Bound To Win Votes

You definitely know when an election is looming when the ruling party start rowing back on climate change measures, foreign aid aid and sending more people to prison, even though there's no room. This from the Guardian yesterday:- 

Shoplifters who commit repeat offences to face prison

Government also plans to make greater use of facial recognition technology as part of crime crackdown bill

Shoplifters, burglars and violent criminals who commit repeat offences will be handed mandatory prison sentences under plans being drawn up by ministers. The government plans to force judges to impose jail terms when sentencing repeat offenders for shoplifting, burglary, theft and common assault, using new legislation to be included in the crime and justice bill.

Currently, these offences do not necessarily result in a prison sentence, the way that two convictions for knife crime automatically do. The number of offences required for a prison sentence would vary according to the type of crime, according to the Times.

A government source told the newspaper the trigger for a custodial sentence for repeat shoplifting would likely be between 10 and 20 instances as it is a lower-level offence than knife crime, for example, although planning for the legislation is still in its early stages. Lower thresholds are reportedly being considered for burglary, theft and common assault.

The government is also in favour of police and retailers making greater use of facial recognition technology. On Sunday, the Observer reported that Home Office officials had made plans to lobby the independent privacy regulator in an attempt to roll out facial recognition technology into high street shops and supermarkets to combat shoplifting.

The covert strategy was agreed during a closed-door meeting on 8 March between the policing minister, Chris Philp, senior Home Office officials and the private firm Facewatch, whose facial recognition cameras provoked fierce opposition after being installed in shops.

Philp is also said to be urging police forces to make greater use of the technology and artificial intelligence to match known shoplifters with images on the police national computer.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Shoplifting strikes at the heart of local communities and we expect police forces to take this seriously – deterring this kind of crime but also catching more offenders. We have delivered more police officers in England and Wales than ever before and invested a record of up to £17.6bn in 2023/24 into policing, including for more visible patrols in our neighbourhoods and better security such as CCTV and alarm systems.”

--oo00oo--

From the Observer on Sunday:-

Home Office secretly backs facial recognition technology to curb shoplifting

Covert government strategy to install electronic surveillance in shops raises issues around bias and data, and contrasts sharply with the EU ban to keep AI out of public spaces

Home Office officials have drawn up secret plans to lobby the independent privacy regulator in an attempt to push the rollout of controversial facial recognition technology into high street shops and supermarkets, internal government minutes seen by the Observer reveal.

The covert strategy was agreed during a closed-door meeting on 8 March between policing minister Chris Philp, senior Home Office officials and the private firm Facewatch, whose facial recognition cameras have provoked fierce opposition after being installed in shops.

In a development that ignores critics who claim the technology breaches human rights and is biased, particularly against darker-skinned people, minutes of the meeting appear to show Home Office officials agreeing to write to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) advocating the merits of facial recognition technology in tackling “retail crime”.

Mark Johnson, advocacy manager of the campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: “The Home Office must urgently answer questions about this meeting, which appears to have led officials to lean on the ICO in order to favour a firm that sells highly invasive facial recognition technology. Government ministers should strive to protect human rights, not cosy up to private companies whose products pose serious threats to civil liberties in the UK.”

The minutes of the previously undisclosed meeting reveal that Philp – appointed policing minister by Rishi Sunak last October – and Simon Gordon, the founder of Facewatch, discussed “retail crime and the benefits of privately owned facial recognition technology”.

Later, as part of an action plan agreed during the meeting, it is noted: “Officials to draft a letter to ICO setting out the effects of retail crime.” In addition, Philp would “consider a speech to bring the benefits of FR [facial recognition] to the fore”.

It remains unclear precisely what contact followed between the Home Office and the privacy regulator regarding Facewatch. However, the minutes do suggest that Philp is aware that any attempt to apply pressure on the independent regulator might be ineffective. “CP [Chris Philp] reiterated that the ICO are independent and he can’t attempt to change their rulings or opinion,” state the minutes, obtained by Big Brother Watch through a freedom of information (FoI) request.

Facial recognition technology has provoked widespread criticism and scrutiny, with the European Union moving to ban the technology in public spaces through its upcoming artificial intelligence act. However the UK’s data protection and information bill proposes to abolish the role of the government-appointed surveillance camera commissioner along with the requirement for a surveillance camera code of practice.

“The UK should seek to emulate the European artificial intelligence act, which would place a ban on the use of facial recognition for surveillance purposes in all public spaces,” added Johnson.

Advocates of biometric surveillance technology installed on retailers’ premises point to the escalating issue of retail crime, with UK shop thefts more than doubling in the past six years, reaching 8m in 2022. Last week the Co-op warned that some communities could become “no-go” areas for shops due to surging levels of retail crime. 

However, the use of Facewatch to tackle the issue is deeply contentious. In April, Sports Direct’s parent company defended its decision to use Facewatch cameras – which check faces against a watch list – in its shops. Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group said the cameras had cut crime, after 50 MPs and peers backed a letter opposing its use of live facial recognition technology.

