Privatised Probation System — House of Lords, 2019-03-04
Topic: Law and Crime
Charlotte Vere (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall repeat in the form of a Statement an Answer given in the other place by my honourable friend the Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice. The Statement is as follows "I am pleased to be called to address this Urgent Question, and fully understand why the honourable Member has raised it. As the House will be aware, we have been looking very carefully at the future of probation services, and this gives me the opportunity to briefly set out what the transforming rehabilitation reforms were, some of the challenges, and our response As the House will be aware, transforming rehabilitation was strongly influenced by a Labour pilot—the Peterborough pilot—which demonstrated that by bringing in non-state providers, concentrating on a cohort of short-sentence prisoners who had not previously been supervised, and paying providers for reducing reoffending, it was possible to achieve significant improvements. Transforming rehabilitation was a coalition government commitment built on these principles, by contracting the private sector and others—for example in Durham Tees Valley this included the local authority—and undertook to pay the providers significant sums if they were able to reduce reoffending. The contracts were left flexible to encourage innovation. This private model was applied only to low-risk offenders; high-risk offenders continued to be supervised in the usual way by the state. The new model has delivered in some ways. But, as the National Audit Office has pointed out, it has not delivered in others There has been a reduction in the binary rate of reoffending, although there has been an increase in the separate frequency measures; 40,000 additional offenders are currently being supervised, who were not previously supervised under the old system. Some innovation has come into the system and it has saved the taxpayer money. So even though the honourable Member opposite would point out that through changes to the contracts, more money has gone in, we are still forecast to spend significantly less than we originally anticipated—perhaps as much as £700 million less. But the programme was challenged by external factors, some of which were difficult to model and predict. For example, societal changes, and different sentencing decisions by judges, meant the case load given to the CRCs—the community rehabilitation companies—shifted and some of the accredited programmes allocated were fewer than expected. This meant that the income streams of these companies were less than anticipated. Broader issues, such as drugs, and issues around housing and treatment programmes, meant that it was difficult for providers to control all the factors in reoffending. This led to some of the companies losing significant sums of money. We have therefore taken a new approach, which seeks to address all these problems. We have just conducted a consultation and are carefully studying the responses. Our intention is, first, to remove the dependence in the new probation system on unpredictable case loads, and to improve co-ordination with the National Probation Service. We are emphasising overall quality of service, not just the reoffending rate; we will be ending the existing contracts early; we will be setting minimum conditions for offender supervision; and we have invested over £20 million in through-the-gate services Our objective—while retaining the benefits of flexibility and innovation—is to create a much higher-quality probation service that focuses on good-quality delivery and protects the public".