Monday 14 August 2017

Peterborough Was a Success!

Here we have Frances Crook of the Howard League writing about the experimental Peterborough project and the news sneaked out recently by the MoJ that it had been a success after all. So what a shame we got the TR omnishambles instead!   

Peterborough prison and social impact bonds

The final evaluation of the Peterborough prison Payment by Results (PbR) pilot was published last week. This was a scheme to provide support for people released from Peterborough prison after serving short sentences aimed at reducing reoffending. Services were provided by charitable organisations in the main, were tailored to individuals needs and, most crucially, people volunteered to go on the programme. Some 60,000 are sentenced to short prison terms each year and until recently they did not qualify for any support on release as the probation service had only dealt with those serving longer sentences, despite repeatedly asking for resources to extend their services to these individuals.

This pilot was originally supposed to run for three years, but was ended after two after the Transforming Rehabilitation programme was rolled out which deconstructed probation into the national and privatised services. Originally Chris Grayling talked about the pilot as evidence for the need for TR, although at that time no results for Peterborough were available and the TR model was very different to the Peterborough one. TR was promoted as delivering support to men and women sentenced for short prison terms and the contacts awarded to private companies.

The evaluation into the first two years of the Peterborough pilot found that it was a success and that reoffending amongst those who took part was around nine per cent lower than a control group. The minimum threshold for a payment by results payment was 7.5 per cent, so the investors would have received a return on their money.

The pilot teaches us several things:
  • Well-funded, tailored services that focus on individual need and engage positively with people can reduce or even halt offending.
  • People who volunteer to receive help are more likely to succeed in desisting.
  • Social impact bonds are neither a ridiculous nor ground-breaking idea. This project did not elicit huge support from the City or pension funds as was intended and may indeed have been counter-productive as these investors are not just looking for a return but on certainty and Chris Grayling’s abandonment of the project would have destabilised the social impact bond experience.
  • Whether a social impact bond for helping former prisoners is cheaper than just financing such services properly through public finance (taxation) isn’t clear.
The majority of funding for this project came from a small group of charitable trusts and the Big Lottery, who often fund this sort of pilot without the lure of PbR. There’s nothing in the results which suggest that had the charities that provided the services been paid through a grant from these trusts, the outcomes would have been any different.

Chris Grayling cancelled something that was working and replaced it with something that could never work.


Frances Crook

--oo00oo--

This on the Civil Society website:-

Peterborough social impact bond investors repaid in full 
Investors in the Peterborough social impact bond will be repaid in full with a 3 per cent per annum return, according to an announcement today. Social Finance, the organisation which created the Peterborough social impact bond – the first in the world – said the SIB had succeeded in reducing reoffending by 9 per cent, against a Ministry of Justice target of 7.5 per cent.

A social impact bond is a type of payment-by-results contract where a charity or other social purpose organisation agrees to deliver a given outcome. Unlike a standard PbR contract, the funding to deliver the project comes from third party investors. If the project hits agreed targets, the investors and charity make money. If it fails, the investors are the ones who lose out.

The SIB model has been widely adopted, with 89 examples in 19 countries worth over £300m. It has been praised because it provides social bodies with freedom to innovate, allows the development of long-term solutions and early intervention, and transfers risk away from charities and public commissioners. But it remains controversial because it is seen as complex, bureaucratic and expensive. SIBs have also struggled to create sufficiently accurate measures to assess whether social issues are being addressed, and are sometimes seen as commodifying social problems.

The Peterborough SIB was intended to invest £5m in reducing reoffending in three tranches of 1,000 prisoners who were leaving Peterborough Prison after serving sentences of less than 12 months. It was intended to operate over seven years.

However the SIB was abandoned after the second tranche, because of the launch of a new government programme, Transforming Rehabilitation, which involved PbR contracts to reduce reoffending among all short-term prisoners, and removed the ability to judge the SIB against a control group. Transforming Rehabilitation, which was based partly on the success of the SIB, has since been heavily criticised for failing to follow its principles, and reverting to the use of large private providers.

David Hutchison, chief executive of Social Finance, said: 

“The Peterborough Social Impact Bond captured people’s imagination with the simple premise that it is possible to invest in interventions to tackle difficult social issues. The results today reflect the hard work, commitment and tenacity of all those involved, working with this group of offenders to help them rebuild their lives. I am immensely grateful to all our partners for their commitment over the past seven years. We have learned that impact investment can drive real change and harness communities and action to rethink how we resolve the challenges our societies face.”
The SIB was delivered by the One Service, a partnership administered by Social Finance. Organisations involved in the delivery included:

St Giles Trust
Ormiston Families
Sova
MIND
TTG Training
YMCA
John Laing Training

Investors in the SIB include:


Barrow Cadbury Trust
The CowPat Trust
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
Friends Provident Foundation
Golden Bottle Trust
The Henry Smith Charity
The Hintze Family Charitable Foundation
J Paul Getty Jr Charitable Trust
Johansson Family Foundation
K L Felicitas Foundation
LankellyChase Foundation
Monument Trust
Panahpur
Paul Hamlyn Foundation
R&S Cohen Foundation
Rockefeller Foundation and the Tudor Trust


--oo00oo--

Readers interested in the topic of TTG (Through the Gate) and short term prisoners generally - the famous 'leave prison with only £46 in their pocket' group so often quoted by Chris Grayling as the main reason for TR - will no doubt be interested in this statement contained on the official MoJ 'Open Justice' website:-
"Offenders sentenced to less than 12 months also serve the second half in the community but are not actively supervised by Probation."
as a consquence, many of us are asking 'so what the hell was TR all about then?'  

15 comments:

  1. Or maybe it was simply statistical inevitability? This from the evaluation report:

    "A final observation is that a comparison of the number of reconviction events over the period 2006- 2009 among men leaving HMP Peterborough and men leaving other prisons reveals a marked difference. Men released from Peterborough in 2006 had fewer reconviction events on average than men released from other prisons but, by 2009, this situation had reversed."

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  2. What constitutes reoffending & how narrow do you want the criteria to be to ensure 'success' ? Again from the evaluation report:

    "There were 997 eligible prisoners released from HMP Peterborough (and who it was possible to match to the PNC) during the cohort 2 period. This reduced to 911 under the revised sampling definition adopted for cohort 2. In addition, 45 were excluded from the estimation sample due to missing information regarding the nature of their index offence or because their index offence was a breach of licence conditions, a breach of a detention and training order or a breach of a conditional discharge."

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  3. Hansard, HoC, Feb 2013:

    "The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright): The proposals in our “Transforming justice” consultation paper are designed to deliver a criminal justice system that punishes offenders properly and helps them to get their lives back on track. We want providers of rehabilitation services to tackle the root causes of offending, and to ensure that they have the right package of support to help offenders to turn their lives around. We will announce further details of our proposals once we have considered the responses to the consultation.

    Kelvin Hopkins: Lower-risk, profitable components of the probation service are to be handed to the private sector. Yet again, the Government are simply putting public money into deep private pockets and bringing additional costs into the system. Given the year-by-year decline in reoffending, why are they intent on unleashing a potentially risky and certainly costly upheaval of the existing system, rather than investing to improve it?

    Jeremy Wright: The first point to make is that we do not think that what we propose will be more expensive than the current arrangements. Quite the reverse: we think that it will save the taxpayer money. The second point is that we intend to bring in good ideas from not just the private sector but the voluntary sector, so that we can start to drive down those all-important reoffending rates."

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    1. And on the same day we had this from the most successful SSJ ever:

      "The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling): Since becoming Justice Secretary, I have embarked on a programme of delivering more for less and of boosting public confidence in the justice system. We are consulting on transforming rehabilitation and will shortly be considering reforms to youth justice.

      In the past, my Department has routinely undertaken 12-week written consultations in some areas, including legal aid."

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  4. We are for ever being lied to by our government and also by our senior managers. I could cope with that because I was able to ignore it. Now lies are coming to us by our own line managers. It is in our faces now and it demands a response. How do people cope when that happens? Secrecy? Furtiveness? Silence? Uproar?

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  5. I may be a bitter old cynic, but I doubt that a 9% reduction in reoffending is actually achievable unless it's been measured against a very selective and highly manipulated scale.
    I have no doubt that the SIB model can be called a great success because of the way the cohorts were formed. Cherry pick those that are likely to be a success and put them in the active group, and cherry pick those who don't stand a chance in hell and put them in the control group.
    The real conflict between the Peterborough SIB is that when you can't cherry pick both the active group and control group, and it becomes all inclusive, then there isn't a hope of hitting MoJ targets, or getting a return by way of PbR.
    It was the encapsulation of EVERYONE serving 12months and under, and not just cleverly engineered cohorts was the fly in the ointment when it came to extending the SIB.
    As for the £46???? Well, there needs to be questions asked urgently about that. Not just on the basis of selling TR on a lie, but for those under the new supervision orders.
    Being under supervision and not being actively supervised means you are Infact being denied support and access to facilities that are legally part of your sentence.

    'Getafix

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    Replies
    1. Amen Getafix, refreshing as ever in your spotting of everlasting streams of lies.

