Excellent piece, particularly the acknowledgement that sometimes the difference between becoming the subject of an SFO review and never experiencing one is not necessarily professional competence, but luck.
Risk assessment is not clairvoyance. Practitioners make judgements using the information, resources and time available to them at that moment. Yet after an SFO almost every action of the individual PP [Probation Practitioner] can be reconstructed: what was recorded, what wasn’t, whether an assessment was updated, whether information was acted upon and whether recall should have been considered.
The question is whether the organisation is examined with anything approaching the same forensic intensity.
And that question becomes even more important with everything now being introduced through OFPS, [Our Future Probation Service].
HMPPS is attempting to release around 25% of practitioner capacity. A new tiering model will determine how supervision is targeted, with seven tiers and maximum rather than minimum contacts. Practitioners will have to review all of their cases as the new arrangements are implemented, including ensuring the relevant risk indicators are captured. At the same time there are changes to supervision packages, increasing reliance on actuarial tools, the removal of practitioner access to the WMT and the additional pressures coming from sentencing reform and electronic monitoring.
These aren’t simply administrative changes. They are organisational decisions about risk.
If HMPPS determines through OFPS that a particular category of case should receive less practitioner resource, and a PP manages that person within the supervision framework HMPPS has designed, what happens if that person subsequently commits an SFO?
Will the review ask whether the model itself allocated sufficient professional time to that case? Will it examine whether the tier was appropriate, whether the supervision package was sufficient, what workload the PP was carrying and what other work they had been instructed to deprioritise?
Or will we once again work backwards through the individual practitioner’s records looking for something they might have done differently?
There is a particularly uncomfortable contradiction here. HMPPS is redesigning probation specifically because it accepts there isn’t sufficient capacity to continue doing everything currently expected of practitioners. Yet practitioner access to the WMT is disappearing just as these changes arrive.
Potentially, therefore, the individual PP becomes more retrospectively measurable while the organisational constraints around their practice become less objectively measurable.
That is exactly how defensive practice is created.
And perhaps this is the real test of whether SFO reviews are genuinely about learning. If HMPPS wants practitioners to embrace a new model that deliberately targets finite professional resource according to assessed need and risk, then HMPPS must be prepared to own the consequences of that model too.
Accountability cannot stop at the practitioner when the parameters within which that practitioner was working were designed much further up the organisation.
The question is whether the organisation is examined with anything approaching the same forensic intensity.
And that question becomes even more important with everything now being introduced through OFPS, [Our Future Probation Service].
HMPPS is attempting to release around 25% of practitioner capacity. A new tiering model will determine how supervision is targeted, with seven tiers and maximum rather than minimum contacts. Practitioners will have to review all of their cases as the new arrangements are implemented, including ensuring the relevant risk indicators are captured. At the same time there are changes to supervision packages, increasing reliance on actuarial tools, the removal of practitioner access to the WMT and the additional pressures coming from sentencing reform and electronic monitoring.
These aren’t simply administrative changes. They are organisational decisions about risk.
If HMPPS determines through OFPS that a particular category of case should receive less practitioner resource, and a PP manages that person within the supervision framework HMPPS has designed, what happens if that person subsequently commits an SFO?
Will the review ask whether the model itself allocated sufficient professional time to that case? Will it examine whether the tier was appropriate, whether the supervision package was sufficient, what workload the PP was carrying and what other work they had been instructed to deprioritise?
Or will we once again work backwards through the individual practitioner’s records looking for something they might have done differently?
There is a particularly uncomfortable contradiction here. HMPPS is redesigning probation specifically because it accepts there isn’t sufficient capacity to continue doing everything currently expected of practitioners. Yet practitioner access to the WMT is disappearing just as these changes arrive.
Potentially, therefore, the individual PP becomes more retrospectively measurable while the organisational constraints around their practice become less objectively measurable.
That is exactly how defensive practice is created.
