Alphabet Soup at NPS

As has been noted many times on this blog, attention tends to focus on the operation of the CRCs and discussion of NPS matters has become somewhat frustrated due to the inculcation of civil service secrecy and bureaucracy. Thanks to a reader forwarding the following, we can gain considerable insight into how the command and control ethos of a uniformed service is so completely changing the nature and operation of the probation element. Is this mushrooming alphabet soup of bloody acronyms really why many people wanted to become probation officers? Surely we need to bear this in mind as the call for reunification grows:- 

TTG Newsletter Edition 31 February 2019

Mobilisation of the enhanced TTG specification continues… 

Welcome to the latest edition of TTG News. I think it’s true to say that everyone involved in the world of TTGI has been very busy with the mobilisation of the enhanced TTG specification over the last few months as we move towards delivery of the service from the 1 April. We are happy to announce that on the 1 February, both Reducing Reoffending Partnership CRCs (SWM and DLNR), went live with the enhanced TTG specification in 10 Prisons namely - HMPs Foston Hall, Nottingham, Oakwood, Ranby, Sudbury, Birmingham, Brinsford, Dovegate, Drake Hall and Leicester where RRP are the lead host. They also went live as the host CRC in HMPs Peterborough Prison and Hewell. 

The HQ TTGI team continues to work with CRCs to assist them in their mobilisation of the enhanced TTG service and the central team have now visited most resettlement prisons across England and Wales. We would like to express our gratitude to all involved with the organisation of these meetings and for the warm welcome that we have received when visiting these prisons. 

In this edition of TTG News we have two sections focusing on stakeholder engagement - the TTG HMIP event that took place in London earlier this month and the resettlement prison visits we have been doing as a team.

Through the Gate Workshop, Learning from Research, HMIP and Best Practice

An engaging, interactive and operationally focused workshop on Through the Gate took place at Petty France on 4 February. It brought together all key stakeholders including CRCs, supply chain partners, NPS, prison staff, other voluntary sector organisations, HMIP Probation, MoJ Policy, Contract Management, Operational Assurance and Prison and Probation Analytical Services. There was also a visitor from MoJ Japan, Kohtaro Yamashita. The event focused on the new enhanced Through the Gate specification with learning from research, HMIP and best practice.

The Executive Director of Community Interventions, Ian Poree, set the scene for the event. He explained “I would like to echo the message from Amy Rees, Director General, that we now have an opportunity to make a long lasting and wide-reaching change across the criminal justice system including in prisons, where probation, whilst working alongside prison officers, can help people through their sentence and prepare them for release. The new enhanced Through the Gate service is central to this and is of critical importance for prisons in helping to support the creation of a rehabilitative culture and in ensuring safety, decency and a reduction in violence. When prisoners have a sense of hope and optimism for their future in the outside community and a plan for how to achieve what they want, they are much more likely to behave well towards others.” 

The first session was delivered by Xxxxxxx Xxxxxxx from the HMPPS Evidence Based Practice Team. Her presentation focused on Procedural Justice. 

• Research shows that when people believe the process of applying the law (how decisions are made, rather than what decision is made) is fair, it influences their views and behaviour. 
• When people feel treated fairly and justly, they have more confidence in authority, see this as more legitimate, and they are more likely to accept and abide (or commit to abide) by decisions/rules/sanctions/the law. 

The second session was delivered by Xxxxxx Xxxxxxx from HMIP Probation. She provided an overview of findings from the latest inspections and their standard – Are the Through the Gate services personalised, coordinated and address the service user’s resettlement needs? Further details can be obtained via this link. Unfortunately, HMIP Prisons were unable to join us at the event due to other commitments but requested a copy of the slides. 

The final session of the day was delivered by the two members of the TTG Implementation team Xxxxxxx Xxxxxx and Xxxxx Xxxxxxx from the Community Interventions Business Delivery Unit. This session provided an overview of the enhanced Through the Gate specification, explained both the HMI Probation Standards and HMI Prison Expectations, evaluated existing performance and detailed expected benefits of the change.

