're no different to anyone. That's the best advice I can give as a manager new to probation.

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That's not advice. It's a sop; something yielded to placate or soothe. As a very experienced Manager, I chose to leave because the plan was to deliver a service that was tokenistic and superficial. The staff recognise this, the managers recognise this. There is nothing left to do but fail. Quarts and pint pots, I am afraid. Workload prioritisation only works when not everything is a priority. When everything is a priority, you simply have too much to do!

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Nothing like a bit of bad publicity ie. Prisons news, to get the government to wake up. So prison officers have been cut by 10,000 and meeting with Truss yesterday results in agreement to recruit 2,000 back! Hmmmm! Impressed by the prison union leader on BBC news this morning. Sticking up for his members. Hopefully more will follow than the paltry 2,000 who will hopefully be frontline staff on the wings and not jobs for civil servants sat at desks!! CRC/NPS need similar outspoken union leaders to get up on the soap-box!

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The current Rehabilitation Revolution is so new, that the governments rhetoric is that CRCs are still bedding in. I'm surprised that no one I've seen speaking about the present crisis has alluded to this. I'm just as surprised that Grayling has hardly been mentioned at all. I've just watched Liz Truss being interviewed on BBC, and thought she looked like a rabbit in the headlights. What I did find very interesting though was her reference many times to the unacceptable level of reoffending rates. The figure given at justice questions this week was said to be 'roughly 30%', Liz Truss this morning spoke of a 'over 50%' reoffending rate. Wonder what they really are, and if that's the next big failing of TR?

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Truss is getting a roasting on radio 4! Increase prison officers by 2,500 but cut staff by 40% in some CRC's including experienced PO/PSO's! It doesn't make sense if the objective is to reduce re-offending does it! We need a joined up system. Now the public know prisons are in crisis they need to know that community rehabilitation services are also in crisis.

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Really? I thought she was let off extremely lightly and was allowed to mouth a lot of sound bites with little or no serious challenge from JH. Extremely short on detail; just lots of sweeping intentions. The only positive thing I heard was the plan to introduce (reintroduce?) Personal Officers for all prisoners. I await this development with interest.

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Liz Truss I'm afraid is clueless. I've just heard her say on Sky news that's it's "ultimately down to the parole board to decide who's fit for release or not". Isn't one of the biggest problems with the CJS whether it's prisons, probation, crime or rehabilitation, the shaping and policies that get developed as solutions to the problems are designed by people who have no experience in those areas, and probably no great interest in those areas either.
It's not really Liz Truss's fault that the whole CJS is on its knees, but nor is she the right person to be charged with sorting it out, especially when she sees the solution to everything as tackling 'drones, phones, and drugs.' They're all problems yes, but focusing just on those issues is like decorating a house and ignoring the fact it's got structural damage.

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Unfortunately no matter what Truss says in her White Paper or in Parliament about how she's going to solve this current crisis, I really doubt anything will actually happen that would actually solve the current disaster. By all means hire more staff but if all you're going to hire is a bunch of clueless 18 yr olds at minimum wage you're not going to get the staff you need to actually bring prisons back into safe running. 

This is an ideal time to completely re imagining what you want the prison estate to be and turn it into something that works like in Holland or Scandinavia. But we're saddled with a completely clueless justice secretary who fixates on unimportant things like cheese and pork rather than the important stuff and a prisons minister clearly out of his depth from his turns in the House. It's the blind leading the really stupid which does not bode at all well. I doubt anything will really change and prisoners will continue to die because the government considers them expendable. Pretty sure prison staff will start dying soon - it's only a matter of time - and then the entire POA will walk out and the system will crumble completely. Truss will still be burbling about drones at that point. Fiddling while Rome burns comes to mind.

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How lucky must Liz Truss feel today? She woke up thinking she had a thousand interviews to do, and then the front pages were taken over by the court ruling on Brexit! But as the old man in the pub says, "Tomorrow never forgets today." The POA are playing hardball, and rightly so, it's a short respite Liz, but you still have to come home with the bacon!

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As was said in response just now on the BBC news, theses officers won't be all in place until 2018. The problem is that salary, terms and conditions have been tampered with and because of the violence in prisons staff are leaving faster than they're being recruited.

The POA are rightly not buying this rubbish. Liz Truss hasn't really got a clue which is why she's trying to grab headlines by talking about 'no fly zones' over prisons. As usual too, no mention of the probation service even though this is key to rehabilitation, resettlement and reducing reoffending.

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No-fly zones for drones is headline-grabbing but distracting: though drones are highly-publicised as a source of illegal contraband they are dwarfed by that smuggled in by corrupt prison officers. But in view of the need to recruit staff, the drones get all the blame.

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Napo should comment about the rush to put 60% of POs into prisons (to be expensive clerks to do the Oasys that prison staff find themselves too busy to complete) until the new staff are in post and the powder kegs that are currently prisons have settled down.....prisoner released this week relates horror stories about current lack of respect for officers and bullying is rife...not an environment that I want to be shafted into.

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So how are NPS supposed to cope if 60% of their staff end up in prisons? Who will manage community sentences for high risk offenders? Oh I forgot, newly recruited PSO's!

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What the hell is going on in London CRC? A transfer-in case and the person supposedly managing the case called herself a 'responsible officer' and was unable to tell me what level of risk the offender was! She said she was 'not trained to assess risk'! We could refuse to accept cases where there is not an adequate risk assessment. For ***** sake Noms/MoJ, why are you continuing to allow this shambolic mess? Sort it out before we go the same way as the prisons and please get more properly trained staff. You are not selling potatoes here, we work with people and need professionals not call centre workers!

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They are in special measures after miserably failing the inspection. Not sure what the so called measures are but hopefully it may include getting rid of private company and putting in place proper management who know what they are doing!

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So, after her tawdry effort to revolutionise the prisons system & impose no fly zones for drones we have Justice Secretary & Lord Chancellor Truss who is happy to sit back in silence (dreaming of past good times when she was opening up new pork markets?) allowing the judiciary be vilified by the gutter press & the privatised probation services to disappear up their own business model.

