HARBHAJAN SINGH BRAR
HR Director
Sodexo Justice Services & Central Functions
Sodexo
One Southampton Row
London WC1B 5HA
(By e-mail, hard copy to follow)
9 April 2015
Dear Harbhajan,
Proposals for Staff Redundancies in Sodexo owned CRCs
In anticipation of our scheduled meeting on the morning of Monday 20 April to discuss the proposed redundancies announced in the Sodexo-owned CRC’s, we would be grateful if you could provide the following information or answers to a number of key questions:
- The number of proposed redundancies in each CRC, broken down by job title/function
- Details of any equality impact assessment which Sodexo expects its CRC’s to carry out during consultation on the redundancies
- Whether Sodexo is required to obtain the permission of the Secretary of State to the redundancies, as special shareholder, given the fact that these redundancies could not have been identified at bid stag
- Details of the consultation which Sodexo plans to carry out with your CRCs’ statutory partners in relation to the proposed redundancies and your proposed operating model
- Details of any Health and Safety risk assessments which have been (or are to be) carried out on the proposed operational model.
- Will a delay to the IT and Estates strategy impact on the capacity to deliver the proposed operational model with the reduced staffing numbers?
- Has any work been carried out to assess the workloads of those staff who will remain? Has Sodexo developed a workload measurement tool to evidence that CRCs have sufficient capacity to function safely?
- We understand SODEXO has awarded itself the role of providing corporate back office support services to the CRCs you own. What procedures have the CRCs undertaken to determine the outsourcing of these sub-contracted services?
- We understand SODEXO has an operating model designed to create the "Rehabilitation Revolution". How does the composition and timing of these proposed staffing reductions contribute to, and synchronise with, the roll out of your plans for improved outcomes and realisation of PbR bonuses?
You will not be surprised to hear that the announcements made by your CRC Chief Executives’ prior to the Easter break, have been received with considerable anger and resentment by our constituent members who are working in the newly formed Community Rehabilitation Companies under your ownership.
This unwelcome news has compounded the demoralisation that is being experienced by them after seeing the service they have given loyal service to broken up in an ill-conceived social experiment. That loyalty and commitment now sees hundreds of them at risk of losing their livelihoods without the guarantee of the protections for Early Voluntary Redundancy as enshrined in the National Staff Transfer agreement that we are maintaining should be available for the life of the CRC contracts.
We are urging the company to think long and hard before embarking on a job reduction programme of this magnitude which, we believe, represents a serious risk to operational efficiency and the management of your clients and as a consequence also creates serious doubts about your capacity to maintain the requisite standards of public safety.
This letter which I am copying to Colin Allars and Ian Poree of NOMS following my recent discussions with them, has been sent as an interim response at national level by the three unions representing staff within the CRC’s owned by Sodexo. I can confirm that Ranjit Singh will be the lead contact for Napo for the operational issues that are emerging at local level. Ben Priestley and David Walton will I understand be acting similarly for Unison and Scoop GMB respectively.
We look forward to your reply.
Yours sincerely,
Ian Lawrence
General Secretary
Napo - on behalf of Napo, UNISON, GMB/SCOOP
Meanwhile, The Guardian have been busy sampling the waters and it should come as no surprise to readers of this blog as to what they've found:-
Probation service split: ‘staff are staring into the abyss’
“I’ve been in this job for 25 years and I’ve never known morale so bad and so low … You just don’t want to go to work on Monday mornings. We’ve just had enough.”
John, a National Probation Service (NPS) probation officer in the south of England, has seen many of his colleagues resign since the service was split in June 2014. Some 70% of probation work has been outsourced to private companies and charities, while the rest – supervision of the most dangerous offenders – remains within the public sector, under the remit of a new NPS.
The 35 probation trusts in England and Wales have been replaced by 21 community rehabilitation companies (CRCs), run by private companies with payment-by-results contracts that kicked in from February 2015. Existing staff have been split between CRCs and the NPS, with many teams now operating alongside each other.
There have been serious consequences. Employees on both sides, many of whom went on strike in April 2014 to protest against the changes, complain of tension, division and a hierarchical work structure. There are more processes, more paperwork, a more intense workload – and absurdities. “It’s getting stupider by the minute,” says John. “I sat in an office yesterday with four managers … and discussion was around whose coffee and tea was put into whose cupboards.”
