Outsourcing and Ideology

In the wake of the Carillion collapse I notice that David Raho has written a piece on Facebook:-

Could Capita be the next Carillion? Why it matters to those working in Probation.

The value of Capita’s share price was slashed by 50% this week as investors, no longer confident that the UK government would bail out their contractors, started dumping shares and shifting their money elsewhere.

Until recently Capita were considered by the government to be a safe pair of hands. A good example of this confidence was demonstrated when G4S and Serco dropped the ball regarding the electronic monitoring of offenders (EM) in 2013 and it was Capita that was asked to pick up the baton and was then subsequently awarded this lucrative contract in England and Wales with largely the same infrastructure and staff employed albeit with stronger direct MoJ oversight and open book accounts.

G4S continued to manage the EM contract in both Northern Ireland and Scotland (subject to different contracts) and after paying a £109m bung in 2014 was again allowed to continue bidding for government contracts including EM. It should not be forgotten that the Serious Fraud Office investigation with regard to both Serco and G4S’s activities in respect of EM continues. Despite this it was to G4S that the government turned when they ran into severe equipment difficulties regarding the GPS EM programme initiated by Ken Clarke when he was Justice Secretary and it is a story worthy of a two hour documentary laying bare a tale of breathtaking commercial and contractual incompetence to the tune of at least £60m of taxpayer monies. The story of how they tried to fleece successful British health monitoring firm Buddi of its intellectual property is worth 30 minutes alone.

It is therefore easy to see that the government is nervous about the prospect of Capita’s collapse as this is perhaps the clearest indication of the collapse too of the governments failed neoliberal ideological mission (a mission close to Grayling et al stony heart) to contract out and outsource the state to private companies effectively creating a shadow state one step removed from an increasingly smaller and less powerful government. By doing this the result is democratically less accountable public services (no information as it is commercially sensitive) who by attempting to produce surplus/profit from contracts actually actually end up running down or distorting the services they are contracted to provide. Some try to convince themselves that if only they had more government money then they would not do this but when the money comes it does not find its way to the front end but rather in increasing the corporate centre concerned with chasing other contracts. These organisations are only interested in hitting targets to ensure payment rather than providing quality services and investing in the future eg training and investing in staff.

Capita apparently put a cheeky bid in for London CRC but according to my sources this was reluctantly rejected by the MoJ/NOMS as it apparently proposed a 50% cut in staff and premises from the outset rather than achieving this stealthily throughout the contract as proposed by most successful bidders. They were apparently asked to address this but apparently informed the MoJ this was the only way to turn a profit as it is nigh on impossible to turn a profit in London without continuous top ups from the government or a blank cheque book. When discussed informally with MoJ staff this has never been denied.

Returning to EM....

Industry experts are pretty sure that if Capita were to collapse then the government would probably have to consider ignoring the ongoing fraud investigation and return EM to G4S or Serco or even hand this contract to the French catering firm Sodexo with G4S supplying some of the equipment or even to one of their new US friends. In other words an utter mess that could have been and could be completely avoided if the government admitted some time ago that criminal justice services including prisons and probation and electronic monitoring should never have been outsourced, as this is clearly the direct responsibility of the state, and should now be taken back into public ownership as a matter of urgency and dealt with in a consistent cost effective way throughout England and Wales.

We can therefore only hope that if Capita collapses or survives by some miracle of behind the scenes deal making then this will remind the government how vulnerable they are in respect of their criminal justice policies and perhaps prompt them to formulate a strategy to explain to the public what they are actually trying to achieve other than profit for their corporate friends and already wealthy supporters.

David Raho

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There's no doubt that the Carillion collapse has turbo-charged the whole debate regarding privatisation and outsourcing and the Tories find themselves on the back foot. I notice the arch protagonist in this regard, Francis Maude, was wheeled out yesterday on the BBC Daily Politics show and in trying to defend the cause, came out with that old hackneyed argument about the public sector never innovating. We know this is crap and strangely, only the day before I learnt of an example I was completely unaware of via this 'exciting' news from Open Reach (BT to you and me):-

Openreach launches ‘Fibre First’ programme to make Fibre to the Premises broadband available to three million UK homes and businesses by the end of 2020

Openreach, Britain’s national broadband infrastructure provider, today announced an acceleration of its Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) build programme to enhance Britain’s digital infrastructure and to reinforce the UK’s position as the leading digital economy in the G20. 1

Openreach is extending its current Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) build target by 50% to reach three million premises by the end of 2020 through its new ‘Fibre First’ programme2. Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, London and Manchester make up the first phase of the programme which will connect up to 40 UK towns, cities and boroughs with FTTP3 with build starting in 2018. Openreach will also continue to focus on delivering FTTP to rural areas, in partnership with the Government, to make sure some of the hardest to reach communities in the UK get access to future-proofed, FTTP networks.

