23/06/2021
Police Oracle
Work with Offenders reviews the structure of the new system for managing low and medium risk offenders which starts later this week
This Saturday, 26 June 2021, the government’s experiment with probation privatisation, known as Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) will be officially over. The 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs), responsible for managing low and medium risk offenders for the last seven years, will cease trading and the public sector National Probation Service (NPS) will once again be responsible for managing all those on a community order or licence following their release from prison in England and Wales.
The new probation service will also deliver unpaid work and behavioural change programmes in England and Wales. Specialist organisations will continue to play a role in the probation system, delivering resettlement and rehabilitative services such as education, training and employment and accommodation (you can see the details of the £195 million worth of community resettlement contracts in our article here.)
There will be 12 probation areas across England and Wales, introducing 11 new probation areas in England, with existing arrangements remaining unchanged in Wales.
In England, each area will be overseen by a new dedicated Regional Probation Director who will provide strategic leadership and be responsible for the overall delivery and commissioning of probation services.
Although the probation sector talks about this process as a reunification, in fact the new model will be quite different from the system that operated before TR when there were 35 local Probation Trusts which, although bound to deliver the same national standards, had considerable autonomy about how to make their services fit local needs.
Most people in the probation community are pleased that privatisation has ended, for a mixture of ideological and practical reasons. In particular, it will make it much easier for probation services to re-forge effective working relationships with its main stakeholders such as local authorities, health and wellbeing boards etc. The process of developing and sustaining partnership work was made much more difficult by having a fragmented probation service with people on supervision being passed back and forth between the NPS and CRCs. The TR system also meant that other stakeholders had to develop working relationships with two separate probation services.
Despite the criticisms of the performance of the CRCs from every direction (HM Inspectorate of Probation, the House of Commons Justice Committee and the National Audit Office, to name but three), there has been a belated acknowledgement that some CRCs had substantially improved their performance (particularly after they were given a more appropriate level of funding) and had introduced a number of innovations and effective models of working. Many will be sorry to see the much-improved through-the-gate schemes go and wonder whether the new resettlement system set out in the new service’s Target Operating Model will be as effective. Similarly, many CRCs have championed the value of lived experience, running extensive peer mentoring and support schemes which are almost non-existent in the National Probation Service. The NPS intends to support this peer approach but we shall have to wait and see whether the more centralised, bureaucratic approach natural to the Civil Service makes the new probation set-up a receptive environment.
Probation staff have expressed a range of opinions about reunification. While it is safe to say that most are positive about the move, others are simply exhausted by the continual reorganisation. Many probation officers were transferred to CRCs against their wishes and are now being transferred back without any choice (save of leaving the profession). Some staff have decided that life as a civil servant is not for them and have opted to stay in the private sector or move to a voluntary sector provider, citing the flexibility and agility of those sectors as making them more attractive workplaces where new ideas can be progressed and implemented more quickly.
Whatever the feelings of different individuals within the probation community, it will take months and perhaps years for the new identity of the reunified, centralised probation service to emerge. The main reason for this is that although on Monday morning everyone supervising an offender on probation or licence will be working for the National Probation Service, those officers who were working for CRCs will be sat at the same desks, supervising the same people. From the outside looking in, and certainly for those people supervised by ex-CRC staff, very little will have actually changed.
Work with offenders will follow the evolution of the new probation service and keep you up-to-date with the latest developments on this site.