Divided teams
More seriously, physical and virtual divisions have been created, with screens put up in some offices. “There is this idea that because we’re separate organisations now we can’t allow the other organisation to see our work because it’s confidential, which is absolute nonsense because six months ago we were all working together,” says John. “There’s no flow of information, no knowledge sharing. It’s this huge demarcation that’s being created.”
John is also worried about proposals to turn workspaces – which in many places CRC and NPS staff share – into open-plan offices. “When you’re talking about some of the people we work with in the NPS, people who commit murder and rape and armed robbery ... it’s going to be a recipe for disaster.”
Napo, the probation officers’ trade union, opposes privatisation, arguing that the probation service had been doing a very good job. It won an excellence award in 2011, a first for a public sector organisation. In 2013, the Ministry of Justice rated all 35 probation trusts in England and Wales as good or excellent.
According to Napo, at least 500 probation officers have left since the start of the reform programme. Su McConnell is one. A manager in what was then Devon and Cornwall probation trust, McConnell officially resigned in December 2014, but had been off work with stress since April.
“I had worked for the probation service since 1986, and I’m incandescent about what’s being done to the institution,” she says. “I was trying to manage a team and that team was just being split up, and I could see it; careers were being wrecked. Some staff who had invested a decade of training to do the thing they wanted to do were suddenly staring into the abyss.”
McConnell’s team was divided just before Christmas 2013. Most applied for roles in the NPS, seeking better terms and conditions as well as clearer career progression and job security. A long period of uncertainty had left the staff anxious, with many too afraid to take time off sick in case it counted against them in the selection process, says McConnell.
Splitting up specialist services
One of the consequences of the split is that the bulk of the supervision of domestic violence offenders has been outsourced while sex offenders, deemed higher risk, are managed by the NPS. Prior to the division, McConnell managed a specialist team trained to deliver programmes for both types of offenders. “The modus operandi of these offenders is not dissimilar – they’re manipulative and complicated to work with,” she says. “A lot of the theory and the practice of how you treat them is not dissimilar.”
Having always had a professional interest in domestic violence probation work, she was horrified by the changes, perceiving that corners were already starting to be cut in terms of budgets and staffing levels, not least because the majority of specialists would end up in the NPS. McConnell escalated her concerns as far as justice secretary Chris Grayling, to no avail.
CRCs supervise 200,000 low- to medium-risk offenders, while the NPS supervises the remaining 31,000 high-risk offenders. Under the Offender Rehabilitation Act, which came into force in February 2015, an extra 45,000 offenders a year who are released from prison sentences of less than 12 months will be supervised for the first time. This group has the highest rate of reoffending, with almost 60% reoffending within a year.
Overloaded IT
Clare, who works for a CRC in the Midlands, does not feel equipped to deal with the extra work that will be coming her way. “The IT is just not fit for purpose. It’s no good: you lose your work, things don’t work properly, it crashes, reports just disappear,” she says.
Many probation staff complain of an increase in bureaucracy, monitoring and tick-box exercises since the split. New risk assessments have been bolted on to existing systems, duplicating the workload and placing greater strain on already ancient IT.
The private companies that have taken on CRC contracts are not allowed to access NPS records, due to security and privacy concerns. Not only does this make Clare’s job more difficult, but she feels it has been deprofessionalised. “You can feel like the role has been dumbed down,” she says. “I don’t see myself staying in it anymore, and this is a job I thought I would spend the rest of my life in.”
Andrew, whose probation career began in 1983, now works in a CRC in the north of England. He believes the government has created a two-tier workforce. Contracts require CRCs to have appropriately trained staff, but there is no definition for this and no requirement for qualifications.
Workloads have also increased. Probation officers are assigned less time to deal with lower-risk offenders, meaning that newly transferred CRC staff, with no high-risk offenders on their caseload, must supervise a greater number of people than they are used to. But most of all, Andrew is fed up with the uncertainty of reform. “We’re a long way away from knowing what the system will look like,” he says.
