Obfuscation Masterclass 2

Q29 Caroline Flint: Let’s go on to through-the-gate services, known as TTG. The NAO Report cites in a number of areas how those services are not providing the necessary transition from prison to the community that people envisaged. In fact, in paragraph 1.19, it says, “The Ministry intended TTG services to be provided to the majority of offenders through resettlement prisons. It estimates that up to 2,961 prisoners did not receive TTG services in 2018. These were offenders released from non-resettlement prisons, predominantly sex offenders and foreign national offenders.” Why have you failed, Mr Spurr, to make TTG services work? 

Michael Spurr: I will deal with the narrower point about the 2,000 first and then make a wider point about through the gate. It is true that those prisoners were not in resettlement prisons where the CRCs were working to deliver those specific services, because they were in specialist prisons where we had not got through-the-gate services to that degree. For foreign national prisoners, for example, the aim in those prisons is for those individuals to be deported, but there is a proportion who were not, and that is why that was the case. For sex offenders, it is not true that they did not get practical support for leaving. All sex offenders managed by the National Probation Service are subject to MAPPAs when they go out. They do not get the CRC services, but it is absolutely not the case that sex offenders have not had the support in leaving establishments—it is given primarily through prison and probation services directly. It is true to say that they have not had the additionality of practical support that they could have had from the CRCs. That practical support— 

Sir Amyas Morse: I don’t mean to interrupt, but I just want to ask whether they were supposed to have had that. 

Michael Spurr: I was just going to go on to that point. Ideally, we had specified for a basic level of resettlement support to all prisoners when they were being released. The plan was originally that we would move prisoners back to resettlement prisons so they would receive that, but we have changed our policy on that. We found that we could not move a lot of sexual offenders back to local prisons to release them, because that was too dangerous for them, so we left them in specialist prisons and put other arrangements in place to support them going out. 

On the wider point, the level of through-the-gate support was much less than we had anticipated would be given. The level of practical support given to people in many establishments is much less than we would have wanted. That, again, is because, with the squeeze in funding that we have spoken about before, it is one of the areas where we specified very little. The expectation was that because the companies would be working with the individuals in prison and with them when in the community, they would invest in them in prison to support them coming out into the community and gain their benefit through the payment-by-results model. The lack of funding meant that that didn’t happen. We also had—I have mentioned this before—an unintended consequence: a lot of people received resettlement support from third sector charitable provision, which was there when there was no statutory provision, and a lot of that withdrew, I guess not unreasonably, on the basis that there was now statutory provision and so they put some of that funding elsewhere. So some establishments saw a deterioration in support because the statutory provision came in offering little and they lost some better quality provision that had come at no cost to the public sector when there was no statutory requirement. 

Q30 Caroline Flint: Cost has been mentioned a number of times, but what I find difficult to understand is that given your years of service, experience and knowledge, there must be a sense of what works to stop offending, whether that is drug treatment, housing or what have you. There must be examples of good practice—I am absolutely sure there are—from people working in this area. I don’t quite understand why that knowledge wasn’t put together for you to better understand not just the working relationships that are necessary to a good outcome, but the cost of a good outcome, and why that wasn’t much more dominant in the structure of this whole process. 

Michael Spurr: I guess because the position was to use a payment-by-results mechanism to drive a different type of innovation. Prior to that, we had done an awful lot of costing what was a good means of delivering improved outcomes from rehabilitation. Frankly, it is complicated; it takes time. You get marginal gains from things like accredited programmes, but it costs quite a lot of money to be able to do that. There was a view, backed up by some of the pilot evidence at Peterborough and Doncaster, for example, that we could use a range of other more personal mentoring engagement and so on with individuals and get the outcomes we wanted. The policy ambition was to free up providers, private and third sector, to do that, but a consequence of that was to not specify, “Do these things.” The view was that having a payment-by-results mechanism would incentivise people to use the things that the evidence base allows you to do. Some of those are quite expensive; in others, the evidence base in this area is to a degree limited, and that level of investment didn’t happen. 

