‘COMPLICATING REHABILITATION’
A revolution in complexity, duplication, cost and confusion
1.
Foreword
The Probation Service is a simple and straightforward delivery agency with good links to
statutory and voluntary partners. It is also a local service, rooted in communities, and trusted
by local people. It is close to those it seeks to help.
Ministers at the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) want to change all of this. They are seeking to
break apart a single coherent service, with a pedigree of 107 years of successful delivery,
into two new organisations:
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National Probation Service (NPS)
21 Community Rehabilitation (CRCs)
In the autumn of 2014, the Government proposes to sell off the CRCs to the private sector.
This programme of reform is called ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ (TR), but in reality it should
be called ‘Complicating Rehabilitation’.
‘Complicating Rehabilitation’ will:
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Create a complicated and costly interface between the two new delivery bodies
Transform simple processes into complicated ones
Create barriers to service delivery
Insert unnecessary service providers
Add costs where previously there were none
Demoralise those delivering the service
This briefing sets out how ‘Complicating Rehabilitation’ will negatively impact on the
Probation Service and the working lives of probation staff. UNISON members are struggling
to make sense of the reforms as they strive to keep communities safe and rehabilitate
offenders.
Overall, the following case studies show that TR will negatively impact on risk, timeliness
and the progression of cases.
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2.
Synopsis
‘Complicating Rehabilitation’ will impact in particular on the following areas of Probation
work:
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Offender Management/Supervision
Enforcement
Courts Work
Interventions
Approved Premises
Information Technology (ICT)
Estates
3. Offender Management/Supervision
3.1 The NPS/CRC split will severely damage the continuity/quality of offender
management. Long-standing relationships between Probation Officers/Probation
Services Officers and offenders will be broken apart, because staff will have to
relinquish responsibility for those offenders who are transferred to the other delivery
body. This is likely to be very difficult for the service users themselves, who have
built up close and productive working relationships with their PO/PSO. The
established good practice of one offender manager working with an offender
throughout his/her order has gone completely out of the window. So much for
seamless, end-to-end offender management!
3.2 POs and PSOs working for the CRC feel de-skilled and undervalued. In future
they will have their recalls, breaches and other work checked by potentially less
experienced colleagues working for NPS. CRC offender managers will no longer be
required to write court reports. PSRs and FDRs will only be written by NPS offender
managers, who will not have the background knowledge, gained over time, of the
offender and his/her circumstances. There is a real risk that CRC staff will be made
to feel like second class citizens in the split of the service into high and low-risk
agencies. POs and PSOs assigned to a CRC have, for example, not been offered
training in the new Risk of Serious Recidivism Tool and feel that their roles are
being seriously de-skilled and undervalued. Without access to this sort of training,
the chances of CRC offender managers being able to apply for jobs in the NPS
looks increasingly remote.
3.3 NPS will decide on CRC offender managers’ breaches and recalls, although
they will know little about the cases.
3.3 Information sharing with other agencies is likely to become more difficult,
after the privatisation of CRCs, because the police service may have reservations
about sharing data with a private company.
3.4 The influx across England and Wales of an additional 80 – 90,000 offenders
who will become subject to licence requirements, is likely to lead to a basic
‘check-in/check-out’ style of supervision, because the staffing resources simply will
not be there in the CRCs to cope with anything more sophisticated.
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3.5 Because CRCs will not be able to use the same risk assessment tools as
NPS, any increase in risk will be impossible to quantify properly across the
two risk assessment systems. Risk will not be managed or measured effectively.
3.6 Another factor affecting the management of risk is the separation of staff who
have a vast knowledge base of the areas where they work. This information is
currently shared amongst Probation Trust Offender Management Units. As a
result of TR, this knowledge base will be lost, because staff will be working for
different organisations and eventually will be working from different locations. At
the moment, here is good information exchange between offender management
staff, at all professional levels, whereby relevant and important detail and
information is ‘picked up’ and acted upon. Once staff are separated, these
discussions won’t be taking place. For instance, PSOs might be managing a
relation/friend of a high risk case, and information can be gleaned from these
offenders and passed on to the PO. Without this interchange of information, the
management of risk of harm/risk of re-offending will be drastically affected.
3.7 Movement of cases between NPS and CRC could increase risk. CRCs will not
manage high risk cases, but when an offender being supervised by a CRC shifts to
high risk, he or she will be transferred to the NPS. This will mean that, at a point of
crisis and raised risk, the case will be managed by a new officer who does not have
full knowledge of the case. Such changes in allocation are themselves proven to
raise risk.