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WL clearly regard the dispute with the unions and referral to ACAS as a sideshow that will have no influence on their plans. They are not interested in a collective agreement and if individuals are applying for exit packages, it would seem staff are marching to the WL music, not the unions. It's a replay of the Sodexo approach which also sidelined the unions, ably assisted by the union membership.

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Staff not marching to WL music. Most totally disillusioned and consider that things will be so dire soon that the VS money is worth going out on, rather than wait to see how it pans out with the union negotiations. It's down to the individuals decision around their self preservation. Good luck to all those who leave, and particularly for those who stay.

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It is each to their own! No one looking out for us so just have to get on with it and follow our instincts!

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If staff were marching to WL's music they would be staying, having listened to all the corporate horse shit about "changing a million lives" and claims that the all-singing, all-dancing new operating model will transform probation work as we know it. Given that we can all see through the lies, and have barely even seen any details of the operating model beyond the rehashed tiering model that is the BRAG system, the majority of staff know it can't possibly work, and realise that getting out now is the safest option.

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It's not over till the fat lady sings. ACAS talks not over yet so BGSW and DDC staff can still afford to wait before making final decision on VS. Why let WL shaft you.

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The union leadership in these situations is undermined by its members. There is no discipline, no solidarity. If staff are in unions they should follow union advice and not go their own sweet way, because by doing so they undermine their union and undermine those other members who seek to hold a union line. Whether it's crossing picket lines or applying for offers, this individual behaviour betrays the collective.

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Sit tight, don't go for voluntary severance. Better wait for WL to be pushed to their limits. They have no consideration for our legacy - don't walk to their tune. Stand up for yourself, ask questions ....... I'm standing firm for so long as I'm here, they have to pay me. Can't get any worse, so sticking it out til ACAS + Unions do their work.

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Yes stick it out as we can ask for our money they want my future they can F****** pay for it. I earned my career from hard work and several years study and poverty. They may see hundreds apply but no one with sense will take the penny when we are owed a pound and they have to go to bank or government with the keys Pay up Sharks.

CRC Dispute Latest 10

Thanks go to the reader for supplying the following from Working Links management and published on their intranet:-

Questions and Answers

Early Retirement

We have had numerous questions relating to the Early Retirement option and have captured the answers to these collectively below. To mitigate the need for compulsory redundancies, in areas where we have identified the need for fewer employees, we have put forward two offers for those who may choose to leave the organisation. One is a voluntary severance type of offer which is 3 weeks’ salary, capped at 52 weeks, paid as a lump sum – and the other one is an opportunity to consider early retirement. These two proposals are offered as an alternative.

If you are in an age group that qualifies for early retirement (individuals aged between 55 and 64) you have the option of early retirement as an alternative to the severance offer we have put forward. Early retirement taken now would enable you to access your unreduced pension (subject to the scheme rules). Where strain costs arise, these are calculated by the Pension Fund, and in order to allow you immediate access to your pension, are met by us. We do though take on board their value before accepting applications. This is because we do take affordability into account in connection with every individual application. If we do not agree to your application for early retirement, you will not be able to access your pension immediately.

All applications for the voluntary severance package that we have put forward are subject to affordability, and we don’t have funds to cover both voluntary severance and early retirement for any one individual. We will therefore look at applications we receive in the round, and will take affordability into account.

Voluntary Severance Scheme

When will I get to know if I have been accepted? 

Wales CRC: All applicants will be advised of the decision on their application by 21 October.
BGSW CRC: All applicants will be advised of the decision on their application by 9th November
DDC CRC: All applicants will be advised of the decision on their application by 9th November

What is the selection process for applications? 

The following factors will be taken into account when considering applications: the number of people in the employee’s area of work, business continuity, retention of skills and expertise, organisational and business needs of the future operating model, maximisation of effectiveness and efficiency and affordability and cost.

Why is this scheme not as generous as previous schemes that have been run? 

We believe that by offering a revised voluntary exit scheme for the remainder of our transformation programme we can continue to manage any exits from the business on a voluntary basis, mitigating the need for any compulsory redundancies.

If I am accepted for voluntary severance can I change my mind? 

Wales CRC: Employees who have been offered a voluntary exit will need to decide whether they want to accept this offer by 26 October. Anytime up to 26 October employees can change their mind. However, once an offer has been formally accepted the decision becomes binding.

BGSW CRC: Employees who have been offered a voluntary exit will need to decide whether they want to accept this offer by 16 November. Anytime up to 16 November employees can change their mind. However, once an offer has been formally accepted the decision becomes binding.

DDC CRC: Employees who have been offered a voluntary exit will need to decide whether they want to accept this offer by 16th November. Anytime up to 16th November employees can change their mind. However, once an offer has been formally accepted the decision becomes binding.

If I apply for voluntary severance and are not offered it, what role will I then have? 

You will remain in your substantive role.

Are voluntary severance decisions going to be based on local area needs? 

Yes, any decisions will be based on local staffing requirements and area needs.

Can I apply for a voluntary exit if I am on maternity leave? If I do, will I need to repay the half maternity pay as I would not be returning for three months? 

Yes, people on maternity can apply for this voluntary severance scheme. We would not expect the half pay element of maternity pay to be repaid 

Other

Is the Change Policy a contractual requirement that cannot be changed without agreement from the NNC? 

The Change Policy is not a contractual requirement.

If I take a lower grade post will my pay be protected? 

Yes, your pay will be protected in line with your local CRC policy. Please review this for more information.

What rationale has been used to map people into roles? 

Individuals will have been mapped into a role if their current substantive role is contained within the new structure and there is no significant change in the duties and responsibilities of the role following restructuring. Where roles are not an exact match but are broadly similar based on the job content, competencies and qualifications if applicable, people will be matched to roles.

How much opportunity is there for me to move from my role to another job variation? 

Once we have completed this transformation process, where vacancies exist going forward these will be advertised and employees will be able to apply in the usual way.

Can I apply for a reduction in hours? 

