Probation Services — House of Lords, 2020-06-15
Topic: Law and Crime
Jonathan Marks (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, we, too, welcome the thrust of the Government’s change of direction in abandoning the failed community rehabilitation companies and moving back towards provision by a National Probation Service I am grateful to the Minister for writing to me last Thursday explaining the Government’s thinking behind the changes, particularly those rowing back on the involvement of the charitable, voluntary and private organisations in probation provision. However, those changes still come as a disappointment, and I regret that his explanation does not justify them Many in this House have called for significant reform of the probation service to co-ordinate the services for offenders in custody and for those serving community sentences, all to secure the best possible outcomes—improving rehabilitation, cutting reoffending and turning lives around. The failed CRC arrangements were memorably criticised by Dame Glenys Stacey when she was Chief Inspector of Probation—in no small part because they failed to involve the voluntary sector in supplementing that work and in providing effective through-the-gate services at the end of prison sentences Dame Glenys’s report reflected the reality that the system failed to harness the skills and enthusiasm of small and committed private and voluntary sector organisations. Therefore, when the decision was, rightly, made to end the CRC contracts, we were promised more specialist resettlement and rehabilitative support from independent probation delivery partners, as they were to be called, in each region. The new proposals planned in May last year were structured so as to encourage charities and other small voluntary and private sector bodies, many of them with specialist expertise, to get fully involved in providing rehabilitation services, whether in addressing addiction and mental health issues or in providing education, training and employment opportunities Sadly, today’s Statement sucks the life out of many of those proposals. The noble and learned Lord has suggested that that is all because of the disruption caused by Covid-19. No one wants to downplay that, but will he explain how the coronavirus crisis demands this retrograde structural retreat? How do the Government think that bringing delivery of all unpaid work and behavioural programmes back within the National Probation Service will work? Dame Glenys’s successor as Chief Inspector of Probation, Justin Russell, has constantly pointed out how understaffed the service is. Now, he has had to stall recruitment, and that has been as a result of the coronavirus crisis We all know that morale among probation officers, as their union leaders remind us, is at an all-time low because officers are overloaded with work and have no time to give a proper service. Will the Minister please explain how the Government intend to maintain the present level of service, let alone improve it, by abandoning the commitment to bring in probation delivery partners? Contracts worth £100 million, organised and run by the National Probation Service for the voluntary sector and others, will hardly provide the innovative and morale-boosting changes that probation delivery partners were going to inject into the process. Can the noble and learned Lord explain how much autonomy organisations from within the voluntary and private sectors will have in delivering services under today’s proposals? Will he say how much money these new proposals will save Finally, does the Minister share my concern that this change of plan is not really about responding to the coronavirus crisis, nor about improving rehabilitation, but more about delivering on the Government’s commitment to make community sentences tougher and to punish offenders more firmly, just as his letter to me stated?