Blimey! Tags Not Being Fitted

Thousands of offenders not wearing electronic tags, report says

Almost 9,000 people in England and Wales required to have an electronic monitoring tag did not have one, a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) has found. They are likely to include violent offenders and prisoners released from jail who need to be checked on. The NAO said, as of March 2026, prison authorities were reviewing around 8,900 cases of individuals recorded as having an active monitoring order but no tag.

However, the Ministry of Justice has disputed the figure, saying its own review puts the number of unmonitored individuals at 5,450. It said the NAO figure referred to the total number of cases they are checking to see if they need monitoring.

The NAO called the current system "inefficient".

Electronic monitoring, also known as tagging, is used in England and Wales as a way of monitoring curfews and conditions of a court or prison order.

Criminals and people deemed to pose a potential risk are sometimes fitted with an ankle tag so that their movements can be monitored. These individuals can include serious offenders such as rapists and murderers. There are three types of tags: curfew tags, location tags, and alcohol tags.

A total of 28,700 people were recorded as being tagged in England and Wales as of March 2026. The NAO said some of the 8,900 cases in its report would include people who were registered as being tagged by mistake. But it also said the real number of those slipping through the system could be "significant".

People can be identified as being "unmonitored" for a number of reasons. These can include errors in the system, refusal to wear a tag, a delay in the fitting of the tag, or an arrest where the tag is removed. But it can also include people who haven't been tagged when they should have been.

Responding to the NAO's report, the Ministry of Justice said: "Public protection is our priority, which is why we're investing £100m in electronic monitoring, tagging offenders before release for the first time and strengthening victim protections via new alert systems – all of which will help cut the number of unmonitored offenders."

The National Audit Office argues the current monitoring system is not fit for purpose.

"Electronic monitoring is central to managing pressures on prisons, but it is not working effectively, creating risks to public protection," NAO chief Gareth Davies said. "Improvements are required to ensure that those who should be monitored are monitored and that breaches are responded to effectively," he added. The report also says police and probation staff often lack information or capacity to respond quickly to breaches.

People tagged are placed under strict conditions as part of their punishment. This can include having to remain in a specific area or sticking to a curfew. If someone breaches their conditions, it can result in a formal warning, being taken back to court, or an immediate return to prison.

Earlier this year, the Ministry of Justice announced plans to significantly expand electronic monitoring as part of the Sentencing Act 2026, which aims to ease prison pressures by managing more offenders in the community.

Thousands more prisoners may be released early from autumn this year as part of the new law. Reports suggest killers, rapists and sex offenders could be among them. Most will require tagging.

Several probation officers have told the BBC they are worried about how they will cope.

Probation officers are responsible for checking offenders are following the terms of their release from prison. This could include things such as wearing ankle tags or not taking drugs.

"The report makes clear we're overworked. And it's only going to get worse with more people set to do their punishment in the community," one probation officer said. "There aren't enough of us, and we have no idea how the government is going to make it work so that nobody is at risk. Because something bad will happen, someone who is dangerous and isn't monitored will kill someone," the probation officer added.

The NAO says that part of the problem is a shortfall of around 2,200 full time probation officers, which the government expects to reduce to around 1,500 by September of this year.

The watchdog also says even though the security contractor Serco - which manages the tagging system for the government - met its 95% timeliness target for tag fitting visits, "it was only successful in fitting tags on 62% of the individuals it visited within its two attempts".

In a statement, Serco told the BBC it had made "significant improvements" and was "tagging a record number of people" and "consistently" meeting key contractual measures, as recognised by the Ministry of Justice and NAO report. It added that efforts to fit tags "rely on us receiving the correct information" from relevant authorities and partners. "We attempt to fit a tag to every person who should be wearing one. Where, for reasons beyond our control, we are unable to do so, we report those breaches to the relevant authorities."

The NAO is calling on the government to improve data quality and management of the monitoring system. It added the government had been working with Serco to improve performance and reduce the backlog in fitting tags. Ministers estimate a further 22,000 people per year will need to be tagged from 2027.

"The government needs to improve the service's resilience and efficiency, otherwise expanding electronic monitoring risks wasting public money and puts public safety at risk", said Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the Committee of Public Accounts.

The Ministry of Justice said the government inherited "a failing tagging system with record backlogs". "As this report shows we have worked hard to fix this, with install rates up by nearly 50% since 2024," it said. "This is in addition to our record £700m investment in probation, recruiting 2,300 trainee probation officers over the last two years, and recruiting a further 1,300 this year - making sure the Probation Service has the resource it needs to keep dangerous offenders under closer surveillance than ever before."

Winner, Winner, Michelin 5 Star Dinner!

What is becoming crystal clear is that there is no extra money for probation at all. That much vaunted £700 million is all going on tagging. The future is - tagging, recalling, tagging, recalling, tagging, recalling (& bagging contracts). Thanks go to the contributor for putting all the following together:-

We start with this:-

EXPLANATORY MEMORANDUM TO THE ELECTRONIC MONITORING (RESPONSIBLE PERSONS) (AMENDMENT) ORDER 2024 2024 No. 328

"This memorandum provides some historical information concerning the behaviour of Serco and G4S who were previously awarded contracts in 2005 for electronic monitoring services in England and Wales.Under those contracts, Serco and G4S overcharged the Ministry of Justice including multiple times for the same cases and for cases where the monitored person had died. This issue came to light in 2013, contracts were terminated, and the matter was referred to the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) for investigation." 

(the excuses on serco's behalf up front)

Some gems from this memo:

* Licence conditions should be preventative as opposed to punitive and must be proportionate, reasonable and necessary.

* The exception is where prisoners are released early on Home Detention Curfew... For these prisoners the curfew also has a punitive role that reflects the fact that they are still serving the custodial element of the sentence.

* Serco and G4S overcharged the Ministry of Justice including multiple times for the same cases and for cases where the monitored person had died.

* A Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) with Serco was approved by Mr Justice William Davis, resulting in a fine of £19.2m and the payment of compensation to the Ministry of Justice of £70m.

* The SFO agreed to the DPA in recognition of Serco’s prompt and voluntary self-disclosure of the fraudulent conduct

Uh? ... "A subsidiary of contracting giant Serco will pay a £19.2m fine after admitting lying to the Ministry of Justice about the true extent of profits from supplying electronic tags. Lisa Osofsky, director of the Serious Fraud Office, said SGL ‘engaged in a concerted effort to lie to the Ministry of Justice in order to profit unlawfully at the expense of UK taxpayers’. The conduct came to light in late 2013 in an investigation into Serco and its employees in respect of the tagging contract."

Ah, I see... "Credit was given in the deferred prosecution agreement for the prompt compensation payment to the MoJ"

The background is neatly summarised by the SFO itself:

“Serco Geografix Ltd devised a scheme to defraud the Ministry of Justice by hiding the true extent of the profits being made between 2010 and 2013 by its parent company, Serco Limited, from its contract for the provision of electronic monitoring services. By dishonestly misleading the Ministry of Justice in this way, Serco Geografix Ltd prevented the Ministry of Justice from attempting to limit any of Serco Limited’s future profits, recover any of Serco Limited’s previous profits, seek more favourable terms during renegotiations of contracts, or otherwise threaten Serco Limited’s contract revenues."

Hence the 'prompt and voluntary self-disclosure of the fraudulent conduct' via:

* falsifying accounting records to overstate revenue earned and costs incurred in the performance of the services (charges 1-4);

* falsifying its Annual Report and Financial Statements for the year ending 31 December 2011 by reporting an additional £7.5m of purported revenue (charge 5).

But then: "On 26 April 2021, the prosecution by the Serious Fraud Office (the "SFO") of fraud charges against two former directors of Serco Geografix Limited ("Serco") collapsed. At the commencement of the trial, 9 years after the conduct underlying the charges began, and 7 years after the SFO commenced its investigation into Serco, disclosure failings came to light."