And perhaps this is the real test of whether SFO reviews are genuinely about learning. If HMPPS wants practitioners to embrace a new model that deliberately targets finite professional resource according to assessed need and risk, then HMPPS must be prepared to own the consequences of that model too.
Accountability cannot stop at the practitioner when the parameters within which that practitioner was working were designed much further up the organisation.
Anon
From Daily Mail:-
ReplyDeleteAndy Burnham's top mandarin is facing questions over her own role in the prison overcrowding crisis that is leading to thousands of criminals being released early.
Dame Antonia Romeo, now Cabinet Secretary, was in charge of the Ministry of Justice for four years as problems mounted with the plan to build more cells.
She was accused by MPs of presiding over a 'ticking timebomb' as her department knew that existing jails were rapidly running out of space yet the construction of new sites was delayed.
On her watch the MoJ built just 6,518 new places were built out of a promised 20,000, and the target will only be reached five years late according to the National Audit Office.
When grilled by the Public Accounts Committee last year, Dame Antonia admitted there had been a 'degree of slippage in the delivery' but blamed unexpected developments including planning hold-ups.
She was also challenged over the MoJ's decision to sign a 10-year least on HMP Dartmoor despite knowing the site had high levels of radon gas, meaning that hundreds of much-needed cells cannot be used.
Former prison governor John Podmore told the Daily Mail: 'She dug a big hole and Andy Burnham jumped right into it.
'While she was at the Ministry of Justice she watched it all go wrong. I didn't see any intervention that she did.
'The overcrowding crisis has been around for a long time but they haven't taken any responsibility.'
He said the department could have created more room by stopping so many suspects being held in jail on remand ahead of long-delayed trials, or by reducing the large number of released prisoners being recalled to jail for minor licence breaches.
Instead, the Prime Minister is now having to consider more radical proposals to free up space - in order to prevent the killers of PC Andrew Harper being included in the looming early release scheme - such as putting men in women's jails.
Another ex governor, Prof Ian Acheson, pointed out that Dame Antonia was previously responsible for the disastrous £4billion part-privatisation of the probation service, which later had to be reversed.
He said: 'The connected upper class of the Senior Civil Service giving the PM advice on this political crisis bear some of the blame for the mess the criminal justice system is in.
'Romeo now sits at the side of the Prime Minister and represents continuity of the administrative class who have presided over chaos with no answers apart from 'No, Prime Minister'.
'The Ministry of Justice in a tight field is one of the worst departments in Whitehall. When the dust settles on this latest debacle, Andy Burnham would do well to consider a wholesale clear out of officials who have served him so poorly.'
But a Government source insisted: 'It is totally ridiculous to claim that anyone is responsible for the prisons crisis Labour inherited other than the Tory ministers who ignored repeated warnings from officials and refused to take action.'
Insiders said that key decisions that led to the overcrowding crisis, including increasing prison sentences as well as failing to provide enough funding, were taken by Tory-era ministers rather than officials.
A Government spokesman added: 'As Permanent Secretary at the MoJ, Antonia led the programme for new prison places, which included opening three new prisons with over 4,500 new prison places and plans to deliver 14,000 by 2031.
'She and her team consistently worked to prevent the prison system reaching maximum capacity, including during the summer riots in 2024 where she led the response of the Criminal Justice System to bring offenders swiftly to justice.'
I've read this before, 'who ignored repeated warnings from officials and refused to take action.' but I've yet to see any evidence recorded by Antonia in meetings that suggests she was one of the officials doing the warning. If she was and was ignored by Conservative ministers then prove it at least, until then she's deemed culpable.
DeleteThe way in which the service deals with SFO reviews is all smoke and mirrors, the smoke to obfuscate the work pressures, the stress and protect the service at all costs and the mirrors to hold up the fact that you sent a letter late 18 months ago, which according the the investigation team, could have prevented a tragedy from occurring…….
