Pick of the Week 29

I have been a PO for over 10 years and whilst I don't see myself as a dinosaur, I did join to help the most vulnerable in society. Its a shame what it has all come to - it really is. Unfortunately, I think the current attitudes towards offenders in general is an effective measure of where our society is really at. THE EVIDENCE IS CLEAR - PRIVATE COMPANIES ARE HERE TO PROFIT AND NOT "PUT PUBLIC SAFETY AT THE FOREFRONT" AS THEY ARE CLAIMING - IF I AM WRONG, PLEASE SHOW ME THE EVIDENCE. We have the Tories to thank for this. Now, I just rock up, do what I'm told, tick those boxes and cover my arse. It's what its come to and all professionalism has gone which is a shame as we were a cost effective, efficient and 'caring' service.

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I think the 'What Works' debate is over simplified because the assumption is that everybody agrees on what the profession is trying to achieve i.e. 'reduction in re-offending' and 'protecting the public'. When I started, it was the old 'advise, assist and befriend'. If the objective is not clear, then the approach won't be. The MoJ and 'Probation' (as was) have been at odds for over a decade. The MoJ is satisfied with 'maintaining an illusion' as it has with the notion of rehabilitation in prisons. Probation staff are (were?) not like Prison staff and won't (wouldn't) turn a blind and meet performance targets that meant nothing. 

The performance culture referenced elsewhere has created a generation of managers who are satisfied with meeting the targets however meaningless and irrelevant they are to the ultimate objectives. I believe that public sector agencies are now managed simply to allow those in power to save face when confronted with the lived experiences of the population. 'We have increased....'. 'there has been a 60% improvement....' 'we are protecting the most vulnerable...' - look! it says so on this spreadsheet (which is covered in blood and pus). We need services based on need not numbers.

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"if the idea was to improve standards, protect the public, reduce re-offending" etc. I for my part have been very slow in realising these were never the real aims of the changes in spite of what was claimed by the government at the time. But I am still thinking that the voting public expects that their taxes are used for those stated aims, and would be outraged if they understood how mis-spent our taxes are vis-a-vis criminal justice. How can this be shown to voters in such a way that they would appreciate what is really going on and how they are hoodwinked?

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These lies about protecting the public, improving standards and reducing reoffending are still being perpetrated by our own managers, right down to my immediate CRC line manager. Every time we are asked to perform yet another long series of manoeuvres on the computer so that the company can be paid by the government for yet another empty gesture the managers try to motivate us by the stated glorious aims or shame us if we disagree that those things we are required to do will help. I don't know if the managers themselves believe what they are spouting, if they believe what their own managers are telling them, if they just state those things because they know their staff value those aims or what. But it makes me respect my managers less and less the more they lie.

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Sadly, as predicted, the excellent journalism of Panorama has generated no meaningful action whatsoever. Just pockets of outrage, a couple of tabloid newspaper headlines & insiders saying "its not even scratching the surface." Where is Lidington? Where are the questions in Parliament? Why isn't Spurr hanging by his £20K bonus from a London lamppost? Why haven't Working Links/ Aurelius and MTCNovo been stripped of their contracts? Why haven't the CEOs been named & shamed? Grayling's old-chum-networks from his BBC/media days must be stretched to the limit to keep his name out of the frame. As ever, the self-serving architects & agents of this disastrous experiment in privatising public services get rewarded & protected, whilst the 'little people' lose their jobs, their liberty and their lives.

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Crying out for experienced PO's in NPS Midlands but anyone joining is shafted out of salary and leave by having to start at bottom of the scale. Meanwhile they're employing temps on 25 quid an hour which is the equivalent of 50k a year or 60% more than me with 14 years in. You could not make up the disjointed contempt that is apparent from all employers for everyone. They must really hate us to treat us like this. Their weasel words mean nothing. Can't wait for my specially struck medallion in a couple of years. Will be following John Lennon's lead and sending it back. GRRR!

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Refuse to start at bottom of pay scale. Other areas I know for a fact are offering 29K plus 15%. Unless they compete with CRC and agency rates they will continue to have massive number of vacancies in certain areas. CRC can be more flexible and have taken people back on top of payscale..after all they can just save a bit on estate costs so that is nothing to them! Know your worth. There is a massive shortage of qualified staff and MoJ are pushing for CRC's and NPS to retain fully qualified staff. If we all refuse to take their measly offers then nothing achieved. Stick to your guns, go to the interview and negotiate your pay. Just like the advert 'you know you're worth it'.

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So what are MoJ going to do to rectify this appalling situation and force Working Links to accept that 'the working links way' is not the correct, legal or morally acceptable way to do things? Clearly they have been getting away with cheating the public out of their money by cutting corners in a completely uncaring manner, leaving staff, public and service users at risk. No doubt this is just the tip of the iceberg and if the rug is pulled there will be plenty more dirt beneath.