Q31 Caroline Flint: But given your experience, knowledge and understanding, and that of those who work in the probation service and those who work in prisons, it sounds like a bit of a gamble to just pitch it out to a market that you were actually trying to create here, with a lot of unknowns. When it comes to staffing, you don’t really have a handle on the number of staff and the types of staff that CRCs are engaging to do the jobs that need to be done with this very challenging and diverse group of individuals. Is that right? 

Michael Spurr: We didn’t specify staff levels. It was, again, something that was discussed in the programme, but we didn’t specify certain levels of staffing. Freedom was given to providers to meet the requirements in a range of different ways. 

In some senses, you are right. It was a new policy initiative. You describe it as a gamble, but I suppose the counter to that is that the vast majority of the people that this was aimed at—the under-12-month group—were not statutorily receiving any services. As part of the argument and response to that, the debate that was had at the time was: we haven’t been successful. This group reoffend at a rate of about 60%-plus. Trying something different and using a different approach, and bringing in others to challenge what had been the norm in my years of experience, and all that, was a positive thing to do. 

Q32 Chair: That was one of the things where you were doing two things at once. You say that it was innovative and new, and everything, but the Work programme had a similar black box approach. There was clearly a policy drive to throw things out, see what happens and pay by results. The Work programme, by the time this was implemented, had been having some problems—the Committee looked at a number of them. Did you have any read across with the DWP? Did you talk to officials there at all? 

Michael Spurr: Yes. I believe colleagues involved in the programme directly—I was the senior business owner for the programme, so receiving the programme and advising the programme board in terms of that— 

Q33 Chair: You had the conversations, so what did you learn from them? 

Michael Spurr: I was not involved directly with those, other than the issues—I was aware of some of them from the programme board, and some of the things were around trying to ensure that we had better arrangements for supply chains, as I have spoken about, which was the case. There were a whole range of things in terms of the contracting and how we would contract. Those discussions were had and fed into the development of the programme. 

Sir Richard Heaton: Mr Spurr is too polite to say so, but he was neither the policy designer nor the Minister behind the programme. The black box philosophy, which, exactly as you say, is similar to ones trialled elsewhere, characterises exactly what was going on. That was: “We will not specify how you achieve your outcome. We will pay you if you achieve your outcome. You will therefore be incentivised to go ahead and do whatever it takes to achieve the outcome.” That was the design philosophy, and it did not work in through the gate, because, among other things, there was no money going into through the gate, because the contracts did not provide the volumes, because of the fixed-variable things I have mentioned. Looking back on that sequence of events, it seems obvious that that was going to happen, but the policy design was absolutely not in Mr Spurr’s hands. 

Q34 Chair: We hear the clever way that you are describing the separation between ministerial decisions and operational decisions, Sir Richard. We will come back to that. 

Sir Richard Heaton: This is a candid hearing. 

Chair: Yes, we like the candour. 

Q35 Caroline Flint: I want to finish off with a couple of questions. We talked about reoffending, but there has also been a shocking increase in recalls. Page 20 of the NAO Report says that, “Between January 2015 and September 2018, the number of offenders recalled to prison for breaching their licence conditions increased from 4,240 to 6,240”, which is a 47% increase, and that, “Over the same period, the percentage of offenders recalled to prison who had received short sentences of less than 12 months increased from 3% to 36%.” What does that tell you about the effectiveness of probation supervision on those offenders? 

Sir Richard Heaton: The major driver behind that large increase is that there were 40,000 people who had not previously been subject to supervision who were subject to supervision for the first time. Therefore, a percentage of those were likely to be recalled just in the normal course of statistics. That was the main driver, although that is not to be complacent about it. 

Q36 Caroline Flint: Was that regression factored in? 

Sir Richard Heaton: It was absolutely known that the policy of extending supervision to the under-12-months group— 

Caroline Flint: The more you looked at people, the more you would find out what they were up to and you would be sending them back. 

Sir Richard Heaton: It was known that you would have an increase in recall. That is not to defend every recall decision. The CRCs and the NPS professionally try to get it right, and the Inspectorate of Probation has said that they usually do get it right, but I am not sure that we have post-sentence supervision quite right. As we achieve the next iteration of whatever this looks like, I hope that we will be able to improve on how post-sentence supervision works. That is the major driver for the numbers going up so largely and so alarmingly. 