3.7
By allowing CRCs to decide that an offender is too risky and referring them
to the NPS leaves the NPS with no capacity to deal with the extra work caused
by the extra cases which could remain with the NPS for the rest of their
sentence. The CRC's could cynically manipulate this by sending all "difficult" cases
to the NPS in order to improve their profit margins. The same can be said of victim
cases which the CRC could decide were discretionary, rather than statutory cases.
This again leaves the victims unit with potentially more cases than it would normally
have.
3.8 NPS will allocate cases to the CRC without any knowledge of the case-loads
of the CRC offender managers. There is a major issue brewing in relation to the
management of workloads for offender managers in both the CRCs and the NPS.
4. Enforcement:
4.1 In the future, CRC employees who are supervising an offender will not be
permitted to do any enforcement work. This means that all enforcement activity
will have to be passed to the NPS, causing huge delays and therefore risk to public
safety. The risk of offenders falling down the gap between the two new
organisations is obvious.
4.2 NPS will decide on CRC offender managers’ breaches and recalls, although
they will know little about the cases.
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5. Courts Work:
5.1 The MOJ has stated that only NPS staff will be classed as officers of the
court, so only they will be able present breach files and other documentation
to court. This means that someone working in a CRC who has been managing a
particular offender and knows a great deal about them will be unable to speak to the
court directly and will have to pass information via the NPS. This has grave
implications for the accuracy and timeliness of reports to the court and for the
outcome of court proceedings.
5.2 The ability of NPS court teams to cope with the sole responsibility that they
will inherit for court work is in serious doubt. UNISON members working in
court teams are already reporting serious staffing shortfalls. Some Trusts are
requesting 4 week adjournments for FDRs and being unable to offer PSR
appointments to offenders. This situation will only get worse once the staffing split
has taken place and more workload is heaped on court teams. Court teams are
being told that 85% of all PSR's will in future be done by the Court Team - either onthe-day or by allocation prior to the next Court date (except high risk ones, ofcourse). UNISON members in court teams feel that they are being set up to fail.
5.3 The new scheme for dealing with Parole hearings is bureaucratic and leaves
the wider service with the potential of duplicating work and being financially
inefficient. The Parole Board has every right to ask both an NPS and CRC
member of staff to attend a Parole hearing for a case which would have previously
been supervised by one officer who would have solely been responsible for
completing the report. In the world of TR, the CRC and NPS both have a role to
play in a Parole oral hearing, when the offender is supervised in the CRC. The bulk
of the report will be completed initially by the CRC supervisor and then will be
finalised by the NPS report writer. If the author of the Parole report is not the
offender's supervisor it may lead to offenders not getting an opportunity of a fair
hearing by the Parole Board. This could create a breakdown in relationships with
offenders, a lack of natural justice and prisoners remaining in prison for longer
terms, due to this extra layer of bureaucracy.
5.3 CRC staff who used to do sessional work to help out with court duty will be
barred from doing this once the staffing split has taken place, removing
valuable knowledge and staff resources from this work.
6. Interventions
6.1 Currently all the offender programmes run by the Probation Service are
accredited and Trusts uphold an evidence based practice approach. There is
no guarantee that programmes will have to be accredited in the future; this is to
allow the private sector running CRCs to drive down delivery costs with the risk of
dumbing down programme content.
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6.2 PSOs working on Education, Training and Employment (ETE) for the CRC will
no longer be able to access the offender risk register and other information
on Oasys and nDelius, because this access is denied to CRC staff. Once this
access is removed when the organisations are split, the PSO will have to go
through a time-consuming, costly and bureaucratic process to request the relevant
risk data from NPS colleagues. This will make it harder to ensure that offenders are
not placed in inappropriate training or employment opportunities.
6.3 PSOs working as Programmes Tutors will not be able to access nDelius for
NPS cases when facilitating certain accredited programmes for NPS. CRC PSOs
will be denied access to the offender’s contact notes and will no longer be permitted
to talk to NPS colleagues about offenders who have been on orders in the past.
6.4 CRC programmes teams are losing all their experienced group facilitators to
NPS, who in the future will only run sex offender programmes for the NPS.
6.5 CRC resources to run programmes will be severely limited post the staffing
split, leading to difficulties in service delivery.
6.6 CRC Treatment Managers, with specialist skills in programme delivery, will
be unable to assist with training NPS staff in the future.
7. Information Technology:
7.1
To deliver TR, particularly the sale of CRCs to the private sector, the MOJ
must split the core Probation ICT system: the nDelius case management
database and Oasys.