ReplyDeleteFrom previous thread:-
ReplyDelete"The move from systemic to individual blame has been a slow and steady one designed to protect reputational damage and more specifically damage to Senior Managers….the creation of SFO investigation team has created the “there must be something to find” mentality so that so called ‘learning points’ can be provided to show that we have our house in order. The personal stress generated by these investigations is ignored and sometimes seen as a tacit admission of guilt………imagine if the SFO investigators continued to find nothing but OK practice…..they don’t want that, they want a head, yours, mine, it doesn’t really matter, just so that workloads, poor man management, the way in which everyone interprets the notion of risk differently, staff sickness, bullying of inexperienced staff, is not blamed……."
There is an interesting contrast between the discussion about Antonia Romeo and the SFO discussion above.
ReplyDeleteWhen accountability reaches senior organisational level, suddenly context matters enormously: political decisions, funding constraints, planning delays, competing pressures and decisions made elsewhere in the system.
And actually, context should matter. Complex systems fail for complex reasons.
But surely the same principle has to apply when examining the actions of an individual PP.
If a practitioner was carrying an excessive workload, covering sickness, working within an organisational supervision model, unable to access accommodation or treatment, dealing with poor information sharing and making decisions within the time and resources available, those aren’t excuses to be stripped away before examining their practice. They are part of the evidence.
Perhaps genuine organisational learning starts when we become as interested in the context surrounding frontline decisions as we apparently are in the context surrounding decisions made at the top.
A significant Twitter thread:-
DeleteI've absolutely avoided the tittle tattle around Romeo's previous conduct mainly because of my own experience of being a pushy outsider in CS. I've focused on aspects of her performance which have been effectively memory holed. 'Transforming Rehabilitation' is exhibit A.
Romeo while DG at the MoJ was Senior Responsible Officer for this part privatisation of the probation service which was a total disaster from start to finish. Government ideological vandalism certainly but implemented by her.
She assured parliament the doomed transformation programme “is going to work and isn’t taking on any unnecessary risk” It was a total fuck up from start to finish when Probation was returned to public sector after wastage of £467 million underestimated costs and bail outs.
The probation union said the process was a “shambles” with “zero communication”, increased paperwork, fragmented risk management, deskilling and demoralisation of staff, and poorer outcomes for offenders being supervised. In other words it put the community at greater risk.
£9 million alone was spent on consultancy trying to gild this turd while probation officers had their pay frozen. The National Audit Office demolished the programme finding 'systemic failings' in design and implementation, aspects she was fully responsible for as SRO.
So it's for this reason and this alone I have serious reservations about the spin that says she's equal to the task of 'rewiring government.' It doesn't matter that she's a women and ambitious (oh no!) or all the fluff around her media profile. What matters is *delivery*.
But airbrushing serious failures won't cut it either. The systemic rot in the senior lanyard class in public service is a 'mediocracy' - people promoted up to and well beyond their level of competence. Not sure she's the best exemplar of how to tackle that. We shall see.
Ian Acheson
"The systemic rot in the senior lanyard class in public service is a 'mediocracy'"
DeleteAfter all of the failures & waste of public money la romeo has been responsible for, someone with media clout has finally said it out loud.
John Podmore also alluded to it last week on R4 (referred to on this blog previously), but without going as far as Ian (possible bbc editing? possibly being cautious?). But la romeo has been at the heart of the destruction of justice for a long time, at least 8 years' at the helm in varying roles:
2011-13, Director General, Transformation.