Development of Basic Custody Screening Tool 

The HQ TTGI team are currently working with MoJ Digital Studio to develop the BCS 2 tool. This includes aligning the BCS 1 to encompass the requirements of the enhanced specification and auto fill areas of the BCS 2. It also includes development of the BCS 2 to align with the additional requirements outlined in the enhanced specification, identifying level 1, 2 & 3 activity. We are currently in the development stage process and will keep you updated as the project develops. The changes to the form will be in place by 1 April and further guidance will be sent to users before that date. 

We are keen to ensure that CRCs are involved in the roll out of the updated BCS 2 tool and will be updating the BCS 2 training tool and OASys guidance documents accordingly. As the tool is developed we will be engaging with some CRC partners for their viewpoint and to assist with any other development activity.

NPS referrals for enhanced Through the Gate (TTG) services in non-resettlement prisons

To support the successful implementation of the enhanced Through the Gate (TTG) specification as a universal service for all prisoners prior to release from custody, an improved set of arrangements for the referral and delivery of TTG services to prisoners due to be released from non-resettlement prisons will be implemented from 1 April 2019. 

Each year, there are a proportion of prisoners released from non-resettlement prisons (including specialist sex offender and FNO prisons), rather than being moved to resettlement prisons pre-release. This occurs for a number of reasons, including operational demand and risk management. To ensure these prisoners have access to the TTG services pre-release, relevant CRCs will make the same TTG service available to all prisoners due to be released from non-resettlement prisons as in resettlement prisons. These services are included on Part 1 of the CRC Rate Cards for purchase by the NPS Responsible Officer. 

Referral to and delivery of the TTG services in non-resettlement prisons has been underused to date and the majority of prisoners released are not being referred to, or receiving, these services as intended. The implementation of the enhanced TTG specification provides an opportunity to review the arrangements in place to secure these services for prisoners’ pre-release, and the following model is intended for implementation alongside the enhanced TTG service. 

Minimum Level of Purchase (MLP) guarantee 

CRC Change Notice 27 (CCN27) introduced an adjustment to the Fee for Use (FFU) payment mechanism into the CRC contracts, comprising a MLP guarantee against all Rate Card services, and a Minimum Level of Service (MLS) requirement on CRCs. 

For 19/20, the MLP guarantee will be set at a higher % rate of forecasted volumes for releases from nonresettlement prisons, providing CRCs with additional financial certainty against this element of the total FFU forecasted spend, with the expectation that this additional certainty will allow for TTG services in non-resettlement prisons to be sufficiently resourced against anticipated release volumes. 

NPS Referral process 

The implementation of the increased MLP % guarantee, while intended to secure service delivery, will continue to require the NPS Responsible Officer to identify planned releases from their caseloads and make a referral to the relevant CRC in order to purchase the enhanced TTG resettlement service. 

It is intended therefore that NPS Responsible Officers and CRCs will be supported through a better-defined referral process as follows: 

• NPS ROs will identify cases due for release from non-resettlement prisons 
• 15 weeks prior to release, the NPS RO will notify the relevant CRC of the planned release through the NDelius NSI function 
• The RO will request the CRC to review the assessment (BCST2) where one exists, or in some cases where there has been no assessment, to carry this out, and notify the NPS RO once complete. 
• The RO will then confirm and agree the delivery by the CRC of the enhanced TTG service as required (and as specified on the CRC Rate Cards) during the 12 weeks pre-release. 
• The CRC should inform the RO as and when the TTG services are delivered. 

Non-Resettlement prisons servicing multiple NPS Divisions 

It is recognised that in many cases a non-resettlement prison will be releasing prisoners to multiple NPS Divisions. As a consequence, the total value of the MLP guarantee for these services will be calculated against total forecasted release volumes per prison and per CRC, as opposed to total forecasted release volumes by NPS Divisions. To support referral from NPS Divisions to CRCs delivering in non-resettlement prisons, CRCs will be asked to provide a referral contact point which will be used to collate a national list and made available to NPS Divisions. 

