Probation Service

Kate Green Excerpts

Tuesday 13th January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to have secured this debate and to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Crausby.

If the Minister has looked at my many previous interventions on this subject, he will know that I have had concerns about the Government’s Transforming Rehabilitation plans right from the start. Those concerns have been borne out by my recent conversations with probation officers and offenders in my constituency and reinforced by the recent report from the chief inspector of probation into the early implementation of Transforming Rehabilitation.

Today I will talk about those implementation issues, but I will also question the Minister about the underlying rationale for, and risks associated with, Transforming Rehabilitation. The Probation Service was a well-performing service. Every single probation trust in the country was assessed as being “good” or “excellent” under the Ministry of Justice’s own measures—indeed, my own probation service in Greater Manchester had a reputation for innovative and effective work. It makes no sense at all to tear all that up and arbitrarily divide up the work of the probation service without there being any evidence of the effectiveness of the new model. That places public safety at risk.

Ministers said that change was needed to address the high level of reoffending among those serving short custodial sentences, and they proposed introducing supervision, for the first time, of those offenders on their release from prison. Everyone agrees that that is entirely right and welcome. However, the probation service never had responsibility for supervising those offenders, so high rates of reoffending among them cannot be characterised as a probation service failure. Indeed, probation trusts, such as my own local trust, were keen to have the chance to work with this challenging group.

Yet in June last year the Government embarked on a radical restructuring, abolishing all probation trusts and replacing them with 21 privately owned community rehabilitation companies and a diminished National Probation Service, which has responsibility for high-risk offenders. Contracts were signed just before Christmas, on 18 December. This massive restructuring has been rushed through by the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice without any piloting or testing of the new approach. The Government were warned by experts, probation staff and the Opposition, as well as in the House of Lords, that their timetable was reckless. In 2013, the chairs of probation trusts wrote to the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, describing the plans as risky, unreasonable and unrealistic.

As soon as the changeover began last summer, problems began to emerge. There have been reports of staff shortages, IT problems, records going missing, staff supervising offenders “blind”—with no information about offenders’ offending history or personal circumstances, because staff lack access to records—and administration staff being unable to access records to manage supervision appointments.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend paints quite a dire picture as things are developing under this new-look service. Does she agree that it is rather sad that those high-performing probation trusts never got the opportunity to consider taking on an expanded work load? They were, after all, the experts and they, too, could have delivered this expanded service.

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend is right. It is highly regrettable that the expertise and commitment that we all see in our probation service was not taken advantage of and that probation staff were not given the opportunity to deliver these new programmes of post-release supervision.

Indeed, in Greater Manchester we had piloted such a programme—the Choose Change programme—and learned many valuable lessons about the challenges of working with this particular group. Since Greater Manchester Probation Trust obviously no longer exists, and so cannot take forward the lessons from Choose Change, perhaps the Minister will say how that learning will be transferred across to the new structures, so that what we now know after that experiment is not lost.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. I hope that she agrees that we had a perfectly good service before the Government tinkered with it. For ideological reasons, the Government made changes and used a private sector model. However, everyone knows that in the private sector—I know, because I worked in it—before any changes are made, a pilot scheme is introduced so that companies learn from their mistakes. Does she agree?

[Kate Green]

I agree with every word that my hon. Friend said. Indeed, it is surprising to me that one of the first acts of the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice was to cancel some of the pilots in relation to these new structures, rather than adopting the sensible approach of continuing with them and evaluating the lessons learned before proceeding with the new model—if there was evidence that it was the right model to follow.

In the aftermath of the changeover, probation officers have talked to me about an overwhelming work load, about IT systems that do not speak to each other and require the same information to be inputted over and over, and about random allocation of staff to the new community rehabilitation companies or the new NPS. Morale has suffered, staff are stressed and the human resources support in the new NPS in particular has been inadequate throughout this period of major change, given that the MoJ closed down the shared support service and that communication to staff has been haphazard and often delayed.

Offenders have also noticed problems. I met offenders in my constituency late last summer and they told me that they were constantly finding themselves seeing different offender managers who did not know anything about them or their circumstances. Now the chief inspector of probation has produced a highly critical report of the early implementation of the changes and the problems that have been experienced, and it bears out much of what I and other MPs have been told.