The workload is set to increase with the supervision of offenders serving less than 12 months in prison – those that breach the rules will end up back in the courts system, putting more pressure on officers like Michael.
Inadequate training
Michael says court reports are wanted at increasingly short notice, there is inadequate training to prepare staff for new processes and systems and he is being asked to deal with matters above his pay grade, without sufficient information about offenders’ backgrounds, history or previous convictions.
“More and more we are being asked to help with the sentencing of people without really doing any background checks,” he says. “Either we’re going to collapse under the weight of it all, or there’s going to be a big mistake made somewhere in the court when someone is sentenced – like a domestic violence case where someone gets out instead of being in prison and they manage to murder their partner. Someone’s going to get hurt. That’s the big fear.”
Sodexo, which runs six CRCs in England and Wales, recently announced plans to replace staff with machines – ATM-style electronic kiosks to which offenders will report in, and which Ian Lawrence, Napo general secretary, has said are “downright dangerous and will put the public at risk”. Sodexo’s probation staff have been told to expect job cuts of more than 30% in the next year.
It is changes like these, alongside a less generous pension scheme and fewer career advancement opportunities in CRCs, that make Andrew – and many others working in probation – fearful for the future. “It is simply a massive and dangerous social experiment that will not, and cannot, work,” he says. “It will be future victims that pay the price and future governments that will have to do something about it.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “It is vital that offenders are managed safely and securely in the communities in which they live.
“The National Probation Service is tasked with protecting the public from high-risk offenders and the 21 community rehabilitation companies are working to turn around the lives of medium and low risk offenders.
“The vast majority of staff are working at the same desks, in the same teams and using the same IT systems as they were previously. Crucially, they are able to call on their experience and knowledge of working with offenders to continue protecting the public.”
Finally, I see Harry Fletcher has felt moved to produce not one, but two blog posts today:-
TAG SNAGS
The enquiry into Serco and G4S and their tagging contracts will be completed very soon. The private companies believe that their previous actions and activities may well have fell within the conditions of the contract. They were contracted to tag someone if instructed to do so by a court and to remove it when the court stated that the tag period ended. The orders normally lasted for 90 or 120 days and the companies received a fixed fee for each order. If an offender died was jailed or ran away during the duration of an order the company was paid unless the court cancelled the order. There would seem therefore if this is the case to be a problem with the conditions of the contract. A number of officials appear to have either left or changed posts.
When the new contracts were let last year no one company had sole responsibility of all aspects of the work. One supplied the kit, another the software, a third the phones and another did the fitting and monitoring. Enforcement however was taken away and given to the state run National Probation Service (NPS). Hitherto anyone absent for 2 hours or more, found tampering with the tag or removing it was automatically breached and sent back to court. Now however the process is determined by the NPS.
Around 28,000 orders were in place at any one time during 2013/14 with 25 to 30% breaching that is 7,000 to 8,000 per year. Up to a third receive short custodial sentences. Under the old rules all went back to court but under the current procedures about half seem to reach court the rest get warnings. It is expected that tagging will sharply increase now that Probation has been privatised perhaps to as many as 75,000 at any one time by 2020. However the new rules on enforcement will result in less pressures on prison numbers as fewer defaulters will end up inside.
John, a National Probation Service (NPS) probation officer in the south of England, has seen many of his colleagues resign since the service was split in June 2014. Some 70% of probation work has been outsourced to private companies and charities, while the rest – supervision of the most dangerous offenders – remains within the public sector, under the remit of a new NPS.
The 35 probation trusts in England and Wales have been replaced by 21 community rehabilitation companies (CRCs), run by private companies with payment-by-results contracts that kicked in from February 2015. Existing staff have been split between CRCs and the NPS, with many teams now operating alongside each other.
There have been serious consequences. Employees on both sides, many of whom went on strike in April 2014 to protest against the changes, complain of tension, division and a hierarchical work structure. There are more processes, more paperwork, a more intense workload – and absurdities. “It’s getting stupider by the minute,” says John. “I sat in an office yesterday with four managers … and discussion was around whose coffee and tea was put into whose cupboards.”
