Probation Service

Lord Beecham Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, I am sure that your Lordships would wish to join me in wishing the Minister a happy Eid. I daresay that it would be happier if he did not have to take his place in the Chamber tonight and answer for the Government in this debate.

It is customary to thank the Member who secured a debate of this kind, and I do so willingly. The noble Lord, Lord Marks, followed me to my Oxford college some eight years after I graduated. Unfortunately, as my noble friend has pointed out, he did not follow me into the Lobbies when we debated the future of the probation service and voted on the amendments to the Offender Rehabilitation Bill tabled and moved by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who cannot be in his place tonight, and by me. Had we not taken that step this would have been the first time that the House had an opportunity to discuss the massive changes that the Government seek to impose on a crucial and, as we have heard, high-performing public service. Members will recall that the Bill contained no reference to probation, and that the leaked risk assessment on the Bill disgracefully declared it had been,

“kept slim to minimise the dependence of the reforms on the passing of the legislation”.

Your Lordships’ House passed a crucial amendment to the Bill requiring proposals to reorganise the probation service to be subject to parliamentary approval. The Government have yet to indicate even when the Bill will receive its Second Reading in the House of Commons. Perhaps the Minister could enlighten us as to when that is likely to occur. In the mean time, the Government have displayed their contempt for the views of this House by embarking on yet another bout of pre-emption, or as I have described it in respect of other matters, pre-legislative implementation of the kind roundly criticised by the Constitution Committee, by pressing ahead with arrangements to dismember the service and put 70% of its work out to contract, for which incidentally the existing service will not be allowed to tender. OJEC procedures have been initiated and a strange document entitled, Target Operating Manual—its initials presumably being derived from the noble Lord, Lord McNally—has been published.

This document sets out a complex structure analogous to the confusing and expensive shambles that was imposed on the National Health Service. Local probation trusts disappear to be replaced by a national service responsible for high-risk offenders while private companies supervise medium and low-risk offenders, including those released after serving sentences of 12 months or less. Yet the paper continues to be vague about the system of payment by results saying only that,

“a proportion of their payment will be at risk and dependent on their performance”,

while failing to establish the basis on which that will be measured, or indeed what proportion might be involved.

There are serious concerns about the largely undefined categories of risk between which some 25% to 30% of offenders move. The National Probation Service is supposed to assume responsibility for those moving from the lower categories to high risk. The document states this will follow the deployment of an “actuarial tool” combined with a “clinical judgment of risk”. Can the Minister explain what those terms actually mean? It goes on to establish a hierarchy of officers—a responsible officer, a supervising officer and a supervisor, all with different roles, piling complexity upon confusion and fragmentation. The model refers to the involvement of police and crime commissioners in the new arrangements, but not local authorities, clinical commissioning groups or NHS England, which has responsibility for commissioning primary care and mental health services, both highly relevant to the issue.

There will be £450 million worth of contracts offered to, among others, the likes of Group 4 and Serco, who gave us the Olympics fiasco, the tagging scandal, Oakwood prison and, as we have heard in the past few days, the transport to prison of male and female prisoners in the same van—but then this is the Secretary of State responsible for the lamentable failure of the Work Programme. No doubt he would be happy to see such organisations take over the entire system from policing to the court service, and from probation to prisons. As Caliban might have said:

“Oh brave new world that has such providers in it”.

The Government claim that the programmes will involve no extra expenditure despite estimating that it will result in some 200,000 coming under its auspices, 60,000 of whom are likely to be recalled into custody and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, pointed out, on the Government’s own figures 13,000 will receive short sentences as a result of the reforms who would not otherwise have done so. What is the basis for this improbable assertion in relation to overall costs? Payment by results has not been piloted—or at least not properly piloted, since the Government terminated the relevant pilots prematurely. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, admitted in debate on Report that formal evaluations were not available because the pilots were discontinued, but claimed that the Government had,

“learnt from the process of designing the pilots”—

I emphasise the word “designing” and were,

“applying that learning process to the design of the new system”.—[Official Report, 25/6/13; col.681.]

Can the Minister tell us precisely what was learnt from the process of designing, but also, importantly, how the Government propose to implement the design that emerged from the short-lived pilots? For that matter can he explain the logic of including in the new regime offenders who may have served as little as one day of a custodial sentence? I repeat some of the questions that I raised on Report, to which no answer was given. In relation to payment by results, what performance indicators will be used to measure service delivery? How will the Ministry of Justice decide to deduct—and on what basis—a proportion of the fee for underperformance? What weight will be given to the nature of any reoffending? Will a motoring offence count the same as a burglary or crime of violence? How long is the period in which reoffending occurs to be measured? The Minister’s letter on the subject suggested 12 months—surely too short.

What of the questions raised by the Chief Inspector of Probation, which also went unanswered in the debate? Was she right to suggest that,

“only a small part of the contract price can be genuinely dependent on a reoffending measure”,

or that,

“victim contact services should remain within the public sector probation service”?

What does the Minister say to her charge that the,

“current proposals for the management of risk cannot be judged as workable”?

Have they been modified; if so how, and with whom have they been discussed?

How do the Government respond to the chief inspector’s concerns that more full pre-sentence reports will be needed where cases are to be referred to contractors, that small local voluntary organisations will be squeezed out once they have been discarded as bid candy, and that national commissioning,

“could be at the expense of the local perspective and the good working relations at the moment between probation trusts and local partners”?

Does the Minister stand by the airy dismissal of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, of the leaked risk assessment which estimates a 51% to 80% risk that predicted cost savings will not be met? Finally, what is the Minister’s estimate of the number of probation officers who will lose their jobs as 70% of their work is transferred? Does he agree that the figure of 18,000 which has been mentioned is about right? If staff do transfer to contractors, will TUPE provisions apply?

The Government’s objective—the reduction of reoffending—is right. Their proposals, however, are complex, confusing, uncosted and potentially risky. They should be properly piloted with probation trusts being allowed to tender for the work for which they have a deservedly high reputation, as we have heard tonight. I thank all those who have contributed to this debate. If the Government railroad through their ill thought-out plans—in a sort of HS2 of the criminal justice world—it will be because they put ideology before criminology in an area where public safety should be paramount.