2013 -15, Director General, Criminal Justice
2021-25, Ministry of Justice as permanent secretary
Dame Antonia Romeo (Jan 2021 – Mar 2025)
Sir Richard Heaton KCB (Aug 2015 – Aug 2020)
Ursula Brennan (July 2012 – July 2015) – Retired
Sir Suma Chakrabarti (May 2007 – 2012)
There's also this motley crew from noms/hmpps who aided & abetted the catastrophe:
Martin Narey (2004 to 2005)
Helen Edwards (2005 to 2008)
Phil Wheatley as Director-General (2008 to 2010)
Michael Spurr (2010 to 2019)
Jo Farrar (2019 to 2022)
Amy Rees (2022 to 2025)
Phil Copple as interim (2025)
James McEwen (2025 to present)
And any assortment of shadowy senior civil servants who shun the limelight but happily impose stupid, uninformed policies upon the minions.
https://www.civilserviceworld.com/in-depth/article/interview-antonia-romeo-moj
ReplyDeleteWhen there's glory to be grasped, Alpha Romeo is more than happy to be in the spotlight.
“To get large transformation programmes working, you’ve got to have really good assurance in place so that you know you’re not believing your own hype”
“My job as senior responsible officer is to make sure we deliver the benefits of the programme. We need to really understand what’s going on – and there are no prizes for not listening.”
Most offenders, she points out, have “a very complex and intractable set of problems that need to be looked at holistically.”
As the new system is established, these will be identified using what Romeo calls an “actuarial tool”: a piece of software that “looks at all the indicators and does something rather complicated and determines what level of risk someone is.” ... Romeo emphasises that the final decision will be made by NPS professionals – as will decisions over whether to recategorise offenders once the system is up and running.
There is clearly a political timetable behind the pace at which the MoJ is moving... Romeo acknowledges that the ministry hasn’t trialled its final proposals anywhere. “You have to turn on the statute once nationally,” she says.
“The Cabinet Office has a very clear process for awarding contracts.”
"I personally listen very carefully to what people tell me; and I go out all the time and talk to trusts, and to local authorities, and to police and crime commissioners.”
Powerful friends are useful, especially when you share a longstanding agenda.
Delete"The Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team broke into a safe and destroyed the department’s copy of a historic bullying investigation into the new head of the civil service.
In 2022 Darren Tierney, the then director-general of the government standards watchdog, asked maintenance staff to force open the vault.
Reports surfaced that the department's copy of the Romeo file was disposed of following the vault breach... He later said he had wanted access to a confidential report about Dame Antonia Romeo.
The Cabinet Office stated that the manual opening of the broken safe was routine due to a mechanical failure" - The Times/Telegraph & others
* Darren Tierney previously worked under Antonia Romeo when she headed the Department for International Trade (DIT) before later becoming the Director-General for Propriety and Ethics in the Cabinet Office
It seems there's a strong link between romeo & the Cabinet Office...
"In July 2022, Francis Maude launched an independent review of UK civil service governance and accountability... Antonia Romeo—acting then as the Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Justice—officially sponsored and supported the review alongside Maude.. Romeo later advanced to become Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, putting her at the head of the department where Maude previously drove major structural reforms as Minister for the Cabinet Office" civil service world & others.
https://www.globalgovernmentforum.com/former-uk-cabinet-office-minister-launches-review-into-civil-service-governance-and-accountability/
"News of the government’s intention to reform the civil service began to emerge in 2020. At the time, the agenda was being pushed by then-Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser of PM Boris Johnson.
Maude will chair the latest review, with the support of Ministry of Justice permanent secretary Antonia Romeo"
2010: Romeo transferred to the Cabinet Office as the Executive Director in the new Efficiency and Reform Group under Francis Maude.
But not everyone's in thrall to alpha romeo:
https://restoremag.com/the-civil-servic-promotes-its-worst-antonia-romeo/
"Antonia did not arrive in the senior civil service by the usual route of decades in a single department. She arrived through the coordination layer, the place where the various arms of the British state meet and agree their stories.
[romeo's] is not the career of a specialist. It is the career of a fixer. Intelligence liaison, efficiency reform, transformation, implementation, delivery. Every job title is a verb dressed up as a noun, and none of them leaves a paper trail you can scrutinise in a newspaper.
