Probation Service

Baroness Chapman of Darlington Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

I welcome the Secretary of State back to the Chamber. It is a pity that he could not be here to listen to the heartfelt and sincere expressions of concern from Labour Members. We could have filled the time three times over, such is our anxiety about these proposals.

We have heard excellent contributions from Members on both sides of the House. This has been a welcome, if overdue, opportunity for us to debate the Government’s upheaval and sell-off of probation services. It is a pity that the Government themselves do not welcome the House’s scrutiny of their proposals. My hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) described that as shameful.

My hon. Friends the Members for Dudley North (Ian Austin), for Islwyn (Chris Evans), for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald), for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) presented clear arguments, and expressed deep concern about the Government’s proposals. The lack of evidence and the abundance of haste mean that this initiative has “blunder” written all over it. These plans will see the majority of probation provision handed out to large companies with no experience of probation. They will see offender supervision divided artificially by risk category, in spite of the fact that risk regularly shifts, and the introduction of an entirely untested payment-by-results model. We are told it will be effective, but they cannot tell us how effective, and we are promised it will make us savings, but they cannot tell us, even roughly, how much will be saved. They cannot tell us the cost, and they cannot tell us any of the efficiency savings they hope to make.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) summed it up extremely well. He pointed out the complete absence of costings and called the plans flawed. Few Members are held in as high esteem as the right hon. Gentleman on these issues.

So far, the public have been offered a personal testimony from the Justice Secretary that he thinks the policy will work, but that assurance comes without evidence as the Government have not seen fit to test its effectiveness. Probation is a front-line service that deals with public safety, and it is not good enough for the Secretary of State just to “believe” his proposals are right. We are not arguing for the status quo and, where we can, we have been very clear about our support for the Government on these issues, but untested, uncosted and dangerous upheaval is not the same thing as effective reform, and this motion calls for the model to be piloted and evaluated so that only the good practice gets rolled out.

Pilots that were in place and ready to begin in two trust areas were instead cancelled by the Secretary of State. That scrapped any opportunity to test or improve the model, learn from mistakes on a small scale, and get it right. Instead, inevitable teething problems, inexperienced providers, failures in communication and glitches in the untested IT systems will have to be contended with all at once on a national scale. My right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown) urged caution. He said risks had not been thought through, and he is absolutely right.

The Government keep referring to the Doncaster and Peterborough pilots. They are prison pilots and are therefore not comparable; nor are they intended to pilot changes for probation—plus, although both pilots showed some reasons for cautious optimism, they missed their targets, which is why it is helpful that they are pilots. The people working on those pilots say they have learned from their mistakes along the way, and of course they have; that is what pilots are for.

In the same week that universal credit is having to be rolled out far more slowly than planned due to serious management and IT difficulties, the Secretary of State for Justice is refusing to learn from the experience of his colleagues. Not only that, but he is failing to learn from the mistakes of his own Department. After the “inglorious saga”, as it was christened by the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), of the Ministry of Justice’s language services contract, the National Audit Office recommended that the Ministry should

“implement future contracts so as to minimise transitional problems, for example through piloting and rolling-out new systems gradually”.

That is good advice.

By failing to test, evaluate or improve the model, Ministers are failing to manage effectively the risks that come with their plans. They will not even admit to them and publish the risk register. Our most serious concern is risk management and the fragmentation of the supervision of dangerous offenders. As we have heard from Members—on both sides of the House, to be fair—risk is not static. One in four offenders change their risk category during their order, and they do not always go from low to medium to high; they shift around far more dynamically than that. As the hon. Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) observed in his excellent speech, the nub of the matter is that the Government are introducing a dangerous layer of bureaucracy where an offender, while at their most volatile, will be passed between organisations. There is a serious risk—if this is not inevitable—of information being lost and vital warning signs being missed through this unnecessary divide, yet the Government have failed to pilot it, and check what sort of delays might be caused and how quickly information can be reliably passed on.

