Doncaster in the Lead

Alongside the news that Ken Clarke has taken the decision to privatise the first state-run prison by giving the HMP Birmingham contract to G4S, he also decided to renew Serco's contract in respect of HMP and YOI Doncaster. This is now set to be the first and hence flagship project in testing if a Payment by Result scheme will work in terms of running a whole prison.

Since construction by the Prison Service in 1994, 'Doncatraz' as it is affectionately known locally has been operated by the multi-national private company Serco. They have just been awarded a further 15 year contract by the Ministry of Justice, but this time a proportion of their fee will be linked to a reduction in offending by prisoners following release. Although the contract is worth £250 million, £25 million of that will only be paid if the one year re-offending rate of offenders released falls by 5 per cent. But they will be in line for a bonus if the the reduction reaches 10 per cent. Judging by their stated aim of a "15 per cent reduction in crime by 2008"  it looks like they've been preparing for this type of contract for some time. 

Now Serco and the government must be feeling pretty confident to have agreed such a deal as clearly it is very much in both parties interest to see that it works. Despite having had quite a bad reputation for bullying, I notice that the Director John Biggin was named as Public Servant of the Year in 2010, partly in recognition of his efforts in improving performance. I think this is no mean achievement seeing that he works for a private company, the award is sponsored by Unison and arranged by the Guardian newspaper!  

It's interesting that Serco have chosen two new voluntary sector partners to work with them in trying to win this cash, Turning Point  the former purely drug treatment charity and Catch 22 another charity working with young people. These are two further examples of how charities are repositioning themselves in order to benefit from the developing market in contract offender work. Catch 22 is the result of an amalgamation and it's particularly ironic that one of their distant constituent bodies was the original London Police Court Mission. Of course in 1907 the staff that worked for them became none other than probation officers. The wheel of history takes another fascinating turn. 

Of course one of the major problems with this PbR idea is how the payment gets to the right agency that supposedly affected the change. A glance at the Doncaster prison website shows that they already have a well-established re-settlement programme running with partners like the Bridge Project. It will be fascinating to see how the bureaucracy will be developed so that payment gets apportioned fairly given the number of agencies involved. It should be noted that there is absolutely no mention of probation being involved in any of this.