Fibre First reconfirms Openreach’s ambition to build a large-scale FTTP network in the UK and accelerates the next fundamental upgrade of critical UK infrastructure. With the largest FTTP footprint in the UK4, Openreach is best placed to deliver the infrastructure required, at scale, to maintain the UK’s position as a leading digital economy. An FTTP network has substantial and far-reaching benefits for UK citizens, businesses, society and the economy.The benefits include: better, more reliable service; fewer faults; and faster, more predictable and consistent speeds.The platform would be future-proof, supporting the speed requirements of customers for decades to come.

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It all sounds pretty good news and you'd be forgiven for thinking that, but in this era of 'fake news' and 'alternative facts', it's worth digging around a little. Have you ever wondered why your internet connection is so rubbish? Perhaps you're relying on good old-fashioned BT and a 'twisted pair' from the telegraph pole? 

Living in a big city, I well remember getting very excited at the arrival of the 'digital super highway' in my street some 25 years ago, but could never understand why the cable company only hooked me up with coax cable and not the magic fibre optic stuff. Surely the future lay in glass, not copper? Well, it turns out we have Margaret Thatcher to thank for our crap internet connection and a key decision she made years ago for purely ideological reasons. It's an astonishing saga and as the UK heads for Brexit amid hopes for greater world markets, it makes for very sobering reading indeed. Here's the story from 2014 on the techradar website:- 

How Thatcher killed the UK's superfast broadband before it even existed

As you sit on the phone to your ISP's customer service line, listening to half-baked excuses for why you've only got 0.5Mbps upload speed and why you "need" to upgrade to "superfast" fibre optic, it may be little comfort to know that in an alternate reality you'd already have it as standard.

In 1990, a single decision by then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had a devastating effect on the UK's broadband infrastructure for the next 20 years and for the foreseeable future. In a little known story about the UK's broadband history, Dr Peter Cochrane, former Chief Technology Officer at BT and all round tech guru, tells TechRadar how the UK lost the broadband race way back in the 90s.

The story actually begins in the 70s when Dr Cochrane was working as BT's Chief Technology Officer, a position he'd climbed up to from engineer some years earlier. Dr Cochrane knew that Britain's tired copper network was insufficient: "In 1974 it was patently obvious that copper wire was unsuitable for digital communication in any form, and it could not afford the capacity we needed for the future." He was asked to do a report on the UK's future of digital communication and what was needed to move forward.

"In 1979 I presented my results," he tells us, "and the conclusion was to forget about copper and get into fibre. So BT started a massive effort - that spanned in six years - involving thousands of people to both digitise the network and to put fibre everywhere. The country had more fibre per capita than any other nation. In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop".

At that time, the UK, Japan and the United States were leading the way in fibre optic technology and roll-out. Indeed, the first wide area fibre optic network was set up in Hastings, UK. But, in 1990, then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that BT's rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do.

"Unfortunately, the Thatcher government decided that it wanted the American cable companies providing the same service to increase competition. So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP, the assets were stripped and the expertise was shipped out to South East Asia. Our colleagues in Korea and Japan, who were working with quite closely at the time, stood back and looked at what happened to us in amazement. What was pivotal was that they carried on with their respective fibre rollouts. And, well, the rest is history as they say.

"What is quite astonishing is that a very similar thing happened in the United States. The US, UK and Japan were leading the world. In the US, a judge was appointed by Congress to break up AT&T. And so AT&T became things like BellSouth and at that point, political decisions were made that crippled the roll out of optical fibre across the rest of the western world, because the rest of the countries just followed like sheep. This created a very stop-start roll-out which doesn't work with fibre optic - it needs to be done en masse. You needed economy of scale. You could not roll out fibre to the home for 1% of Europe and make it economic, you had to go whole hog. It's like everything else in the electronics world, if you make one laptop, it costs billions; if you make billions of laptops it costs a few quid".

Immediately after that decision by Thatcher's government, the UK fell far behind in broadband speeds and, to this day, has never properly recovered. When the current government came to power it pledged that the UK would have the best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015 and 90% of homes will be connected to superfast broadband by 2017.

But, as Dr Cochrane explains, there are two things wrong with this. Firstly, the government's definition of superfast broadband is 24Mbps. Secondly, comparing against Europe is pointless. "Western nations blindly compare with each other. There's no point in saying 'we're better than the French, we're better than the Germans' - that's not the point. Are we better than the Japanese, the Koreans and other competing nations?"

"[In Southeast Asia] they roared ahead. The Japanese in particular formulated a plan. While we were faffing about with half an Mbps 'being sufficient' the Japanese were rolling out 10Mbps. When we got to 2Mbps they were rolling out 100Mbps. Hong Kong in 2012 already had a gigabit both ways. In 1999 Japan already had 50Mbps universally and South Korea was comfortably using 4G by 2006. In the UK there's no vision, mission or plan, we're engaged in a random walk into the future".