The Government have failed to provide any evidence for the benefits of this upheaval, have failed to admit to the inherent risks and publish the risk register, and have failed to provide a realistic or responsible timetable in which to operate. The chairs of three probation trusts have written to the Secretary State this week to ask him to delay his rushed timetable, which is risky, unreasonable and, they say, “unrealistic”. Apparently, those managing the changes do not “just believe” that everything is going to turn out all right. By forcing through a timetable that his own Department has deemed “aggressive”, the Secretary of State, who is having a friendly chat with his colleagues rather than listening, appears to be showing more concern for being a champion of change—any change, it seems—than for safe service delivery.

Serious concerns have been expressed, and not only in the Chamber today, about the Ministry of Justice’s capacity ably to procure and contract quality services. The language services procurement process was described as “shambolic” by the Select Committee on Justice, and the Public Accounts Committee reported that the Department was not an “intelligent customer”. The Justice Committee also found that the Ministry’s naivety in contracting was matched by its “indulgence towards underperformance” after the contracts came into operation. In the past two years, we have had Jajo the rabbit signed up to be a court interpreter; charges for tagging dead inmates; and a new contracted prison in which it is easier to get drugs than soap. When is the Secretary of State going to recognise the need to hit the brakes, build skills and capacity in his Department, and improve on past failures?

My hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Mike Wood) summed it up brilliantly. He said, and was backed up by interventions by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), that the Government should trust the skills, experience and expertise of high-performing trusts, which are hungry to take responsibility for short-term prisoners. What a shame that the Secretary of State puts more faith in his inner belief than in evidence and experience.

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

I thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have spoken and apologise to some for the fact that I will not be able to deal in detail with what they have said. In particular, I should apologise to the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel), because she kindly donated two minutes of her time but some of her Labour colleagues have stolen it back. I am sorry about that, but I will do my best to answer what has been said.

There is no contradiction between two things that have been said in this debate. The first is that good work is being done up and down the country by probation officers. The second is that there is a need for change. I accept that a good deal of good work is being done by probation officers, but they, too, would say that we are simply not doing well enough on reoffending rates, which are far too high; half of those released from custody are reoffending within 12 months, despite our spending 70% more on probation over the past 10 years.

There are two key advantages in what the Government propose to do. The first is that we bring innovation and good new ideas into the management of offenders. Many hon. Members on both sides of the House have mentioned good voluntary sector organisations that do exactly that sort of work. We want to see them do more, and it is important to bring them more into rehabilitation work—our reforms will do that. That point was made by, among others, my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard).

The second huge advantage to what we are proposing is that we bring into the ambit of rehabilitation those offenders who at the moment have very little or no rehabilitation—those who receive sentences of 12 months or less. I detected very little disagreement across the House about that. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) summed up the case for doing that passionately and well; we have overlooked those people and we should not do so because it is not in our interests to do so, as those are the offenders with the highest rates of reoffending and it is very important that we deal with them. It is also important that we deal effectively with support through the gate, so that people do not reach the cliff edge that he so well described.

The question, surely, for Labour Members, not least those on the Front Bench, is this: if they do not like our way of doing those things, which they agree are worth while, what is their way? I heard not a word of an alternative solution to the problems they accurately describe, except of course that the probation trusts should do it all themselves.

Interestingly, the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) suggested that we should simply ask the probation trusts to do the work. I was rather surprised to hear that from an ex-Treasury Minister, because it would have an additional cost. I suspect that had I gone to him as a Treasury Minister—he was a very good one in his day—and said that I wanted the probation trusts to do more and wanted the money to pay for it, it is likely that he would have told me to ask the probation system to do better with the money it already received. That is exactly what we are proposing. We must make taxpayers’ money work better; that is hugely important.

Some concerns have been expressed and we take them seriously. I want to pick up on as many as I can. The first concerns the principle of payment by results, which, it seems to me, is perfectly sensible. We want the taxpayer to pay for those things that work and not for those that do not. That is at the root of payment by results. I am confused, however, about the Opposition’s view: is it that we should not have payment by results or that we should have more? Both views seem to have been expressed.

[Jenny Chapman]

On the issue of payment by results, how much of the contract will be paid regardless of the results? Any more than 90% is not payment by results—it is just leaving a tip.

[Jeremy Wright]

As I have said to the hon. Lady before, this is a process that we are going through with those who will be involved in the system—