Gordon, who founded Facewatch in 2010, said: “We provide each individual business with a service that will reduce crime in their stores and make their staff safer. Every store has 10 to 20 people who just constantly steal from that store. And the store knows who they are. They’ve been preventing theft for years – this isn’t a new thing. All this is doing is using new technology to stop it. One of our big retailers using it has a 25% [crime] reduction compared to stores not using Facewatch,” he added.

Facial recognition software has been used by South Wales police and London’s Metropolitan police during events like the Notting Hill Carnival and, more recently, during the coronation. In 2020, appeal court judges ruled that previous trials by South Wales police of the technology were unlawful and unethical, although the force continues to use the technology.

Last month, the Met revealed the results of its review into the technology’s effectiveness and claimed “no statistically significant bias in relation to race and gender, and the chance of a false match is just 1 in 6,000 people who pass the camera”.

Asked about the ministerial support for Facewatch, a Home Office spokesperson said: “Shops are at the heart of our communities, and it is important that businesses are free to trade without fear of crime or disorder. That is why we continue to work closely with retail businesses, security representatives, trade associations and policing to ensure our response to retail crime is as robust as it can be. New technologies like facial recognition can help businesses protect their customers, staff and stock by actively managing shoplifting and crime.”

Perfect Cover

I think we've all come to accept that a global pandemic is being used by all kinds of regimes to take unprecedented actions they'd never normally dare. Think China, Hong Kong, Myanmar, UK. Whilst we're all distracted and under cover of a dense smokescreen, our particularly nasty bullying Home Secretary is rushing through some legislation that's going to have profound consequences for our democratic way of life and free speech. Ian Dunt on the Politics.co.uk website explains:-  

Silencing Black Lives Matter : Priti Patel's anti-protest law

We knew this was coming. Priti Patel has been extremely clear about what she thinks of Black Lives Matter. “Those protests were dreadful,” she said last month. She’s also been clear about what she thinks of Extinction Rebellion. At a police conference last year she branded its activists “eco-crusaders turned criminals”. Now we see what she plans to do about it.

On Tuesday, the Home Office published the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill. It covers a wide range of areas, from sentencing to digital information. But it has a specific section on the policing of protests. And the function of this section is simple: It aims to silence them. It is cancel culture on a statutory footing, directed against the left.

This is not a metaphor. It is the literal and explicit function of the legislation.

The policing bill does this by amending an old piece of legislation called the Public Order Act 1986. This older Act gave police officers powers which they have used against protestors ever since. If they believe that a demonstration risked “serious public disorder, serious damage to property or serious disruption to the life of the community”, they could impose restrictions on it – for instance on where it went, whether it moved or how many people could be present.

This week’s policing bill adds a further justification for the restrictions: noise. If the noise of the protest “may result in serious disruption to the activities of an organisation” – for instance by distracting employees in a nearby office, then the police can impose restrictions. It goes without saying that this applies to almost any protest at all around parliament, the whole purpose of which is to get the attention of politicians. It can therefore cause “serious disruption” of an organisation.

It also applies to passers-by. If the noise of the protest could have “a relevant impact on persons in the vicinity of the procession”, the police can impose restrictions. The standard for this threshold is very low indeed: If the police believe that just one person nearby could be caused “serious unease, alarm or distress”, they can impose restrictions.

Wherever you look in the legislation, it works to lower the point at which the police can intervene. The old legislation, for instance, said they could do so to prevent “disorder, damage, disruption or intimidation”. That old formulation remains, but the Home Office has added a new criteria: “impact”.

Look closely at those words. The ones in the old legislation were all negative. But the new one is entirely neutral. Legally, it seems very broad. But if you look closer it is actually quite specific. It aims its sights at the entire purpose of protest.

The point of a demonstration is to be heard, to make an argument, to encourage others – whether they are people passing by, or workers in a company, or MPs in parliament – to hear the protestors’ point of view. In other words, to have an “impact”. This is why we call them ‘demonstrations’. It is a demonstration of a political view, expressed so that it can convince others. That is what makes it a vital part of free speech.

Demonstrations are not just any kind of free speech. They are the free speech of the unheard. They are the last medium of communication and influence available to people who are frozen out of the formal political system, either in the media or in parliament. And those are the people Patel is trying to silence.

The government is effectively sticking duct tape over the mouths of protestors. They are requiring, quite literally, that they do not make noise. They are silencing them. The inability to be heard is now a precondition for being able to protest.

“Protesting in the way that people did last summer was not the right way at all,” Patel said of Black Lives Matter. Well now we know what the right way is: a way in which no-one can hear you.

She then opens up a new front against demonstrators. She increases the number of them who can be prosecuted for failing to abide by the police restrictions.

These restrictions are usually announced to protestors by police on loudspeakers and on social media. But when those who broke the restrictions ended up in court, they could always say they were unaware of them. And that was entirely reasonable. Protests are chaotic events, often involving large areas, many people and – yes – a lot of noise. It’s very likely a protestor won’t have seen a tweet from the police or been in a position to hear their announcements on a loudspeaker.