There was a reason for the trajectory, and his name was Jeremy Heywood, later Lord Heywood of Whitehall, who was Cabinet Secretary from 2012 until his death in 2018... Heywood was Romeo's mentor. He personally asked her to stay in the civil service when she was considering leaving, and sent her to New York. He smoothed her path to DIT, reportedly striking a "trade-off" with Theresa May, according to the Mail on Sunday's 2020 reporting, to secure her appointment despite the New York investigation.
Past performance is the best predictor of future performance. On past performance, Antonia Romeo is precisely what a failing administrative state produces, elevates, and protects. Not despite the record. Because of it.
She will also, we are told, rewrite the Civil Service Code, which is a bit like asking the fox to redraft the henhouse security policy."
Reading that old interview alongside this discussion is quite sobering.
ReplyDeleteForget personalities for a moment because the more important issue is institutional memory. We have been here before.
A major transformation programme. Pressure to release capacity. Increasing reliance on actuarial tools. Assurances that professional judgement will remain with practitioners. A nationally implemented model accompanied by confidence from the centre that the risks are understood and appropriately managed.
TR subsequently failed, at enormous financial and human cost.
So surely one of the most important questions for OFPS is: what has HMPPS actually learned from that experience?
Because the line from that 2014 interview that really stands out now is: “You’ve got to have really good assurance in place so that you know you’re not believing your own hype.”
Quite.
If OFPS is deliberately attempting to release 25% of practitioner capacity through new tiering and supervision arrangements, where is the independent assurance that the model can safely do that? What happens if the assumptions underpinning the actuarial tools prove wrong? How will unintended consequences be identified once implemented? And crucially, who owns that risk?
That’s why this connects directly with SFO accountability. It cannot be acceptable for the organisation to design the model, determine the available resource and set the parameters of supervision, but for the individual practitioner to inherit the consequences if those assumptions subsequently prove wrong.
TR should have taught HMPPS that organisational optimism is not evidence. The question is whether anyone retained the lesson.
There is another aspect of this that troubles me and it goes beyond OFPS itself.
ReplyDeleteWe talk a lot about “professional judgement”, but professional judgement doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
An organisation can retain the language of practitioner autonomy while progressively determining almost everything around it: how cases are tiered, what level of contact is expected, which activities are considered essential, what information practitioners receive, how much time is available and what competing work takes priority.
At the end of that process the PP may technically still make the decision, but how meaningful is it to say that the risk therefore belongs to them?
Imagine an SFO involving somebody allocated a lower level of supervision under the new model. The obvious retrospective questions will be whether the PP recognised changing risk, whether they should have increased contact, whether they should have sought more information or whether they should have intervened sooner.
Those may all be legitimate questions.
But there has to be another set of questions asked with equal seriousness. Why was that level of resource allocated to the case in the first place? What assumptions did the model make? What evidence supported those assumptions? What workload was the practitioner carrying? What were they explicitly told they no longer needed to do in order to release the required capacity?
Otherwise there is a danger of creating a very convenient accountability structure: risk is designed collectively and centrally, but failure is investigated individually and locally.
And that isn’t really professional autonomy. It’s delegated liability.
If HMPPS genuinely wants PPs to exercise professional judgement, it must also accept that professional judgement sometimes means departing from the model – spending longer with someone, seeing them more frequently, undertaking a home visit or pursuing something that an algorithm hasn’t identified as significant – without practitioners constantly having to justify why they haven’t followed the most efficient route.
Perhaps that is what needs protecting through OFPS more than anything else. Not simply the words “professional judgement”, but the time, authority and organisational permission to actually exercise it.
"If OFPS is deliberately attempting to release 25% of practitioner capacity through new tiering and supervision arrangements, where is the independent assurance that the model can safely do that? "
DeleteThere isn't any assurance ir independence. Its just another contract opportunity for chums. It has a bizarre timeline:
https://opentenders.co.uk/tenders/the-our-future-probation-service-ofps-programme-delivery-partner-d247813b
Procurement Timeline
Opportunity Published: 11 June 2026
Submission Deadline: 26 March 2026
Contract Awarded: 17 May 2026
Contract Starts: 17 May 2026
Contract Ends: 17 May 2028
(how can the opportunity be published 3 months after submissions close? Unless it isn't such an 'open' tender after all...?)
