Wednesday 7 May 2014

Omnishambles Update 48

First off, the latest from Pat Waterman, Chair of Napo Greater London Branch:-

TO: NAPO MEMBERS

Showing the privateers what we think of them

Following the valiant example set by members in other trusts, when some of the prospective bidders came to visit Camden & Islington last week some members of this branch showed them what they think by walking out of the office. WELL DONE

This caused a bit of a stir amongst LPT Senior Management who wanted to know if this was official industrial action. The matter was referred to our General Secretary who responded as follows: "National Office is not empowered to issue any such instruction unless we have served notice of specific action. We have not called for any action to this effect and if members choose to walk out spontaneously and are victimised we will seek to support them"

Here is my advice: You are not being instructed by your union to walk out when any prospective bidders visit. BUT you are entitled under Health & Safety legislation to take breaks from work. Should you decide to take a “break” with your colleagues at the same time that any prospective bidders are visiting your office would be entirely coincidental.

Sick of hearing the latest scandal about Serco, G4S and Capita?
Unhappy that £4 billion of public money goes into their pockets every year?
Want to have your say over YOUR public services?

SERCO is holding its AGM at: Clifford Chance LLP 10 Upper Bank Street London E14 5JJ (Canary Wharf tube or DLR) on Thursday 8th May. This branch will be supporting the “SICK OF SERCO” demonstration being organised by We own it www.weownit.org.uk and 38 Degrees www.38degrees.org.uk from 10.30 a.m. – 11.30 a.m. Join us to tell Serco that they're part of the problem, not the solution. The government needs to give shady outsourcing companies the boot.

Serco is currently under criminal investigation by the Serious Fraud Office for defrauding the taxpayer. - they'd rather we forget about that. The company has an image problem, and hiring Winston Churchill's grandson (Rupert Soames) as new chief executive won't solve it. Despite the criminal investigation, Serco has been cleared to bid for government work. Your branch officers will be there. Please join us.

The next branch meeting is on Friday 16th May. Our guest speakers will be Sara Robinson and Nick Smart. This will be your opportunity to ask them all the questions you have been wanting to ask. As LPT hurtles to its end with leaving parties for some members of SMT and a service of Thanksgiving, remember that this is NOT the end of Greater London Branch NAPO. We will be continuing to represent the interests of ALL our members be they in the CRC or NPS.

On Friday 6th June we will be showing the film “Spirit of 45” by Ken Loach at 6 pm at BPR Conference Room. We hope that this film will act as an inspiration to us all to continue the struggle against this government’s plans to sell us off. Refreshments will be provided and entrance is free. Donations are welcome and any money raised will go to the EDRIDGE fund.

PROBATION IS NOT FOR SALE

Pat Waterman
Branch Chair

Some interesting news sent in from one Trust confirms how things appear to be changing on a daily basis:- 
"You will all now be in the process of making arrangements to transfer cases. New guidance has been issued by NOMS based on legal advice which means that any case which has not been transferred by 30 June will need to have a formal agreement in place. This would only be in exceptional circumstances. This supersedes previous messages from NOMS that the transition could occur over a longer period. Updated guidance on the process will shortly be issued to staff in both Trusts."
and comes on top of this:-
ps did you know that trainee po's are now going to be seconded back to CRC in order to gain a broader range of experience for their qualification. Madness!
Here's some news from the charity sector on the Johnny Void website that will really upset government plans:-

Over 200 charities and voluntary organisations have now signed the Keep Volunteering Voluntary agreement in response to the Government’s launch of mass workfare.

As pointed out by Boycott Workfare, this vastly outnumbers the 70 organisations that the DWP claim have backed the new Community Work Placements, which involve 780 hours forced work under the threat of meagre benefits being stopped.

Many more charities have confirmed they will not be involved in the scheme on twitter, including household names such as British Red Cross, Scope and Friends of the Earth. This is a disaster for the DWP as they attempt to find tens of thousands of workfare placements in the voluntary sector.

It could also spell trouble for Mandatory Work Activity (MWA), the shorter workfare scheme which used to punish claimants when Jobcentre busy-bodies decide they aren’t trying hard enough to find work. The Keep Volunteering Voluntary agreement does not just apply to the new six month workfare scheme, but all mandatory unpaid work for benefits. Visit the Keep Volunteering Voluntary website for a handy guide to current workfare schemes.