The report specifically recognises that the speed of the implementation caused problems that could have been avoided or mitigated. It makes a number of suggestions about how those problems can be addressed. The Minister may argue that these problems are teething problems and that the recommendations in the report will be followed, but in fact the problems run deeper. They are a reflection of a model that fragments the management of offenders, adding bureaucracy, damaging effective communication and increasing risk. I have genuine concerns about the implications of Transforming Rehabilitation for public safety, and indeed for the safety of officers supervising offenders.

My first concern is that there are clearly issues about access to the full and timely information necessary for the initial risk assessment to be made. It was worrying to read in the chief inspector’s report of delays in obtaining information about an offender after they had been sentenced, because that information is needed to enable a full risk assessment to be carried out.

The MoJ claims that that situation is not different from what happened previously, when an offender could be allocated to an offender manager who would not necessarily have the full information at the first appointment. I appreciate that Ministers want the allocation process to be speedier, with an expectation that cases will be assessed on the Offender Assessment System, or OASys, within two working days of sentencing, rather than five weeks, as can be the case now. However, that would represent a huge step change in service standards. How confident is the Minister that such an improvement can be achieved?

Moreover, even if the assessment can be done speedily, there is increased risk from the fragmentation that arises from having two entirely separate services. If the initial risk assessment and allocation are wrong, there will inevitably be a delay in getting the offender to the right place and therefore a delay in the offender’s building a relationship with his or her supervisor, as well as in beginning the appropriate programme of support to address their offending behaviour.

It also seems that the information for forming an assessment, even if timely, may not be sufficient. I was pretty shocked that the inspector identified a failure to address diversity issues in the assessment and allocation process. Ethnic, religious and cultural background may have a bearing, for example, on the language needs of an offender or on appropriate sentence planning, such as what unpaid work might be suitable.

There is a high prevalence of mental health problems and learning disability among offenders, and those need to be identified at the outset; the offender manager must be made aware, so that tailor-made sentence planning and effective communication with the offender takes place. Understanding the offender’s family circumstances is relevant. Child care responsibilities may impact on sentence planning and information about family members and relationships is especially important in relation to risk and safeguarding.

Clearly, these all-important matters go to the heart of successful intervention to address offending behaviours and to protect the public. What steps will the Minister take to address the concerns raised by the inspector in relation to reflecting diverse circumstances in reports and in the allocation process?

The Minister may not be surprised to hear that I am particularly concerned about the need for specific, tailor-made approaches for women offenders. The weaknesses in preparing assessment reports, identified by the inspector, are of real concern in this context, but there is also concern about the nature of the interventions that women will receive. As far as I can see, none of the community rehabilitation companies or the organisations that they are working with appear to be specialists in managing women offenders.

In recent years, there has been some good learning and recognition of the specific needs of women offenders and of what works. Specialist women’s centres are effective and positively regarded by offenders. I recently met a group of female offenders in Manchester—Women Moving Forward—who told me how important the support they received from the women’s centre was and who expressed anxiety about future provision, as well they might when women’s centres lack any certainty about their funding after March.

[Alex Cunningham]

This morning, I met some people from Barnardo’s, who told me about their concerns for children affected by people who may be in prison or on some probation regime, or something of that nature. Does my hon. Friend agree that more must be done by the Minister and others to ensure that we get the correct approach from Government, so that offenders with children are identified and these factors are properly taken into consideration, so that the whole family can be looked at properly, rather than a prisoner or offender being looked at entirely in isolation?

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend is right on many levels. First, it is important that family circumstances—particularly the presence of children and other vulnerable family members—are properly understood, so that safeguarding issues can be addressed properly. Secondly, what he said relates to my point about the need to understand particularly the circumstances of women offenders. Many women offenders are mothers: that impacts on the kind of responses and programmes that will work for them and what sentence planning will be appropriate. Mothers in particular will have to balance child care responsibilities with the demands of the sentencing plan.

Thirdly, my hon. Friend makes a good point about the whole-family approach. A stable, comfortable and happy family life helps an offender to overcome offending behaviour, so the ability to take that holistic view of family circumstances would be a real opportunity to address the offending behaviour of many offenders who could be supervised in the community. Indeed, the Minister may want to say how this might be taken forward in the context of his expectation that the community rehabilitation companies will be more innovative than the old probation service. I have not yet seen any evidence of that, but he and the CRCs might like to turn their attention to that area.

I am concerned about specialist provision through women’s centres for women offenders and women at risk from offending. The Prison Reform Trust points out that CRCs will be “expected to fund” ongoing provision after March. Can the Minister therefore assure us that specialist provision will be guaranteed? Given the concerns about this small, often highly vulnerable group of offenders, will he undertake to carry out an annual audit under section 10 of the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014, to confirm that Transforming Rehabilitation is meeting the needs of women offenders?