 Any individual can apply for a reduction in hours in the usual way via your local CRC policy

--oo00oo--

Probation union updates

As we move forward with our transformation plans we are continuing to consult with the probation unions about our proposed changes and new ways of working – and ultimately what impact this will have on people. We’re sharing this information with you too, and earlier this year you will have attended a briefing where our proposals were discussed and you also had the opportunity to have your say to help shape and influence the changes. More recently you have had the opportunity to dial into regular calls where each area of our proposed new model has been discussed in greater detail, and we’ve continued to share information through Justice News and our management teams.

Because of the changes we need to make to the business to ensure our future success, you will be aware that we feel we have more people than we need in certain areas of the business and this is something we are discussing with the unions. We are keen to ensure everyone is kept informed on these discussions as we work to try and minimise this impact. And as we have the group intranet in place, and a platform that is accessible to all people working across the business, we have created this area which is dedicated to our ongoing dialogue with the unions to ensure you are up to date.

The below table outlines the current concerns the unions have raised and how we are addressing them. In the table opposite you can view the supporting correspondence.

Voluntary Severance scheme

The unions have requested that we put the Voluntary Severance scheme we have recently opened in the CRCs on hold and refrain from agreeing to any of the existing Voluntary Severance applications until further dialogue has taken place.

We feel that this scheme is in the interests of our people, who have already responded on a voluntary basis and in good numbers, and we will continue with the scheme as per the proposed timescale that has been shared locally. We do not feel it is fair or reasonable for the unions to prevent our people being able to take up this voluntary scheme, which has ultimately been put in place to mitigate the need for any compulsory redundancies.

Work with the Arbitration and Conciliation Advisory Service

At a recent Joint Secretaries meeting, which was held to try and resolve our ongoing dispute, it was suggested that our consultation activity would benefit from the intervention of a third party in the form of the Arbitration and Conciliation Advisory Service (ACAS). We are fully supportive of this and welcome the approach.

We are currently arranging a meeting with ACAS and hope that this intervention will allow us to end the ongoing dispute and continue with our national, and local, union meetings as normal so that we can continue to consult on our proposals.

The unions requested we withdraw the Section 188 notification we submitted to them in January advising of the proposed employee reductions

We are concerned that the removal of the Section 188 could give a confusing message to our people in that headcount reductions are not being considered, when they are. However, we recognise that the information in the Section 188 is now out of date and needs to be refreshed. We also recognise that we are not actively considering compulsory redundancies. We wish to continue to mitigate the risk of making any compulsory redundancies by seeking volunteers to exit in line with our headcount reductions.

Proposed headcount reductions and revised Voluntary Redundancy Scheme 

We have recently undertaken a further session with the unions to ensure they fully understand our proposals and the reasons for them. We have discussed a revised Voluntary Redundancy (VR) scheme and it is our intention to use this revised scheme for the remainder of our transformation programme, when offering VR in certain parts of the business where we know we have more people than we need. By doing this it means we can continue to manage any exits from the business on a voluntary basis, mitigating the need for any compulsory redundancies, which is something we are really keen to do.

We are disappointed that the unions have asked us not to progress with this revised VR scheme but instead continue to offer the EVR scheme which would mean we would have no other option but to move to a compulsory redundancy situation at this point, due to affordability of the current scheme. We do not agree with this request and our intention has always been to avoid compulsory redundancies wherever we can. We have now submitted our plans to the NNC Joint Secretaries for consideration. While this process is running we will be discussing with our people across the three CRCs the proposed VR scheme, including what the scheme is, who is currently eligible for it and how to apply.

Commencement of consultation if Compulsory Redundancy happens

We have confirmed with the unions that should compulsory redundancies become necessary then we would undertake a 45 day formal consultation period and would wish to engage with them in accordance with the CRC local redundancy policies.

Halt the process of transformation to enable reflection

We have made clear that we cannot alter our end point of March 2017 and we believe our people are extremely keen to move ahead so that they can resolve their own positions, whatever that might be. We do not think it is in our employees’ interests to delay our plans and we are very keen to offer certainty and clarity. However, we have reviewed our timetable and have built in added time for reflection.

Announce an early retirement scheme

We already have an early retirement scheme in place and, as it always has been, information is available on our local intranets. If people would like to discuss the scheme in more detail please contact your local HR lead.

Use of temporary and agency employee

We have committed to avoiding using temporary and agency employees, subject to maintaining business effectiveness. We have an enormous geographical area to cover and have shortages in some parts of the geography that we cannot cover by redeploying people from other areas. Nevertheless, we are already reducing our use of agency personnel where operationally this is feasible.

Introduce a recruitment freeze

This is something we introduced a while ago, and we will continue a freeze on all permanent recruitment where the role may provide opportunities for redeployment. Only business critical roles, approved by a member of the Executive Team, can be recruited for. Our preference is to recruit to these roles using internal people where possible.

Consider secondment opportunities

Secondment opportunities will be pursued where appropriate as a way of reducing job losses. We are also sharing all opportunities across the wider Working Links group and a number of employees have taken up permanent and secondment roles through this route.

Liz Truss - Not Up to Much

So, we now know the contents of Liz Truss's much-vaunted White Paper on dealing with the prison crisis and the general view of expert opinion is that it's not up to much - a bit like the minister in fact. No mention of sentencing reforms or the probation service. We'll be hearing a lot more about this over the coming days, but here's a starter with Ken Clarke writing in the Guardian and he states the obvious:-

Ken Clarke: prison changes won't work until sentencing is reformed

The justice secretary, Elizabeth Truss, has been warned by her Conservative predecessor Ken Clarke that her major prison reform programme will be “impossible to achieve” unless she addresses the “prison works” sentencing policies of the past 20 years that have doubled the jail population to a record 85,000 in England and Wales.

Clarke welcomed the justice secretary’s new prison plan but told MPs she needed to “take the courageous decision to start addressing some of the sentencing policies of the 1990s/2000s, which accidentally doubled the prison population in those overcrowded slums and actually make sure our prisons are for serious criminals who need punishment”.

His warning came after the Prison Governors Association welcomed Truss’s decision to recruit an extra 2,500 prison officers to “help halt the staggering rise in prison violence” but said her package will not have an immediate impact “as the real challenge now is actually getting staff through the gates”. The justice secretary acknowledged that there are serious recruitment problems in London and the south-east.