Winner Winner, Michelin 5 Star Dinner! MoJ gets a £70million bung, Serco get £hundreds-of-millions in new contracts, Serco directors aren't prosecuted, er, that's it. Nothing to see here. It's all perfectly normal.

The Contract awarded:

Electronic Monitoring Field and Monitoring Service (FMS). The provision of contact and monitoring centre and field service functions for Electronic Monitoring. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has awarded this contract for the provision of Electronic Monitoring Services (EMS)... FMS is a service which has been delivered under one national contract... FMS includes the monitoring of offenders released on licence which covers Global Positioning System (GPS) monitoring, Radio Frequency (RF) monitoring and Alcohol monitoring (AM).

Value of contract: £329,900,000.00

Contract start date: 27 October 2023
Contract end date: 30 April 2030

This contract was awarded to 1 supplier: Serco Corporate Services Ltd

--oo00oo--

House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee

Investigation into electronic monitoring 16 September 2025

The Justice and Home Affairs Committee is questioning Lord Timpson OBE DL, Minister of State for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending and Jim Barton, Director for Probation Reform and Electronic Monitoring at the Ministry of Justice. The Committee will cover a range of topics, including the purpose of Electronic Monitoring, the future of Electronic Monitoring technology, anticipated increases in the use of Electronic Monitoring, and the use of Electronic Monitoring in detecting and preventing crime. The Committee will also ask about accountability mechanisms for private contractors, the consequences of breaching an Electronic Monitoring order, and the move to tag prison leavers as they leave prison.

The job title that sums it up in one pay packet: Director for Probation Reform and Electronic Monitoring. Highlights of the Timpson/Barton oral evidence... read it & weep:

On tagging:

Lord Bach: My general question is about what the Ministry of Justice sees as the purpose of electronic monitoring. I suppose another way of putting it is to ask whether probation can manage offenders just as effectively without resorting to electronic monitoring.

Lord Timpson: Electronic monitoring has an absolutely key central role in the justice sector. Its role is as punishment... Because we know that the technology works, you can look at what the evidence is... The technology is going to get more interesting.

Lord Tope: the Government are saying they really want to go big on EM... Is there going to be a new strategy?

Lord Timpson: There is not going to be a new strategy, but we need to expand the way electronic monitoring works ... to help us manage offenders more effectively in the community... we are doing a trial starting next month in six prisons where we will be, as we call it, tagging at source. That is, before people leave prison, we will be putting the tag on their ankle.

The truth about the £700million:

Lord Filkin: The plan is to double its use over the next few years, which is a quite remarkable increase. First, is probation ready for this?

Lord Timpson: As we expand electronic monitoring... We also need more probation staff... It is a case of recruiting them and training them up to do the job. That is where the £700 million of extra funding over the next three years is absolutely vital... I am confident in our suppliers’ ability to deliver this because I have ongoing conversations with them. I have had five board-level meetings with Serco.

Jim Barton: Building on the Minister’s evidence, we are working already with both suppliers in order to maximise the time that we have available to be ready for the expansion of EM... we have already delivered a doubling of the EM case load over the last five years. We have a track record of delivering significant expansions and innovations... How do we streamline process? That is where EM is so powerful, because it provides probation staff with data and information for them to have richer, more impactful conversations with the people on probation who they are working with.

On the contracts:

Lord Filkin: You have a duopoly, in effect, with just two suppliers, at a time when you are doubling your demand.

Lord Timpson: This is a contract that we inherited.

Lord Filkin: The implication of what you have said, Minister, is that you are contractually locked into those two suppliers. For how long are you contractually locked into those two suppliers?

Jim Barton: I am happy to come in on that point, Lord Filkin. There are a few points. The current contracts run until 2030. They are not monopoly contracts. If we wanted to, we would be able to run parallel competitions for alternative EM provision... We do not want to do that

The Chair: So that we are absolutely clear, the contract, as we understood it, with Serco and Allied Universal is basically a six-year contract from 2024 to 2030, but there is then an additional two-year option to extend it. During that period of time, you have said that you could be in a position to run a parallel contract or contracts

Jim Barton: To be really clear, we have no plan whatsoever to run a parallel contract... Our contracts work... We need to keep working with Serco and Allied Universal.

The Chair: Mr Barton, you are continuing to tell me what you have chosen to do. I am merely asking whether you have the option to do it differently, should you choose to do it differently.

Jim Barton: Apologies, Lord Chair. I think I said yes, but perhaps in Civil Service terms

The Chair: We hear very clearly where you are coming from, Mr Barton. We will move on.

The future:

Baroness Cash: We would be very interested to have some insight into what is coming.

Lord Timpson: The first thing to say is that everyone gets very excited about new things... We are exploring new hardware. We had a “Dragons’ Den” event before the Recess... We are trialling, from spring next year, live access for probation to where someone is. We will be able to check in. For example, an offender comes to see a probation officer and they say, “Why weren’t you at your appointment last week?” They say, “I was at the doctor’s”. They will be able to go in and say, “You weren’t at the doctor’s. You were in Blackpool for the day”... I am really determined that, if offenders do not comply, I can have sanctions on them and recall them back to prison, because it is a punishment and we need to use the data effectively.

Jim Barton: I have a few very quick additions, if I may... The acquisitive crime pathfinder that the Minister referenced is a good example of that, through which we are already able to provide, not live but overnight, GPS data for probation practitioners where they have robbers or burglars on their case load.

Lord Timpson: There is a small trial still going on in Northumberland on proximity tags

Oh yes, cobbler, we hear VERY, VERY clearly where you are coming from:

"Working in a prison is the most amazing job. If I had not gone down my path in commercial life, I think it would have been a most rewarding job to do. We have done a really good job on recruitment."

"I am really determined that, if offenders do not comply, I can have sanctions on them and recall them back to prison, because it is a punishment and we need to use the data effectively."

Guest Blog 104

Humiliation as a Policy!

It’s shocking to read that Ministers are planning to “name and shame” people completing community sentences. What utter nonsense from the Ministry of Justice, dressing it up as a way to “build confidence in community sentences.”

We’ve seen this before. Just as with Transforming Rehabilitation, the next step will be to shift control of Unpaid Work to Serco or a shoddy equivalent. Privatisation by stealth. Probation Officers may well have upon themselves forced a “legal power to take and publish the names and photographs” of those on Unpaid Work, but let’s be real: that duty will land in the hands of Serco “responsible officers” who will lap it up quicker than you can say “Chris Grayling”.

Serco will turn “name and shame” into part of the induction ritual. Refuse the photo, refuse the boots, refuse the high-vis vest, and the poor soul will be breached and dragged back to court.

And under Starmer’s Labour, do we really think Serco will stop there? Name and shame those electronically tagged, control of National ID cards and management of Trump’s border control ideas will likely be next.

Back in December 2013, the late Professor Paul Senior warned in his BJCJ TR special edition editorial, Probation: Peering Through the Uncertainty. They didn’t listen then and they won’t listen now. This time there’s no uncertainty at all. We know exactly how this ends: probation reduced to dust. Just look at the figures Prof Senior once brought together, many names we recognise if you’ve studied or worked in probation long enough; Steven Calder, Anthony Goodman, Jane Dominey, Wendy Fitzgibbon, Theo Gavrielides, Mike Guilfoyle, Carol Hedderman, Jamal Hylton, Fergus McNeill, Anne Robinson, Russell Webster, Kevin Wong. Where are their voices now? Where’s our champion?

As was written a few posts ago in the letter to Mr Jones, HM Chief Inspector of Probation: nobody speaks up for probation any more, not managers, not the unions, and certainly not the Chief Probation-Puppet. Martin Jones’s “I am very concerned” is a damp squib. And Napo’s Ian Lawrence claiming this “seems to only serve as a form of humiliation” misses the point entirely. Humiliation is exactly the government’s intention.

