Probation Service — Debate

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 2:23 pm on 21 January 2010.

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Photo of Lord Ramsbotham Lord Ramsbotham Crossbench 2:23, 21 January 2010

My Lords, on 16 May 2000 the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, addressing the then Central Probation Council, said:

"The new (National) Probation Service will work more closely with the Police and other agencies, and with local Crime and Disorder Partnerships. Local Probation Boards will work to deliver their services in a way that serves their locality better ... One of the key challenges will be to find ways of being accountable to local communities for the work of the Service".

The only thing new about this was the mention of a single national service rather than a number of local probation services. He was expounding how probation had operated since its introduction 93 years before. However, less than eight years later, on 28 January 2008, the same Jack Straw, now the Justice Secretary, announced a complete reversal of this. He said that the National Probation Service, which had been in existence only since 2001, would now be merged with the Prison Service in a new version of the National Offender Management Service, which was to be launched in April that year, to deliver jointly his recently announced punishment and reform mantra. The new NOMS was to be under a new chief executive, the then director-general of the Prison Service. These starkly contrasting directions by the same person with the same responsibility for probation explain why the story of probation under this Government has been so turbulent.

Before I go any further, I want to make one wish and one plea to the Minister. My wish is that the clocks around the Chamber should show the letters PANT, instead of the numbers 0:01. The letters stand for "People Are Not Things", which are words that should be emblazoned on the hearts and desks of every Minister and official with any responsibility for probation.

I sympathise with the Minister, because he will not be familiar with much that will be said during this debate. My plea to him is that, when he comes to wind up, he strikes out the meaningless and dangerous mantra that I am willing to bet is in his script. Every time probation service problems are mentioned, Ministers trot out what Jack Straw alleged in the other place. On 21 July 2009-at Commons Hansard col. 734-he said that resources are not an issue because 70 per cent more money and 50 per cent more staff have been made available to probation since 1997, while the case load has increased by only 53 per cent. That is meaningless because money is not the only resource required and, while the numbers of lesser trained probation service officers and management staff have increased, the number of fully trained officers has gone down, which is dangerous. If that mantra is believed, it discloses a wilful blindness to the actual situation on the ground, which has been set out over and over again by those who work there, as they have done to me as I prepared for this debate.

The purpose given to what were called "officers of the court", who were first appointed by the Probation of Offenders Act 1907, was "advise, assist and befriend". Probation became one of the four parts of the criminal justice system. It is the service responsible for the supervision and rehabilitation of those awarded community sentences and it works alongside the courts, the police and the Prison Service, which is responsible for the custody and rehabilitation of those awarded sentences of imprisonment. The system, like any other system, is only as good as how its individual parts perform their own function and work together.

From the outset, probation officers worked principally with courts and the police, all being community based. Work with prisons was confined, as it is now, to those prisoners whose sentences included a period of community supervision or licence. This focus and purpose was confirmed in the Criminal Justice Act 1991, which promised probation a centre-stage role in the management of much toughened, more publicly credible community penalties, including electronic monitoring. Please note the link between credibility and public confidence.

However, all was to change in 1997. On becoming Home Secretary, Jack Straw made it immediately apparent that he did not like the existing system of 54 autonomous county probation forces, each with a local probation committee. He wanted to bring probation and prisons together, which needed primary legislation. Happily, a proposal to change probation's name to the community rehabilitation and punishment service was rejected, before a National Probation Service, under its own director-general, with 42 probation areas each with its own probation board, was established by the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000. The purpose, too, was changed, with the proper punishment of offenders in the community and ensuring offender's awareness of the effects of crime on victims being added to rehabilitation. But the independence of the director-general was not to last for long, because a commissioner of corrections, who was responsible for prisons and probation, was appointed in 2002.

Then, before you could blink, came NOMS in 2004, initially allegedly a commissioning service. In 2005, the Home Office disregarded 99 per cent of the 756 responders to a so-called consultation on the future of probation who opposed the government line and pressed ahead with its plans, which culminated with Jack Straw's 2008 redirection of NOMS.

Those who doubt that the effect of this has been to exclude the voice of probation from policy-making in a NOMS that is virtually run by the Prison Service should reflect on the figures disclosed on 21 January 2009 by Mr Malik in the other place, in Hansard col. 1566W: of the 4,270 persons employed within NOMS, 742 were old NOMS, 3,415 ex-Prison Service and only 113 ex-probation service, none of whom is in a senior position or in any of the main units such as strategy and effectiveness, offender assessment and management or the briefing and casework groups. In addition, the post of director of the National Probation Service was abolished in April 2009.

People are the only effective tool for dealing with people-PANT. At the heart of the distinct role of the probation service within the criminal justice system is person-to-person supervision and rehabilitation of offenders awarded community sentences. Working with offenders in the community is not the same as working with them in prison; it needs different training and skills, about which my noble friend Lady Howe will speak. The only alternative to custody is community sentencing, in which the public will have confidence only if offender supervision is seen to be credible. Of course probation staff have other tasks, but to have a credible probation service the Government's basic responsibility is to ensure that there are enough trained probation officers with enough available time to supervise the rehabilitation of the number of offenders for whom they are responsible-nothing more, nothing less. If there are not, neither probation nor the criminal justice system will be effective.