"HMPPS, as part of the MoJ, is delivering the Our Future Probation Service (OFPS) Programme. The Programme is central to the MoJ Justice Delivery Plan and is responsible for rebalancing demand and capacity across probation.
OFPS will deliver the Government's response to the Independent Sentencing Review (ISR), ensuring probation services are placed on a sustainable footing while continuing to protect the public and reduce reoffending."
Awarded to: Ernst & Young LLP (renowned for their expertise in probation work)
Award Value: £5.0Million
Award Date: 17 May 2026
Contract start: 17 May 2026
Contract end: 17 May 2028
"Ernst & Young (EY) acts as a major strategic, digital, and financial advisory partner for public sector bodies and government departments globally and in the UK, securing £hundreds_of_millions in framework agreements and delivery contracts... Ernst And Young LLP has won 51 UK public-sector contracts, including:
* Central Digital Platform (CDP): A £17 million, two-year digital delivery partnership with the Cabinet Office
* Civil Service Jobs Platform: A five-year, £18.2 million contract awarded by the Cabinet Office
* Department for Work & Pensions (DWP): High-value digital and engineering practice support agreements valued at over £39million
* IT Oversight and Consultancy: a £5.5 million contract to oversee major government IT modernization
NAO report from Oct 2025
Delete"Since unification, the Probation Service has remained under significant strain, with staffing shortfalls, increasing pressures and continuing poor performance... This report examines why HMPPS has not been able to improve performance of the service to date."
https://www.nao.org.uk/press-releases/government-must-actively-manage-plan-to-boost-weak-probation-service-performance/
"In 2024-25, HMPPS met only 26% of its targets, a drop of 24 percentage points since 2021-22.
HMPPS has been recruiting more probation staff, but in 2024 found it had underestimated the number of staff required to provide sentence management tasks by around a third (5,400 staff).
To mitigate the impact on offender outcomes and public protection, HMPPS and MoJ must actively manage the risks associated with its innovative programme to reduce Probation Service workloads.
The Independent Sentencing Review (published in May 2025) ... will likely increase pressures on probation further."
Full report link can be found here:
https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/building-an-effective-and-resilient-probation-service/
_______________________________________________
"unification" should, in my view, read "re-unification" as it was merely the hasty & reluctant sticking back together of the two parts the useless fuckers so carelessly & callously tore apart (under romeo's guiding hand as SRO).
I do like the careful coding used though:
"...the Probation Service has REMAINED under significant strain... and CONTINUING poor performance."
In whitehall speak they are damning words which stretch back into the TR debacle.
Probation actuarial scores provide a structured, evidence-based estimate of reoffending risk, combining static and dynamic factors. They support probation officers in making defensible, informed decisions about supervision and interventions, while emphasizing that professional judgement and individualized assessment remain essential components of effective risk management.
ReplyDeletePO’s use professional judgement on a daily basis, we understand the community in which offenders reside, the challenges, housing, substance misuse, employment etc. How many times do you see psychologists in prisons talking about moderate and low risk, they appear to see prisons as a sausage factory, they have a few interviews with a prisoner and then the parole board take their assessments as fact the majority of the time. The reason that there are an increase in SFO’s and recalls is the reliance that the parole board place on psychological risk assessments and not the experience of those at the coal face. POs warning of the risk that this person poses that the risks are not fully understood, that now such reliance is placed on Building Choices, a strength based, protective factors intervention and not a risk investigation process where prisoners are challenged about their offending behaviour. It is a bit like probation SPO interviews give the right answers and get the job, in this case give the right answers and become moderate to low risk. When are there going to be standardised risk of serious harm scoring to be introduced to stop the VH and HROSH been challenged by prisoners on the low to moderate and their legal reps? Leave the psychologists to deal with their world of prison and give PO’s the professional respect to manage and address the ROSH when the prisoner is assessed by us as ready for open conditions and the critical cases for release on licence. There appears to be a shift in prisons and definitely within the trainee/newly qualified cohort of psychologists and PPs to bow to the pressures of open conditions or release because of the political hot potato of increased prison populations. Just look at the reports in papers about the increased level of violence which is reflected in the increase in custody, releasing prisoners early is not the solution.
