Martin Narey's Thoughts

The House of Commons Justice Affairs Committee have recently taken evidence from Martin Narey, the former Director General of the Prison Service and later first Chief Executive of NOMS, the National Offender Management Service. Readers will recall that he resigned from NOMS when it started going pear-shaped and has been in charge of Barnardo's for the last six years.

I've always admired Martin and think he generally talks sense, but I find his explanation and defence of the introduction of so-called 'end-to-end offender management' astonishing and naive in the extreme. He told the Committee that he knew that Probation Officers were not treated with respect by staff in the Prison Service, so he thought this could be addressed by giving them "authority and influence" over the management of offenders whilst serving the custodial element of sentences. 

You will recall that under the NOMS structure (which was of course a takeover of Probation by the Prison Service) Probation Officers were rebranded as 'Offender Managers' and they supposedly assumed control of the prisoners passage through the prison system. So the person who knew least about how the prison system worked, that was based in an office miles away from the prison, would be expected to chair sentence planning meetings, often by video link due to travel restrictions, made up mostly of people who held a completely differing professional and cultural background and in the process attempt to arrive at meaningful decisions. The concept might at first glance have sounded brilliant, especially that bit I recall about 'breaking down the silos' but in practice it's proved a complete disaster, not helped by the inadequacies of OASys and the failure of the replacement joint IT system C-NOMIS.  

He went on to say that the success of NOMS had been predicated on a deal being struck between the Attorney General and Home Secretary that would have effectively put a cap on the prison population, but the then Labour government bottled out. He explained that in all the years that he was running prisons and enjoying increasing budgets from Jack Straw for training and drug treatment, he was not able to spend more per head overall because increased prison numbers swallowed all the increased resources.

Not surprisingly he was scathing of the Prison Officers Association as being the last "untouched and unreconstructed union" that only really started to change when he introduced some competition in the form of private prisons. He feels that any public service that is not open to competition is likely to be run badly and thus fully supports contestability being introduced into the Probation Service. Astonishingly he feels that even "imperfect competition is better than none at all." In passing he effectively said that he never believed the figures supplied by the Probation Service for completed Unpaid Work hours.

Martin bemoaned the immature level of debate about sentencing policy in this country and harked fondly back to the days of Douglas Hurd in Margaret Thatchers government who coined the phrase "prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse" the effect of which was to talk the prison population down by 4,000 to 39,000. He felt that in his view Ken Clarke was on the right track and that the inexorable rise in prison numbers had to stop. 

Finally, he stated categorically that in his view the use of reconviction data as a way of measuring success or failure was "almost completely useless" and that reoffending rates using proxy indicators such as accommodation or employment were instead the key in helping to assess improvement.