Mandatory Work Activity suffered another blow this week after St Werburgh’s City Farm in Bristol suspended their involvement with workfare following a protest by Bristol Anarchist Federation. With many of the larger charities now publicly distancing themselves from forced work, actions like these, to pick off the smaller users of workfare, will be vital. If you know of an organisation near you who uses forced unpaid work then contact Boycott Workfare to have them named and shamed.

Boycott Workfare are also calling for everyone opposed to workfare to contact local voluntary groups and charities and ask them to sign up to Keep Volunteering Voluntary: “If you’re part of a voluntary organisation, or you know one that hasn’t signed the agreement yet, then please ask them to sign the pledge. Any kind of voluntary group can sign up: from a union branch to a major charity to a local housing action group.”


There's more bad news in the Daily Telegraph for those charities who still might be tempted to bid for probation work:-
Charities bidding for contracts to rehabilitate criminals under the Government’s “payment by results” probation reforms could be gambling with their future, a new report has warned. A think-tank called for significant changes to the shake-up of probation services, devised by Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary, which will see voluntary groups taking on work currently carried out by the public sector.
The Social Market Foundation (SMF) said it amounted to a “game of roulette” for smaller charities and warned some could be forced out of business by the way the new contracts are due to work. Nigel Keohane, the SMF’s research director, said: “Taken to extremes you could find charities that go into these contracts going under if they are not fully aware of the risks that we have identified. “I do think it’s a very serious situation.”
One of the key problems the SMF identified with the system is the way charities could have to wait many months for payment, creating cashflow problems. It will also be difficult to measure the performance of small organisations working with as few as 100 offenders with national trends in reoffending, he added. The SMF said it was “broadly supportive” of the Government’s reforms but called for a number of changes to ensure charities can play a major role without taking risks which could threaten their future.
A previous report by the group, published last year, said the plans could backfire and actually increase crime. The scheme contained “perverse incentives” that could deter firms and charities from investing in crime-cutting projects, it said.
piece in the Guardian suggests there's little if any evidence that privatisation works:-

The outsourcing bandwagon has now been rolling for three decades, but it's remarkable how little robust evidence we have about contracts and contracting in public service. Assertions and propaganda, yes; rigorous evaluation and instructive case studies, no.
The Local Government Association says hundreds of councils across England – 95% of them – are now inside shared service arrangements. The LGA claims hundreds of millions of efficiency savings. That's a formidable body of potential evidence, but to be useable it needs audit and high-grade external appraisal. Shared services may be an efficient alternative to outsourcing, but as yet we have no way of knowing.
The Institute for Government's Tom Gash – who is as clued up as anyone – has to reach back to the 1980s to come up with credible figures on possible savings from outsourcing. Those came from the first round of local authority cleaning and bin emptying contracts, which were very much of their time. Why is there nothing more recent?
The IfG and the National Audit Office have done good, informative work about the companies proffering their services. But where are the shelves full of analysis on the voluminous experience of Whitehall and local government in specifying, letting and monitoring service contracts with for-profit firms?
"Good question", was the response of the Cabinet Office's Ed Welsh, who was on the panel with Gash at a recent IfG "new ways of working in Whitehall" event. Welsh is an ex-Rothschild banker in charge of promoting commercial models. He can't be held responsible for the Cabinet Office's failure to do research and collect data, which could be due to its oddly contingent relationship with other departments. The same could be said of the Treasury and Number 10.
(cont)
Ministers (justice minister Chris Grayling at their head) still have dogmatic views about the benefits of compulsory tendering, but Whitehall officials add they must also think through the consequences of outsourcing for accountability and the involvement of service users. Does outsourcing really bring innovation, or are there other ways of improving performance in public services and departments?
Unusually, the consultants who are so facile at putting themselves ahead of the game are struggling to catch up. PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the patrons of the IfG seminar, produced a booklet, Opening Out?, which is still locked into the belief that private firms will always do a better job, and that government should not press them too hard on their performance and profits.
Even the Confederation of British Industry, which has been conducting a consultation on the future of public services contracting, acknowledges that after Serco and G4S, the least the public expects is transparencyaround their governance, ownership and profits.
Is it naive to look forward to a more reasoned and evidence-rich discussion about how public bodies cope with financial pressure and demand, given what we now know about the limits and risks of traditional contracting?