Anon (Probation Officer)

--oo00oo--

Postscript

Seeing as the author mentions Paul Senior's editorial from this TR special from way back, I thought it worthwhile quoting from his conclusion. Oh how we miss such wisdom:-

Concluding thoughts 

Reading through these contributions and also adding the passion and sheer exasperation which emerges from the Letters to Grayling it is tempting, if not impossible, not to conclude that the TR changes are simply wrong-headed and do not appreciate the complex web of reciprocity that probation functions within. It is often stated in debates that probation is little understood and there is little doubt in a sound-bite world probation is not a sound-bite organisation. But what these papers suggest is that this is as it should be. Probation deals with complex, difficult and intangible problems in a quietly authoritative, caring and committed way. Moreover even in the language of government it works. Probation on the Justice Ministry's own figures reduces re-offending and moreover offers service users real opportunities to reintegrate into society. Rather than throw this away in the rush to appeal to an ideological dogma hardly demonstrably successful in any other field of welfare reform surely now is the time to stop and think again. These contributions suggest that is self-evidently the case. We invite the government and the Ministers to take note.

Prof Paul Senior

Usual Populist Political Stuff

Probation continues to be side-lined and ignored whilst we get the usual populist political stuff. This from the BBC website today:-

More offenders could be tagged, as minister insists he's 'not soft on crime'

Prisons minister James Timpson has told the BBC more criminals could be tagged in future instead of being sent to prison - but insists he's not "soft on crime".

More than 30 companies, including Microsoft and Google, will meet the government today to explore how technology could help monitor offenders in the community more effectively and tackle violence in prison.

Lord Timpson says tagging more people instead of sending them to prison is a potential alternative punishment. But critics have questioned his previous comments about the UK being "addicted" to sentencing and punishment, and how "only a third" of inmates should be in prison.

"I don't think I'm soft on crime at all," Lord Timpson says in the wide-ranging BBC interview. "I think I'm pretty tough in my style. In business, I'm tough but I use the evidence - and in this job I'm using the evidence."

He says he is passionate about rehabilitating offenders in prison so they don't commit further crimes when released. However, more than 26% of adult criminals in England and Wales go on to reoffend within a year of being let out of prison.

"How do we reduce re-offending? How do we deal with people's drug addiction, mental health problems, the fact that people leave prison they don't know where to live, people don't have a job? That is also a really important part of my job," he says.

The former CEO of the Timpson Group, which provides key cutting and shoe repair services, is known for hiring ex-offenders and is a former chairman of the Prison Reform Trust.

Lord Timpson took up his role at the Ministry of Justice in July last year, when the penal system in England and Wales was close to breaking point. Prisons were full, and months later thousands of inmates were released early as part of an emergency plan to ease overcrowding and free up space.

He says prisons are still in a state of "crisis", with fewer than 1,000 spare places and more than 88,000 people in custody in England and Wales.

"We recently opened HMP Millsike," he says, describing the new category C prison which opened in East Yorkshire in March, with capacity for up to 1,500 inmates. "We've got more cells opening across the country. We need to keep building prison places because the population is going up."

Last month, three prison officers were seriously injured at HMP Frankland, in Durham, after they were attacked with makeshift weapons and hot oil by one of the men responsible for the Manchester Arena bombing. Hashem Abedi was being held in a separation centre - used to house a small number of the most dangerous and extremist inmates - at the category A, maximum security jail.

"What happened in Franklin is absolutely shocking," Lord Timpson says. "The level of violence in prisons is far too high - and it is increasing. "Our prison staff did an incredible job. I don't want them to turn up to work thinking that there's going to be violence. I want them to turn up to work helping people turn their lives around."

However, the number of assaults on staff in prison is the highest in a decade, with 10,605 recorded in 2024.

Lord Timpson refutes claims that gangs are in charge of some of Britain's biggest jails, but acknowledges that serious organised crime is the one thing that "keeps me awake at night".

"Serious organised crime brings drugs in and creates violence and intimidation in prisons," he says. "This has been a long-term problem in prisons, but it is even more of a problem when the capacity is as full as it is.

"If we had people who went to prison who didn't get drugs and weren't intimidated by serious organised criminals, they'd be far more likely to engage with a sentence and get well enough so that when they leave they don't commit further crime."

The government has commissioned an independent sentencing review to explore alternatives to prison in an attempt to ease overcrowding. The review will provide long-term solutions for the justice system and examine the use and composition of non-custodial sentences, including community alternatives to prison and the use of fines. Increased tagging will also be considered.

There are three types of ankle tags currently used to monitor offenders: alcohol, GPS, and curfew tags. A new study suggests tags that monitor curfews cut reoffending by 20%.

"We want them to have a one-way ticket - not a return back into prison or back into non-custodial sentences," Lord Timpson says. "What's really important is we embrace technology and look at the evidence - tagging can have some very important benefits."

But the use of electronic tagging to monitor offenders has been problematic. In recent months several probation staff have told the BBC offenders who should be tagged, have not been. The security company Serco has been contracted by the government to manage tagging since October 2023.

"We inherited a contract with Serco and it's been far from perfect," Lord Timpson says. "We're putting a lot of pressure still on them to perform, but we need to work together to make sure that people are tagged on time in the right way. Things are getting better, but we're not there yet."

Anthony Kirby, Serco Group CEO, told the BBC he is pleased the prisons minister has recognised the progress Serco has made since taking over the electronic monitoring service: "We are proud of the role we have supporting the Criminal Justice System, monitoring record numbers of people in the community and protecting public safety in partnership with HMPPS."

Fool Me Once, Shame On You:

Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me

Those with long memories will recall the electronic tagging scandals of the past when the dead and a false leg were tagged as part of a massive and systematic fraud committed over many years by both G4S and Serco. Well, the hapless HMPPS have decided both companies are now rehabilitated and each has been rewarded with brand new contracts, as reported here on the Civil Service World website:- 

HMPPS says ‘lessons have been learned’ as Serco and G4S bag electronic monitoring contracts

Deals worth up to £450m come almost a decade after firms admitted overcharging government to the tune of £170m. The boss of HM Prison and Probation Service has told MPs that lessons from past experience with electronic tagging contracts have been learned as Serco and G4S have been awarded new deals worth up to £450m.

The firms wrongly billed the Ministry of Justice for tens of millions of pounds under electronic-monitoring contracts first awarded in 2005. Sometimes multiple charges were made in relation to the same offender, in other cases charges were made for offenders who were dead.

G4S repaid the department more than £100m after details of the overcharging scandal emerged in 2013; Serco repaid £70.5m. Both firms removed themselves from the procurement process for the “next generation” of electronic monitoring devices. G4S subsequently returned to supplying electronic tags to government.

Investigations by the Serious Fraud Office resulted in Serco being fined £19.2m plus £3.7m costs and G4S being fined £38.5m plus £5.9m costs over the scandal.

Earlier this month Serco landed a £200m MoJ contract to deliver electronic-monitoring services in England and Wales for six years to May 2030. The deal will be worth an additional £75m if two one-year extension options are exercised. G4S was granted a £175m contract to deliver monitoring technology, which includes devices for location monitoring and alcohol monitoring.

In a letter to members of parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, HMPPS chief executive Amy Rees said the service’s approach to the new contract arrangements had “been informed by previous experience and lessons learned, as well as government best practice”. She said specific supplier “accountabilities, roles and responsibilities” had been set out in the respective contracts agreed with Serco and G4S.

“During implementation of the new service, both suppliers will be required to report on progress and risks through an implementation board,” she said. “This board will oversee delivery of the integrated implementation plan and ensure risks are appropriately managed through the various phases of transition. The implementation board will report into a service delivery board, chaired by the head of EM operations, where ultimate responsibility for holding suppliers to account and dealing with any issues will take place. This will ensure there is senior-level oversight of progress and risks.”

Rees’ letter was prompted by a recommendation in PAC’s Transforming electronic monitoring services report last year, which called for HMPPS to set out how it would handle risks in the programme once suppliers had been appointed. The letter was dated 27 October but was only published yesterday. The Serco and G4S contracts were announced on 8 November.

