Tags are keywords. I put tags on every post to help you find the content you want. Tags may be people (Dominic Raab, say), organisations (The Howard League, PRT), themes (women offenders, homelessness) or specific items (heroin, racial disparity, ROTL). If you’re looking to research a particular issue, they can be invaluable.
A proper assessment will have to wait until we have more details but these figures do suggest that Payment by Results may be a more successful approach when savings are shared between government and providers with an explicit understanding that providers will reinvest their success payments rather than merely pass them on to shareholders.
SPCR is a longitudinal cohort study of 3,849 adult prisoners in England and Wales sentenced to up to four years in prison. Interviews were conducted with offenders on reception to prison, in the weeks prior to release, and in the community approximately two months after release. Participants were matched to the Police National Computer (PNC), allowing reconviction rates to be calculated.
Perhaps the best outcome from the MoJ Transforming Rehabilitation project is the renewed interest in and focus on the whole area of tackling re-offending
What works? One of the positive side-effects of the Transforming Rehabilitation project (launched in earnest yesterday) has been the debate it has provoked about what
Payment by results is about driving improvement, so no self-respecting PBR scheme will pay for results that will happen anyway, known in the jargon is “deadweight”. The proportion of deadweight in a PbR funded initiative varies markedly across different spheres of operation. Despite all the adverse publicity about reoffending rates which has accompanied the debate about the Rehabilitation Revolution, 65.8% of those supervised in the community and 53.1% of those released from prison do NOT re-offend in the first year. However, when we look at the Work Programme…
Earlier this week, the MoJ published the findings from the first evaluation of the justice reinvestment project conducted by Kevin Wong and his colleagues from Sheffield Hallam University. The pilot operates a payment by results approach which means that if the pilot areas succeed in reducing demand on criminal justice services (by 5% for adults and 10% for young offenders), they receive additional funds generated by the savings to invest in further reducing re-offending initiatives.
The publication of the MoJ’s response to Transforming Rehabilitation last Thursday 9 May has made it almost certain that the plans to overhaul the reducing reoffending system will take place.
By bringing the timeline even further forward, the Secretary of State has built in 6 months’ slippage before next general election.
Even if the Labour Party wins the next election, there is no sign that @SadiqKhan would undo the changes.
The dramatic changes proposed for the probation service have yet to receive any detailed planning. Indeed, we still don’t know how many probation trust areas there will be, how many Contract Package Areas and the nature of the relationship between the future statutory probation service with its responsibility for risk and the new providers who will be delivering interventions to reduce re-offending. We are expecting some answers to these questions in the middle of May but …
The new MoJ data lab promises small voluntary organisations access to information about their effectiveness – for free. It could be invaluable for organisations looking to win reducing re-offending contracts under the new payment by results framework. But how will it work in practice?
PbR is simple in theory…
Payment by results is quite a straightforward concept. Its chief attraction lies in its ability to incentivise providers to deliver exactly what a commissioner wants. For example, any PbR contract concerned with reducing reoffending should ensure that organisations receive the biggest payments when they succeed in getting prolific offenders to give up crime. This saves the commissioner – the Ministry of Justice – and the country money and is to the benefit of everyone in society.
However, getting the contract right in practice is proving rather more challenging – indeed, I’ve yet to go to a PbR event where at least one speaker hasn’t said: “The devil is in the detail.”
Price is what you pay, value is what you get There is a consensus that the Work Programme contracts were primarily awarded on price with
Jon Collins is Deputy Director of the Police Foundation and has written extensively on payment by results when he was at the Criminal Justice Alliance.