Finally, I know it's somewhat old news, but I really did find this in the Independent from Sadiq Khan a bit feeble to say the least:-
One of Whitehall’s most senior civil servants has been asked to tell the Tories not to sell off the probation service to private firms before next year’s general election. Labour fiercely opposes the planned privatisation, which would transfer £650-£700 million year worth of business to the private sector, and wants to cancel them. But the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling is hoping to see the privatisation through before the end of this this year.
Labour’s shadow Justice Secretary, Sadiq Khan, has written to the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice, Ursula Brennan, asking that the contracts be held up on the grounds that it would be wrong for the coalition government to make a decision of this importance only months before an election. Alternatively, he has asked that the contracts be written in such a way that they can be cancelled by an incoming government without huge financial penalties.

9 comments:

  1. If I was a trainee probation officer I would be very worried about being placed in a CRC. I would want a full risk assessment as to the support and oversight that is provided during my stay. The questions I would be asking:
    who will be supervising me?
    what restrictions will be put on any caseload?
    can VQ evidence gathered working in a CRC be utilised by an NPS assessor?
    what arrangements will be made for regular assessment and feedback on my learning and development?
    who will determine whether I am competent in the tasks allocated to me?

    I will amazed if any of the above are properly thought through. It is much more likely to be 'cross our fingers and hope both nothing goes wrong and trainee POs accept whatever is thrown at them'.

    Assessors in the NPS should also be concerned.

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  2. Jim this gives yet another insight into the failure of G4S and "our" government. Out of "Red Pepper"

    .redpepper.org.uk/is-there-nothing-g4s-can-do/

    papa

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    1. G4S, the giant private security contractor, is perhaps best known for making a total hash of the London 2012 Olympics, when its staff simply failed to turn up. It is also currently being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office for overcharging after claiming it had electronically tagged people who turned out to be dead. In 2010, Jimmy Mubenga died after being restrained by G4S guards during a deportation. G4S-run private prisons, meanwhile, were reported this week to be in chaos.

      This is just a brief glimpse of the firm’s long record of making megaprofits for grim failure across the world. And yet, and yet. G4S has just won a collection of contracts to deliver the £300 million ‘Help to Work’ scheme, the Tories’ latest punitive programme for unemployed people. The security firm will be in charge of enforcing ‘community work placements’ – in other words, unpaid workfare.

      Under the headline ‘G4S back in favour at Whitehall’, the Financial Times reports that the government has lifted a ban on the firm bidding for public sector work, essentially allowing G4S back into the fold. The reasoning given is that there just aren’t enough other bidders to give the contracts to – and the other big players, Serco, Atos and Capita, all have awful track records too.

      This is the end result of privatisation: a multi-billion pound oligopoly of incompetence. And all the main political parties are equally dependent on the privateers – who can forget that, just months after the Olympics, the Labour Party employed G4S to do the security at its own party conference?

      Of course, G4S is far from the only problem with ‘Help to Work’. Aimed at the 200,000 people who have been on the Tories’ failed Work Programme for two years, the scheme forces them to either work for free or sign on at the jobcentre every day. Missing a day will get them sanctioned and their benefits suspended or stopped altogether. This is a scheme clearly designed not to ‘help people into work’, but to push them off the unemployment benefits they are entitled to.

      Awarding the contract to G4S reinforces the impression that this new scheme will be even worse than workfare as we know it, more resembling the court-ordered punishment version of ‘community service’. As with Atos, however, the involvement of G4S offers a weak point when we are taking aim at the whole apparatus of stigmatisation that is replacing the social safety net.

      Delete
  3. http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2014/05/07/prison-governors-grayling-s-regime-is-driving-us-to-tipping

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    1. Chris Grayling's "Spartan" prison regime is leading to a "tipping point" of instability, the president of the Prison Governors' Association has warned.

      In a highly embarrassing intervention for the justice secretary, Eoin McLennan-Murray warned that the Incentives and Earned Privileges (IEP) scheme was triggering an increase in assaults and suicides behind bars.

      "In order to run a safe, decent prison it is vital to have the co-operation of the majority of prisoners," he said.

      "This relationship is underpinned by staff having legitimacy in the eyes of prisoners and this is dependent on trust and transparency in decision making.

      "Some of the recent changes to the IEP system have undermined this trust and threaten the legitimacy of decisions made by staff.

      "If this is allowed to continue unchecked then a tipping point may be reached whereby prisons are more likely to become unstable than stable.

      "We are already seeing the early signs of this with rising levels of assaults, reportable incidents and a disturbing rise in self inflicted deaths."

