Echoes From the Past

As a consequence of today's damning NAO report on TR, the time seems right to remind ourselves of a few things:-



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Here is Ian Dunt writing on the Politics.co.uk website 9th May 2013:- 



Comment: The probation service is a success story - so why is Grayling privatising it?

What do you do with a public service which is enjoying considerable success and just won the British Quality Foundation Gold Award for Excellence? The answer, obviously, is to scrap it and open it up to private competition. Justice secretary Chris Grayling is implementing the wholesale privatisation of the probation service. Quite why is anyone's guess. The probation service has managed to get reoffending rates down to 34.2% after a decade of steady year-on-year decline. It is a minor success story in a difficult area of public policy.

Grayling has blamed the service for the persistently high reoffending rates of those in jail less than a year. The only trouble with this argument is that the probation service has no responsiblity for this area and hasn't done for nearly three decades. The part of the system which isn't working is precisely the bit which the probation service does not control.

To his credit, Grayling has been fairly explicit about his plans. The probation service will be reduced to dealing with the rump of its current caseload. They currently deal with 250,000 cases a year. They will remain responsible for the 30,000 high risk cases but control of the roughly 220,000 low to medium risk offenders will go to private firms and voluntary groups. It's equivalent to the policy initiatives which will soon prove catastrophic for the NHS and are already proving so in welfare.

As ever, privatising a public service raises two serious problems: fragmentation and perverse incentives.

Fragmentation

"It's hard to describe preventative activity," Paul Senior, a former probation officer and now a professor of probation studies at Sheffield Hallam university, says. "Lots of it is observing, monitoring. You knew something was happening. Maybe there was an increase in drinking or a family member comes to chat you. You could see escalation going on."

This is the fluid process by which risk categories change. It is a process Grayling's black-and-white system does little to recognise. Offenders, who often live uniquely chaotic lives, do not just sit in one risk category. They drift across them, up and down, depending on circumstance. Risk is dynamic.

Take domestic abuse. Perhaps an offender has a minor conviction of some sort and authorities are aware they have problems at home. They are low risk. Then something changes. Neighbours hear fighting in the house and inform the police. The risk level has changed and it has to be managed accordingly. Supervision needs to increase.

This was relatively simple. You had one agency separated into probation trusts across the country in regular contact with the police. Now these will be split into areas synched up with the government's crime commissioners (remember them?) with contractors employing an array of subcontractors. The police will be far more wary of sharing intelligence with Serco or G4S than they are with fellow public services.

Furthermore, the level of joined-up service required to reduce reoffending rates is quite extraordinary. We know well-paid work is the best route to staying out of crime, but at least two-thirds of ex-offenders have the literacy and numeracy levels of an 11-year-old, making them virtually unemployable. Seventy per cent of the prison population has two or more mental disorders. The vast majority of those on short-term prison sentences have significant problems with substance misuse. Trying to provide a joined up service with all these factors is extremely difficult for one service, it will prove much more difficult for a collection of private firms, charities and subcontractors spread across political regions dictated from Whitehall.

Incentives

Penal experts struggle to identify the causal link between interventions and behavioural change because of the range of variables which can also influence behaviour. This is impossible to recognise in a payment-by-results system. So instead, providers will receive payment only if they can show the work has directly resulted in reductions in reoffending. Many experts believe this is an impossible standard to demonstrate.

The first attempt to create this new system began in early 2010, via a programme run by Sodexo Justice Services, a private contractor, in conjunction with HMP Peterborough. The non-compulsory system was funded by the National Lottery and social impact bonds. The National Association of Probation Officers (Napo) believes it is costing £5 million and that the government will repay the investors with a significant amount of interest if reoffending rates are reduced by at least seven per cent against the predicted score. But we won't know if this has worked until 2015/16. We are stumbling in the dark, with no evidence that the current course will get us where we want to go.

Furthermore, because the scheme is voluntary, only the most motivated offenders will go, providing the best of all possible test scenarios for a government which has already made up its mind.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) even recognised that payment by results can lead to perverse incentives which hit targets but do not achieve desired outcomes. One way this happens is by private firms concentrating on offenders with lower reconviction rates, as health providers will focus on cheap, easy operations and leave all the difficult stuff to the NHS. But the MoJ green paper offered no information about this could be avoided. They're sticking their heads in the sand.

What works

The solution is to use prison only a last resort for minor crimes – reserved for particularly dangerous individuals. Last year 55,000 individuals were jailed for six months or less. It is an extraordinary waste of public money (£45,000 per person per year), but it is also ineffective.

