Keep up-to-date with drugs and crime

The latest research, policy, practice and opinion on our criminal justice and drug & alcohol treatment systems
Search
Transforming Rehabilitation faces big challenges
Achieving value for money from the new probation system will require resolving these fundamental issues, and ensuring the right incentives for all participants in the system.

Share This Post

Prospects for success not clear for two years at least

That was the overall conclusion of today’s National Audit Office report on the new probation system. The report, entitled simply “Transforming Rehabilitation” examines the progress of the new split probation service to date and seeks to assess what value it provides for public money.

NAO reports are important because they are authoritative and impartial — their focus is ensuring that public services are effective and provide good value for public money. This report is no exception and provides a detailed analysis over 56 pages, while making it clear that it is both too early to make a definitive assessment and that there are gaps in the data which make passing judgement difficult.

Published alongside the NAO report was a separate report by User Voice commissioned by the NAO on the views of 251 offenders/service users of the new service.

Structure of the report

The report explores the ongoing probation reforms and the extent to which changes are being managed in a way likely to promote value for money and is split into four parts:

  • Part One provides an overview of probation reforms and assesses the procurement for the CRC contracts.
  • Part Two focuses on the performance management of the 21 CRCs and the NPS.
  • Part Three identifies important operational issues in CRCs and the NPS.
  • Part Four examines progress by CRCs and the NPS in transforming probation services, and the main challenges they face in achieving the necessary transformation.

The report is crammed with detail and of such significance that I don’t intend to cover it all in this post. Instead, this post will simply summarise the headline findings. On Saturday (30 April 2016), I will publish a summary of the User Voice report on service users’ perspectives on TR and over the next four Mondays (starting on 9th May), I will cover each section of the report in greater detail.

Headline findings

I have organised the headline findings under three of the NAO’s four headings and deal with each in turn below.

Performance

  • The performance of CRCs and the NPS remains unclear given limitations around data quality and availability.
  • As at December 2015, NOMS has no data for three of 24 CRC service levels and assurance metrics, and insufficiently robust data in another two. Nationally, CRC performance is at or above target levels in seven of the remaining 19 measures, including positive completion of court orders, seen by the Ministry as a leading indicator for future reoffending.
  • However, performance varies significantly across CRCs and the contracts require that CRCs achieve all targets by February 2017.
  • The NPS has similar issues including currently no data for five of 25 NPS service levels and insufficiently robust data in another two. Performance is at or above targets in seven of the remaining 18 measures. In the important measure of positive completion of court orders, NPS performance is lower than the equivalent performance by CRCs (70% versus 80% in December 2015).

Operational challenges

  • The reforms have established new organisations with different incentives, creating unsurprising frictions between CRC and NPS staff at working level, which will take time to work through. Close cooperation is essential to handle the transfer of offenders between CRCs and the NPS when their risks change or when they breach the terms of their probation.
  • Many junior staff the NAO interviewed in CRCs considered their NPS contacts were often unduly critical and dismissive, while many junior staff in the NPS thought that their CRC contacts were often not providing them with necessary information and had become too focused on their commercial interests as opposed to the best interests of offenders. The NAO concludes “at this early stage the organisations have more to do to ensure that they work together more effectively to improve case management.”
  • Concerns over probation workloads are not new, although staff in both the CRCs and the NPS considered that high workloads have reduced the supervision and training that they receive and the service they provide.
  • The various ICT systems used in probation casework create severe inefficiencies. New tools used by the NPS for assessing and allocating offenders are cumbersome and require repeated data re-entry. All CRCs planned to replace existing ICT systems once they could develop new case management and assessment systems, but NOMS was delayed in developing and implementing the interface (the Gateway) required for CRCs to share data on offenders.

Challenges and risks

The NAO identifies five key risks which the TR reforms need to overcome if they are to be successful:

  1. CRC business volumes are much lower than the Ministry modelled during the procurement, which, if translated into reduced income, would affect the ability of CRCs to transform their businesses. The volume reductions vary greatly, from 6% to 36%.
  2. CRCs are paid primarily for completing specified activities with offenders rather than for reducing reoffending, which also risks hindering innovative practice.
  3. The NPS has higher than predicted caseloads and faces a difficult further period of change if it is to play a fully effective role in the new Transforming Rehabilitation model.
  4. Arrangements to resettle offenders ‘Through the Gate’ are still in their early stages.
  5. The Ministry has more work to do to sustain the supply chain of mainly voluntary sector bodies now working to CRCs and the NPS.

Summary

The NAO’s conclusion summarises the scale of the challenge ahead:

Ultimately, the success of the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms will depend on the extent to which they create the conditions and incentives to reduce reoffending. While NOMS’ oversight of CRCs is robust, significantly lower levels of business than the Ministry projected will affect some CRCs’ ability to deliver the level of innovation they proposed in their bids. Furthermore, the NPS is not yet operating as a truly national, sustainable service. Achieving value for money from the new probation system will require resolving these fundamental issues, and ensuring the right incentives for all participants in the system.

The NAO has published an extremely well constructed infographic which summarises their main findings and which is reproduced below.

TR NAO infographic

 

Share This Post

Related posts

9 Responses

  1. Russell
    Thanks for the customary excellent summary.
    My reading of figure 12 is that on average more service users thought services have got worse than thought they have got better. I think the wording above the figure is misleading ie most service users thought that they were the same or got worse rather than were the same and got better.
    Do you agree?
    Best
    Rob

    1. Thanks for your kind comment, Rob.
      I’ve just finished reading the User Voice report – blog post out on Saturday -and users said service was better in 6 aspects and worse in 4. However, the differences were not great for most aspects with more than half noticing no change for all 10 areas interrogated apart from help with housing which was judged to have got worse by 42.4% service users.
      The heading is technically correct if you add up the total percentage points but it would be more accurate to say no discernible pattern either way. Of course, biggest changes still to happen, so who knows what the service user experience will be in early 2018?

      Best Wishes
      Russell

  2. The first recommendation can be translated as: too much change, too fast, the risks were not properly understood or managed. No surprise there: as I noted in my book, TR was the ONLY programme across government on which the then Major Projects Authority, whch exists to ensure government programmes are properly managed, was unable to give any information whatsover on risks and risk management. That was Grayling’s style: bullheaded, doctrinaire, impervious to advice or evidence, careless of the damage he might do just so long as he gets his way. A dangerous man. Gove does at least listen to a variety of views and has reversed some of Grayling’s policies, though this one, alas, is by its nature irreversible, however badly it plays out.

    1. Hi Julian
      There were too particularly poor decisions – to split probation in two, introducing a design fault and an ongoing communication & co-ordination problem and to abandon the pilots.
      Best Wishes
      Russell

      1. “Poor” possibly an understatement? Julian’s description of Grayling spot on. But now, how to repair. Without addressing the fault line of the split it is hard to be confident that sensible progress can be achieved.

Leave a Reply to C Gray Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Probation posts sponsored by Unilink

 

Excellence through innovation

Unilink, Europe’s provider of Offender/Probation Management Software

Subscribe

Get every blog post by email for free