This defence was open to them because the 86 Act said they had to have “knowingly” failed to comply. But the new legislation makes a very significant change. It applies if they “ought to know” of the restriction.

This is an astonishing move. It means that even if a demonstrator hasn’t seen the tweet sent by police, or heard the announcements on a loudspeaker, they can still be prosecuted.

Patel is also making the definition of a protest much wider. Previously “assemblies” and “processions”, which are the legal categories of these types of events, had to involve more than one person. But MPs have spent the last few years getting increasingly irritated by Steve Bray, the Remainer campaigner who stood outside parliament during the Brexit crisis. And the Home Office is keen to clamp down on Extinction Rebellion’s plan for a “Rebellion Of One” campaign which would see people take action on their own. The bill seeks to undermine these events by giving police the powers they would have over normal demonstrations even for “one-person protests”.

It then takes aim at the statue debate which blew up around Black Lives Matter. The government seems intent on raising the maximum penalty for criminal damage of a memorial from three months to an astonishing and completely disproportionate ten years. A memorial is defined extremely broadly indeed, as “a building or other structure, or any other thing” which has “a commemorative purpose”.

And then Patel does something really quite extraordinary, which should not be possible in a properly-functioning liberal democracy. She gives herself the power to fundamentally change the meaning of the law at any time without any real parliamentary scrutiny.

The 86 Act hinges on the phrase “serious disruption”. It’s police suspicion of that eventuality which authorises the powers they have over protestors. But the new legislation allows the secretary of state to “make provision about the meaning” of the phrase. She can do this using something called statutory instruments.

Statutory instruments are powers given to ministers allowing them to change or update law with no real parliamentary scrutiny. They’re supposed to be used to implement something that is in an Act of parliament – for instance by changing the type of speed cameras that are used in road safety legislation. It’s uncontroversial, unfussy stuff that parliament doesn’t really need to be consulted on. But Patel isn’t using them for anything like that. She is using them to unilaterally change the meaning of an Act of parliament.

She could, of course, have put what her definition of “serious disruption” is in this new bill. That means it would have got all the scrutiny you’d normally get for legislation – committee stage, impact assessments, press attention, full parliamentary votes. But she hasn’t done that. Instead, she has given herself the power to make it whatever she wants, whenever she wants, with only a slim scrap of scrutiny available. The criteria for whether a protest can go ahead and how is now effectively in the hands of the home secretary.

Just a few weeks ago, education secretary Gavin Williamson insisted that “free speech underpins our democratic society”. He did so because he was ostensibly concerned about left-wing students no-platforming conservatives in universities.

But this legislation shows just how shallow those sentiments were. This government isn’t interested in free speech. It is interested in culture war. Those on the government’s side of the culture war have their speech legally protected. Those on the other side are silenced.

Ian Dunt

Once a Bully, Always a Bully?

So, in anti-bullying week and having sat for months on the report about Priti Patel's bullying and breaking the Ministerial Code, the prime minister instructs his troops via whatsapp it's "Time to form a square around the prittster" and says he has full confidence in her. The author of the damning report Sir Alex Allan, resigns instead, clearly unimpressed to hear the home secretary's lame excuse that her behaviour was 'unintentional'. 

I think it's probably worth reminding ourselves at this point as to how this great ship of state is being steered with Captain Patel on the bridge. This from the Guardian on Wednesday and as you read it dear colleagues, bear in mind all probation staff are about to become civil servants:-   

Black official quit ‘racist’ Windrush compensation scheme

Exclusive: Former senior Home Office employee Alexandra Ankrah says some colleagues showed ‘complete lack of humanity’

Complaints of racism and discrimination within Home Office teams set up to address the Windrush scandal prompted the launch of an internal investigation and the resignation of a senior official, the Guardian has learned. The most senior black Home Office employee in the team responsible for the Windrush compensation scheme resigned this year, describing the scheme as systemically racist and unfit for purpose, it can be revealed.

The Guardian has also learned that a separate set of complaints about discrimination within a different Home Office team researching the causes of the Windrush scandal led to an earlier internal investigation. About 20 members of staff working on the independent Windrush Lessons Learned review by Wendy Williams were interviewed by a civil service “equality, diversity and inclusion” officer after allegations of racially discriminatory treatment were made by minority ethnic staff members.

Alexandra Ankrah, a former barrister who worked as head of policy in the Windrush compensation scheme, said she resigned because she lost confidence in a programme that she alleged was “not supportive of people who have been victims” and which “doesn’t acknowledge their trauma”.

Several proposals she made to improve the scheme were rejected, she said. “The results speak for themselves: the sluggishness of getting money to people, the unwillingness to provide information and guidance that ordinary people can understand.”

She was troubled by the fact that several Home Office staff responsible for the compensation scheme had previously helped implement the hostile environment policies that had originally caused claimants so many problems.

By the end of October, the compensation scheme had been running for 18 months and only £1.6m had been paid out to 196 people. Officials had originally expected thousands to apply and estimated that the government might eventually have to pay out between £200m and £570m. At least nine people have died before receiving compensation they applied for.

