Probation Service

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Wednesday 13th March 2013 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. I shook my head because, as he will know from his close reading of the consultation document, the 16 contract package areas are a starting point, and not necessarily a finishing point. We will listen carefully to what people say to us during the consultation.

[Mr Mudie]

I will touch on that later in my speech, but I am interested in the Minister’s comments.

It is interesting that the private sector will be commissioned, not locally by the individual probation trusts, but from Whitehall. The Government justify decimating this 105-year-old, well regarded service—which has received all the commendations I have read out—at considerable risk to public safety, on the specific grounds of reducing reoffending rates.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Crausby. I congratulate the hon. Member for Leeds East (Mr Mudie) on securing the debate. I thank him and all the other hon. Members who have spoken in the course of what has been a good debate. I shall try to deal with as many of the points as I can in the time that I have.

The first thing that I want to say is that it is no part of my case today, or the Government’s case for reform, to make the argument that there is not good work going on in probation trusts already. Clearly, there is. I have seen it, and other hon. Members who have spoken have seen it for themselves, too. However, I am also sure that the probation officers whom they have seen and I have seen would agree—as many of those who have spoken in the debate agree—that we can do better than we are doing at the moment.

The hon. Member for Leeds East was right to accept that reoffending rates are too high and that we need to bring them down. That has been a common theme in the debate. The truth is that despite significant extra investment, of the order of 70% over the past 10 years, reoffending rates have not come down by as much as they should have. I think that it was the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) who said that the rate of reduction in reoffending—we are talking now not about short sentences, but about the overall rate of reduction—was 3.1%. That is 3.1% for a 70% additional investment. We can do better than that. I think that people in the probation service accept that, too. It is therefore sensible to consider how we can do things differently.

Bringing prisoners serving sentences of 12 months or less into the ambit of rehabilitative services is another thing that also has widespread agreement in the debate, and I do not think that it met with disagreement in the consultation or beyond. We will include such offenders in the cohorts dealt with by those taking on the work across a set geographical area. The crucial question, which was raised a number of times is, how do we pay for those extra offenders? It is a fair question, so I shall start there.

The truth is that payment by results and competition for the rehabilitation of medium and low-risk offenders will release the savings that enable us to pay for those additional offenders. The difficulty we have, which is again widely recognised, is that we are not in a position to expect large amounts of extra investment to pay for the additional offenders, so we need to find another way of doing so. If the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) has a way in which he intends to pay for them, beyond releasing savings from the existing budget, it would be interesting to hear what it is, but we do not believe that such funds are available.

[Andy Sawford]

The Government have made disappointing progress with community budgets, which are precisely the kind of approach, building on Total Place, that would enable us to look at the kind of interventions that would release funding though better social outcomes to make the investments we all want to see.

[Jeremy Wright]

I very much hope that the kinds of projects the hon. Gentleman describes are successful, but we do not believe that the funding necessary to do what we are discussing will be released quickly enough in this case. The best way to do it is to engage in exactly the course of action we have set out. Payment by results is not, as some believe, ideological at all. It is very practical. It is about paying for what works and investing taxpayers’ money in it. After all, taxpayers expect us to invest their money wisely in effective outcomes. In this case, the outcome is simple: the reduction of reoffending. That is what we are after. It means fewer victims, less misery for communities and lower costs to the taxpayer.

An argument has been made about pilots. Why not pilot? Why not spend more time exploring and experimenting? It is a myth that we do not already have learning on payment by results—we do. We have learning from pilots undertaken and stopped early. It is not the case that one can learn nothing from a pilot unless it runs its full course. It is equally not the case that one can learn nothing from a pilot unless it succeeds; sometimes you can learn as much from what does not work as you can learn from what does.

I shall change the subject entirely. The Work programme has also been mentioned. Of course, I do not accept that the Work programme is a failure in the way it has been characterised, but it is true the programme is a source of learning for this project. We do not intend to lift the Work programme from the Department for Work and Pensions and deposit it into the Ministry of Justice, because it is different. There are differences because we expect those who take on the work to carry out the orders of the court and meet licence requirements, which is why such contracts, under any payment-by-results arrangement, will not be 100% payment by results.

[Kate Green]

I suggest, in passing, that it might be sensible to wait for the Work programme to demonstrate its successes before using it as a helpful model to run ahead with this programme. Some Work programme providers will undoubtedly bid for contracts for probation provision and supervision provision. Given that we have identified employment as a key way out of offending behaviour, are those providers likely to be paid twice, once as an offender’s Work programme provider and a second time for providing their criminal justice supervision?

[Jeremy Wright]

In our system, we will look for justice outcomes under the payment-by-results contracts. We will be interested in whether people have reoffended. I shall come back to some of the difficulties with metrics, which were mentioned, in a moment. The Work programme is different in that providers are rewarded for getting people back into work. On the hon. Lady’s first point, I must say that if we should wait two years to find out whether the Work programme is a success, she should wait two years before she deems it a failure. Until we wait for those two years, she cannot say what Opposition Members have been saying loudly for some weeks.