Divided teams
More seriously, physical and virtual divisions have been created, with screens put up in some offices. “There is this idea that because we’re separate organisations now we can’t allow the other organisation to see our work because it’s confidential, which is absolute nonsense because six months ago we were all working together,” says John. “There’s no flow of information, no knowledge sharing. It’s this huge demarcation that’s being created.”
John is also worried about proposals to turn workspaces – which in many places CRC and NPS staff share – into open-plan offices. “When you’re talking about some of the people we work with in the NPS, people who commit murder and rape and armed robbery ... it’s going to be a recipe for disaster.”
Napo, the probation officers’ trade union, opposes privatisation, arguing that the probation service had been doing a very good job. It won an excellence award in 2011, a first for a public sector organisation. In 2013, the Ministry of Justice rated all 35 probation trusts in England and Wales as good or excellent.
According to Napo, at least 500 probation officers have left since the start of the reform programme. Su McConnell is one. A manager in what was then Devon and Cornwall probation trust, McConnell officially resigned in December 2014, but had been off work with stress since April.
“I had worked for the probation service since 1986, and I’m incandescent about what’s being done to the institution,” she says. “I was trying to manage a team and that team was just being split up, and I could see it; careers were being wrecked. Some staff who had invested a decade of training to do the thing they wanted to do were suddenly staring into the abyss.”
McConnell’s team was divided just before Christmas 2013. Most applied for roles in the NPS, seeking better terms and conditions as well as clearer career progression and job security. A long period of uncertainty had left the staff anxious, with many too afraid to take time off sick in case it counted against them in the selection process, says McConnell.
Splitting up specialist services
One of the consequences of the split is that the bulk of the supervision of domestic violence offenders has been outsourced while sex offenders, deemed higher risk, are managed by the NPS. Prior to the division, McConnell managed a specialist team trained to deliver programmes for both types of offenders. “The modus operandi of these offenders is not dissimilar – they’re manipulative and complicated to work with,” she says. “A lot of the theory and the practice of how you treat them is not dissimilar.”
Having always had a professional interest in domestic violence probation work, she was horrified by the changes, perceiving that corners were already starting to be cut in terms of budgets and staffing levels, not least because the majority of specialists would end up in the NPS. McConnell escalated her concerns as far as justice secretary Chris Grayling, to no avail.
CRCs supervise 200,000 low- to medium-risk offenders, while the NPS supervises the remaining 31,000 high-risk offenders. Under the Offender Rehabilitation Act, which came into force in February 2015, an extra 45,000 offenders a year who are released from prison sentences of less than 12 months will be supervised for the first time. This group has the highest rate of reoffending, with almost 60% reoffending within a year.
Overloaded IT
Clare, who works for a CRC in the Midlands, does not feel equipped to deal with the extra work that will be coming her way. “The IT is just not fit for purpose. It’s no good: you lose your work, things don’t work properly, it crashes, reports just disappear,” she says.
Many probation staff complain of an increase in bureaucracy, monitoring and tick-box exercises since the split. New risk assessments have been bolted on to existing systems, duplicating the workload and placing greater strain on already ancient IT.
The private companies that have taken on CRC contracts are not allowed to access NPS records, due to security and privacy concerns. Not only does this make Clare’s job more difficult, but she feels it has been deprofessionalised. “You can feel like the role has been dumbed down,” she says. “I don’t see myself staying in it anymore, and this is a job I thought I would spend the rest of my life in.”
Andrew, whose probation career began in 1983, now works in a CRC in the north of England. He believes the government has created a two-tier workforce. Contracts require CRCs to have appropriately trained staff, but there is no definition for this and no requirement for qualifications.
Workloads have also increased. Probation officers are assigned less time to deal with lower-risk offenders, meaning that newly transferred CRC staff, with no high-risk offenders on their caseload, must supervise a greater number of people than they are used to. But most of all, Andrew is fed up with the uncertainty of reform. “We’re a long way away from knowing what the system will look like,” he says.
The workload is set to increase with the supervision of offenders serving less than 12 months in prison – those that breach the rules will end up back in the courts system, putting more pressure on officers like Michael.
Inadequate training
Michael says court reports are wanted at increasingly short notice, there is inadequate training to prepare staff for new processes and systems and he is being asked to deal with matters above his pay grade, without sufficient information about offenders’ backgrounds, history or previous convictions.