The Home Office said it rejected any suggestion that the scheme was discriminatory.

Ankrah’s concerns were echoed by whistleblowers from the Lessons Learned review, who felt uneasy that entrenched Home Office styles of working made staff insensitive on the issue of race. “The irony was that the very review team that was investigating what the Home Office thinks is past injustice was doing it in a way that was upholding all the systemic racism that exists in the Home Office,” one team member who was interviewed as part of the internal investigation said.

Ankrah worked as a head of policy in the Windrush compensation scheme from its launch in March 2019 until April 2020, when she resigned and moved to another Home Office department. She left the Home Office entirely in August 2020 to take up a job in the NHS.

She said she raised concerns to her bosses on several occasions about what she felt was systemic racism within the scheme. “It’s not just racism. It is an unwillingness to look with any curiosity or genuine concern at the situation of victims, many of whom were elderly and unwell,” she said. As a result, a group of predominantly black and Asian people were being “re-traumatised” by the compensation scheme, she said.

She said a senior colleague criticised her for always seeing “things through the prism of race” and she was censured for “standing outside and throwing stones in”. As the only black senior member of the team, she was “irritated” by these rebukes, asking: “[If] I was throwing stones from the outside – who put me on the outside?” She felt her role on the compensation team was marginalised and that her “experiences as a black person, as a professional, were diminished or devalued”.

“I am not a disgruntled employee; I am not bringing an employment tribunal claim – this was not about my job. It was about meeting this government’s promise to put right the harm that many people had suffered,” she said.

She described accepting the role because she wanted to help with the process of ensuring justice for the Windrush generation, but quickly becoming concerned about the team’s capacity to deliver it. Ankrah proposed a simplified, plain-English version of the compensation application form, as well as greater understanding towards the families of those people who died before completing a claim. She also made suggestions about how to assist widows and children.

She said she wanted to help people to prove that their treatment had a detrimental impact on their lives but that her recommendations were ignored. “The scheme was intended to allow people to make their own applications, without the need for legal advice. But the guidance was poor; this meant it was not fit for purpose.”

Ankrah’s main concern was that many in the team working on compensation had immigration enforcement backgrounds, or were still working in that section of the Home Office. “These were the very same people who hadn’t questioned the Windrush situation in the first place,” she said. “It is unusual, is it not, to have the same bit of the organisation in charge of the complaints? You normally have some type of separation at least to show credibility.”

Ankrah was also troubled by numerous comments that she believed were revealing about attitudes of Home Office employees. She said staff were grudging about payments and told her: “People should be happy with whatever they get.” She added: “A Home Office lawyer was telling me: ‘If they die without a will then too bad, they should have made a will.’”

When she tried to help speed up payment for a terminally ill claimant, colleagues began “discussing whether he should be paid a trifling sum or a very trifling sum”. She felt some of the comments “betrayed a complete lack of humanity”.

Amid growing concerns about the running of the programme, the Commons home affairs committee announced on Wednesday that it was launching an inquiry into the compensation scheme. The first evidence session is expected next month.

Three separate teams were established to right the wrongs against the Windrush generation in 2018. Alongside the compensation scheme, the Windrush taskforce has been widely praise for swiftly giving documentation to about 13,000 people who had wrongly been designated as illegal immigrants.

Separately, BAME staff working on the Windrush Lessons Learned review – the third unit established in the wake of the scandal – said they were concerned they were not invited to key workshops and were given non-speaking roles at meetings, whistleblowers told the Guardian.

After staff members attempted to raise concerns internally, a complaint was made to the chair of the Home Office’s race board. As a result, a Home Office human resources team was instructed to do some work to ensure that the team was “leading the way in creating inclusive working environments”.

An internal investigation was also launched, and about 20 members of staff working on the review were interviewed at length in early 2019 by a civil servant with a responsibility for equality and diversity. The conclusions of the internal investigation were not shared with the team, though it is understood to have looked at the lack of inclusion.

Remembering a Period of Enlightenment

There are many in the probation field who can still reflect on rather more enlightened times when the sponsoring department was the Home Office and benefitted from wise counsel such as provided by David Faulkner who died recently. This from the Guardian:-

  
Dominic Cummings, take note: even Thatcher had liberal civil servants

Committed to the common good, David Faulkner, who has died, embodied all that was right about the Civil Service

In a delicately weighted coda at the end of Middlemarch, George Eliot quietly celebrates the unheroic but life-enhancing example of the novel’s central character. Dorothea Brooke’s spirit may have “spent itself in channels which have no great name on the earth,” Eliot writes. “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”

The effect of the Home Office civil servant David Faulkner, who died last week aged 86, was incalculably diffusive too. I didn’t know him terribly well, but I am definitely one of many journalists, researchers, academics and practitioners whom he influenced. In manner, Faulkner was always modest, fair, serious and unflashy. When I have mentioned him to others in the last few days, the first thing that people say is always – and rightly – how nice he was.