As I have said, one important change in Transforming Rehabilitation is that, for the first time, offenders who have served short custodial sentences of less than 12 months will receive supervision on release. That has been universally welcomed, although there is little sign yet of when it will actually happen. Of course, it is vital that the CRCs and the National Probation Service have the resources to do the job. Again, there are some serious worries. The report from the inspector specifically raises concerns about staffing in the new NPS. Can the Minister say what expectation there is about the proportion of those leaving custody who will be deemed to be high risk and under NPS supervision? The inspector recommends a full evaluation of staff resources and this surely must be undertaken as a matter of urgency, so that we can be sure there is adequate provision for the supervision of high-risk offenders. Will the Minister say how he intends to respond to that recommendation?

Of course, the NPS needs adequate contingent resource to address the fact that risk is not static. Categorising offenders as low, medium or high risk is massively to oversimplify. Transforming Rehabilitation recognises this: if there is a concern that an offender who has been categorised as low or medium risk becomes high risk, a fresh assessment will be carried out and he or she will transfer from the community rehabilitation company to the NPS. That is hardly likely to be an infrequent situation.

An offender who is identified as low or medium risk can quickly become high risk if circumstances change. Many offenders are volatile or vulnerable and prone to erratic and potentially dangerous behaviours in response to difficult or unexpected life experiences, such as loss of a job or the ending of a relationship, bereavement or the arrival of a new member of the household. Many come from relatively chaotic backgrounds, where such changes in their circumstances happen fairly frequently. We may see a substantial proportion of offenders move at some time in their sentence from medium or low to high risk, which will necessitate their transfer to the NPS. Has the Minister an assessment of the likelihood of a transition and can he assure us that the NPS will have the resources it needs to deal with it?

[Alex Cunningham]

I wonder who will be carrying out the assessments at different levels, when people are allocated to various parts of this new-look probation service, and how confident we can feel. Probation officers tell me that they are not perfectly sure yet who is going to do what in the system. Yet here we are, hurtling along on this great change programme that is under way.

[Kate Green]

It is worrying that those working in the system are still not clear about who is doing what. This is symptomatic of an approach that seems both unnecessarily complicated and fraught with difficulty.

I understand that the system depends on the CRC identifying and escalating a case where there is a perception that risk is increasing—someone in the CRC will have to make that judgment—and then the determination of the risk level will be made by an officer in the NPS. Will the Minister say how the NPS will carry out effective risk assessments of offenders with whom it has not previously had any contact because they have hitherto been managed entirely in the CRC? How can those assessments be objective, given that the NPS has a stake in the outcome, as it will become responsible for any offender that it assesses as high risk? Equally, how will we know whether the CRCs are escalating risk appropriately when they, too, have a stake in the outcome of the risk assessment? I understand—perhaps the Minister can confirm this—that the CRCs will continue to collect outcome payments, even after offenders transfer to the NPS, if the reoffending targets are met.

How will the payment-by-results element work, and what incentives will the NPS and the CRCs have to ensure that we get the crucial risk identification assessment and identification process absolutely right? Although low and medium-risk offenders can become high risk, conversely high-risk offenders can become lower risk over time. I would have thought that we hope rehabilitation programmes have that outcome, but the system does not seem to make provision for it. Once an offender is with the NPS, they stay there, even if their risk subsequently reduces. Will the Minister tell us why high-risk offenders who are subsequently reassessed as low or medium risk will not be transferred back to the CRCs? What are the resource implications of that structure?

What monitoring will be undertaken of when cases are escalated? For example, if there is a pattern of cases escalated very soon after the initial allocation, that might suggest delays in the provision of information or poor data at the time of sentence. A pattern of escalation later in the sentence might offer an early warning of weak intervention in the CRC.

[Alex Cunningham]

Might it not also reveal that the personnel in the new organisations do not have the appropriate range of skills and understanding and that they are washing their hands of difficult problems as quickly as possible and dealing with only the easy ones?

[Kate Green]

We have seen that kind of parking approach in other privatised programmes. In the Work programme, for example, the most difficult clients, for whom it was difficult to produce effective outcomes, were parked by the providers. My hon. Friend is right to highlight that risk.

What will happen if an offender is wrongly allocated to the NPS? Can he or she challenge the assessment of the risk if they think it is wrong? That is important, given that it appears that once an offender is allocated to the NPS, they are stuck there. It is important that we know whether the Minister has thought about the effect that that will have on the relevance of the interventions that the NPS receives and the expectations and preconceptions surrounding the offender, which might feed into their chances of resettlement.