Q37 Caroline Flint: Finally, on workload pressures across the National Probation Service, the high levels of vacancies and temporary staff come up time and time again. In your assessment of how things are working, how much are staff identified as a risk factor for the delivery of the programmes? I want to know—and I would hope it is somewhere in there—that you have a sense that if you do not have a certain level of experience of staff, training of staff and numbers of staff, with the best will in the world, those offenders are not going to get the meaningful time they need for staff to engage with them. 

Michael Spurr: I agree with you, and I think it is one of the big learning points. We have now specified a minimum level that we want for the through-the-gate service. We have also specified—and having negotiated it with the providers, our expectation is that they will provide it—484 staff to deliver that. Going forward, I think it is really important to have clarity—while providing some flexibility for doing things differently—about a basic minimum level of expectation of professional standards that you want from your staff. I think that is one of the things that comes out of our learning from this process. 

Sir Richard Heaton: The flip-side of the volumes being lower in the CRCs was that volumes were higher in the National Probation Service, which is what exacerbated staff pressures and so on. Again, it is a matter of design constraints. 

Q38 Caroline Flint: Reflecting on the earlier question about the CRCs, and the fact that staffing was not in the specification, what do you know today about the composition of staffing in CRCs that you did not know before, to help you get a handle on whether they are staffing-up in the way that you clearly see as being important to the delivery? 

Michael Spurr: We know where we are able to specify, which we are very clear on with through-the-gate. On the existing contracts, they still have a significant amount of flexibility. If they are changing their provisions, we can engage with them on that, but staffing is their business and we are responsible for ensuring that they deliver to the requirements of the contract. As we have talked about, the requirements are lightly specified for a whole range of services under the existing contracts, because they were driven by payment by results. We have tightened that in some key areas, face-to-face supervision and through-the-gate being the two main ones. 

Q39 Caroline Flint: I apologise if I am misunderstanding you. It may be my fault for not listening as much as I should. You are identifying some of the issues around services that you need and what they need to do, but you are saying that there is flexibility for them on their staffing. Does it cause you any concern that if you have not got a handle on the types of staff they have, whether temporary or full time, there could be another problem emerging—something they are not delivering—that suddenly reveals another hole in the strategy for ensuring that we are getting better outcomes? 

Michael Spurr: That is a good point. I apologise if I have not been clear. We are looking at the quality of the services they are providing. The NAO Report sets that out. We do our own audits. We have the inspection outcomes. We challenge what the quality of the delivery is. We are entitled to ask them about that and look at what staffing they have to deliver that. We have challenged that and talked about where we think that is not right. There are contractual mechanisms for dealing with poor delivery. 

Obviously, we have stepped in because of administration, but we would have stepped in for Working Links because of quality, and those two went together. We do have mechanisms and look at what is happening. My point is that I cannot specify to a provider, “You must have this number of staff,” but I can specify, “You are required to meet this level of performance in the contract.” 

Q40 Caroline Flint: There is an overall staff vacancy rate of 11% in the NPS; in London it rises to 20%. What are you doing to address those workload pressures? Are you confident that the public, especially in London, are safe from high-risk offenders when they are so short-staffed? 

Michael Spurr: We are recruiting effectively new probation officers in large numbers—around 600 in the last cohort. I had successful recruitment campaigns. It takes up to two years to fully train probation officers, so we have been doing that and I am determined to do it, recognising that we need sufficient qualified probation officers. That 11% vacancy rate includes all vacancies in probation and half of it is operational, so it is not 11% of probation officers—it includes case administrators and a whole range of others. 

It does vary; you are right that London, not surprisingly, has the highest rate. It is 4% in the midlands and 20% in London. We do use agency staff. I would rather not use agency staff, but we use them so that we are able to cover and deliver our work. Broadly, both in public protection terms and quality of work, the inspectorate generally has found the NPS to be delivering well. They are strained. We are taking action through the recruitment process to address that. 

Q41 Chair: How many probation officers have you lost from the probation service as a result of the changes? Do you keep track? 

Michael Spurr: I do not have that figure. The actual attrition rate for probation officers is about 6% in the NPS, which is not an unreasonable level. 