But Faulkner was also a tough thinker. He honed his policymaking talents in the 1980s, a turbulent time for British government. As a result, he always looked round political corners before charging on. He liked to say his job was to speak truth to power, but in a voice to which power would listen. In this way, unlike Dorothea Brooke, he managed to notch up some notably historic acts too. These included the setting up of the still invaluable independent prisons inspectorate. He also oversaw a long period in the 1980s in which government policy towards criminal justice, penal issues, policing and drugs took serious account of research and facts rather than following and chasing headlines. This may seem surprising, since these were the Margaret Thatcher years, but on these issues the Home Office was able to keep its distance from No 10.

Faulkner was a liberal in the best sense. In one of the books he wrote in retirement he defined this in an exemplary way – and with a neat thrust of the dagger at the end:

“The term ‘liberal’ has come to be used as one of abuse, often without much thought for what it means. I have always understood it to mean a commitment to the values of freedom, democracy, social justice, respect for the individual and protection from oppression by corporate interests or the state. Critics now associate it with weakness, complacency and social irresponsibility and by doing so diminish the fundamental values for which it stands. Politicians and others praise the liberal values for which the country fought two world wars, but rarely apply them to contemporary situations.”

He also embodied a form of civil service integrity that now seems increasingly remote. In Faulkner’s civil service generation, career paths took very different directions from today. He spent almost his whole career in one department, the Home Office, moving up through it and developing a commitment to the institution itself. Today that institutional mentality would be a cause for censure, not approval, and the lack of diversity that went with it would trigger justified alarm. But it gave room for senior civil servants to be involved in policy development in ways that are also rarer today, when so much of a department’s work is routinely outsourced (which was not yet the case in the Home Office in the 1980s) to consultancies and cronies as well as to more partisan pressure groups.

The upshot was that Faulkner’s thoughtfulness, preparedness and openness were mostly treated as a departmental asset, not a threat. It is hard to think of any career civil servant who was so genuinely interested for so long in solving hard public policy problems calmly, in listening to what others knew and thought before making a decision, or who was so willing to share his own thinking with colleagues and with others as he did so. He was the antithesis of the Yes Minister stereotype.

Probably Faulkner’s finest hour was when he was the head of what was then the Home Office prison department, before taking charge of criminal justice policy more generally until 1992. Faulkner didn’t achieve everything he wanted in either of these roles, not by a long chalk, and his heart wasn’t always in everything that he had to do. But he had an ethos and a strategy, and he was a pivotal figure in something that mattered a lot, helping to create a more liberal, rational and purposeful criminal justice world than had existed before that period of reform. It was the golden age of the much missed Home Office research unit.

But that was then, and this is now. References to the growing good of the world, as George Eliot put it, ring hollow in these post-liberal times. The fairness, transparency, fact-based policymaking and the openness to ameliorative ideas that marked Faulkner’s approach are despised in the Dominic Cummings era. Public confidence, expressed through mainstream media, and later social media, has been the great governmental god of the past quarter century, from New Labour to Boris Johnson.

Towards the end of his autobiographical 2014 Servant of the Crown, Faulkner reflected on whether his liberal principles were now an anachronism. “I have asked myself many times whether they belong to an era which has now passed,” he wrote. “But I cannot persuade myself that they are no longer relevant. To argue for them is not to try to return to the past, but to find a sense of direction for the future.”

Is this merely denial? Or is it possible that a new liberal approach to collective ethos and rational policymaking can in fact be forged again from the fractured pieces of the liberal past? Looking at Donald Trump’s defiance of America’s voters, at the insouciance with which Boris Johnson dismisses a possible EU trade deal, or the shamelessness of the current UK government’s partisan chumocracy, it is hard to be confident. Yet Faulkner’s instinct was right. The plain fact is that, for all the difficulties, there is no alternative.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

There Could Be Trouble Ahead

As always, the Daily Mail proves to be the perfect place to run a flag up the pole and make sure enough people are keen to salute it. Here's Rob Allen's take on word of Priti Patel's plans for a return to the Home Office:-  

Back Home? Why Sentencing, Prison and Probation Should Stay in the Ministry of Justice

The Johnson government is reportedly considering a shift in responsibility for sentencing, prisons and probation from the Ministry of Justice to the Home Office. I’m not altogether surprised; before the 2016 referendum, I heard Michael Gove tell an Oxford seminar he’d like to disband the MoJ (of which he was then Secretary of State), because it was a European type of institution unsuited to British traditions.

There may be a superficial attraction in combining responsibilities for crime and punishment - not only to those who favour a more punitive approach to offending but by those who hope that any Home Office plans for a crackdown would be tempered by the need for the Department to pay for its penal consequences.

But while the MoJ’s governance of criminal justice over the last 12 years may have earned it few friends, progressive reform is much less likely to emerge from our Interior Ministry – famously described by Whitehall-watcher Peter Hennessey as the graveyard of liberal thinking since the days of Lord Sidmouth.

