Probation Service

Sarah Champion Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

Our probation service comprises 35 trusts, staffed by incredibly dedicated, hard-working probation officers, all of whom are extremely concerned about the Government’s proposals. The National Offender Management Service published a report in July this year that demonstrated that the quality of the service was either “good” or “exceptional” in every single probation trust. I am proud to say that the facilities in Rotherham won an award for excellence.

Reoffending rates are not the only criterion for measuring the successes of the probation service. Victim feedback has been positive in 98% of cases. Targets for completions on domestic violence interventions, and for court report timeliness, have been exceeded, and completion targets were also met or exceeded on the vast majority of probation programmes. Moreover, the service has managed to achieve all this while making the considerable budgetary savings expected of it. Given that record, I find it astonishing that the Secretary of State is planning to scrap the trusts in a few months and to replace them with an entirely different system, most of which will be run by the private sector. In an echo of the disastrous Work programme, the Secretary of State intends to impose an untried, untested payment-by-results model on the probation service. These reforms are flawed, rushed and ill-conceived.

I want to focus on three issues. First, the proposals will allow cherry-picking by the private sector and will lead to a downgrading of the quality of support that medium and low-risk offenders get. As the National Audit Office has put it, the proposals

“could encourage providers to concentrate their efforts on the offenders least likely to reoffend and prevent them from working with the most prolific offenders”.

Part of the success of the probation service in reducing reoffending has been its use of more targeted interventions. A good example is how interventions for women are handled. These work well because they are small, local and holistic; they look at each woman as an individual with her own problems and needs, rather than as just another offender. Under the proposals, this type of niche service is likely to be lost altogether as the links between large, prime contractors and smaller local providers either break down over time or do not emerge at all. Crucially, those tailored services are simply more expensive. The proposed changes mean that it will become the probation provider, rather than the court, that decides the activities the offender should undertake. Through commercial necessity, providers are likely to prioritise the cheapest solution, rather than the best.

Secondly, let me turn to the issue of exactly what sort of company might tender to run the new community rehabilitation companies. In July this year, the Secretary of State announced that internal findings in his Department had revealed a

“significant anomaly in the billing practices”

of Serco and G4S. That anomaly amounted to tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money being mis-spent. Those practices have rightly been referred to the Serious Fraud Office, and the Department has also arranged a further, more detailed, audit of the companies’ activities. The results of the SFO investigation are not expected for several months, but I understand that those firms have not been ruled out of the bidding process, and that the pre-qualification questionnaire deadline has been delayed to give them a chance to tender.

Finally, I understand that senior staff in the probation trusts have been formally “reminded” that they have a duty to carry out the will of the Secretary of State. Nevertheless, we learned this week that the chairs of the probation trusts of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Warwickshire had written to the Secretary of State warning of the dire consequences of rushing this reform through. We need to listen to the people who know and understand the service best. Those experts say that

“performance is bound to be damaged and that public protection failures will inevitably increase”.

They go on to say that the current timetable was

“unrealistic and unreasonable...with serious implications for service delivery and therefore increases the risk to public”.

In summary, the probation service of 35 trusts ain’t broke, and the privatisation should not be going ahead.