Next Steps 

You will appreciate that this approach requires some critical dependencies to be met, in order to enable both the CRCs and NPS to focus on delivery and ensuring the resettlement needs of this particular group of prisoners are met pre-release. A meeting was held on the 8th February with senior leaders from CRCs and the NPS, clarifying the following: 

• Forecasted release data for 19/20 and volumes by prison and CPA has been collated and this has been made available to CRCs and NPS. 
• The collation of the forecasted release data allows for the total FFU value and MLP % guarantee to be calculated and apportioned to CRCs accordingly. This is dependent on CRCs confirming any revisions to the Rate Card TTG services. CRCs have been requested to provide proposed Rate Card prices by 15th February. 

The identification of all CRC referral contact arrangements (e.g. mailbox address) is necessary in order to facilitate the referral arrangements. CRC support in providing these details is necessary and the national contact list should be in place prior to the implementation of the enhanced TTG service at the start of 19/20

Joined up work with OMiC

During our prison meetings, many prison governors and directors have raised the issue of the roll out of OMiC alongside that of the enhanced TTG specification. It is important that our service users understand the difference between TTG and OMiC and, as part of the mobilisation, we have asked CRCs to develop communications products to raise awareness of the enhanced TTG specification and the new service being provided. This formulates part of each CRC’s enhanced TTG roll out and CRC TTG implementation leads will be discussing these plans with prison governors and directors and providing promotional literature. 

To further enhance this, the HQ TTGI team continue to work with the OMiC Team to ensure a joined-up approach with the mobilisation of the enhanced TTG specification and OMiC. We continue to attend Divisional Implementation Board (DIB) meetings to discuss this joined up approach with Prison Implementation Managers and the way in which it supports integrated working between, CRCs, prisons and NPS staff.

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Update from the OMiC Project Lead

December and January turned out to be very busy months for OMIC – both for the national team and in activity across prison and probation and particularly so in Wales where they are now live with testing the OMIC case management for Welsh prisoners in Wales. A big thank you to staff and managers in Wales! We now look forward to working with Wales on learning the lessons. In the national OMIC team we have been busy recruiting and at the end of February we will be back up to full strength. We are delighted that Xxxxxx Xxxxxxxxxx is joining the team as the Deputy Lead, Xxx Xxxxxxx from Drake Hall is joining us to lead on key work and Xxxxxx Xxxxxxxx and Xxxxxxxx Xxxxxxx have also recently joined the team from Lancaster Farms and Hewell.

On the key work side, there are now 87 prisons across the male closed estate where implementation has started and 34 prisons which have completed their implementation activities. That means over 30,000 prisoners have an allocated key worker! That is a significant achievement and something everyone involved should be proud of.

Having said that, we know that maintaining consistent delivery of key work is going to be challenging and the OMIC team are going to focus our attention on this over the coming months. To support prisons maintaining key work delivery we have developed dashboards on New NOMIS which set out really helpful performance data, including average time between reception and first key work session and how many sessions are being delivered – please make use of them!

Continuing the digital theme, OMIC EQUIP is now live! All unchanged custodial offender management processes and associated documents are now available to view by NPS and prison colleagues working in Offender Management Units. Please make sure you can access them and use them – they are a real opportunity to provide assurance that you are following the correct process and not doing more or less than is required!

Planning for starting case management implementation in September 19 is going ahead at pace and a number of key decisions have been made in January to support this. These include confirming the model for the women’s estate after consulting with all our unions. This model builds on the excellent relationships already in place between staff and women and recognises the different challenges and opportunities in the women’s estate, where self-harm and the complex needs of some women are of significant concern. Key work and case management will be fully integrated in the women’s estate with complexity of need a key driver for deciding how we support the women.

The other important decision taken during January is the model for Privately Managed Prisons – please see the article in this issue of the update for further details. We have also agreed that this is the model we will use in public sector prisons where we are not able to deploy sufficient numbers of probation officers into prisons. Following this decision, we are working with the Chairs of the Divisional Implementation Boards on the detailed planning and sign-off process for go-live.