For one thing, according to a book she co-authored in 2011, Priti Patel the current Home Secretary believes that we need to “reverse the tide of soft justice”, ensure that persistent offenders are imprisoned for long periods of time and make prisons “tough, unpleasant and uncomfortable places”. After the Coalition- a Conservative Agenda for Britain written with four other current government ministers argues that “the primary purpose of our justice system is to protect our society, not to act as a welfare service for convicted criminals”. Current proposals to increase the severity of sentences may not go far enough to satisfy their desire for harder penalties.

Not all Home Secretaries are so firmly in the Michael Howard Prison Works tradition of course, but responsibility for security and the reduction of crime will often produce penal policy which is at best risk averse and at worst unnecessarily harsh. The Ministry of Justice, whose centre of gravity includes human rights and the rule of law ought to tend to a more balanced approach to the use and practice of imprisonment. Home Secretary Theresa May's joke to Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke., “I lock ‘em up, you let em out” says something about the departments as well as their ministers.

Consolidating crime and punishment in the Home Office would raise questions about the Parole Board - increasingly a judicial body that would not sit well in Marsham Street; about Youth Justice which many think belongs in the Education department; and about the role of Police and Crime Commissioners.

Ms Patel and her colleagues argue that the role of PCCs should be extended so they are responsible for commissioning custodial and non-custodial sentences for those who are convicted. There could be some benefits to such a devolved approach if it creates a dynamic to encourage the development of better alternatives to prison and measures to reduce re-offending. But the government’s belief that public confidence in criminal justice will be restored by longer prison terms make these Justice Reinvestment outcomes unlikely in the current climate.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the new democracies of Eastern Europe who wanted to join the Council of Europe had to meet certain conditions including abolishing the death penalty and moving their prison systems to the Ministry of Justice. The latter was to encourage the "civilianisation" of highly militaristic and security focused approaches to detention. The MoJ is now responsible for prisons in all 47 countries of the Council of Europe, except Spain.

In their book, Ms Patel and her colleagues have deplored the fact that an increasing human rights agenda and increasing interference from Europe discourage prison sentences, decrying the Council of Europe’s belief that prisoners should be treated in a way that reflects the normal life of freedom that all citizens generally enjoy.

Moving prisons to the Home Office could mean much more than an administrative change. It could be a fast and slippery slope to people going to prison not as a punishment but for a punishment.

Rob Allen

What Could Possibly Go Wrong? 2

You privatise the National Forensic Science Service and just look what happens. This from BBC website:- 

Randox forensics inquiry: Forty drug-driving offences quashed

At least 40 motorists convicted of drug-driving offences have been cleared after evidence of manipulation was found in the forensic testing process. The motorists were banned from driving and in some cases fined, but their convictions have since been overturned. About 10,500 test results are being reviewed after data was allegedly manipulated at Randox Testing Services.

The National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) described it as a "most serious breach" of forensic science standards. A further 50 drug-driving cases have been dropped as a result of the alleged data manipulation at the firm's Manchester laboratory. Police suspended all contracts with the company, used by 42 of the UK's 43 forces, in November last year.

Greater Manchester Police has arrested two men, aged 47 and 31, who worked at one of its laboratories. They were arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. Six others have been interviewed under caution, with one remaining under investigation as part of what Justice Minister, Lucy Frazier, described last month as an "expansive" criminal inquiry.
Analysis

The scale of the operation to review the 10,500 Randox cases is unprecedented. It began in January 2017 and is likely to continue until the end of 2019. Randox, which is paying for samples to be re-tested by other laboratories, estimates it will cost the firm £2.5m. Police are also likely to incur costs because of delays to other cases, while motorists whose careers and livelihoods have been affected after being wrongly banned from driving may sue for compensation.

But the most significant impact of this disturbing affair may be on public confidence in forensic science: can we be sure that the test results we almost take for granted are accurate? In total, up to 2,700 cases have been re-analysed so far and two drug-driving cases that resulted in road deaths were referred to the Court of Appeal. Both convictions were upheld but one motorist's sentence was reduced. Two other non-fatal cases involving drug-driving have also been sent to the Court of Appeal. One conviction was quashed and the other has yet to be decided.

Ch Con James Vaughan, NPCC lead on forensics, said he could not remember a forensic science failure "of this magnitude". He said re-testing was taking longer than expected because there was a "chronic shortage" of scientific expertise and accredited laboratories, leading to delays in providing toxicology analysis in unrelated cases of sexual offence and rape.

Curtains for MoJ?

With the election starting gun fired, Rob Allen speculates what it might mean for the criminal justice system, including possible 'curtains' for the MoJ and the Home Office getting prison and probation back! (It will be recalled they got the Fire Service back recently).

What's on the criminal justice cards from a new May government?

More shocking revelations on prisons, this time from the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture who visited a range of detention facilities last year - Pentonville and Doncaster prisons and Cookham Wood YOI (as well as police stations, immigration detention centres and closed psychiatric hospitals). The report catalogues the depressing if familiar reality of prison conditions, finding none of the three establishments safe for prisoners or staff. The CPT found that locking children alone in their cell for all but half an hour a day amounts to inhuman and degrading treatment. And they were concerned that incidents of violence was under recorded, particularly at SERCO run Doncaster.