Rees said that as field and monitoring services supplier, Serco would act as service integrator and be responsible for the running and management of the end-to-end service. She said that in addition to their individual contractual obligations, Serco and G4S had also signed a separate collaboration agreement setting out clear expectations on behaviours and ways of working.

“Both suppliers will appoint a suitably senior lead officer who will be specifically accountable for ensuring their respective teams adhere to the requirements set out in the collaboration agreement,” she said. “These leads will attend the service delivery board.”

Published in October last year, PAC’s Transforming electronic monitoring services report detailed a litany of concerns about HMPPS and MoJ’s handling of tagging.

Committee chair Dame Meg Hillier said the current system was “outdated” and at “constant risk of failure”, while the report flagged £98.2m wasted on the scrapped Gemini case-management system, which MPs described as “high-risk and over-ambitious”. MPs also criticised the MoJ and HMPPS for failing to rigorously evaluate whether tagging reduces reoffending before pushing ahead with a £1.2bn programme to expand it to another 10,000 people. As of March last year around 15,300 offenders were tagged, according to the report.

--oo00oo--

Of course tagging is seen by politicians as a 'silver bullet' and cheaper way of punishment for much criminal behaviour, alongside community service as part of so-called 'tough' community sentences as alternatives to imprisonment. However, it does nothing to address rehabilitation, but that's just indicative of politicians never understanding what's involved in that. 

Anyway, there's a chronic shortage of prison capacity and I notice the Sentencing Council have launched a consultation on the whole subject and this must surely be the opportunity for some serious submissions on the central role a reformed probation service could play from PSR through to proper, meaningful supervision. Reported here on the BBC news website:-

Courts to issue fewer short jail terms under plans

Courts could soon be handing out more rehabilitative community sentences, rather than sending people to jail for short terms, under radical new plans. The Sentencing Council for England and Wales says judges and magistrates should think more about sentences that are proven to reform offenders. The plans tell courts to think twice about jailing women because of the impact on children. The plans, years in development, come amid a prison overcrowding crisis.

The council is the official body that advises all criminal judges and magistrates on how they should sentence criminals fairly and consistently, following rules set out by Parliament. The new consultation covers the principle of choosing community sentences, such as unpaid work or drug treatment programmes, or prison.

For almost 30 years the trend in sentencing has meant that more criminals have been sent to jail and for longer periods. However, academic studies show that community sentences do more good in rehabilitating low-level offenders than prison. In the major consultation, the council argues that if judges and magistrates conclude that an offender potentially deserves to be jailed, they must first pause and consider if a community order would actually be more effective at achieving rehabilitation, one of the key purposes of sentencing.

"Increasing academic research has covered the importance of rehabilitation in reducing reoffending," says the council. The Council believes it is important to reflect the findings."

The document suggests that judges needs to take extra care in assessing the lives of offenders from specific backgrounds including young adults, women, people with dependants, people who are transgender, ethnic minorities or people with addictions, learning disabilities or mental disorders. Crucially, before judges jail a woman, the council says they must consider the harm that could be caused to a pregnant woman's unborn child.

"A custodial sentence may become disproportionate to achieving the purposes of sentencing where there would be an impact on dependants, including on unborn children where the offender is pregnant," says the council. "Courts should avoid the possibility of an offender giving birth in prison unless the imposition of a custodial sentence is unavoidable."

That highly significant guidance comes after the death in 2019 of a baby whose mother went into labour unaided in a cell. The proposals also tell judges for the first time to consider whether older women who commit crimes may be experiencing changes in their mental health caused by the menopause.

Sentencing Council chairman, Lord Justice Davis, said the existing guidelines were among the most important in use. "The revised guideline updates and extends the current guidance," he said. "It reflects new information and research in relation to young adult and female offenders and findings from research on the effectiveness of sentencing."

Tom Franklin, head of the Magistrates Association, said it welcomed the "robust emphasis on alternatives to custody. Magistrates want effective community sentences and more information about their impact on the people who are given them," he said. The consultation runs until 21 February next year on the Sentencing Council's website.

What a Lovely Surprise!

This from BBC website on Thursday:-

G4S selected to run Wellingborough 'mega prison'

Private firm G4S has been selected as the preferred bidder to run a new "mega prison", the BBC understands. It is believed the contract to operate the jail in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, will be for 10 years at a cost of more than £300m.

The company has been told it has been chosen, but the contract has not been ratified and could be challenged. An official announcement on the prison, which will hold 1,600 male inmates, is expected over the next few weeks. A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: "The operator competition has not yet concluded. We will set out confirmed details in due course."

The decision comes as a surprise after G4S was stripped of its contract to run Birmingham Prison following a damning inspection report which said it was in a "state of crisis". The company also gave up running Medway secure training centre in Kent and Brook House immigration removal centre near Gatwick Airport after undercover filming by the BBC's Panorama programme showed inmates and detainees allegedly being mistreated.

However, G4S has been praised for its running of four prisons in England and Wales - Altcourse, Oakwood, Parc and Rye Hill. It is thought three other companies - Sodexo, Serco and MTC Novo - bid to run Wellingborough, which is costing £253m to build and is expected to open next year. A source with knowledge of the process said the G4S bid was not the "cheapest" but was regarded as of "higher quality" than the others.

Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: "It is disappointing that public money is being squandered on expanding the prison estate; extremely disappointing that public money is being poured into the coffers of G4S. At a time when we need to invest in jobs and the nation's health, it is shameful to waste money on the profiteers of punishment."

Shadow justice secretary David Lammy said: "When G4S ran HMP Birmingham there had to be an emergency takeover by the government after reports of drug dealing, violence, squalid conditions and poor leadership. It highlighted many of the problems with privatisation in the justice system. Serious questions must now be asked about why the government plans to hand the company control of the new prison in Wellingborough."

Wellingborough MP Peter Bone said: "My concern would be to make sure that whoever runs it, runs it properly."

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This from BBC website on Friday:-

G4S fined £44m by Serious Fraud Office over electronic tagging

Security firm G4S has been fined £44m by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) as part of an agreement that will see it avoid prosecution for overcharging the Ministry of Justice for the electronic tagging of offenders, some of whom had died. The SFO said G4S had accepted responsibility for three counts of fraud that were carried out in an effort to “dishonestly mislead” the government, in order to boost its profits.

Former justice minister Chris Grayling asked the SFO to investigate G4S and rival Serco in 2013, after a departmental review found they had overcharged for tracking the movements of people who had moved abroad, returned to prison, or died. G4S agreed to compensate the Ministry of Justice in 2014, reaching a settlement worth £121m. But it remained under investigation by the SFO until Friday, when it announced a deferred prosecution agreement, pending approval by a judge at a hearing scheduled for next Friday.

Under the terms of the agreement, G4S will pay a £38.5m penalty and £5.9m to cover the SFO’s costs. The company was given a 40% discount on its fine after co-operating with the SFO. It has also agreed to enforce new controls, including a programme of “corporate renewal” to prevent a repeat of the scandal, which took place within its G4S Care & Justice division.

“G4S Care & Justice repeatedly lied to the Ministry of Justice, profiting to the tune of millions of pounds and failing to provide the openness, transparency, and overall good corporate citizenship that UK taxpayers expect and deserve from companies entering into government contracts,” SFO director Lisa Osofsky said. “The terms of this deferred prosecution agreement will provide substantial oversight and assurance regarding G4S Care & Justice’s commitment to responsible corporate behaviour.”

G4S chief executive Ashley Almanza said: 

“The behaviour which resulted in the offences committed in 2011 and 2012 is completely counter to the group’s values and standards and is not tolerated within G4S. We have apologised to the UK government and implemented significant changes to people, policies, practices and controls, designed to ensure that our culture is underpinned by high ethical standards and that our business is always conducted in a manner which is consistent with our values. We have made significant progress in embedding these standards throughout the group and we are pleased that this has been acknowledged by the SFO and the UK government.”