Community sentencing provides a much higher success rate. Parliamentary answers show those sentenced to less than 12 months imprisonment have a 61.1% reconviction rate within one year. The reconviction rate for those given a community order is just 36.4%.

But instead of following the data, Grayling is pursuing ideological interests. He could have taken the part of the system which was failing and apply the thinking and process which were in force in the bits which were working. Instead, he has scrapped the bits that are working and handed over the most problematic part of the system to a free market experiment which has no data to support it. It's the behaviour of a zealot.

Ian Dunt

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Here's Alan Travis writing in the Guardian 24th June 2013:-



Privatising probation service will put public at risk, officials tell Grayling

The justice secretary, Chris Grayling, has been warned by his most senior officials that plans to privatise 70% of the probation service lack support, are being pushed through on an aggressive timetable and potentially endanger public safety, leaked documents show. They also warn that promised cost savings are unlikely to be achieved.

The official internal risk register for Grayling's "rehabilitation revolution", which he has so far refused to publish, warns that there is a more than 80% risk that his proposals will lead to "an unacceptable drop in operational performance" triggering "delivery failures and reputational damage".

The cost of failures in the probation service have been illustrated by cases such as those of Anthony Rice, who sadistically murdered Naomi Bryant in 2005, after being released from prison on a life licence, and Daniel Sonnex, who tortured and murdered two French students in 2008 after blunders in his probation supervision.

The warnings are contained in a document marked "restricted policy", prepared for the Ministry of Justice board responsible for the rehabilitation programme. It also says there is a high risk of insufficient support within the probation service to push through the changes.

Grayling's proposals are the most radical in the probation service's 100-year history. They involve abolishing the existing 35 public probation trusts and replacing them with 21 government companies, which will tender out the supervision of all medium and low-risk offenders on a payment-by-results basis. But the officials warn that it is likely that the transfer of 70% of probation work to the private and voluntary sectors will fail to deliver the promised scale of savings.

A second leaked document, dated June 2013, on the future of the much smaller public probation service that would be responsible for the remaining 30% of work with high-risk offenders and public protection cases, shows that it faces cuts of 19% by 2017/18.

The shake-up would result in reallocating the supervision of 250,000 offenders, moving 18,000 staff to new employers and the appointment of 22 senior management teams. The plan is to put the changes in place by October, so the new service is up and running by the general election in 2015 – "a complex, large-scale change programme to be completed within an aggressive timetable," the risk register notes.

The disclosures come as peers prepare for a key vote on Tuesdayon Grayling's offender rehabilitation bill which provides the legal framework for the proposals. Among the concerns expressed by the authors of the risk register are the "considerable challenge" of closing down 2,000 separate computer packages and moving to a single shared services computer system.

The document also reveals that while many probation trusts are continuing to voice concerns about the proposals, nearly all are actively making preparations: "Our concerns focus on some trusts whose senior staff seem less able to make the transition themselves. Although these senior staff recognise their responsibility, as public servants, to manage the process of change, there is a difference between managing change and leading it."

The risk register uses traffic lights to describe the risks facing the programme, coding each risk factor as green, amber, red or black, but makes no assessment of the financial risk of not delivering the programme to the agreed timescale, quality or cost. It appears that detailed Treasury approval for the proposals will only be secured after the framework bill reaches the statute book.

The senior MoJ officials rate the risk that a campaign against the proposals will delay or block them in parliament as a "code red". They reveal that the bill being debated in the House of Lords this week has deliberately been kept slim to "minimise the dependence of the reforms" on the passing of the legislation. Media messaging is also being used to "keep key elements of reform at the top of the agenda".

The register also makes clear there are anxieties at the highest level that not enough private sector and voluntary organisations will bid for the work (code red) and that once privatised the supervision programmes will be ineffective or fail to meet the required quality.

The highest rated concerns – code black – detailed in the document are:

• There is a more than 80% risk that an unacceptable drop in operational performance will lead to delivery failure and reputational damage. The report says the failures could be caused by industrial action, falling staff morale, staff departures or probation leadership disengaging.
• There is a 51% to 80% risk that insufficient support for the proposals by probation management and staff will lead to failure to implement the changes properly and on time.
• There is a 51% to 80% risk that cost savings will not be met.

Harry Fletcher, a criminal justice expert, said the documents showed that the plans were ill-thought through and potentially dangerous: "Probation's sell-off is being carried out too hastily, there is too much risk. It is highly likely that service delivery will collapse and public protection will be undermined. The government must think again about the future of its successful and efficient probation service."

Alan Travis