I often find myself at odds on here as I genuinely believe we more often than not over-risk offenders, violent crime has fallen hugely over the last 10 years and homicide rates have remained flat, but if you look at our caseloads and how they are sometimes treated everyone is one missed appointment away from a murder! The exception is sexual offences which have and continues to increase, I'd say this is due to social media, the internet and mobiles etc
ReplyDeleteThe fear of violent crime has also fallen but, as ever, those who scream the loudest get heard, right wing media and forums who sell stories that we are all doomed and surrounded by killers. If we (and politicians) could ignore them then maybe we could actually focus our resources and skills on those who require them to genuinely reduce the number of victims and levels of harm, in particular towards children and females.
There were approximately 1.96 million violence against the person crime offences recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2025/26, compared with almost 1.94 million offences in the previous reporting year. The number of recorded violent crime offences in England and Wales has increased considerably in the last decade, with just 600,000 violent crimes recorded in 2013/14.
DeleteRecorded crime isn't the best statistic to use according to 'experts'
Delete@14 .58 ‘experts’ manipulate statistics and findings to support their theories. Very few ‘experts’ have ever been employed in the roles they pontificate about. The increase in violence towards prison and probation staff is increasing and some ‘expert’ will pop up with another ‘woke’ theory for the ‘woke’ management to jump on as the way ahead, it would be interesting to see how many operational POs with significant experience are involved in the ‘Our Future Probation Service’ debacle that is currently rolling over us.
DeleteThis whole system is based on the answer to the following two questions…….1) who can we blame for this event and 2) can we make sure this stays at the PP level?
ReplyDeleteletter to Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, Chair of the Committee of Public Accounts from copple in July 2025:
ReplyDelete21 July 2025
Dear Chair,
PRISON ESTATE CAPACITY - SENTENCING REVIEW RECOMMENDATIONS
Further to the Committee’s Report, ‘Prison Estate Capacity’, I am writing to you in response to recommendation 3b and 6.
As set out by the Lord Chancellor in a prison capacity briefing on 14 May 2025, despite unprecedented construction, we are expected to be approximately 9,500 prison places short by Spring 2028... 21,000 currently occupied prison places do not meet the current fire safety standards... e currently estimate that around 6,000 prison places may not meet the required fire safety standards by the end of 2027...
... The MoJ has been awarded £2.3bn of Capital Departmental Expenditure Limit (CDEL) investment annually for the first three years in the Spending Review (Financial Years 2026/27, 2027/28, 2028/29) and £2.0bn in 2029/30, totalling £8.9bn over four years... The MoJ will receive up to £700m by the final year of the Spending Review for investment in the Probation Service and related community services... We are working through the detailed breakdown of how this additional investment will be used as part of the Ministry of Justice’s allocations process... We will invest £4.7billion in prison building over the spending review period... In the longer-term, we will increase probation capacity through a mixture of extra investment and making more efficient use of the resources we have... HMPPS established the Our Future Probation Service (OFPS) programme to design and implement measures that will reduce workloads. It will ensure those services are delivered more productively through the use of modern technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Spending Review announced an initial £8 million for investment in new technology to lift the administrative burden on probation practitioners, so they can focus on managing and rehabilitating offenders."
https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/49298/documents/262529/default/
The inherent racism & misogyny of the establishment is never far away:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1w1yv987jqo
"The Metropolitan Police has apologised after it inadvertently disclosed email addresses of around 140 people who say they were sexually abused by the late Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed.