Q42 Chair: But with the changes, I know that there were probation officers who chose not to change and others who went to work for the CRCs—I met one in my London area. Whether they will ever go back to the National Probation Service is another matter. What is the average starting pay for a probation officer—let’s say in London, because I’m a London MP, so I can compute it? 

Michael Spurr: In London, it is in the mid-£20,000s. 

Chair: Which is quite hard to live on in London; pretty much impossible, actually, unless you are living with a family member. Maybe that is part of the reason. Anyway, that is another debate. 

Q43 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Mr Spurr, you lauded the commercial aspects of these contracts, including payment by results. If I can refer you to— 

Michael Spurr: I did what, sorry? 

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: You lauded the commercial aspects of these contracts, in terms of payment by results, which is one of the major aims of these contracts. Paragraph 2.20 on page 35 of the NAO Report says: “The Ministry also did not reconcile its appetite for risk with its commercial approach. There is an inherent tension between the desire to promote innovation and the need to maintain minimum service requirements for statutory probation services to protect the public and deliver courts’ sentences.” How do you reconcile the dichotomy in that particular statement? 

Michael Spurr: I am sorry that I did not quite hear you the first time. I did not “laud”, in my view; I explained what the policy desire of payment by results was about. That was absolutely a policy desire—to drive innovation. I was simply stating that that was the case.

I agree with what the NAO Report says about this. One reality and one big learning point is that, in this area—not unreasonably; quite properly—the public, external independent inspection, Parliament and others have expectations when people are overseen by the state. 

It was argued initially, as part of this policy, that we were not doing anything with a whole bunch of people who we would then begin to do things with. The very basic argument would be that anything you do will therefore be an additionality, and better. The reality is that, when companies are inspected against what they are doing with that group of people, now that they have the responsibility for them, they are inspected against standards at a level that they were not required to meet. That is a perfectly proper finding from this. 

The reality is that, given the nature of the work, standards have to be set, but we did not do so within the payment-by-results mechanism. Much freedom was given to providers to work with these individuals, with the perfectly ambitious and proper aim to try to reduce reoffending. However, when that is looked at, the quality of the work has not been what we would want. The inspectorate and others say that that is not acceptable, and we say that it is not acceptable and therefore that this mechanism is not a good mechanism for working with individuals on probation caseloads. 

Q44 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: We drew attention to this aspect in our 2015 Report. I hear your justification, but hasn’t it taken you rather a long time to come to that conclusion? 

Michael Spurr: In one sense, yes, it has, because there is a lag in the data that we get about what the results will look like. That has been one of the big issues. It is a two-year timeframe before we really see the results. We took action within the contracts where we could and worked with CRCs to improve quality. There is some evidence of that happening in, for example, South Yorkshire CRC, which really struggled initially but improved in quality when we worked with it. London CRC has also improved in quality, but it is still not where we want it to be. 

In one sense, it is right that it has taken a while for that to become absolutely clear. However, for the reasons I said earlier, some of this was about funding, and some of this was about the fact that if the results were better than we or the companies anticipated, which would have put more funding back into the system. We are spending much less than we anticipated spending with CRCs. 

As I said, in cash terms, we are spending about the same amount on probation today as 10 years ago, but there is a bigger cohort of people, so it is not really enough to do the type of work that people expect to be delivered at the standards that people want. 

Q45 Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: Just saying that you are spending less than you anticipated spending, when you are not actually reducing the rate of recidivism, is surely not the answer. The NAO goes on with its criticism in the same paragraph: “The Ministry’s light-touch approach to specifying services in contracts has prevented it from holding CRCs to account when services were failing”. How do you react to that? 

Michael Spurr: I agree with it. It has. That is one of the lessons that came out of this. 

Sir Richard Heaton: In the recent series of interventions on the termination of contracts, we have rowed back from the black box model and deliberately specified what is supposed to be done on the through-the-gate service, and we have put in extra money to pay for that. You are right, Sir Geoffrey: there is a spectrum between high risk, black box and specification of public safety, and we have moved away from the original contract design in the recent interventions on the contract.

To be continued....