It’s possible that the report will be the last of its kind. If Mrs May fulfils her wish to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, a new Conservative government will find itself with a BREXIT 2 to negotiate. The Council of Europe may be the smallest of beer compared to the EU but it’s the continent’s leading human rights organisation. We may find ourselves sharing observer status with Belarus. But at least we won’t have to worry about letting prisoners vote.

What else might we see from a new Conservative government on the justice and prison front? There’s quite a bit from the 2015 manifesto that hasn’t been achieved. The promise of new technology is as yet undelivered, whether to monitor offenders in the community, to bring persistent offenders to justice more quickly or allow women with small children to serve sentences in the community. Perhaps thankfully there is no sign of the new semi-custodial sentence for prolific criminals, allowing for a short, sharp spell in custody to change behaviour; nor of extensions to the scope of the unduly lenient sentence scheme. Will we see these commitments reappear in this year’s manifesto or will they be quietly shelved? What will happen to plans for increasing penalties for driving offences which result in fatalities?

At least one commentator thinks that the 2015 manifesto is the enemy Mrs May wishes to slay. If he is right, there is no guarantee that the prison reform measures contained in the Prison and Courts Bill will necessarily reappear. For those with long memories, the post 1992 Major Government rapidly undid the liberal justice reforms it inherited. The counterpoint of recent headlines about prisons no longer being places for punishment and violent crime surges could easily prompt a harder approach on criminal justice in the new manifesto. Despite the flowing oratory of Michael Gove and process re-engineering of Liz Truss, the ghost of Michael Howard has never been far from the feast. While Mrs May is difficult to pigeonhole, I've always doubted whether her appetite for rehabilitation and redemption will have been sharpened by six years in the Home office - famously described by Peter Hennessy as the graveyard of liberal thinking since the days of Lord Sidmouth.

The CPT emphasised that unless determined action is taken to significantly reduce the current prison population, the regime improvements envisaged by the authorities’ reform agenda will remain unattainable. I wouldn’t put money on that. The best we can hope for is perhaps a steady state. Although if I were a betting man, I’d put a flutter on the dismantling of the Ministry of Justice. It’s quite conceivable that prisons and probation will return to the Home Office. The Tories have always thought of the MoJ as a European construct ill-suited to our traditions. Prepare to welcome back the Lord Chancellor’s Department.

The Might of Mitie

Again from Facebook, I notice that Napo Greater London Branch are continuing their discussion of possible bidders for probation work and as a consequence have turned their attention to the largely unknown cleaning company Mitie. 

Now this outfit used to have a cleaning contract at my office after our faithful band of long-serving ladies got the push some years ago. I think I'm right in saying they had a contract for 'facilities management' right across the whole probation estate, including hostels, following our nationalisation into the NPS first time around. They proved to be broadly useless and vastly expensive amid stories of huge round trips to change a light bulb if I remember correctly, so what's the story behind this lot? 

The Wikipedia entry says of them:- 

Mitie Group PLC is a British strategic outsourcing and energy services company with their head office in Bristol, and more than 200 smaller offices throughout the UK and Ireland. Mitie operates mainly in the UK and Ireland with a growing presence in Europe. It provides infrastructure consultancy, facilities management, property maintenance and a range of energy management services to its customers. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.

Mitie was founded by David Telling and Ian Stewart as MESL in 1987. It was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1988. It merged with Highgate & Job in 1989 and was renamed the Mitie Group.

Their strategy of growth through acquisition has seen Mitie acquire several businesses over the past few years and in 2006 it acquired Initial Security, a leading security business. Following on in 2007 Mitie acquired Robert Prettie & Co. Ltd for £32.7m and incorporated the specialist plumbing, heating and mechanical services business into their Property Services division. In 2008 Mitie continued its acquisitions strategy through the acquisition of Catering Partnership, and DW Tilley. The purchase of DW Tilley allowed Mitie to extend their roofing services nation-wide. 2009 saw the acquisition of Dalkia Facilities Management for £130m to bolster its Technical Facilities Management capability and an expansion into Social Housing with the purchase of Environmental Property Services (EPS) for £38.5m. In 2010, Mitie acquired the integrated facilities management business of Dalkia in Ireland.

Mitie stands for Management Incentive Through Investment Equity, and the company's managers own a substantial minority stake in the business. Mitie's business model is based on taking 51% equity stakes in start-up businesses that fall into its broad fields of activity. The management of the new business invests the remaining capital and if certain targets are met they may sell the balance of the business to Mitie after a fixed period for a sum based on the profits achieved (an earn out). Payment is made in a mixture of cash and Mitie shares. The managers usually remain with Mitie after the earn out.

As a result of this business model Mitie has a large number of group businesses that have significant managerial autonomy but share internal systems, Human Resources and marketing resources.