The £44.4m in fines and costs takes the total paid out by outsourcing firms involved in the prisoner tagging scandal to more than £250m. Serco reached its own £22.9m agreement with the SFO last year, six years after repaying £68m to the Ministry of Justice. The SFO said its agreement with G4S was made possible by factors including the company’s disclosure of evidence and its “overall – albeit delayed – substantial cooperation” with the investigation.

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In other dodgy-dealing - some would say corruption - news by HM Government, this from the Guardian:-  

Firm with links to Gove and Cummings given Covid-19 contract without open tender

The Cabinet Office has awarded an £840,000 contract to research public opinion about government policies to a company owned by two long-term associates of Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, without putting the work out for tender.

Public First, a small policy and research company in London, is run by James Frayne, whose work alongside Cummings – the prime minister’s senior adviser – dates back to a Eurosceptic campaign 20 years ago, and Rachel Wolf, a former adviser to Gove who co-wrote the Conservative party’s 2019 election manifesto.

The government justified the absence of a competitive tendering process, which would have enabled other companies to bid, under emergency regulations that allow services to be urgently commissioned in response to the Covid-19 crisis. However, the Cabinet Office’s public record states that portions of the work, which involved focus group research, related to Brexit rather than Covid-19, a joint investigation by the Guardian and openDemocracy has established.

A Cabinet Office spokesman said this was because of bookkeeping methods, and insisted that, contrary to government records, all the focus group research done by Public First was related to the pandemic. The Cabinet Office, where Gove is the minister responsible, initially commissioned Public First to carry out focus groups from 3 March, although no contract was put in place until 5 June.

Government work is legally required to be put out for competitive tender to ensure the best qualified company is appointed, unless there are exceptional circumstances, such as an unforeseen emergency. When a contract was finally produced on 5 June, it was made retrospective to cover the work done since 3 March. The Cabinet Office paid Public First £253,000 for the two projects listed as being Brexit-related and two more pieces of work done before the contract was put in place.

Public First was required to conduct focus groups “covering the general public and key sub-groups”, according to a Cabinet Office letter. The firm was required to provide the government with “topline reporting” of their findings on the same day, with fuller findings reported the following day. The deal also included “on-site resource to support No 10 communications” in the form of a Public First partner, Gabriel Milland, being seconded to Downing Street until 26 June. Milland was the head of communications at the Department for Education when Gove was the minister and Cummings was his political adviser.

The Cabinet Office said in the letter that it had commissioned the work from Public First for a total of £840,000 without any tender “due to unforeseeable consequences of the current Covid-19 pandemic”. According to further details published by the government under its transparency requirements, Public First was paid £58,000 on 18 March for its first focus group work, classed by the Cabinet Office as being for “Gov Comms EU Exit Prog”, then a further £75,000 on 20 March for work classed as “Insight and Evaluation”.

On 2 April, 10 days into lockdown and with increasing numbers of people dying from Covid-19, the Cabinet Office paid Public First £42,000 for work listed again as “EU Exit Comms”. The first payment for work listed as being coronavirus-related was on 27 May: £78,187.07. A total of £253,187.07 was paid to Public First before the contract was entered into on 5 June.

Consolation Prizes

Whilst we await confirmation from the government that the privateers will no longer have a role in the delivery of probation services, here we have an article in the FT yesterday confirming that the decision is definitely not for 'ideological' reasons! So if that's the case it must be financial and either the bids were too high or no one was interested. Apparently the commercial sector is pretty pissed-off having been led up the garden path by the MoJ and will have to settle on a couple of new prisons instead:-   

Outsourcers to manage two new prisons in England

Boris Johnson’s government is expected to press ahead with outsourcing the management of two new prisons, even as it confirms this week that it has reversed plans to give the private sector a role in managing rehabilitation programmes for offenders. 

Serco, G4S, MTC Novo and Sodexo are all understood to be contenders to manage the new Wellingborough and Glen Parva prisons, which will provide an additional 3,360 places by 2023. The prisons are due to be completed next year with contracts to run them each worth around £300m over 10 years. The winning bidder for Wellingborough is expected to be announced this week, while Glen Parva’s will follow later. 

The decision comes despite a series of troubles with privatised prisons, with the government in 2018 forced to take over the management of HMP Birmingham from security contractor G4S after an inspector’s report found it “exceptionally violent”, with inmates high on drugs wandering around like zombies in a “war zone”. Last year the government decided to return HMP Birmingham permanently to state management. 

This week the government is also expected to confirm plans to end private sector involvement in probation services — bringing to an end one of the country’s more disastrous attempts at privatisation. Although most of the probation service is due to be brought in-house in June 2021, around £1.3bn of contracts to provide services, including unpaid work, training, and alcohol and housing advice for offenders, were put out to tender to private sector suppliers in December. 

The contracts were due to be awarded in August but the government abruptly aborted the tendering process last week. A government official said the decision to cancel the tenders was “not ideological” but admitted that no one could call the privatisation of probation a success.

The U-turn is the latest twist in a long running saga that has demoralised and splintered the probation service. Former justice secretary Chris Grayling in 2017 made the decision, against expert advice, to outsource the management of low-and medium-risk offenders to private providers such as Sodexo and Interserve. The government-run National Probation Service continued to manage high-risk individuals.

The result was a fractured, underfunded system that Dame Glenys Stacey, chief inspector of probation, said was “irredeemably flawed”. Parliament’s spending watchdog criticised the outsourced probation service as presenting “significant risks” to both offenders and the wider public. The government agreed to end the privatisation of the sector in May last year, with probation officers working for private companies due to be switched to public sector contracts by the end of 2021. 

But one of the companies bidding for the new probation support contracts said the government’s late U-turn was a “watershed” moment that would dent the industry’s trust. “Why would we invest in prisons if we and others have been treated like this?” he said. “Investing millions in a competition that has been pulled.” 

Almost half of prisoners reoffend within a year of release, with the proportion rising to nearly two-thirds for petty offenders serving sentences of less than 12 months, according to the Prison Reform Trust, which estimates that reoffending costs the state about £18bn a year. 

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson confirmed there would be an announcement on the prison programme within weeks. They added: “reforming probation to improve public protection and reduce reoffending remains one of our top priorities and we are assessing whether any changes to our current plans are required in light of the coronavirus pandemic.”

A Warning About TR2

We all know TR was a complete disaster, not withstanding the civil servants involved received awards, and at least one former Tory minister has recently repented and admitted they tried to stop Chris Grayling. But as the government still seems wedded to privatising bits of probation under TR2, for completeness we'd better cover this latest report from the Institute for Government that spells out why it almost certainly won't work:-  

Government outsourcing: what has worked and what needs reform?

Introduction
Labour’s policy of bringing public services back into government hands by default would be a mistake. But senior politicians have consistently overstated how much money is saved by outsourcing services. Outsourced services are those delivered by the private or voluntary sector. This report ranks which have been outsourced successfully and which need reform.

It finds that outsourcing waste collection, cleaning, catering and maintenance services has delivered significant savings and benefits to citizens. Particularly in these areas, bringing services entirely back into government hands could lead to worse and more expensive services for the public.

The report also shows that consecutive governments have overstated the benefits of outsourcing. Senior politicians regularly claim outsourcing can still deliver 20–30% savings but there is no evidence to support this.

It highlights a series of high-profile contract failures – including security at the Olympics, welfare assessments, offender tagging and probation. These contracts have wasted millions of pounds, delivered poor services and undermined public trust. The outsourcing of probation failed on every measure, harming ex-offenders trying to rebuild their lives.

Consecutive governments have outsourced services with no market of good suppliers or in pursuit of unrealistic cost savings – and without a reasonable expectation that companies could deliver efficiencies or improve the quality of services.

The report recommends that the current government must strengthen its commercial skills and capabilities, makes ministers and officials more accountable to the public and improve the evidence base that informs outsourcing decisions.

About this report 
The role of external suppliers in delivering services to the public and to government has been expanded significantly over the past 40 years. This report assesses where outsourcing has worked and where it has not, and why, and makes recommendations on how to improve the way government contracts out services. 