In the Commons, Truss confirmed that a prison safety and reform bill would be introduced into parliament in the new year to increase freedoms for governors, improve education opportunities for offenders and close old and inefficient jails as part of the biggest overhaul of the prison system for a generation.

She rejected, however, Clarke’s warning of the need to tackle the inflation in sentencing that was introduced under Michael Howard’s punitive “prison works” policy and which has seen the jail population in England and Wales jump from 42,000 in 1990 to more than 85,000 this week. Truss said she was not in favour of such “arbitrary reductions” in the prison population.

The detailed white paper published on Thursday, Prison Safety and Reform, confirms the plans for a new anti-drugs strategy, to devolve budgets to governors and to introduce a system of league tables and a new trigger for the justice secretary to intervene in failing prisons.

It discloses that the prison authorities intend to tackle deliveries of drugs and other contraband by drone with trials to detect and block them. They are also talking to the drone industry about the potential to programme the GPS coordinates of prison no-fly zones into the majority of drones on the market so they are blocked from overflying jails.

The white paper confirms the plans to open the next “supersized” 1,000 plus-inmate jail at Wellingborough in Northamptonshire and says a planning application will also be submitted to build a new prison at Glen Parva in Leicestershire.

It also discloses plans to open five new “community prisons” for women as part of a £1.3bn programme to provide 10,000 modern prison places by 2020.

The white paper also confirms the commitment to a “major programme of closures” of the “oldest and most inadequate” prisons over the next five years including a plan to reconfigure the estate, which has a surplus of 10,500 local prison places and a shortage of 14,400 resettlement and training places.

Truss says that former prisons at Dover and Haslar, Portsmouth, which have recently been immigration removal centres, will not be reopened as prisons. The white paper doesn’t name Pentonville, the Victorian jail dubbed the “grimmest of the grim” and which Michael Gove identified as a candidate for closure. But it does mention another Victorian London jail, Wandsworth, which is supposed to be a remand prison and yet only a third of its 1,600 population is awaiting trial or sentence.

The white paper also confirms that the prison service intends to press ahead with anti-extremism plans to set up a network of separate specialist units to house “the most subversive individuals” in the prison system despite a recent French decision to abandon a similar system.

Truss said that the recruitment of an extra 2,500 staff, including 400 she announced at the Tory party conference, would enable a new system of dedicated officers with each responsible for six inmates. She acknowledged that there were particular recruitment difficulties in London and the south-east but said she hoped new recruits would come from the armed forces among others. A prison officer apprenticeship scheme to be introduced next year will provide 1,000 new officers and a graduate scheme will provided 40 more a year.

The shadow justice secretary, Richard Burgon, criticised the package as “too little, too late”, saying: “It’s 2,500 extra [officers], after over 6,000 fewer on the frontline. Will the secretary of state now admit that there is a Conservative cuts-created crisis in safety in our prisons?

“The root cause of this prison crisis is the political decision to cut our prison service back to the bone. Today’s announcement feels a lot like too little, too late,” he said.

--oo00oo--

Here's Rob Allen's take on the White Paper published on the Justice Gap Website:-

'A glimmer of hope but the challenges remain formidable’

The government’s prison white paper published this afternoon – Prison Safety and Reform – purports to be ‘a blueprint for the biggest overhaul of our prisons in a generation’. That’s a less grandiose claim than David Cameron’s February announcement of the biggest prison shake-up since Victorian times but ambitious none the less.

Do the proposals justify the hype?

Putting back 2,500 staff into a service which has shed 7,000 in six years is no more than a necessary corrective to a badly conceived programme of cuts for which Messrs Clarke and Grayling must take prime responsibility. It will enable a ‘new’ offender management model in which an officer will have specific responsibility for offering one to one support to no more than six prisoners. That’s neither new – it’s the old personal officer scheme – nor plausible, particularly in busy local prisons.

More significant are the plans for governors to have more control over budgets, staffing arrangements and what goes on in their prisons. As well as increasing their role in managing education and health care they will be able to introduce operational policies that fit their prison rather than having to comply to the letter with hundreds of detailed instructions. How far this will go is not clear. Could a Governor of a prison for long termers meet their responsibility to strengthen prisoners’ family ties by introducing conjugal visits for example?

Like much in the white paper, we must await the detail.

While prisons may welcome a promised bonfire of regulations, they’ll be less keen on the monitoring regime which will see league tables and stronger powers for inspectorates and the Ministry of Justice to step in when things are going wrong. There’s a lot in the paper about the clarifying responsibilities, creating transparency and measuring performance, complete with a plumbing diagram to show who does what in the system – reflecting perhaps Liz Truss’s experience as a management accountant. But the paper expresses surprise that there is no clarity over what that system as a whole should be delivering. A statutory purpose for the prison system will be created by the end of this Parliament, although there does not seem too much wrong with the longstanding duty to look after prisoners ‘with humanity and to help them lead law-abiding and useful lives in custody and after release’.

It is 25 years since a white paper made such a wide range of proposals for prisons. The reform agenda from Custody, Care and Justice ended abruptly in the mid 1990s after a disastrous series of escapes. One of the inquiries into those found a time of very mixed ideologies within the Prison Service intent on increasing physical security but wishing to provide the greater element of care and positive inmate relationships which Lord Woolf’s report into the Strangeways riot had encouraged. Prison Safety and Reform contains a similar mix of ideas. More searching, drug testing and cracking down on criminality and radicalisation on the one hand; more rewarding incentives and privileges, increased work and training opportunities and greater use of temporary release on the other.

It’s hard to combine the two approaches but the paper’s acknowledgment of the need to invest in leadership and staff training offers a glimmer of hope that it can be done. The new prisons being built provide a chance to develop a safe and positive culture from the start – particularly five small community prisons for women which we will hear more about next year.

But the challenges remain formidable. One of the 1990s inquiries noted a yawning gap between the prison service’s ideals and actual practice. It’s got worse and whether today’s proposals go far enough in bridging it remains to be seen. Kenneth Clarke suggested in Parliament today it is unlikely unless his successor but two takes ‘the courageous decision to start addressing some of the sentencing policies of the 1990s and the 2000s, which accidentally doubled the prison population in those overcrowded slums?’ Many would share that view.