The outfit is run by Ruby MacGregor-Smith and her Wikipedia entry tells us:-

Ruby McGregor-Smith, CBE, is the CEO of Mitie Group PLC, a strategic outsourcing company headquartered in Bristol, UK. She joined Mitie as Group Financial Director in 2002 and was appointed CEO in 2007. She is the only Asian female chief executive of a FTSE 250 company. She was awarded a CBE in 2012 for services to business and promoting diversity. Her ten years at Mitie have seen a £1.5bn rise in the firm’s turnover, which passed the £2bn mark for the first time in 2012.

Following university McGregor-Smith trained for six years as an accountant at BDO Stoy Hayward. After qualifying, she joined Serco Group PLC, an outsourcing firm, in 1991, and worked there for nine years in a range of operational and financial roles.

In 2002, after a brief spell at the facilities management firm Service Group International (SGI), McGregor-Smith joined Mitie Group PLC as Group Financial Director. In 2005 she was promoted to Group COO, and became CEO two years later when her predecessor Ian Stewart retired to take over the role of Deputy Chairman. As the first Asian female chief executive of a FTSE 250 company, the appointment received extensive press coverage.

McGregor-Smith’s tenure as CEO has seen Mitie’s top and bottom lines grow every year, boosted by strong demand for energy efficiency services. She was quick to identify energy management as a source of future growth: the 2009 acquisition Dalkia UK, a facilities management firm specialising in energy services, significantly boosted Mitie’s strength in this niche market. Internal initiatives at Mitie in which McGregor-Smith has personal involvement include ‘Mitie’s Got Talent’, a company-wide talent contest; and ‘Mitie Millions’, at which she and finance director Suzanne Baxter judge budding entrepreneurs with up to £5m to invest in the winners. The only non-executive directorship she holds is on the board of recruitment firm Michael Page.

A recent article entitled 'Fail and prosper : how privatisation really works' on the OpenDemocracy website dwells quite a bit on Ruby, Mitie and how they fit into the great privatisation scam, sorry plan:- 

Ruby earns more than maybe anybody you have ever met. She is not an Oscar-winning movie star. She hasn't won Wimbledon. Ruby McGregor-Smith is an accountant who runs a British company called Mitie (pronounced Mighty). She pays herself £1.4 million a year. Her Mitie shares, worth £2 million, bring another £60K in annual dividends. On the side, as a part-time director, she picks up £60K more. Last September she 'bought' more shares. They cost her absolutely nothing. She sold them straightaway, making £730,000 in a moment. And now, thanks to British taxpayers, Ruby is about to get richer.

On the eve of her 51st birthday last month, the Home Office gave her a gigantic contract: eight years' work, worth £180 million, running two immigration lock-ups in West London. Mitie got the job — holding 1000 men at Colnbrook and Harmondsworth Removal Centres — only three years after entering what Ruby calls the "market". What's Mitie's experience? They run buildings for Lloyds Bank, clean Odeon cinemas, print and distribute documents, and maintain school buildings under Private Finance Initiative contracts.

For almost three years they have run Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre, near Oxford. It isn't going well. Last October one suicidal inmate set fire to his cell. The blaze spread quickly — there was no sprinkler system. Ten fire engines rushed to the scene; 180 people had to be evacuated. Seven years ago, after a similar fire in the same Campsfield block, Oxfordshire Fire & Rescue Services strongly recommended sprinklers. It didn't happen. Mitie are experts in fire prevention. They tell potential clients: "our fire and security team can integrate fire prevention, detection, and suppression with your security equipment, including fire detectors, fire alarms, extinguishers, sprinkler systems . . ." Why didn't Mitie heed the Fire Service's warning and install sprinklers when they got the Campsfield contract? Phil Miller, a Corporate Watch researcher, asked Mitie. They wouldn't say.

How does this 'market' work? Less than three years' experience of guarding immigration detainees. One massive fire. And then a gigantic government contract to run two more detention centres. Why didn't the work go to a company more experienced than Mitie?

Ruby McGregor-Smith became chair of the CBI's Public Services Strategy Board last year, not long after she'd scooped that £730,000 windfall. “UK business plays a hugely important role in delivering many public services around the country," she said. And:

"It is crucial, at a time when private provision is under intense scrutiny, that we demonstrate the positive impact that the private sector can make in transforming services and generating value for taxpayers through greater competition."

Four years ago she was one of 35 business leaders invited to sign a letter in the Daily Telegraph, urging Chancellor George Osborne to cut public services. Reducing the budget deficit quickly, they claimed, would "deliver a healthier and more stable economy". They said: "everyone knows that when you have a debt problem, delaying the necessary action will make it worse not better." The BBC's Robert Peston noted: "there is a whole school of economists . . . who would describe that statement as laughable."

Austerity politics creates work for outsourcers regardless of whether they do things more efficiently than the public sector, or not. The PFI model that accountants have dreamed up keeps capital spending off the government's balance sheet, making the official budget deficit smaller. Pushing public money into private hands shrinks the state and weakens organised labour.

Ruby McGregor-Smith's £730,000 windfall is unlikely to be her last. On top of her £1.5 million-a-year, and assuming Mitie's share price keeps rising, this year she is due another mighty windfall. Next year, same again . . .