Finally, I want to say something about transparency. The public has a right to know whether an upheaval on this scale has been worth it. They must be able to find out whether the contracts are working effectively, whether we are being more effectively protected, whether reoffending has been reduced as a result of the changes and whether public money has been well spent. A Labour Government would extend freedom of information legislation to ensure that the community rehabilitation companies are covered, but the Government opposed that during the passage of the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014. Shamefully, they made it impossible for a future Government to reverse the contracts, except at great cost to the taxpayer. Can the Minister assure us that the contracts include strong break clauses to ensure that the public does not end up paying for failure if they do not deliver the reduction in reoffending, which we are told is the goal of Transforming Rehabilitation?

All the concerns I have highlighted today should have been addressed before this wholesale, high-risk, evidence-free reorganisation of the probation service went ahead. It seems that ideology, not evidence, characterised the Government’s approach. Perhaps the Minister will reassure us with his answers today. I look forward to his response.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

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[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I welcome the Minister to his post; I felt that he should have been appointed to a job much earlier. I caution him, however, that he has been given a bed of nails and predecessors who have raised issues about the development of this policy have been short-lived in post. I hope that today we can at least take some of the issues raised by the inspector’s report and, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, by NAPO—from the front line—on what is happening at the moment and see how they can be addressed. For an initial report on such a change, the inspector’s report is damning.

As an aside, with regard to the inspector’s post, we have seen coverage in the press about potential conflicts of interest. I welcome the report, which I think demonstrates that the inspector has gone about his job well. I must say, however—the Select Committee on Justice has been in correspondence with the Secretary of State on this—that justice needs not only to be done, but to be seen to be done. The same can be said for probity, transparency and governance.

The Secretary of State needs to give a clear response at some stage on how an appointment has been made without a full, wider declaration of interests that covers potential conflicts of interest. In no way do I question or impugn the independence of the inspector, but that process issue must be addressed.

I identified about 29 or 30 worrying points in the inspector’s report about how the process has operated over the past few months. My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) mentioned the allocation of cases, which was fundamental to the restructuring process. The report makes clear in its first paragraphs that the key issue in allocation is the associated assessment and documentation. It says not only that the processes were time-consuming with regard to allocation, but that the documentary evidence did not support a full and clear reading of all the factors. That is surprising. It says:

“our view is that the new processes linked to allocation should be completed by the member of staff preparing any report for court.”

At this first stage in establishing how a case is allocated, there is a lack of clarity about who undertakes the process. Not even the documentation is clear or appropriate.

On timeliness, the inspector argues:

“The majority of cases were allocated…within one working day”.

However, he then demonstrates that a number of cases were allocated wrongly: they went to the NPS instead of the CRC. He says:

“These cases had to be reallocated from the Community Rehabilitation Company back to the National Probation Service with all the work and disruption that this involved.”

More than work and disruption is involved; there is anxiety about the safety and security of prisoner supervision.

The report is even more worrying on the risk of serious harm screenings. Proper screenings for risk of serious harm are fundamental, but, what do we find? It says:

“Staff were not clear about whether the new risk of serious harm screening replaced the previous one or was additional to it.”

One element of that was deportation—this is an issue that Government Members have raised recently—but there is nowhere in the new form and paperwork to record those issues. That is quite remarkable, because deportation is usually associated with criminals who have undertaken serious acts.

The inspector argued for a fuller serious harm analysis than provided at the moment. He says:

“We found that in many cases a full risk of serious harm analysis had not been completed by the National Probation Service, or if it had been done, the Community Rehabilitation Company had not received it.”

Therefore, the analysis is often not being done properly, the paperwork does not cover all the critical aspects and, even if it is done, the CRC does not receive it in sufficient time. He says that, as a result, offenders

“could be assigned to the wrong grade of staff and subsequently need to be reassigned.”

A junior member of staff could therefore supervise a serious offender and be out of their depth. That puts not just the general public, but that member of staff at risk.

[Kate Green]

On that point, my hon. Friend will be as concerned as I am—the Minister will be, too—to hear about a report passed to me by a member of staff who had heard of a colleague who had not been informed that she was supervising a sex offender. During that supervision, she was subject to a sexual assault. Had that information been provided, first, she might not have supervised that offender, given her grade, and secondly, she certainly would not have seen him on her own.