Whilst all the right-wing press were celebrating the news that Ken Clarke had been forced to undertake a u-turn on sentencing discounts for guilty pleas, more considered commentators were left wondering how the planned savings of £130million could be delivered from the prisons budget. After all in Kens overall sentencing and rehabilitation reform plans, the lions share of savings were due to be as a result of this measure alone. It may still survive for offences other than rape or other violent acts, but apparently the Prime Minister is now keen on the idea being ditched altogether.
But far from being all-washed up, Ken Clarke is a wily operator who sensed there might be problems way back last year in the fraught discussions with the Chancellor. As a result of some clever negotiation he secured a special deal whereby the Treasury agreed to fund any shortfall, should he be unable to reduce the prison population for any reason. No doubt he reminded his boss of this when he went into no10 for a chat on Wednesday.
Today is the day start of the governments flagship new Work Programme that's designed to get some of the most entrenched unemployed back to work. This group are featured fairly regularly on Inspector Gadjets blogsite and of course many are well known to the Probation Service. Depending on your point of view, it could be seen as an admirable attempt at tackling an enduring problem, pretty much created by an earlier Conservative government intent on massaging the unemployment figures by pushing people onto Sickness Benefit. Or it could be viewed as an opportunity for the private sector to rake in up to £3billion over the 7 year life of the contracts.
Under the Payment by Results method of rewarding contractors, a considerable 'price' is now attached to this 'difficult to place' group and can amount to a staggering £14,000 if they remain in a job for between 6 months and 2 years. With potential rewards like that available to the likes of Serco or G4S, no wonder there was keen competition for the contracts. Whilst there might be a temptation to 'cherry pick' easy cases, no doubt some interesting thinking has been going on as to how the difficult group can be incentivised to keep any job. That's where the big money is. Wouldn't it be novel if the person got a big chunk of that sort of dosh on offer?
We wait to see, but meanwhile it should be a sobering thought for Probation Officers that the stick for non-compliance is considerable with Benefits withdrawn for 13 weeks on a first failure and 26 weeks on a second. Sanctions like that can't fail to have a potential knock-on effect for possible criminal activity, which of course will be self-defeating in terms of another government policy of reducing crime and custodial sentences.
Finally, with all the depressing stuff about how some families and clients view probation, it's good to see at least one positive story has surfaced on the Prisoners Families Views website.
(I'm off for a few days so there will be a break in transmission until early next week)
Jim,
ReplyDeleteEnjoy your mini- break..you may find this piece of recent research of interest in alerting Probation Staff to 'best practice ' in working with families( where it happens!)...
http://www.barefootresearch.org.uk/families-and-parenting/working-with-children-and-families-of-offenders/
Regards
Mike
Don't assume that this is coning out of the prisons budget or that treasury will cough up. The way I see it the whole of MoJ is in the frame, and No 10 is no fan of probation.
ReplyDeleteKPMG has the ear of Government - expect PbR to underpin a far more radical shake up. Much easier to break up probation than prisons
http://www.kpmg.co.uk/pubs/204000%20Payment%20For%20Success%20Access.pdf
The government has NO interest in probation. I know little about probation, I just found a thoughtful blog in a noisy wilderness, that let me post without annoying signups so I'm sticking around to read and comment a bit...
ReplyDeleteG4S and Serco? That's what the govt want. G4S have a history (studded with brutal news reports about their failures) of manhandling prisoners and property! Now they are a private army to put people to work. This is how the new workhouses will be built. This is how the small private prisons the govt doesn't want to run will be put to use. Last decade, it was the asylum seekers who saw this truth first hand, but soon most people in the UK will likely get a personal taste of it.
Like 'care in the community' and other failed results of a dereliction of real caring or responsibility, we're reaping what was sowed in an age of aspiring home ownership and greed based on weird financial wheezes instead of actual work, done for real reasons. All those who could not have these unrealistic aspirations are now so populous that the leaders have decided they can't afford to spread the wealth anymore, they're pulling up drawbridges behind them as they vanish into their castles and bellow from their pulpits and battlements. Meanwhile outside their gated communities, mansions, or whatever they are lucky enough to keep, a huge number of people with not much to hope for are going to face thugs of a type once concealed inside high walls in more ugly and brutal institutions, now emerging into the Big Society with a profit motive fed right into their mouths by a willing government! The gloves are now firmly off the iron fists. The voices are still polite, but the intentions are clear. They don't even bother to pave the road to hell now. They want to bulldoze people along it with all speed because they no longer have a clue how to share, or what else to do with all these people who claim the same basic right to a life.
Society may be about to change so much, so brutally, that 'probation' may become a word as lost as some of the more dated references in Shakespeare, a relic of very different times.