Oh How Probation Has Changed!

Today's Guardian:-

‘In probation, we’re poorly paid and the caseloads are unmanageable’

Steve Brown has just completed three months on home detention curfew, having left prison at the end of November. Things are looking up. He has had his electronic tag removed and last week moved into new supported accommodation. “I’m in a good place,” he says, “but no thanks to the probation service.”

Earlier this month, the government’s spending watchdog issued a damning critique of former justice secretary Chris Grayling’s 2013 probation reforms, which, in its assessment, had been “set up to fail”. According to the National Audit Office (NAO), the number of offenders returned to prison has “skyrocketed” and taxpayers face paying at least £467m more than anticipated.

Under Grayling’s transforming rehabilitation programme, the Ministry of Justice dismantled 35 probation trusts and in their place created 21 community rehabilitation companies (CRCs) to manage low- or medium-risk offenders, while the National Probation Service looked after those posing higher risks. The proposals were rolled out in 2013 without being piloted and were foisted on a sector united in opposition to the part-privatisation of a public service. In 2017, HM Inspectorate of Probation found that CRCs were failing to properly assess risk of harm in half of cases and, last month, Working Links, the CRC responsible for probation in Wales and the south-west, went bust.

Brown is well placed to express a view on the success or otherwise of Grayling’s self-styled “rehabilitation revolution”. “I’ve been on and off licence since I was 18 and I’m now 39,” he says. He reckons he has been in prison 12 to 15 times. “I was on probation in 2015 just as the changeover started,” he says. “It was horrendous. The arse didn’t know what the elbow was doing.”

Last week, Brown moved into his new flat in the Midlands, without help from probation services. He was worried at the level of drug use in the supposed dry house he moved into on release: he says much of his offending was caused by a drug habit that he hopes he has finally kicked. “There were kids who were relapsing. I couldn’t be around them,” he says. To make contact with his officer, he says he would have to ring the freephone number to arrange an appointment through a call centre. “You end up being stuck on the phone for 20 minutes and you’re never put through to an officer. It’s pointless and frustrating. In the old days, I’d have my officer’s number on my phone and I’d just ring them.”

Brown has seen his probation officer just three times in the three months since leaving prison. Under the terms of his licence, he was supposed to see him once a week when first released. In his view, the main problem with CRCs is caseloads. “There aren’t enough probation officers to cover their cases and, because there aren’t enough, they’re often off sick because of the pressure,” he says. The appointments he has had have been limited to 10-15 minutes. “It’s a tick-box exercise. If the person in front of you wants you out the door, you’re hardly going to be straight with them,” he adds.

The charity Revolving Doors is helping Brown. “We are seeing ridiculously high caseloads that make it difficult to identify and meet underlying needs that drive reoffending,” says its chief executive, Christina Marriott.

It’s a bleak picture that chimes with the experience of frontline probation officers. “We’ve always had high workloads but I’ve never felt that we have been at the stage we’re at now. They are unmanageable and that’s down to a failure to retain and recruit staff,” says Sally Fen, a probation worker with 18 years’ experience, now working for a CRC. It is a tense time for all probation staff since Working Links and three of the CRCs it ran went into administration. “We have had such a battering – we’re not an attractive sector. We are poorly paid, overworked, and no one wants to come to join us,” she says.

It’s had an impact on results. According to a report by the NAO published this month, of 13 CRCs inspected between December 2016 and March 2018, the Probation Inspectorate rated nine negatively for their work reducing reoffending and protecting the public. While 13 of the NPS regions fared better, the NAO noted that the service was also struggling with high workloads and plagued by severe staff shortfalls. Across the service there was a vacancy rate of 11%, which was as high as one in five in London.

Sarah Richards has been in the probation service for 12 years and is with the NPS. She describes herself as “burned out”. That works out as at least an extra day, if not two days, a week ” she adds. Fen says that the problem in her CRC is retention. “Like most areas we end up having to rely on agency staff who don’t tend to hang around for too long. One of the big downsides of [the reforms] is that so many people left. Huge numbers of experienced officers who could see the writing on the wall just walked.”

The collapse of Working Links came as it was rated “inadequate” by the chief inspector of probation, Glenys Stacey. As she put it, the “professional ethos” of probation had “buckled under the strain of the commercial pressures”.

Tania Bassett spent 11 years as a probation officer, working for what was West Mercia probation trust, and now works full-time for the probation officers’ trade union, Napo. Other CRCs are “wobbling” on the brink, she reckons. “One CRC boss told me that they were running at a loss of £75,000 a week.”

According to Bassett, the fatal flaw of the reforms was splitting the service in two. “If you cut it in half, both sides are going to die. The NPS isn’t a success but it appears to be quite good because CRCs are so awful.”

Probation, as Bassett says, isn’t a marketable business. The NAO concluded that the reforms were designed and implemented too quickly. Basic assumptions proved wrong. The caseload split between CRCs and NPS wasn’t the 64/36 split as predicted but 59/41. Two years into the contracts, CRC work volumes were between 16% and 48% lower than anticipated. This was partly driven by a 15% drop in community orders between 2015 and 2017, and not helped by the lack of confidence of the judiciary in CRCs. “As a public service we should be rejoicing that the level of input had gone down,” says Bassett. “But we’re not because the whole purpose of the business model is that the private sector needs more people to commit crime in order to make money.”

Grayling, who last week admitted his reforms had not “worked as well as we would have wanted”, derided the idea of testing his radical vision. The New Labour government was “obsessed with pilots”, he said in an exchange in the House of Commons in 2013: “Sometimes those in government just have to believe in something and do it,” he said .

Probation work is about risk management. As Richards points out, officers can’t afford to take gambles with public safety. “Unlike Chris Grayling, we have to be able to provide evidence for every decision we make,” she says.

• Some names have been changed

• Jon Robins is author of Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The Crisis in Our Justice System (Biteback, 2018)