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One of the biggest scandals in the whole TR train crash, is the lack of urgency by the government to intervene and take action. The further the train rolls down the track, the more damage caused, and the more expensive it becomes to recover it and pull it back. It fails to meet any test in human or economic cost. If the chair of the justice select committee should by chance be reading today, I'd like to pose a question that he may like to ponder on. 

Q. What realistic expectations can the government have that probation services can assist those leaving custody with fundamental necessities such as accommodation when the contracted companies delivering probation services can't even provide office space for their employees to work from? 

£46 is just not good enough was the TR mantra. Unfortunately, if you're lucky enough to get £46 to get you through your six week wait for universal credit, that really is all you can expect.

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Interserve case managers carrying caseloads of 80 and 90. Deny it Interserve and the exodus of staff is shocking so if they say they're recruiting they are only replenishing the staff that have gone. None of us have any hope of caseloads reducing. We are burnt out and still have the whip cracked over hitting targets despite us being at least 20 cases over our workload management.

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We don't even have a work load management tool, so they can allocate as many cases as they want without us knowing at what % we are are working. And for 2 SPO's to hand their notices in one week shows how bad things are. I work for Manchester CRC and note that things are very quiet, feels like all the top heads are giving up maybe linked to the drop in their shares. Maybe just maybe it will all collapse.

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The absent workload management tool. Just part of the farce that now occurs, daily. Allocating SPO’s show no understanding of work being completed. They turn a blind eye. Nothing is factored in. Whether you have 3-4 ISP’s due, HDC’s, 2-3 prison releases, that case with child safeguarding concerns, the numerous cases with housing issues, mental health concerns - all with no adequate support or services available. Here are another 3 cases. Off you go. Don’t forget to hit your targets. It’s a shambles. London are now focusing on quality. What quality can actually be achieved? Top management are simply creating room to discipline staff, move them on to replace with cheaper alternatives.

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I don't get the statistics. I don't understand how they are worked out. My impression from working in London CRC is that we do everything worse than before. We work in a knee jerk fashion, attending to our tasks in a piecemeal fashion. It is all plate spinning stuff, ill thought out, badly planned if at all planned, no investment, no continuity, staff moving perpetually from pillar to post, service users changing officers every 5 minutes. It can't help desistance, and sure enough I see service users going in and out of prison at an ever faster pace and not just for recalls. So yes, I do think the statistics lie. And the presenters of the statistics lie. They would wouldn't they. This lie is totally in keeping with all the other lies we are constantly being fed.

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Since we have had the IT to collect data, it has been used and abused by managers and politicians. "Gaming" performance has been around longer than TR, although it has now become the priority activity of both CRC and NPS, the former to secure profit, the latter to justify itself. OASys and Delius are both designed primarily to generate data: it is abundantly obvious that their function as assessment and recording tools for practitioners is secondary. Suffice to note that the event advertised has a statistician advising attenders how to improve performance, cynical me assumes this may be a tutorial on how to finesse your gaming skills.

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Way back in the early days of the campaign against TR I suggested that in lieu of striking, we should hit our employers where it really hurts them, and negatively game performance on given days. That is, perform the exact same work, but game our recording in order to fail the targets. It is within the gift of all workers beaten with the performance target stick: just turn "good performance" on and off like flicking a light switch. It would have been extraordinarily therapeutic too. I think we could, for instance, knacker a key performance figure by underscoring OASys sections. Leave the commentary box for actual practitioners use, the people who have genuine curiosity and interest in the client, but ensure the boxes are set to zero at the start of an order, and maximum at the end. Two years down the line: Catastrophic increase in reoffending as measured in these stats.

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Funnily enough our unreliable IT systems seem to do a great deal of this for us. One minute we are jogging along at a steady rate, a little under what we should be, as always, this goes on comfortably for a few weeks. Suddenly there is a surge of something, we suddenly have well over 100 incomplete outcomes, no next appointments, from one day to the next. The SPO goes into a flat spin, emails urgent urgent urgent, attend to your stats. We abandon our plans for the day and settle down to a few hours of frantic mouse clicking. 

An hour or so into the exercise the SPO appears after having queried the stats with the IT, with the message that the 100 + have now plunged down by 115. Her question to us was: had we her team reduced that many between yesterday and today? The answer of course was no. My own hour's furious activity had only removed 3 or 4. I continued my exercise, finally eliminating all the statistical disasters I had been responsible for. Towards the end of the day the SPO appeared to let us know that the stats for our team was well above 100 again. It was an emotional roller coaster of a day. The powers that be know full well that their own gaming equipment is as unreliable as their own moral compass. They will lie whatever. We need something bigger.