Is that provision being made? In 2008-09, the probation case load was 197,000 on community orders and 46,200 ex-prisoners under supervision. To supervise them are 7,200 qualified and senior probation officers, 6,100 probation service officers and 6,950 managers and administrative staff. However, every area is having to make staff redundant, with further financial cuts of 2.7 per cent next year. Also, in 2008-09 the service was required to complete 216,000 pre-sentence court reports, of which 134,000-60 per cent-were standard reports, which take two to three weeks to compile and eight hours to write up, and 82,000-40 per cent-were fast delivery reports, which take two hours to write up on the day of sentence. Apparently the Government now wish to reverse the 60 standard and 40 fast ratio to 70 fast and 30 standard, which is bound to result in a decreased service to the courts. My noble and learned friend Lord Woolf and my noble friend Lord Tenby will expand on the court story. To all this has now been added responsibilities as offender managers of offenders in prison to meet national standards demanding that sentence reports are written within five days of reception.

The impact of this case load on the number of trained staff on the ground was set out clearly in a December 2008 Ministry of Justice survey of direct contact. It found that 24 per cent of the available time is spent on direct contact with offenders, described as either face to face or by telephone; 41 per cent is spent in computer activity such as writing reports and letters or completing returns to the offender assessment system; and 35 per cent is spent on non-computer activities, such as drafting correspondence, writing reports, attending meetings, administration and travel. I ask the House to note the figure of only 24 per cent of time being spent in direct contact, including by telephone. It is the guts of the situation to which I am drawing attention. There can be no more damning indictment of the Government's failure to provide probation with the vital resources of people and time. It explains why probation officers say that some have case loads in excess of 100, which means that they can spend no more than 15 to 30 minutes with medium-risk offenders, often having no time for others. The report concludes:

"NOMS needs to decide whether the reported amount of direct contact time with offenders is sufficient to meet its main objectives of reducing re-offending and protecting the public".

It says that,

"repeatedly the main issue regarding bureaucracy and red tape refers to ... the amount of time spent in non-direct contact".

The review of policing report made similar observations about the use of police time; my noble friend Lord Dear will speak about police involvement with probation.

A Lilliputian touch is added to all this by what are called probation quarterly ratings, published by NOMS and rushed to ministerial desks. The most recent, covering the second quarter of 2009-10, declares that, of the 42 probation areas, the performance of 18 is exceptional, 22 are good and only two require development due to a drop in performance. The ratings result from a data-driven, integrated probation performance assessment of 40 indicators. I have to admit that I am left speechless by the thought of Ministers basking in the delusion that all is wonderfully well thanks to a computer-based assessment of a number of largely irrelevant indicators produced by the vastly expensive bureaucracy that is NOMS, publicly criticised for its incompetence over its failed computer system, C-NOMIS, while on the ground impoverished probation service staff are unable to offer medium-risk offenders more than 15 minutes of contact a week.

How has all this come about? The Government are fond of telling us how much worse things were in 1997. I do not deny, nor does the probation service, that all was not well with the way in which the service functioned at that time, but all the bureaucracy and red tape that I have described has been imposed on probation since 1997. No one has suffered more from micromanagement than probation, illustrated by the fact that there is now an external, an internal and a NOMS auditor permanently present in each area probation chief officer's office, on top of all the other time-consuming obligatory reports and returns, audit and inspections.

Prison staff do not understand the minutiae of probation work, nor can they be expected to do so, any more than soldiers can be expected to be sailors. The two services are different but complementary within the criminal justice system. Therefore, to exclude the voice of probation from the formulation and direction of probation policy and to put it in the hands of people who know only about prisons is seriously unwise.

What can be done? I know that we are in the run-up to an election and that this is not the best time to make proposals, but in the hope that the next Government, from whatever party, will realise the danger and do something about it, I shall make the following suggestions for action. First, repeat Jack Straw's statement of 16 May 2000, substituting the word "restored" for "new". Secondly, restore an independent National Probation Service by immediately appointing a director-general, with membership of all relevant policy committees, responsible and accountable for the performance of the service. Thirdly, recast NOMS not as a service but as the acronym of the national offender management system within the criminal justice system. Fourthly, ensure that probation really is accountable to local communities, again as stated by Jack Straw, linking regional management to local rather than central control by rationalising probation performance criteria within local area agreements and crime reduction partnerships. All-important local confidence in community-based alternatives to custody is best gained by local rather than national action, because outcomes are locally visible. Fifthly, announce that, in principle, and as a basis for resource planning, probation officers and probation service officers are to spend a minimum of 50 per cent of their time in face-to-face contact with offenders. Sixthly, decentralise administration and rein back micromanagement, examine and cut out all superfluous branches in NOMS and rationalise and reduce audit reports and returns.

I have not had time to explore many other factors affecting the situation, such as the commissioning of probation services. Again and again, I come back to PANT. I am sure that, if the incoming Government act decisively, many of the current problems facing probation can be swept away. In doing so, I hope above all, on behalf of the public whom it is their duty to protect, that they will never forget that, not least, all the marvellous people who work in the probation service are not things. I beg to move.