“More and more we are being asked to help with the sentencing of people without really doing any background checks,” he says. “Either we’re going to collapse under the weight of it all, or there’s going to be a big mistake made somewhere in the court when someone is sentenced – like a domestic violence case where someone gets out instead of being in prison and they manage to murder their partner. Someone’s going to get hurt. That’s the big fear.”
Sodexo, which runs six CRCs in England and Wales, recently announced plans to replace staff with machines – ATM-style electronic kiosks to which offenders will report in, and which Ian Lawrence, Napo general secretary, has said are “downright dangerous and will put the public at risk”. Sodexo’s probation staff have been told to expect job cuts of more than 30% in the next year.
It is changes like these, alongside a less generous pension scheme and fewer career advancement opportunities in CRCs, that make Andrew – and many others working in probation – fearful for the future. “It is simply a massive and dangerous social experiment that will not, and cannot, work,” he says. “It will be future victims that pay the price and future governments that will have to do something about it.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “It is vital that offenders are managed safely and securely in the communities in which they live.
“The National Probation Service is tasked with protecting the public from high-risk offenders and the 21 community rehabilitation companies are working to turn around the lives of medium and low risk offenders.
“The vast majority of staff are working at the same desks, in the same teams and using the same IT systems as they were previously. Crucially, they are able to call on their experience and knowledge of working with offenders to continue protecting the public.”
Finally, I see Harry Fletcher has felt moved to produce not one, but two blog posts today:-
TAG SNAGS
The enquiry into Serco and G4S and their tagging contracts will be completed very soon. The private companies believe that their previous actions and activities may well have fell within the conditions of the contract. They were contracted to tag someone if instructed to do so by a court and to remove it when the court stated that the tag period ended. The orders normally lasted for 90 or 120 days and the companies received a fixed fee for each order. If an offender died was jailed or ran away during the duration of an order the company was paid unless the court cancelled the order. There would seem therefore if this is the case to be a problem with the conditions of the contract. A number of officials appear to have either left or changed posts.
When the new contracts were let last year no one company had sole responsibility of all aspects of the work. One supplied the kit, another the software, a third the phones and another did the fitting and monitoring. Enforcement however was taken away and given to the state run National Probation Service (NPS). Hitherto anyone absent for 2 hours or more, found tampering with the tag or removing it was automatically breached and sent back to court. Now however the process is determined by the NPS.
Around 28,000 orders were in place at any one time during 2013/14 with 25 to 30% breaching that is 7,000 to 8,000 per year. Up to a third receive short custodial sentences. Under the old rules all went back to court but under the current procedures about half seem to reach court the rest get warnings. It is expected that tagging will sharply increase now that Probation has been privatised perhaps to as many as 75,000 at any one time by 2020. However the new rules on enforcement will result in less pressures on prison numbers as fewer defaulters will end up inside.
PREDICTION PROBATION
Predictions made at least 15 months ago about the likely impact of the privatisation of the Probation service in England and Wales is becoming a reality. In February 2015 the supervision of low and medium risk offenders, around 100,000 individuals were sold off in lots to the private sector. This included work with domestic violence perpetrators.
In Private Eye and elsewhere Harry Fletcher now Director of the Digital Trust forecast the end of positive interventions for offenders and there replacement by a huge increase in electronic tagging, staff reductions and the introduction of reporting centres and check in biometric machines instead of 1 to1 supervision.
Many new providers have already said that they will be shedding staff from September 2015, maybe by as much as 25 to 30%.The main tagging companies are preparing for a significant expansion of the market and report centres where offenders will sign in are very much on the agenda.
The state retains responsibility for supervising high risk offenders but the number of new court orders deemed high risk and therefore suitable for the National Probation Service is often less than 15% of the total.
Although in the short term the NPS did take on a 100 or so extra staff to deal with writing court reports, the impact of further cuts across the public sector post-election and fewer cases seem inevitably to lead to less supervisors.
A service that won Excellence awards just 3 years ago is now demoralised and in deep trouble. But more tags and reporting machines mean that the New owners can both cut costs and keep the Government happy and make competitive profit margins for shareholders.