Prison Staffing Crisis 2

We are all expecting Liz Truss to make a statement later today about the state of the prison staffing crisis - a crisis brought about by the government of course. Here is Alan Travis writing in the Guardian:-

Prisons in England and Wales get boost of 2,500 new staff to tackle violence

An extra 2,500 frontline prison staff are to be recruited to tackle soaring levels of gang violence, drug abuse and attacks on staff and inmates inside prisons across England and Wales, the justice secretary is to announce.The new officers to be promised by Liz Truss are equivalent to a 15% boost in prison officer numbers at a cost of £104m a year and represent a key part of a white paper reform programme designed to stabilise an under-pressure prison system and cut reoffending rates.

Introducing the plans, the minister will say that extra staff “will help us crack down on the toxic cocktail of drugs, drones and mobile phones that are flooding our prisons, imperilling the safety of staff and offenders and thwarting reform”. The announcement follows an emergency £14m funding package last month to recruit 400 extra officers in 10 of the most challenging prisons in the country. This represents a significant boost to the 18,000 frontline prison officers and will go some way to restoring the 30% cut in staffing that had taken place since 2010 as part of the Cameron government’s austerity plan.

The latest prison safety figures show that assaults on staff and inmates had risen 40% in the past year to 65 a day, while there are record levels of prison suicides and self-harm – although previous ministers did not accept there was a link between prison funding and people killing themselves inside jail. Prisoner numbers, at 85,000, are also at record levels.

A wider package of safety measures proposed also includes mandatory drug testing of all offenders on entry and exit from prison, and the creation of “no-fly zones” over jails to tackle the new problem of drones dropping drugs and other contraband over the prison wall. The white paper is not expected to include details of how these no-fly zones will be enforced but the prisons minister Sam Gyimah told MPs on Tuesday that he was keeping a close eye on the Netherlands, where eagles are being used to stop drones.

Underlining the pressures on the prison service, Truss agreed to meet representatives of the Prison Officers Association (POA) earlier on Wednesday and to start urgent talks on health and safety inside prisons and serious problems in the recruitment and retention of staff. The POA had threatened to hold emergency meetings outside every jail before the morning prisoner unlocking in protest against the levels of violence behind bars, but suspended its action to allow talks with Truss to take place.

The white paper will include plans for a new “supersized” prison for 1,000-plus inmates to be built at Wellingborough, new powers for governors, testing of offenders’ levels of English and maths, a system of prison league tables and a new duty on the justice secretary to take over failing prisons.

“It is absolutely right that prisons punish people who commit serious crimes by depriving them of their most fundamental right: liberty,” Truss is expected to say. “However, our reoffending rates have remained too high for too long. So prisons need to be more than places of containment – they must be places of discipline, hard work and self improvement. They must be places where offenders get off drugs and get the education and skills they need to find work and turn their back on crime for good.”

Earlier the head of the POA, Mike Rolfe, said jails have been engulfed by a “bloodbath”. He told BBC Radio 4’s World at One: “It’s a bloodbath in prisons at this minute in time. Staff are absolutely on their knees, lost all morale, all motivation. Prisoners are scared. They want prison officers to be in charge, and the prison officers feel incapable to do that. Low staffing numbers, people leaving the job in droves, it’s a real bad mix, and it’s dangerous for everyone, staff and prisoners alike.”

Publication of the prison safety and reform white paper follows the pledge made by David Cameron in February when he was prime minister to undertake a radical overhaul of the prison system. Truss’s reform plans come after a pause during which detailed work on the radical ideas of her predecessor, Michael Gove, was undertaken to ensure they were deliverable.

Individual prison governors will be given more powers over education, work and health budgets, alongside new measures to hold them to account on an agreed set of standards that will include publishing prisons’ annual performance in league tables for the first time. These will include the results of the new mandatory drug-testing regime and the English and maths testing of offenders so that progress made inside particular jails can be measured. Justice ministry officials say that if a prison is shown to be failing by the chief inspector of prisons then the justice secretary will be under a new legal duty to intervene.

One of Gove’s ideas to be implemented in the reform package is the government’s £1.3bn “new for old” programme of closing dilapidated Victorian inner-city prisons and replacing them with 10,000 modern prison places by 2020. The first site to be earmarked for potential redevelopment under the programme is Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, which formerly housed a youth detention centre, then an adult training prison, before closing in 2012.

The chair of the parole board and former chief inspector of prisons, Prof Nick Hardwick, said last month that violence inside jails was now at its worst ever level. He described the recent murder in Pentonville prison as “the most extreme example of the decline in safety” that he and others have warned about for years.

--oo00oo--

Here's Rob Allen yet again stating the obvious that trying to increase prison staff will not solve the problem alone - action must be taken to reduce the prison population. The trouble is the government have done an excellent job of wrecking the probation service as well:-

Forget about the price tag? What to look for in the Prisons White Paper

Today’s meeting between Liz Truss and the POA will have come too late to influence the contents of tomorrow’s White Paper, but prison staff and those of us who care about prisons will be looking at two key elements if we are to have confidence in the government’s plans for the beleaguered service

First will it include a costed plan for properly staffing jails? It’s quite clear that in the Coalition years, faced with wholesale privatisation, public prisons accepted staffing levels in many cases too low to be safe, let alone achieve the lofty objectives subsequently promised by Messrs Gove and Cameron. While Mr Grayling is the main villain of the piece as the author of the Faustian pact forced on the service, Ken Clarke bears some blame for reaching too stringent a financial settlement with the Treasury back in 2010. When his plans for reducing prison numbers crashed and burned, the funds were not adjusted upwards to cope with new projections.