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Valid the stats may be, but if it's going to take another two years to determine their reliability it just leaves questions hanging. If it emerges that they're not reliable in two years time there's going to be a protracted discussion about what went wrong, who's to blame, what should happen next. Won't that bring the contacts for TR to just about the end of their life? Will new contracts be negotiated with new criteria and payment mechanisms, or will the privateers just close shop and hand back the keys?

I don't trust statistics anyway, but I'm struck by these ones for a couple of reasons. Firstly the PbR mechanism was changed, and I don't really know in what way. Secondly, it was only in February this year that MTCNovo and Interserve appeared before the justice select committee threatening to walk away from their contracts because the PbR model was giving them such a pitiful return that it really wasn't worth having. How good are your results if the payment you get for them isn't worth having?

Since February there's been an unexpected spike in the prison population, which was already at an all time high? These statistics seem not to correlate with the national conversation in the media, those that work on the front line, or what I see with my own eyes. I simply don't believe them.

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To put the 'reoffending rates' into context it is right & proper that Police policy & data for the corresponding areas are also examined over the same period. Which Forces are using more Cautions where previously there were arrests & charges? What have been the reduction of staff figures for each Force area? What are the arrest/charging figures for each Force over the same period? What criteria define 'reoffending'', e.g. is it arrest; charge; court appearance; conviction?

A cynic's cynic might take the view that Policing has been intentionally underfunded in order to reduce the numbers of arrests/convictions as Police necessarily prioritise the more serious aspects of their work, e.g. the massive demands on Police due to counter-terrorism must have affected levels of intervention at the lower end of seriousness?

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For a proper assessment of the "success" of TR we also need a comparison with how the Trusts were performing in relation to reoffending rates. No doubt the MoJ will say they can't provide that because ORA changed the cohort.

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Even if the statistics could be proved to be absolutely true and correct, it's quantitative only. Before the bugles herald the success of TR the qualitative aspect needs consideration also. Working conditions, caseloads, service practices and service delivery should form part of the picture. If TR has by some unbelievable method reduced reoffending, then at what cost in human and monetary terms has been paid to effect that reduction? Are the costs really good value?

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I recall my last couple of years before retirement in 2011, when the Trust was firing targets at us. We were told that if we didn't meet targets we would lose precious money. So, on Crams, we had to indicate at commencement of Order, then every month, then most importantly, at termination of Order, if someone had got a job because of the officer's efforts, by the end of the Order. That included a tick if clients found employment with no intervention from us, or were on very short training courses, had employment for a few days, or did voluntary work, from their own efforts, and the most annoying - we had to give a tick if they already had work when they started their Order!

This fibbing continued onto Oasys, when at the termination of the Order, the score had to indicate that a homeless person had found accommodation if they were in a temporary shelter, or if they slept the odd night on friend's settees, or even floors. I, and several other officers, ignored this instruction. We found this disgusting, but it has no comparison with the fraudulent instructions which are coming out of the sleazy CRCs, which include being told not to breach, even if they are a risk to the public. I appreciate that this has not been happening everywhere, before I get angry comments but it is certainly not uncommon, as the Blog has revealed many times.

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I can safely say that I haven't reoffended not due to anything probation did or didn't do but solely as a result of my own actions and decisions. To be blunt, probation was so unhelpful and pretty much completely absent from the equation I may as well not have been "under supervision" for 3.5 years in respect of anything they had to do with my reoffending or not. This also means that Purple Futures got a ton of money due to my not reoffending even though they did diddly squat to earn it in any way shape or form. The tax payer got royally ripped off.

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If you are a critic of TR you won't like these statistics. You can add health warnings - the human toil and low morale - but these will be trumped by the headline figures. If the statistics had been damning of TR performance, we, too, would be focusing on the headlines to bash TR. As the statistician cautions, it's too early for any firm conclusions, so it's a waiting game.

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Working Links must be the most infamous CRC in the UK for all of the wrong reasons. They must have to spend millions on media representation, money that should be spent on providing an acceptable operational framework as well as honour staff terms and conditions. They have failure upon failure with several murders committed by offenders not being monitored properly due to 60% staff reduction. Working Links are dangerous and inadequate, interested only in the profits to be made from crime. Their contract should be revoked. The government should make an example of what happens to inadequate service providers,in an effort to reassure the public. How many more serious further offences with consequential victims need to be exposed under Working Links before safeguarding action is taken by those in power.

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Hi Pat, John and Dan. I cannot reveal who I am but I know you all from pre-privatisation. You were all brilliant probation officers / SPO's and were an asset to Avon and Somerset Probation Service, as it was then. I am sorry you have to read about the terrible turn of events under Working Links. It is indeed a sorry state of affairs and will only get worse until MoJ step in or perhaps a new Government. It is truly depressing and remaining staff with a backbone are doing their best to continue to provide a service and raise issues that need addressing. Sadly more will leave as staying just becomes more untenable each day. I hope you are all well and good that you are keeping in touch.