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    2. When you read what Russell Webster had to say in 2015,and the data he highlights for SIB pilots at HMP Peterborough and Doncaster, you have to be amazed at turn around and success of HMP Peterboroughs SIB.

      http://www.russellwebster.com/disappointing-outcomes-for-peterborough-and-doncaster-prison-pbr-pilots/

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  6. From BSC newsletter 72, Summer 2013 (article by Michael Teague):

    "Critics have argued that outsourcing probation work privileges profit and ideology at the expense of public safety. The Probation Association, speaking for the Trusts, has expressed concerns about the inevitable fragmentation of probation work and a potential increase in public risk. Napo, the probation union, estimates that almost 70,000 - out of a total of 140,000 medium and low-risk cases that will be moved outside the public sector - may be individuals convicted of violent and sexual offences, domestic violence, burglary, and robbery (Justice Unions’ Parliamentary Group, 2013: 6). Pushing over two thirds of probation’s challenging workload into untrained private sector hands is viewed as an inherently risky strategy that may compromise public protection. Given the prevalence of mental health problems and substance abuse within probation’s client group, there is unease about the ability of private companies to conduct adequate risk assessments. There are also concerns focused on decreased accountability and the dilution of inter-agency cooperation. One frontline probation practitioner, blogging anonymously - understandably so, given the Justice Secretary’s edict that probation staff who publicly challenge the outsourcing of their work on social media face disciplinary action - observed that the Bill laid the foundations for a “perfect omnishambles” (Brown, 2013)."

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  7. You're never going to reduce reoffending rates under the current system no matter how much those in power may tinker with it. It needs a wholesale root and branch revision from start to end of the criminal justice system with the focus of stuff that actually works. If other countries can do it there is absolutely no reason why the UK cannot follow suit instead of lemming like blindly following the failing US penal example.

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  8. Off topic but another wonderful Tory privatisation outcome comes to pass. Can only guess at the amount of tax payers money that has been bled from government coffers.

    http://www.imeche.org/news/news-article/largest-apprenticeship-provider-'at-risk-of-collapse-after-critical-ofsted-report

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    Replies
    1. The biggest apprenticeship provider in the UK is reportedly “at risk of collapse” after a highly critical Ofsted report.

      Learndirect, which provides training courses for a range of sectors including advanced manufacturing and engineering, tried to block the report’s publication, according to the Financial Times and FE Week. The publications said Ofsted gave the government-funded, Lloyds Bank-owned organisation an “inadequate” rating – the worst possible score.

      Set up in 2000 by the Labour government and privatised during the coalition, Learndirect works with employers to develop tailored apprenticeships and is the UK’s largest provider of skills, training and employment services.

      Following an inspection in March, Ofsted reportedly listed many failings. The regulator allegedly found one third of apprentices had no off-the-job training as required, and discovered “no evidence of learning plans or monitoring of process” in a random sample of apprentices.

      The FT/FE Week investigation found “tens of millions of pounds” was extracted from Learndirect after its privatisation, with payments to financiers and managers accounting for 84% of cash generated.

      The organisation reportedly obtained an injunction against the report’s publication, claiming it could lose government contracts “and be forced into administration”.

      Learndirect has been contacted for comment.

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    2. “tens of millions of pounds” was extracted from Learndirect after its privatisation, with payments to financiers and managers accounting for 84% of cash generated."

      It's just disgraceful. It's ugly, and it sickens me.

      Delete
  9. Hansard, written answers, July 2017:

    Sam Gyimah The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice:

    The release of prisoners serving indeterminate sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) who have completed their tariff is a matter for the independent Parole Board. Before directing the release of an IPP prisoner, the Board must be satisfied that his detention is no longer necessary for the protection of the public.

    Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) have worked hard in supporting the Parole Board to reduce significantly the backlog of oral hearings for IPP prisoners. Earlier this year, HMPPS set up a new unit to support this effort has now embedded the learning in all pre-release casework, so as to enhance the efficiency of the parole process.

    HMPPS is focused on giving IPP prisoners the support, opportunities and motivation they need to progress more quickly when they are reviewed by the Parole Board so that they have the best possible prospect for securing release. HMPPS and the Parole Board have implemented a joint action plan, the purpose of which is to deliver further improvements and efficiencies in the effort to help IPP prisoners progress towards release. During 2016/17, 46% of all IPP prisoners considered by the Parole Board were released and 24% recommended for a move to open conditions.

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    1. In the interests of balance & fairness we have also to lambast the Labour stance on THEIR ipp project. Here's Jenny Chapman in HoC from Feb 2013:

      "Jenny Chapman: .... However, while the Secretary of State has been fretting over the weekend about the pocket money, the trainers and the overalls of inmates, he has failed to keep the most dangerous prisoners locked up. Indeterminate sentences help keep offenders inside until they are safe to release. The governor of Whatton prison, Lynn Saunders, told The Guardian:

      'I think I am fairly liberal in my attitude—I haven’t come across anyone serving indeterminate sentences for public protection in this prison who I didn’t think should have an IPP. Not one.'

      Why did this Government abolish indeterminate sentences, putting the public’s safety at risk?"

      Not Labour's finest hour.

      It was, bizarrely, Ken Clarke's moment to shine when he outlawed the spiteful, prejudicial sentencing practice; but PiggyBoyCameron kicked Jazzy Ken into touch and allowed Numpty Grayling to visit his ideologically deranged vision of "justice" upon the UK.

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