Six years on, the bottom line is that the benchmarking exercise which helped take a billion pounds out of the NOMS budget needs redoing and the resources found to fund what results from it. Just as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) were asked after the Mid Staffs Hospital disaster to look at safe staffing for nursing in adult inpatient wards in acute hospitals, an independent body should do so in respect of prisons. With an advisory board comprising personnel at all levels and ex prisoners, it should look seriously at how many staff are required to meet the expectations set by Prison Inspectors and the various recommendations made by them and the Ombudsman. Benchmarking Mark Two should be completed by Easter.

An alternative would be to return to 2010 frontline staffing levels - something recommended by last week's admirable RSA report. But whether Ms Truss has persuaded the Treasury to provide much in the way of additional cash must be doubtful. Her Permanent Secretary told the Justice Committee a fortnight ago that “the subject we talk about most in my executive committee is improving our finances and bearing down on the gap between our allocation and our projected spend.”

This means the White Paper must propose ways of reducing the prison population, the second and more controversial matter. I have argued that replacing short sentences with community supervision may be desirable but will not provide enough relief. In addition the Ministry will need to look to halt the upward drift in sentence lengths. A report I’ve written for Transform Justice, to be published next month, will argue that the time is right to revisit the aims and purposes of the Sentencing Council in order to reduce the extent to which courts impose imprisonment and the lengths of its terms. Ms Truss previously argued for longer sentences and tougher prisons but wherever she once wanted the ship of penal policy to go, she surely knows now her job is to keep it afloat.

Without manageable prisoner numbers and enough staff, the governor autonomy agenda – now known as empowerment – will not get prison reform very far. Nor will the £1.3 billion capital programme for 9 new prisons which are supposed to be completed by 2020. Expect some re-profiling of this. If Treasury rules allow, some of the funds could be used to boost the budgets for running existing prisons (and the new prison at Wrexham) more safely and for pump priming measures to divert low risk offenders from prison. This must be the priority for Ms Truss over the lifetime of the parliament rather than the grandiose schemes of her predecessor.

Serious Further Offence 5

I think I'm right in saying that the recent BBC Radio4 File on Four programme featured the Conner Marshall case and the family's attempts to obtain a copy of the Serious Further Offence report. Subsequently, it's been brought to my attention that the family are intending to try and pursue a legal case and are in the process of a crowdfunding appeal having been refused Legal Aid:-   

A voice for Conner
By Nadine Marshall

Who are you?

We are the parents of CONNER MARSHALL 18 years of age, who was viciously attacked and murdered in an unprovoked attack in Porthcawl in March 2015. Deeply upsetting is the knowledge that Braddon was known by authorities in addition to being supervised by Wales CRC/Probation service under two separate orders for previous violence, alcohol and drug offences. This information was never disclosed to us his parents, before or during the court case.

Despite a guilty verdict and life sentence, with a minimum of twenty years to be served has been handed down to David Braddon, 27.The very real living nightmare is a daily battle that we didn't chose to be a part of. The loss of a child is unimaginable and unfair to all parents.

The devastation and result of a single heinous act has left a family bereft, in turmoil, and ruined. Our family has disintegrated beyond recognition. In a single act we have each been cheated of life, stability, memories and consistency. Our future is uncertain and unpredictable due the huge impact on our financial, emotional, physical health and well being. 

What and why are you raising legal funds?

It is our hope to raise sufficient funds to enable 'A voice for Conner', by securing specific action against the Wales CRC/Probation service. This can only be done with the help of a specialist barrister and solicitor to provide advice and advocacy to pursue potential court action.

We want documents and evidence to be examined in order that steps can be taken to prevent other families being denied the truth and access to all information recorded.

Requests for legal aid have been declined on the basis that we as a family do not meet the eligibility criteria set out by the board governed by the Ministry of Justice.

Too many families have been let down and are still without truthful explanations and information relating to the death of a loved one. Despite families raising questions, the current procedures are unreliable and inconsistent.

We as parents have always insisted and made the very clear point that we would wish to have access to all known information in order to understand how a known criminal with several convictions and allegations with increasing drug and violence use could ever be deemed as ''Low risk'' and be able to non conform or not follow any directions laid down by a court .

After continual refusals from all agencies, we created an online public petition for access to the SFO. Successfully gaining almost 3,000 signatures in a matter of days and as a result of many hours and months of discussions and meetings with various agencies we have now gained access to the Serious Further Offence Report, which contains detailed information of the trail of events relating to the alleged support of Braddon by probation services in the weeks and months prior to the murder of our son. Contents of the full report are inexcusable and deeply upsetting. Failure of internal procedures are deemed acceptable and unforeseeable.

To date no other family in the UK has ever secured access to this document. Instead families are not told of any such report, or offered a summary report with the explanation that the document contents are for internal learning opportunities and not be released to families. Currently families are still being refused and denied access to either report. Detailed information surrounding the death of their loved one is withheld or refused.

This fact alone in our opinion is both unjust and unfair.

Worryingly, for our family the original summary report bears little resemblance to the full SFO, many details are redacted or omitted from the summary. The contents of this full report is totally unacceptable and deeply offensive and concerning. Several areas of deficiency and weakness are highlighted.

What's next in the legal process?

We are now seeking accountability, recompense and reassurances of practice overhaul and change, for maximum learning, and future prevention. Multiple agencies were supposedly supervising Braddon, yet this is despite many areas of supervision being missed, absent or non existent.

Radio and television programmes are due to be aired within the coming weeks, giving further details of our continuing campaign to secure ''A voice for Conner''

It is our view that there were circumstances and events which should have put the professionals on alert and would have led to Conner still being alive today if things had been managed appropriately with sufficient information sharing.

Discussions' with senior executives at NOMS/Wales CRC, in addition to numerous meetings with various MOJ official's have been unsuccessful in obtaining accountability or clarity. Rather department passing blame and responsibility to other departments or providers.

Is Tagging the Answer?

The MoJ has long harboured the expansion of tagging as a 'magic bullet' solution to all its prison overcrowding problems and cost reduction plans and my guess is it will feature heavily when Liz Truss has to answer Parliamentary questions this week. Here's Alan Travis writing in the Guardian on Friday:-  

GPS monitoring tags trial could help cut rising prison population

Up to 1,500 offenders are to be fitted with satellite-tracking tags in a Ministry of Justice trial intended to provide a viable alternative to custody and stabilise the relentless rise in the prison population. The 12-month satellite-tracking trials, already under way in two parts of England, come as the latest prison population figures published on Friday show that inmate numbers have risen by more than 1,000 in under two months to 85,108, a new record.

Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said the rapid increase in inmate numbers since early September was unusual and is placing additional pressure on an overstretched system already experiencing record levels of violence, self-harm and suicide.

The GPS monitoring tags, which are fixed to the offender’s ankle, will be used to enforce exclusion zones such as a particular address, a place such as a town or a football ground, or a number of locations such as train stations, airports or city centres. The tags can also be used to create an inclusion zone that the offender is not allowed to leave, such as a building, city or even country, and can be used to ban them from associating with other people who are also tagged. Up to 50 exclusion or inclusion zones can be created, which can be limited by time, day or a particular date.

The tags are designed to be difficult to remove and require two hours’ charging every day. The official guidance says GPS-tagged offenders will be banned from “unsuitable activities”, including water sports such as diving and surfing, as well as contact sports such as football, rugby, hockey and kickboxing, because they risk hurting themselves or damaging the tag. They may also have problems visiting some hospitals as the tag may interfere with medical equipment.

Ministry of Justice guidance on the details of the trials published on Friday says that a monitoring centre, staffed 24 hours a day, records the movements of tagged offenders, reports alerts and responds immediately to breaches. The trials are taking place in eight police force areas across the Midlands and south-east England.

The pilot scheme is available to encourage courts to make greater use of bail rather than prison remand and community and suspended sentences, and as a sentence in itself. They will also encourage prison governors to make greater use of early-release schemes, prevent recalls of those already out on licence, and could lead to the parole board ordering the release of more inmates on indefinite public-protection sentences.

Plans to introduce satellite tracking of offenders were first announced 12 years ago, but official trials in 2007 raised the question of whether the benefits could be delivered at a price that justified a national rollout of the scheme. The renewed attempt to introduce the next-generation tags was first raised by David Cameron in his speech on prison reform in February.

The MoJ guidance says “there is real potential for electronic monitoring to act as a tool that could help stabilise demand on the prison estate. It will be critical for decision-makers that we demonstrate that GPS tagging is a viable and useful alternative to custody. The pilots will also test whether satellite tags do modify the behaviour of offenders.”

Case studies cited by the MoJ include a convicted football hooligan who is banned from the Madejski stadium in Reading on match days. The tag will warn the offender if he approaches the exclusion zone around the stadium and alert the monitoring centre if he goes into the off-limits zone.

In a second example, the GPS tag can be used to keep a convicted burglar out of jail but allow him to keep his job, even though his workplace is in the middle of a number of residential areas where he was caught burgling. The GPS tag would allow him to go work on a prescribed route, but if he wanders off into any of the nearby banned residential areas the monitoring centre is alerted.

The first pilot area covers Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, Leicester and the West Midlands, and the tags are being trialled for court-imposed bail, community and suspended sentence orders and in parole board cases. In the second pilot, covering Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, the satellite tags are being used in prison-recall cases, early release and home-detention curfew cases, and parole board cases.

--oo00oo--

Professor Mike Nellis has written extensively on the subject of tagging, most recently in an article for the British Journal of Criminal Justice March 2016 and here is a taster:-

ELECTRONIC MONITORING AND PENAL REFORM: CONSTRUCTIVE RESISTANCE IN THE AGE OF "COERCIVE CONNECTEDNESS" Mike Nellis, Emeritus Professor of Criminal and Community Justice, School of Law, University of Strathclyde

Abstract 

Alongside its strategy for privatising the probation service, the Ministry of Justice in the Conservative-led Coalition government (2010-2015) hatched a plan to upgrade from radio frequency electronic monitoring (EM) to a much larger scale, and solo use of GPS tracking. The plan failed, but was revealing nonetheless about the government’s policy intentions, to transform the community supervision of offenders more according to commercial-technological criteria than evidence-based penal ones. It is unclear if the new Conservative government, and new Minister of Justice, will retain the same misplaced confidence in an all GPS approach to EM and make a second, better finessed attempt at “disruptive innovation”. It is vital however that at this point in debate on the future of EM in England and Wales that probation interests and penal reform bodies abandon their traditional aloofness towards EM. They must recognise that it is merely an affordance, a customised coercive form, of the ubiquitous digital connectedness that characterises our age, and engage more actively in shaping the wise use of monitoring technology. Failure to do so will guarantee the continuing – but unwarranted - domination of rightwing, neoliberal narratives about the purpose, direction and scale of EM use. Other models, better aligned with community justice, already have prototypes in police-based Integrated Offender Management schemes, but are badly in need of professional and political champions.

Conclusion 

The "New World" all-GPS EM strategy devised by the Conservative-led Coalition Government, informed by Policy Exchange and led by Chris Grayling was a commercial, technological and penal fiasco and there is nothing to be regretted about its passing - if indeed it has passed. The fact of its failure, in this iteration at least, is less important than what was revealed by the plan itself. That said, its failure serves to confirm Nicola Lacey's (2013) argument that abstract, reified visions of neoliberal practice can't be implemented without viable institutional structures and networks which are capable of carrying them. The Ministry of Justice will doubtless work to improve these structures and networks; whether it will revive or revise the original vision of GPS, or something more modest and sensible, remains to be seen. 

Michael Gove, the present Justice Minister, is no less neoliberal in outlook than his predecessor, but may have more talent for finessing the implementation process. Like Grayling, he is a committed marketiser, an ambitious disrupter of public sector provision, a confirmed Brexiteer unlikely to be receptive to cautious European models of EM, and opposed to strategic reductions in the size of the prison population (Gentleman, 2016). Marshalling an evidence-base of some sorts, consulting more with relevant interests and establishing GPS pilots are all sensible in themselves, as well as means by which the Ministry of Justice can regain lost legitimacy in this area of policy-making. Nonetheless, any sign of continuing commitment to an all-GPS system or the bulk monitoring of 75,000 offenders per day as envisaged by Policy Exchange will be evidence that commercialtechnological factors rather than penal factors are still driving the vision and implementation strategy, and must be contested. 