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On resuming—

[Jeremy Wright]

I was talking about what else is needed to make a PBR-based system work. For a start, the areas over which contracts operate need to be large enough to enable the PBR figures to be meaningful. That really is why we cannot continue with the same number of probation trusts that we currently have. Probation trusts, by their nature, are not capable of taking on the financial risk that PBR requires. That is why existing trusts, as they are currently constituted, cannot participate.

That brings me on to the questions asked by the hon. Member for Corby about what options are available to those who are currently working in the public sector probation service. We are keen to see the opportunity made available to them to be part of either mutuals or other types of vehicle that will enable them to compete for the rehabilitative work. Many people currently working in probation trusts will want to consider the alternative option, which is to work in the public sector probation service and look after high-risk offenders. There are a number of complexities around that, and I hope, in view of the time, that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I write to him on the detail. I hope to reassure him that opportunities will be available.

Concerns have also been raised about central commissioning. Payment by results requires particular commissioning expertise, and it is difficult to see how that can be done successfully on the existing local commissioning model. However, I have made it clear throughout the process that if there are ways in which PBR-based commissioning can be effectively done at a local level, or at least a less national level, we are open to hearing about them. We will see what comes out of the consultation.

There is the crucial point about local partnerships. I accept entirely what has been said by many, that it is vital to have fully effective local partnerships that bring together a variety of agencies to work on the re-offending challenge. We will want to ensure that all bidders for the contracts can demonstrate that they will be able to sustain those local partnerships.

There are a number of significant design challenges, and I would not wish to minimise them. We are already looking at a number of those challenges through the consultation and the responses to it. The consultation closed on 22 February, and we are still going through a number of detailed responses. I cannot therefore give specific answers about how we will address all those challenges, but we will address and find ways round them.

Let me highlight one or two of the challenges that have been mentioned. The first is the direct management of offenders. The proposals currently say that we wish to separate direct management of those who pose the greatest risk of serious harm and reserve them for the public sector probation service, while the management of medium and lower risk offenders would be competed for.

The point has been made about the dynamic nature of risk, which I entirely understand, because people might not stay in the categories in which they are initially placed. It is therefore important that public sector probation officers—they will retain responsibility for the management of risk of serious harm for all offenders, not just the highest risk ones—have the opportunity to do that job, which involves the transfer of information and good relationships between those engaged in what I might describe as the life management part of the job and the public sector probation officer who has oversight of risk of serious harm.

The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) was right to highlight that as a significant challenge, but it is important to recognise that, in the world we are in now, probation officers often have to deal with people in the voluntary sector who provide particular interventions. They must have a good relationship with those people and make sure that the flow of information is effective. When I talk to probation trusts, I always ask whether that flow of information is good and gives them what they need, and the answer is invariably, “Yes, it does.”

The concept is not therefore entirely alien, but we will ensure, in the design of the system, that the flow of information is good. I stress that the decision whether a defender remains as a medium-risk offender or is transferred to a higher risk category will be taken by a public sector probation officer based, as I have said, on the information flows that they receive.

Another concern is about opportunities for smaller voluntary and community sector organisations in the new landscape. Again, we entirely understand and share that concern. We want such organisations to play an important part in rehabilitation. Clearly, much of the expertise and many of the skills that have the greatest effect are located in those organisations.

We will want to look not only at the bids when they come in—assessing them for quality and price—but at the sustainability of the relationships that they put forward. It is highly likely that organisations, including smaller voluntary sector ones, will come to us with a bid, and we will ask, “How do you demonstrate that you will maintain those good relationships over the course of the bids?” We will also want to have contract management mechanisms in place to ensure that that happens.

Of course, we must design a system that avoids the perverse incentives around cherry-picking and choosing to look after only those offenders who are easiest to turn round. We are very conscious of that challenge, much of which, as the hon. Member for Caerphilly said, relates to exactly how we measure and pay for success. We are exploring several options for that at the moment, and carefully considering what people have told us during the consultation, so that we can introduce a solution that will avoid those perverse incentives.

The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston was quite right to mention the specific needs of female offenders. I am glad that she welcomes the appointment of the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant), which is a significant move because it will bring together management and responsibility for female offenders in the criminal justice system more broadly. As the hon. Lady will recognise, we will ask a specific question about that in the consultation and consider carefully what people say. We will also include those specific offenders in our plans.

I will finish where I started—with the basic premise about making sure that we do better on reoffending than we currently do. We can do that only if we include in our proposals the 46,000 offenders a year who now receive very little statutory intervention and support. It is vital to extend that intervention and support to them and that we find the money to pay for that. That brings us to payment by results, which is a sensible concept. It is a common-sense principle to pay for outcomes that work in driving down reoffending, which are highly valuable because they mean fewer victims of crime, less misery for communities and lower cost to the taxpayer.

On that basis, we believe the proposals are well worth pursuing, but we will carefully consider the many design challenges, what we are told during the consultation and the points made during this debate.