Summary

Government outsourcing is at a crossroads. Government spends tens of billions of pounds a year on services delivered by external suppliers. Yet a string of high-profile failures has put Britain’s outsourcing model under intense scrutiny. The Labour Party has called for a wide range of services to be brought back into government hands. 

But in some areas, outsourcing has delivered substantial benefits, saving money and improving services. Instead of preferring public or private on ideological principle, government should base contracting decisions on what has worked and what has not, and why. 

Outsourcing, which we define as the private or voluntary sector delivering services to the government or the public after a process of competitive tendering,* has been expanded over the past four decades. Beginning in local government with services such as waste collection, successive governments have extended outsourcing to areas including front-line services and major information technology (IT) projects. 

They have done so with a largely consistent rationale: that applying market mechanisms and private sector expertise to the work of government can reduce costs, raise quality and achieve wider benefits such as innovations and improved public sector efficiency. 

In this report, based on more than 50 interviews with current and former government officials, suppliers, academics and industry experts, we assess whether outsourcing has met those aims. We review the evidence in 11 service areas: waste collection, cleaning, catering, maintenance, back-office human resources (HR) and IT, prisons, health care, employment services, adult social care, private financing of construction and probation. Our judgment of each is presented in Table 1 (we include a full summary of each service area in Chapter 2).

Outsourcing has worked best in ‘support services’ that are relatively simple to contract for and deliver: waste collection, cleaning, catering and maintenance. When these services were first outsourced in the 1980s and 1990s, it delivered large savings, often around 20% of annual operating costs, mostly while maintaining levels of quality. Companies therefore achieved significant efficiencies, although some savings were driven by paying staff less. 

Over time, the public sector has become more efficient in these areas, meaning the comparative advantage of the private sector has got smaller or disappeared. This has led some contracting authorities to bring services back in-house. But that does not mean outsourcing has not worked – early savings have effectively been ‘banked’, and improving public sector efficiency was a key motivation for the exercise. It is doubtful that if provision were returned entirely to government hands it would deliver the levels of efficiency currently achieved while competitive pressures remain from private services. 

For front-line services, the picture is more mixed. Private prisons are cheaper to run and have introduced innovations, including in how staff treat prisoners. They perform better on some quality metrics and worse on others, but the introduction of competition has improved performance in public prisons. Outsourcing has provided extra capacity in the NHS and, in some cases, improved the performance of public hospitals, but there is a lack of comparable data on cost and quality and some case studies show damaging failures. 

Probation is an exception: outsourcing has failed on every measure, harming ex-offenders trying to rebuild their lives. The heavy costs show why government should be cautious about extending outsourcing of front-line services and only do so when it is confident it will work. 

Outsourced IT services, on balance, appear to have often been more efficient and modern – despite multiple well-reported failures. Private financing of construction projects, on the other hand, has been more expensive while achieving unclear benefits. 

Politicians and senior officials often cite 20%–30% savings when making the case for outsourcing services today.1 But while this was possible for some services outsourced in the 1980s and 1990s, we found little evidence that such savings are available today, whether for services outsourced for the first time or on second- or third-generation contracts. Where there is more recent evidence of savings, they are typically of around 5%–10%. 

Across these areas, we found that government lacks the evidence it needs to inform current decisions on how to deliver services. This includes a paucity of evidence on the cost and performance of services that the public sector delivers in-house, not just those that are outsourced.

Probation
In 2015, under a programme called Transforming Rehabilitation, the MoJ outsourced the management of medium and low-risk offenders in England and Wales to 21 regional community rehabilitation companies. The rationale for introducing competition and outsourcing was that, despite increased spending on prisons and probation, re-offending had remained stubbornly high.

Community rehabilitation companies supervise 150,000 medium and low-risk offenders, and some of the 40,000 extra short-term prisoners who previously had not been managed in the probation system. They also provide some services to high-risk offenders managed by the National Probation Service. The contracts were for seven years but the MoJ decided in 2018 to terminate the contracts in 2020, two years early. In 2019, it announced that the management of offenders will be brought back in-house, although private companies will continue to provide “innovative” drug and rehabilitation services.

The case study of Transforming Rehabilitation shows that the outsourcing of probation has not worked in the UK. Quality has been unacceptably poor. As chief inspector of probation, Dame Glenys Stacey concluded that the outsourcing of probation was “irredeemably flawed” after she found 80% of community rehabilitation companies to be inadequate in at least one key quality area, and many in several, including delays and poor-quality assessments. Support provided by the public sector’s National Probation Service for high-risk offenders performed better on every metric.

Outcomes are also generally poor. The proportion of offenders who re-offended decreased slightly but the number of re-offences per offender, and the number of prisoners recalled to prison for breaching their licence, both increased for medium and low-risk offenders, while the rates for high-risk offenders (for whom probation remained in-house) saw no such increase. But interviewees questioned how much providers could be held responsible for these outcomes – even though they are partly paid on the basis of them – given they depend significantly on other localised factors such as the police, magistrates and judges.

Nor does the outsourcing appear to have delivered the intended cost savings. The MoJ has had to invest at least £467m more than was required under the contracts because the contracts were not delivering a good-quality service. This is still less than was initially anticipated at the outset of the reforms, but as the NAO has said the department has made little progress in transforming rehabilitation. One industry expert speculated that the programme had probably cost roughly the same as the previous programme, while dealing with more offenders, but it is not possible to confirm this. An audit of the contract in 2019 concluded that it had provided “poor value for money”.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to rigorously compare the cost and quality of probation services before and after they were outsourced. We found no rigorous comparative evidence, in part because outsourcing in this area is only a recent phenomenon, but also because of changes in the service and problems accessing data held by suppliers. We found no comparable evidence from other countries, because probation has not been outsourced in most countries. Announcing in 2018 that the services would be brought back in-house, the MoJ itself recognised that outsourcing had not worked as it had hoped. Sector experts agreed. We set out the reasons why the outsourcing of probation hit so many problems in the next chapter.

3. Why has outsourcing succeeded or failed?

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But in several areas, including electronic monitoring and probation, government has outsourced services without a well-functioning market and has paid too little attention to generating competition. As we highlighted in earlier work, this not only jeopardises the potential gains of competition described above, it also increases the likelihood of opportunism from suppliers and risks problems with service performance.

The outsourcing of the electronic monitoring of offenders, where the market has been dominated by two suppliers (G4S and Serco), demonstrates how an uncompetitive market risks supplier opportunism. In 2013, when the Ministry of Justice’s (MoJ) contracts with the two companies came up to be re-tendered, it discovered “significant anomalies” in billing practices: both had charged the department for tags that had never been fitted. In the summer of 2013, Serco and G4S withdrew from the tender process for the electronic monitoring contract. In December 2013, interim arrangements were put in place for Capita, the remaining supplier in the bidding process by the end of the financial year when the contracts were due to expire, to take on the contracts. G4S subsequently won a further contract for the provision of tags.

Such uncompetitive markets are liable to suppliers abusing their power – and the exit of one or two suppliers can leave government in a poor position with limited bargaining power. The NAO found that the contracts failed to deliver promised quality outcomes, while it is unclear whether projected cost savings were achieved.

Several subsequent attempts at procurement hit problems partly because the market was not sufficiently competitive. Interviewees suggested that there was an early assumption in government that reputational risk would ensure that private providers performed well, but that has not proved to be the case – and in many cases where markets are weak, suppliers win further contracts soon after serious failures.

The outsourcing of probation services shows how outsourcing without a well-functioning market contributes to poor service performance. While some probation service providers had provided specific interventions, the full management of offenders had not been outsourced before in the UK, or anywhere else using the model the UK adopted.19 At the time, the Institute for Government and others warned that the absence of capable suppliers, combined with the difficulty of contracting probation services, made outsourcing a poor choice.