We hope you are finding these monthly updates useful. If there is anything you would like to see or hear more about then let us know at: omic@hmps.gsi.gov.uk and don’t forget to follow us on twitter for the latest news and updates omic@hmpps.

Xxxxxxxx Xxxxxxx
OMiC Project Lead

Case Management Implementation Update

Mitigating vacancies:

Preparation for the switch-on of the OMiC case management model from 16th September 2019 is now gathering pace and momentum. Divisional Implementation Boards (DIBs) are implementing a range of activities as agreed in their Implementation Plans. In particular they are currently scoping out where their vacancies may still exist come September 2019. DIBs will be reporting back to the OMiC Project in early February 2019 on the outcome of this joint HMPPS workforce forward planning exercise.

To assist with the preparation for implementation of OMiC case management the DIBs have received two documents from the OMiC Project. The Mitigating Vacancies document outlines a number of actions that could be taken to enable delivery of OMiC case management whilst full resourcing levels are being realised beyond September 2019. The Transfer Principles document outlines the process of identifying which existing long term NPS custodial cases are to be transferred to the new Prison Offender Manager roles from 16th September onwards, and the activities needing to be undertaken over the next nine months in readiness for the transfer of these cases. Both these documents are accessible through your DIB Implementation Manager and through the Senior Leaders Bulletin.

SPO line management responsibilities:

The proposed line management arrangements for custodial based Senior Probation Officers to be line management by the prison Governor, with contact for continuous professional development support from the community senior NPS manager, has been tested in six prisons since July 2018.

A lessons learnt evaluation has been presented to the OMiC Programme Board with a number of recommendations to support of implementation. As a result the OMiC Project is developing an approach to engage more directly with prison Governors on their new role and responsibilities arising from accountability for the case management of long term custodial cases.

We hope to enhance the understanding of prison Governors in the role of the SPO deployed to manage the delivery and quality of OMiC case management within each establishment. Organisational Development are also working with each of the DIBs to support a greater awareness of the shared working practices, knowledge and values that will support the delivery and management of OMiC case management. Once this engagement work has been completed a full roll-out of the new line management arrangements can then be agreed through the national OMiC Project Board.

Case management in Privately Managed Prisons

The OMIC Board decided that high risk of harm cases require probation officer oversight in privately managed prisons (PMPs) and the OMIC team have been working on how we best deliver this. We held a number of workshops, including meetings with senior leaders from NPS, PMPs, contract management and policy leads. Following these the OMIC Board has agreed that we will implement a case support model and furthermore that we will use this model in public sector prisons where we are not able to deploy sufficient numbers of probation officers.

The case support model provides oversight of all high-risk cases by qualified probation officers and is a variation of a model of delivery in common usage across NPS. In this model, each prisoner identified as high risk (tiers A and B) and where responsibility sits in the prison, will have an allocated probation officer who is ultimately responsible for managing the risk the offender poses. The case management support role will be undertaken by a range of staff currently employed in PMPs as offender supervisors and includes Prison Custody Officers and contracted staff.

The probation officer would be responsible for OASys risk assessment, including initial engagement with prisoners, reviews of the assessment, sentence planning meetings and all work in relation to MALRAP, MAPPA, parole as well as being involved in the handovers to the community offender manager. This does not include conducting one to one prisoner supervision, which will need to be carried out by the contractor’s staff.

The case management support staff would undertake specific work identified in the sentence plan such as one to one supervision with prisoners, referrals, information gathering and liaison with other agencies including contact with VLOs.

Current contracts with PMPs are output or outcome based and the Authority provides the required policies or frameworks and the contractor then decides how to deliver this to an agreed price. In practice this means that the PMPs have adopted very different staffing models and approaches to offender supervision in each of the prisons. We will therefore only model new tasks and not the total staffing requirements for PMPs. We have assessed the new and changed tasks in the OMIC case management model in comparison to the current model in order to support commercial negotiations.