      The IEP scheme has been criticised across the political spectrum for the ban it places on all parcels being sent to prisoners. The inclusion of books in the ban sparked a protest campaign by the Howard League for Penal Reform and English PEN.

      The regime also limits family contact and opportunities for education and learning - all factors which have been shown to reduce people's risk of reoffending.

      EP contains a number of other draconian measures. It makes it much harder for inmates to secure 'enhanced' status in prison, where they are granted certain creature comforts, and much easier for them to drop down a status level.

      It is thought to have significantly increased the number of people on 'basic' regime, where they are kept alone in a cell for most of the day and denied any personal property.

      Since the new regime was introduced last November, the number of suicides in prison has doubled compared to the same period a year ago.

      McLennan-Murray made the comments in response to a Prison Reform Trust briefing highlighting the effect of the policy on prisoners and staff.

      Letters and phone calls from prisoners to the trust have nearly trebled since IEP was introduced last November.

      "The legitimacy of prison regimes risk being undermined by low staffing levels, new mean and petty restrictions and a developing culture of punishment without purpose," Mark Day of the Prison Reform Trust wrote in an article for Monitor magazine.

      "Changes to prison rules are eliciting a strong sense of injustice in prisons and undermining opportunities for effective rehabilitation."

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    2. The trust's briefing quotes one prisoner who was prevented from undertaking a distance learning course because of the restrictions on parcels.

      "I am about to start a distance learning course. A friend of mine has done all these courses and is fully qualified and was going to send me all his books but we can't have books sent in anymore," the inmate said.

      Another said: "The prison service/government keep saying how important it is to maintain family ties. So they put phone prices up, send us miles away from our families and stop us from having stamps and writing materials posted in.

      "My partner used to send them all in for me so we can all stay in touch as much as possible and that has now come to a sudden stop and now my daughter wants to know why her daddy can’t write to her anymore.

      "I know that if I lose my family because of this lack of contact, it will be straight back to square one and I know I will go straight back to crime as I’ll have nothing left to lose."

      A mother of a prisoner told a recent meeting of the all-party parliamentary penal affairs group: "We have heard a lot about the ban on books in recent weeks. But this is the one tangible link you can have with your family: 'I thought you might enjoy this – I did' or 'a few crosswords to keep you busy'.

      "This prohibition isn’t only about reducing opportunities for learning. It also removes the last possibility of a gift, a tangible piece of human warmth."

      Grayling's new rules mean prisoners must be able to show they are engaged in "purposeful activity" in order to stay on enhanced level, but the chief inspector of prisons has highlighted that opportunities for activity in prison have plummetted. This has led to many prisoners being downgraded through no fault of their own.

      One disabled prisoner who was dependant on his carer told the Prison Reform Trust he had been downgraded from enhanced states because he was not "helping others".

      Prisoners who were about to drop down a status level used to have the opportunity to make representations to the prison authorities. Now it is the decision of a single senior prison officer.

      Another prisoner said: "From being a settled lifer, working years to gain trust and respect from a difficult enough system, I find myself regarded as nothing.

      "The basic regime is inhumane; it will give me just over an hour out of my cell.

      "For years I have contributed to our community, always worked. My behaviour has been impeccable and I have mentored many inmates in several fields. Now in one fell swoop Chris Grayling has taken everything from me."

      Grayling receieved a letter from leading British authors, the Howard League and English PEN about the parcel ban in which they asked for a meeting to discuss their concerns, but he has not replied.

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  4. With a cabinet reshuffle likely to take place before the end of the month, it's very clear that if Grayling is moved from the MoJ then whatever office he's likely to take up will soon find itself in utter chaos.
    Do the right thing PM, and make him a minister without portfollio, and stop him making a crock of shite of everything he touches. I'm sure you'll benefit just as much as the public and the poor sods that have to work under him.

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  5. Off topic but cant resist.

    http://www.barnet-today.co.uk/news.cfm?id=15324&headline=Pensioners%20get%20%C2%A3100k%20tax%20codes,%20while%20Capita%20error%20leaves%20staff%20unpaid

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  6. CRC PO:"...and if you don't comply you could be breached"
    Client:" so you can send me back to court?"
    CRC PO:"Well actually, no. If I think you've breached I'll prepare the paperwork and hand it it someone you've never met, who will decide whether or not to progress the breach"
    Client:"your boss?"
    CRC PO:"well...ummm...no, another probation officer working for another organisation called the NPS"
    Client:"I thought you were my probation officer, can't you do it?"
    CRC PO:"I am but...errr..."

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