Scotland Yard confirmed to the BBC it copied in all those who had signed up to receive a monthly email update for victims instead of blind copying them."
Very, very similar echoes of the trump admin's approach to the epstein victims, doncha think?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9982znvyk4o
"Andy Burnham has described the death of former Cambridge professor Jason Arday as "a tragedy on so many levels", as he called for a "moment for reflection".
Arday was found dead at an address in Battersea, south London, on Friday afternoon."
The met has been a safe haven for rapists & abusers of women while Cambridge University has been covering up for racists: Extreme right wingers have enjoyed working at Cambridge, such as noah carl, eventually dismissed in 2019 for links to far-right extremists & nathan cofnas, who was ***cleared of all charges*** when he claimed that race was linked to academic ability: "under a true meritocracy, black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” and that the number of black professors at Harvard would “approach zero”. The university still runs on hypocrisy and racism. Jesus College, where Arday taught, still displays a plaque in the chapel celebrating the slave trader Tobias Rustat.
In the words of one of my SPOs remember the 7 Ps "Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance"
ReplyDeleteirritating old engineer friend insisted on saying "fail t'prepare, prepare t'fail"
DeleteQuite. The only question is why that principle should apparently apply to the PP but not equally to the organisation designing the system they work within.
DeleteNever heard so much rubbish. Your SPO needs to apply that to those above. These little nuggets of wisdom don’t mean much at the coalface when staff hold excessive caseloads and work in a blame culture. You can’t 7P your way out of a system that’s fundamentally overloaded and then blame staff when it fails.
DeleteThe letter to the Public Accounts Committee quoted above perhaps gets closer to the heart of this than the £700m headline ever does.
ReplyDeleteThe language is revealing: probation capacity will be increased partly by “making more efficient use of the resources we have”, while OFPS will “reduce workloads”.
But there is an important distinction between creating capacity and declaring capacity.
If OFPS determines that certain cases require less practitioner contact, removes or reduces existing activities and calculates that this releases 25% of practitioner capacity, no additional experienced PP has appeared. No extra hour has been added to anyone’s working week. HMPPS has made an organisational judgement that some of the work previously undertaken can safely be reduced.
That may prove to be entirely justified. But it means the 25% isn’t free capacity appearing from nowhere. It is capacity created by accepting a different distribution of risk and professional resource.
And presumably much of that newly “released” capacity will then be required to absorb the consequences of sentencing reform, increased community supervision, electronic monitoring and whatever else follows.
Which brings us back to accountability.
If an SFO subsequently occurs in a case receiving less practitioner input because the nationally designed model determined that was proportionate, an SFO review cannot fairly begin from the assumption that the PP could have done more. Of course they could have done more. The entire purpose of the model was to require them to do less somewhere.
The relevant question must therefore be: did the practitioner act reasonably within the model and resources HMPPS provided?
Otherwise HMPPS gets to count the benefit of reduced practitioner activity as “released capacity”, while retaining the ability to treat that same reduced activity as an individual practitioner failing when examined retrospectively.
You cannot have that both ways.
If the organisation takes the efficiency saving, the organisation must also own the risk assumptions on which that saving depends.
The “Our Future Probation Service” tagline needs to stop. It’s selling a lie because what future is there for the people actually doing the work, when we’re battling for half-decent pay, manageable workloads and decent conditions, while constantly worrying about blame, SFOs and being thrown under the bus, while many are off sick, preparing to leave or have already left, We’ve had reform after reform, but how many of these changes were actually agreed with frontline staff? And of that £700m we keep hearing about, how much is actually going to make life better for the people delivering probation on the ground, the new recruits with minimal experience and those on probation. They can’t keep calling it “our future” while treating the people who are supposed to deliver that future like an afterthought.
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ReplyDeleteYou’re not wrong. If the organisation decides and redefines what is necessary, and cant be honest about what is being distorted or lost, then it is impossible to describe probation as a profession.
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