7.2 This split will create 2 systems, one for use by CRCs and one by the NPS.
The potential for this mass restructuring of probation ICT systems, each one of
which comes with its own problems, to go badly wrong is very high.
7.3 The cost of splitting the systems is truly enormous.
7.4
Following the split, CRC staff will be blocked from seeing any NPS data on
nDelius or electronic files. This means that information sharing will simply not
take place. All serious further offences (SFOs) highlight the need for good
information sharing. The NPS/CRC split will completely undermine information
sharing with a massive risk to public safety.
7.5 The ICT support model for NPS has yet to be defined, so CRC staff will be
providing this function to the NPS for an indeterminate transitional period,
but staffing constraints will mean that turn-around will be affected and processes
like recalls could be badly affected.
7.6
ICT support roles, such as systems managers, will be replicated in NPS and
in each CRC: leading to additional costs.
7.7 The delivery dates for the staffing split are not achievable from an IT
perspective. Previous experience, such as the NDC migration, the Remote
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Access Systems and nDelius, all suggest that the split will require at least 12
months preparation time.
7.8 The OMNI IT hardware system is on its last legs, yet the MOJ expect things to
continue to work through to the end of December 2015.
7.9
All the TR ICT investment is going into the NPS, leaving the CRCs to cope with
outdated systems and the logistics of bringing together the legacy systems of
merging Trusts
7.10 NOMS has let a contract for first line ICT support to Lockheed Martin,
without any consultation with staff or unions. There is total confusion as to the
scope of the LM contract and its impact on NPS or CRC staff. Throwing this
change on the Service at the same time as the staffing split is wilfully risky.
7.11 The MOJ has an appalling track record of holding ICT contractors to
account, yet within the proposed FITS system, they plan to move from one to six
ICT contractors, each of whom will be free to sub-contract the work further. This is
a real recipe for disaster.
7.12 CRC ICT support staff will have to support both CRC and NPS staff for an
indeterminate period post staffing split, requiring them to log in and out of
different systems, leading to delays in advice/resolutions and putting great strain
on staff. There will need to be two sets of user accounts and the details of the
separate operating environments will be very different.
7.13 CRC staff will not be permitted to amend a requirement or licence after the
staffing split. Instead they are going to have to ask ICT helpdesk staff to do this,
which will involve ICT staff amending live offender data in relation to cases that
they have no prior knowledge of. There is a real risk here that ICT staff might then
be held accountable for any issues that subsequently arise regarding the
recording of offender data – SFO reviews for example.
7.14 The ambition of NOMS to achieve the IT cut over between CRCs and NPS by
1 June is totally unrealistic and unachievable. However, NOMS is pressing
ahead regardless of the serious issues for the case management system.
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8. Estates:
8.1 TR requires existing probation buildings to become "segregated" so that CRC
staff do not have access to NPS areas of the buildings. This is to ensure that
private companies do not get access to privileged information that could impact on
commercial matters. Ministers claim that people can simply "walk across the office"
to consult an NPS or CRC colleague about a particular offender, but as physical
segregation takes place (for commercial reasons) this simply will not be possible.
Communication, collaboration and public safety will be compromised.
8.2 Within 18 months of the staffing split CRCs are likely be moved to different
premises therefore splitting the NPS and CRC even further. This will be more cost
intensive as telephone calls and emails and the time it takes to contact our
colleagues in both services will cut into our working day. It also risks data protection
act breaches due to the transmission of more messages via fax machines and
emails that may not be secure.
8.3 The MOJ is buying new archive storage for paper files that were once held on
offenders by Trusts. These files will now have to be taken out of offices and stored
centrally as the MOJ do not want CRC staff to have access to them. Again, there
are massive public safety issues here, as well as ones of cost and adding
complication to data access and retrieval.
8.4 There is no clarity as to how long building officers will have to cover sites for
the two organisations
8.5 Multiple meetings and form filling will be required in future in the event of any
estates work that covers both organisations.
8.6 The likelihood of confusion over joint liability for health, safety and welfare in
premises in multiple occupation is very high.
10. Conclusion
In Chris Grayling’s Foreword to his ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ consultation paper,
published in January 2013, he refers to the chaotic lives of those for whom the Probation
Service was created 107 years ago.
But the reality is that it is Transforming Rehabilitation itself which has become chaotic. It has
truly become ‘Complicating Rehabilitation’.
UNISON’s members who work in Probation are fearful for the future on account of all the
issues set out above. Unachievable promises, public money misuse, experimenting with risk
management, ideas that simply won’t work – these are all elements that now go to make up
the TR programme.
UNISON continues to call on the TR programme to be halted for all the reasons set out
above.
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