But more than issue-specific contestation is needed: the bigger picture must be appreciated. The temporary implementation hiatus in EM policy creates an opportunity for penal reform bodies to reconsider their position on EM in England and Wales, and become more than simply reactive to it. Such groups need to engage in constructive resistance, shaping not rejecting, on the understanding that EM is now such an integral element in a digitally connected world that it is neither going away nor growing less important, and that unless they attempt to shift the centre of gravity in public and professional debate, policy will continue to be dominated by untrammelled right wing interests. Historically, and from experience, penal reformers know, more than most, that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing, but for want of an informed understanding of the digital technoculture in which EM is rooted, they have come close to letting this happen. 

Penal reformers need to enter the EM debate with (to use a somewhat passé term) a "hacker ethic" in mind, a sense that EM technologies are not solely owned by government, that they can be appropriated and deployed to better, more creative ends than those who control the dominant narratives about them have thus far been prepared to concede. It is precisely because the various modalities of EM can - among other things - add a flexible element of control to community supervision that it is capable of enabling viable alternatives to custody - something well understood by most European probation services - and the fact that Gove has already decided not to exploit this strategic aspect of it is an own goal on his part, and an open one for penal reformers. 

The challenge for probation interests and penal reform bodies in England is pressing, because as Hucklesby et al. (2016) have intuited, in relation to Europe as a whole, a new surge of enthusiasm for EM seems imminent, indeed already underway, in which it is likely that the Ministry of Justice will wish to remain at the fore. Hucklesby (2016) herself has quite aptly likened this surge of interest to the opening of Pandora's Box, out of which nothing good comes, but a more commercial, socio-technical account can be given of what lies behind it. Over the past two years the Bank of America, the Bank of England, the World Economic Forum and sundry economic commentators have been forecasting a vast expansion of automation and robotics in global businesses which will have far-reaching consequences for many middle class occupations, including legal and welfare professions, particularly those whose working practices and processes have become so standardised that they can readily be replicated (and improved) by smart machines (Susskind & Susskind, 2015; Treanor, 2016). One aspect of this upcoming tech transformation is the socalled “internet of things”, which will further normalise the idea of ubiquitous environmental sensors constantly feeding real-time data to monitoring centres for analysis and profiling, both aggregated and individualised, and it is inevitable, given past trends in the adoption of technology, that law enforcement will seek in some way or other to harness its potential. 

GPS tracking devices are essentially internet-linked mobile sensors, and many aspects of EM systems are already automated: the larger the system the more algorithmic processing of events is required. While there is no simple, mechanistic relationship between "the rise of the robots" (Ford, 2015) and “the internet of things” (Greengard, 2015) and EM as such, they both give further symbolic and practical credence to the value of "non-human" approaches to increasing efficiency in and control over a range of business, administrative and governmental processes. Coupled with that, many EM manufacturers are nested in and overlap with the same digital ecosystems and research and investment networks, and the same corporate futurist imaginaries from which automation, robotics and remote sensing are arising, and will be emboldened by the same trends, which modernising, efficiency-seeking governments will facilitate and align with in greater or lesser degree. 

It is tempting, even plausible, in retrospect, to see the English Ministry of Justice's efforts at simultaneously upgrading EM and downgrading probation from 2012 onwards as an early, localised expression of these broader global developments, a step towards “nonhuman” (or less human) offender management. Knowledge of these developments, and the momentum which will flow from them into and through the "penal field", necessarily raises the stakes in debate on EM, because the dismal spectre of "the probation officer" going the same way as the lamplighter in the age of electrification looms even larger. Soft “people skills” might well survive in future work with offenders – because empathy can’t be automated – but not (unless it is fought for) as the basis of organised professional employment, more as lower status work such as part-time mentoring. Thus, all future critical engagement with EM in Britain, indeed in Europe, must now be grounded in a more informed understanding of the affordances of the digital world, and of the potential and limits of "technological solutionism" more generally (Morozov, 2013). The focus must be on constructively resisting excess in EM – and using it wisely - rather than a wishful, anachronistic belief that it is still simply a discrete and peripheral intervention, easily derided and readily contained, and without capacity to disrupt existing penal arrangements – especially probation services.

Notes

 1. Two representatives of potential bidders for the third contract, initially uncertain of its commercial viability, separately told me that in private meetings at the Ministry of Justice in 2013 officials tantalized them with a figure of "about 75,000 per day" as the anticipated, eventual size of the GPS market. Tipped off by Napo, an associate business editor at The Independent phoned the Ministry of Justice media office to confirm the 75,000 per day figure, which they did - only to withdraw it a day later. I wrote "Upgrading EM, Downgrading Probation: reconfiguring offender management in England and Wales" (Nellis 2015) specifically to expose and critique the Ministry of Justice's ambitions for GPS, once I had found out what they were. I am grateful to Ioan Durnescu, the editor of the European Journal of Probation, for publishing it so quickly. 

2. Both US pioneers of prototypical thinking on EM in the 1960s and 70s, the Schwitzgebel brothers and Joseph Mayer, were confident that monitoring technology would inexorably - and massively - reduce the need for imprisonment in the future. In England, journalist and EM champion Tom Stacey believed the same. Despite all experience to the contrary, such techno-utopianism dies hard. It misunderstands the enduring symbolic and material power of physical imprisonment. Only if monitoring technology and supportive supervision regimes are fused with sustained political will and operationalised by appropriate institutions might there be such a transformative effect on penal practice, and with good or ill results (or both), depending on how the technology was used (see Nellis, 2013). 

3. The term "hacker" did not originally denote activists who illicitly accessed and exposed computerised data, but activists who would put the burgeoning affordances of the coming digital society to creative and democratic use, not least because, without informed political intervention from below, the new technologies could so obviously be used to bolster corporate and governmental authority. The term "hacker ethic", which has some affinity with the "community justice" emphasis on action-from-below, was shortlived, but the sensibility lives on and, in respect of EM, can usefully be commended to probation interests and penal reformers (see Himanen, 2001). 

(The full article is available via BJCJ website)