Interviewees told us that major outsourcing companies issued similar warnings – and late in the procurement process the department struggled to ensure that it had enough bidders for contracts in some regions and had to approach suppliers directly to encourage them to step forward. By requiring that organisations bidding to be one of the 21 ‘prime contractors’ had a ‘parent company guarantee’ – effectively taking on financial risk – the department excluded voluntary sector organisations and social enterprises with experience in this area from bidding to become prime contractors. Many of the companies that won contracts had minimal prior experience, which in some cases contributed to the widespread failures to provide a quality service. 

Latest From Napo 190

From the most recent edition of Napo News Online:-

The ‘Mixed Market’ and the lessons from the Serco UPW Fiasco

Whilst Napo members will welcome the Government U-turn which will see the transfer of Offender Management work to the NPS England and Wales by April 2021, the evidence against leaving Intervention services to the vagaries of the market are writ large in the failure of the last experiment.

On the 6th February 2014 Chris Grayling, then Secretary of State for Justice, announced to Parliament that he intended to terminate Serco’s Community Payback (London) contract by the end of that year. This followed an earlier award to SERCO of the entire Unpaid Work Service in 2012 with the intention that it should deliver this until at least the autumn of 2016.

The decision came after compelling evidence that Serco’s approach to delivering this critically important intervention regime had been a mixture of disorganisation and financial ineptitude. The flaws in service delivery were also graphically exposed in a BBC2 ‘Newsnight’ feature involving ‘whistle-blowing’ Napo members. They told of serious failings in the contract and embarrassing examples of community service projects not being properly supervised due to staff shortages, along with serious inaccuracies in the reporting of offenders who had failed to turn up at their appointments. By now, none of this came as a surprise to Napo members who were well aware of the Serious Fraud Office investigation involving SERCO, where allegations of ‘tagging the dead’ to falsely record the numbers and names of people wearing an electronic tag were in need of some answers.

In March 2013 Napo wrote to Michael Spurr following Chris Grayling’s statement to the Justice Select Committee that the Serco contract had produced savings of 40% since its commencement. Napo demanded to know how this figure was arrived at. We also asked for a costing of the work carried out prior to the transfer on legal and consultancy advice and the time spent by NOMS and then London Probation staff time in drawing up the bid. Michael Spurr’s reply was that the 40% figure was a re-working of the often repeated MoJ claim that the contract was to save the taxpayer £25 million (37%) over the life of the four-year contract, and that he could not reply to our questions on costing due to ‘commercial confidentiality’.

In the May/June 2013 edition of Napo News, Pat Waterman then Greater London branch chair and Sarah Friday Napo National Official co-authored an article: ‘Lessons learnt from the part privatisation of London Community Payback’ in which they highlighted the scale of job losses. Pat wrote: “Over 300 LPT staff were transferred to Serco on 30 October. However, no sooner was the ink dry on the trade union recognition agreement when Serco announced its plans to make 99 redundancies by way of a severance scheme”, adding: “The scale of the job losses arising from the privatisation of London CP is one of the most devastating things about it, with nearly 200 jobs being cut from a pre-privatisation total of around 550 (including about 100 casuals)”. In addition to the above job cuts in June 2013 Serco made a subsequent round of 10 redundancies – this time to managerial grades (senior and field managers).

In December 2013, Napo General Secretary Ian Lawrence, commented on the Serco decision to withdraw from the MoJ competition to become a primary provider of probation services, (due to the SFO investigations into their activities as well as another outsourcing giant G4S). Ian said: “Despite their clear transgressions, both companies may still be allowed to work with other potential suppliers to support the Governments’ objective of achieving a diverse market in Probation”, adding that: “We will now be using this as further evidence to parliamentarians that both companies have proved themselves to be unfit for purpose in terms of their contracts within the justice sector”.

The pressure was mounting, and by the end of 2014, the 129 full time equivalent staff had been subject to a messy transfer from SERCO into the newly created London CRC (Community Rehabilitation Company). The MoJ claimed that this move would assist the national Transforming Rehabilitation programme, but most commentators believed it was because the Government wanted to downplay the news of abject failure, especially as the announcement appeared as a footnote in a wider MoJ announcement.

Exposing the myth of the ‘mixed – market’

Clocks forward to the present; where it appears that this Government has not only failed to heed the lessons of the past, but seems intent on repeating them. The mantra that there is still a market for Interventions and Programmes in the face of all empirical evidence to the contrary is pushing credulity to its absolute limits.

The past failures of Serco, along with those of a vast majority of CRCs (that’s the companies not our members who have worked damn hard to keep them afloat) as evidenced in reports by the Chief Inspector for Probation, the National Audit Office and two parliamentary select committees, have not exactly concentrated the minds of people who ought to know better in number 102 Parliament Street.

It seems that money is no object when it comes to presenting Interventions as some sort of second-rate accoutrement to a client’s contact with probation. In the face of what we know to be an extremely sceptical response to new contracts by current CRC owners, the MoJ spin machine has gone into overdrive. The GOV.UK portal regularly spewing out unintelligible material extolling the so-called benefits of a probation mixed-market to would be purchasers. Some have confided to Napo that the prospect has about the same allure as the ‘snake oil’ once peddled by travelling Wild West salespeople.

Anyone can see that whatever wheels Grayling thought were on his TR bandwagon came off a long time ago. Even before he embarked on his gargantuan personal disaster he could have seen, (but chose not to) that the London Serco CP experiment was its X-rated prequel. The privatisation of London Community payback (just like TR) was a scandalous waste of public money, it seriously impacted on public safety and, in the view of the Probation trade unions, is still in breach of an International Labour Organisation convention on forced labour.

Napo will simply not settle for the significant victory that we secured on 16th May, and we have wasted no time in doubling our campaigning efforts to fix probation. Our ultimate objective is to see all probation work under public control with not-for-profit third sector partners providing the additional assistance that worked so well for clients and the taxpaying public before the TR disaster divided a once gold standard service.

Ian Lawrence and Sarah Friday

Time For a National Probation Agency

As many readers will be aware, Russell Webster has produced three succinct blog posts regarding the MoJ's plans for a redesigned probation service. Following the last in the series I notice from Facebook that David Raho has continued to make the case for a different direction of travel and one that undoubtedly would find widespread support within the profession:- 

Russell Webster on redesigning probation

I know I’ve said it before but the thinking is now finally edging at glacial speed towards the realisation that what is really required is not for the CRCs to be assimilated into the NPS (like The Borg on Star Trek) but rather the establishment of a brand new service built around the infrastructure and best bits of all probation providers that is both tied into local services and one step removed from direct government interference and Stalinist centralisation. Probation is not a civil service and when Grayling made it one it was another of his failings as it does not sit well with what we are and what we do. We are public servants not civil servants.

Probation regions in a brand new National Probation Agency (NPA) need to have some autonomy from central control to respond to local need but be able to use revamped shared services providing HR and administrative services to free up practitioners as much as possible without unduly reducing their professional autonomy.

It is vitally important that we do not lose the innovations that have been mostly developed in the CRCs as unlike the MoJs plans they have now been tested in the field and are being developed further through practitioner feedback. Time-saving innovations and advances that work reasonably well and that are helpful need to be developed further then scaled up and rolled out service-wide. The MoJ's blueprint is blatantly wrong when it says that it is sticking with Delius and Oasys as better solutions are required and better solutions are now potentially available. However, decisions have to be made now and plans made and actions taken expeditiously to prevent further delays down the line. Going backwards as suggested by the MoJ does not increase stability, by sticking with the devils you know from the 1990s, but rather denies the opportunity to move forward to better things that can be improved more easily and that are fit for the 21st century and the technologies that we are familiar with and would want to use to make our job easier.

There is certainly a place for private contractors under the probation umbrella in a reunified service and it would be naive to believe otherwise. Grayling clearly got it wrong but those of us who knew where the trusts were heading know that CP in London was an example of what Trusts were planning to do on a wider scale just as NHS Trusts contract out service provision to private providers. What the Serco CP experience in London was able to prove was that little or no money can be made from CP as public sector probation were actually able to run it fairly efficiently as it shared resources and did not have to provide separate HR and financial services. Serco slimmed CP in London down to the very minimum and retained staff by paying them more than their equivalents back in the Trust. The unions did not object to employers paying increases over and above what was expected particularly as these increases would be preserved in a staff transfer.

Government plans to reunite probation casework certainly does not mean sending private companies and contractors packing. It makes sense that some key services are provided in-house and some might be contracted out eg IT, HR, financial, facilities management, H&S if it is cost effective to do so. There are also parcels of work that could be provided by others working under the probation umbrella. I for one want to see the trend towards greater integration of electronic monitoring into offender management take place although the private sector will need to be involved to provide technical services. The important thing is to get the best people doing the jobs they are best qualified to do at a reasonable cost to taxpayers. This is how modern organisations function.

Where TR went badly wrong was to go too far by dividing the service and splitting the service users according to a relatively arbitrary assessment of risk at point of sentence. Whereas tweaking and expanding the Trusts and giving them commissioning powers would have been sufficient. Whilst core services should by default be provided by the public sector - for some very good reasons - many colleagues across probation may wish to have the choice to work for private providers provided that they are adequately resourced to do what they are being asked to do. For efficiency, private companies would need to provide specialist services on longer contracts subject to oversight by the new NPA, not the MoJ (who have a fairly poor record). Also, no one should be penalised or prevented from moving between employers whether moving from public to private or to the voluntary sector if they are doing the same sort of work. In order to facilitate this it would be necessary to have some form of universally recognised competency-based accreditation system

Funding to the 3rd sector who had been in partnership with Trusts fell by approximately 50% following TR and we sometimes wonder why former partners and friends are somewhat less motivated to help out than previously. In a new organisation, the 3rd sector needs to play a bigger role in service provision with long term funding contracts again subject to oversight by the new NPA.

David Raho

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I work for a CRC but also have over a decade of NPS experience. I like elements of our IT System Omnia as its case management and risk and needs assessment together. You don’t have to keep logging into different systems all the time. With all the good will in the world it’s a challenge to keep looking at oasys when you are time pressured. However, I prefer oasys as a risk assessment tool. If we improved parts of omnia it would be a good alternative to delius and Oasys.

*****

I’d put a bet on Serco increasing pay for CP is a one off in the private world. It’s highly likely keeping private providers will create a two tier system, with public sector staff seeing pay rises whilst the poorer cousins in CRCs sit by and watch colleagues celebrate. Oh wait, that’s already happened. I predict it only getting worse with the pay gap widening and career opportunities being stunted for us left out here in the private sphere. Just a thought!

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Serco had their reasons and remember they were keen to repair their image and engage in corporate renewal under a new MD who was happy to get shot of CP as soon as TR was announced. Some staff decided to stay with Serco. Private companies however often do pay more than the public sector for similar work although they tend to pay managers more and like to reward individual high performers with bonuses rather than agree to blanket increases irrespective of performance. There is quite a lot of data that indicates that probation pay fell way behind other similar professions when it was fully in the public sector I remember the pay hikes of the 1980s when we fell behind social workers and as we had a shared qualification people were jumping ship. I have heard estimates of between £6-9000 as about the sum required that would bring a mid career PO up to where they should be in terms of earnings. This gradual fall in probation earnings relative to other professions has been due to a number of factors.

The recent NPS pay settlement was almost unprecedented in the public sector and probably one of the biggest increases in the public sector in recent times although some benefiting from it still had issues with it. CRCs have probably not been able to deliver the rewards they thought they might have been able to because they have been strapped for cash due to a dodgy PbR system etc. On the other hand the NPS just gets more cash from the treasury. It is well known that had it had to operate within the same financial restrictions as the CRCs it would have gone bust at about the 18 month stage. The difference being that despite stories of amusing notes left by departing ministers the government cannot go bust and must keep paying the wages. Meanwhile some CRCs were struggling to keep the lights on. An FOI request to the NPS would probably confirm their financial status. Things like career development and innovation are expensive but some has taken place in the CRCs and I have certainly seen some people now enjoying positions that they could not have dreamt of occupying in public sector probation where there was widespread stagnation and lack of opportunities as well as some good stuff. I think there are more opportunities in the CRCs and a bit more movement of staff around. There are also some more commercially orientated training and job opportunities. It’s a bit swings and roundabouts. 

However not all CRCs are the same and created equal. Over in the NPS some people have failed to gain any benefit from being part of a national service for instance being able to in theory transfer anywhere in England and Wales. Try it. There are also people who have left the NPS after repeated attempts to advance or gain promotion and then joined the CRC where they have been promoted quickly and offered pretty good training and opportunities. Pay is something that needs to be sorted out either through negotiations (preferred) or further action. David Raho

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You make a very valid point. Indeed I came from a private sector company in fostering social work into Probation. However I think the split (#2) has created the unique position that many of us find ourselves literally sat next to those who are again looking at security of tenure in the public sector as well as a pay rise while Interventions/CP (many qualified PSOs amongst us) face uncertainty. At least when we were dumped in the CRCs it was a sense of team work as we’re ‘all in it together’. Despite this post I’m not money focused! I came back to the public sector as a vocational career move. But it offered security. There are things the private sector does better, but making profit from Human misfortune isn’t one of them. And we all have choices so as my loyalty to this profession has been totally obliterated for the second time I now feel able to apply for other jobs as personally there’s no vocation left worth fighting for. Sorry for the whinge but I have found this group to be heavily dominated by OMs mainly in the NPS so I’d like to appeal to you all not to forget your friends who were once your equals who share your office - we are currently uncomfortable and very concerned for the future. Thank you.

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Well said. I am proud to be a PO in London CRC and really proud of my colleagues who have kept professionalism alive and probation's unique identity strong. Indeed I’m having a T-shirt made with the slogan ‘In this one the probation is strong’ with a picture of Yoda. I am very conscious of the professional dimension to our situation and we must keep fighting for our identity every day. Unfortunately I am also aware of the bizarre phenomenon of a minority of influential NPS colleagues organising themselves to protect the NPS against change to their way of working when case management is reunified. There is a odd compromise suggestion to silo CRC staff within the NPS to protect them from the NPS and the NPS from being exposed to more advanced business processes IT etc. Whilst this might mean the former CRC operating in the more or less freed up way the have been used to there is however no doubt that this would not last long. The slow moving but creativity crushing and bureaucratically suffocating mass that is the MoJ HMPPS NPS bloc will, like a large shapeless globulous entity of enormous bulk and weight, bear down upon CRC staff wiping out their will to live let alone work and who will find resistance is futile as the Empire can launch salvos of directives and instructions day and night against the Resistance safe in the knowledge they have the former CRCs staff penned in and unable to move. 

As I have previously suggested the only viable solution is to form a new non pseudo civil service organisation removed from direct government control and operational interference or in fact too much freedom lest we go the other way and where we leave our former affiliations at the door and take up a new fresh unified identity where open mindedness and learning are the watch words and do what research informs us is the most effective way to ensure those we work with are rehabilitated and stay rehabilitated. Leave punishment to others and behaviourist nonsense to others who want to be involved in such things. Our business is rehabilitation and resettlement and we should be given the freedom and resources to go about our work with a minimum amount of interference from the centre - a bit like the Home Office back in the 1980s. It should be the probation services choice whether to commission services from the private or 3rd sector not the government who know little about what works (look at their record). Taking back control of the probation service and making it more accountable to the local communities it serves should be a top priority. When we are back together employment law protections should enable those doing the same job to be paid the same or employers would face legal action. A lot of problems can be solved at a stroke but many others require compromise and understanding and a liberal dose of vision. Vision is unfortunately a thing in short supply. David Raho

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Open mindedness and learning would be the watch words. I’d like to shake your hand and buy you a pint for that last message. I have numerous NPS old friends who do tell me it’s no bed of roses. Let’s just pray/hope that things all come out in the wash eventually... I still like the Irish/Scottish model but I’m sure if we asked their officers they’d shed some light on the state of their own services too.