It all comes down to bandwidth

The UK's fibre rollout is mostly Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC), rather than Fibre To The Home (FTTH). What's the difference? Well, FTTH is fibre optic cable directly to the home, whereas FTTC is fibre optic cable to your nearest cabinet, with copper wire taking the signal the last leg of the journey. The copper limits speeds to 80Mbps, compared with 1,000Mbps or more available in all-fibre networks.

Dr Cochrane explained: "Fibre To The Home gives you an infinity of bandwidth, both ways, that you can upgrade forever, and it's symmetric. If you go for Fibre To The Cabinet, you finish up with an asymmetric service. Now, this is really important. Why? How about the cloud, the cloud is not an asymmetric service, video conferencing is not an asymmetric service, so the whole ethos of the telecoms industry has been skewed by decision makers who think that the future of the internet is watching TV or movies, which it isn't".

"Businesses rely on symmetric bandwidth for cloud computing and video conferencing and this lack of bandwidth will put us slowly into a second world status. For example, I am sitting here, I work all over the world and say I want to upload a 350MB file. 350MB is not huge. With my old broadband, when I had less than 0.5Mbps upload you'd start in the morning and finish sometime in the middle of the night. Now I've got 32Mbps upload, I can actually watch it going. If I was in Hong Kong it would be instantaneous. Imagine having a discussion and putting a 10 second delay between each word, it wouldn't work."

New technologies, too, are hampered by low bandwidth, which has a direct effect on our ability to embrace revolutionary concepts. IBM's Watson, the learning super-computer that functions through the cloud and is able to give evidence-based medical diagnoses, will fail in the UK because a lack of bandwidth, according to Dr Cochrane.

"If you look at the story of IBM Watson, it's moving into the medical industry in the United States and you will be able soon to have an app with which you can configure Watson for your industry. It's going to change everything, from investment banking to the legal industry. That sort of service, being able to get remote diagnostics, can only occur if you've got bandwidth".

The future isn't so bright for the UK when it comes to broadband, and that's largely owing to an administration taking the wrong path 24 years ago. Unless there's massive investment in broadband infrastructure and a complete rethink at the highest levels of government, the UK will only fall further behind.

"The UK will be frozen out of cloud computing because we don't have bandwidth, worst of all we don't have symmetric bandwidth. And the UK network cannot support the population in the cloud. It will be OK if you're in a hotspot for bandwidth, and there are some hotspots of bandwidth in the UK, but for the most part the population will be frozen out. Ergo, this will hit the bottom line - it all comes down to GDP. If businesses can't operate, the UK won't generate money".

More Prison Trouble

Recent prison inspections and IMB reports have often made mention of the poor state of the fabric, insanitary conditions and repairs taking ages to fix. Could this possibly be part of the problem:-   

Press release:-

Carillion signs contracts worth approximately £200 million to provide facilities management services for public sector prisons

Posted 23 January 2015

Further to the announcement on 19 November 2014 that the UK Ministry of Justice had selected Carillion as the preferred bidder for two contracts to provide a range of hard and soft facilities management services to the National Offender Management Service for public sector prisons in two geographical areas, Carillion announces today that it has signed these contracts.

One contract will provide services in prisons in London and the East of England and the second will provide services in prisons in the South West, South Central, Kent and Sussex.

The contracts, which cover approximately 50 prisons, will be for an initial five-year period, but with the potential for two subsequent one-year extensions, subject to satisfactory performance. Mobilisation has begun with service delivery due to commence on 1 June 2015.

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This in the Guardian 13th July 2017 :-

Carillion has 'no future without rights issue of at least £500m'

For many, the morning of 8 July promised a feast of sport: the British Lions Test in New Zealand, a Lord’s Test and Wimbledon. But a small group of bankers were about to have their weekend ruined by a summons to an emergency meeting in London’s Maddox Street.

Board papers had been delivered to the homes of the directors of Carillion, a FTSE 250 business best known as a builder that works on huge construction projects, and the documents contained disturbing news. A review of the group’s finances, commissioned two months earlier from accountants KPMG, had unearthed a gaping hole in the accounts.

Meetings through Saturday and Sunday produced an 800-word statement to the stock exchange, which shocked the City when it was released at 7am on Monday morning. It was a monster profit warning following an £845m writedown, of which £375m related to three large public private partnership (PPP) contracts in the UK and £470m to the cost of pulling out of several markets in the Middle East and Canada.

The announcement continued: chief executive Richard Howson had immediately stepped down, and a new interim boss, Keith Cochrane, had been parachuted in to conduct a “comprehensive review of the business” until a permanent successor was found. Predictably, the shares reacted violently to the news – slumping 39% on Monday – but the bloodbath didn’t stop there.

They were down again by 33% on Tuesday, plus another 27% on Wednesday, and suddenly a business with annual revenues of £5bn and 48,000 employees was worth less than £250m. The shares are now changing hands at just 57p – down from 200p a month ago and 350p two years ago. The City now expects the company will need to raise double that figure just to survive.

Sam Cullen, an analyst at investment bank Jefferies, said: “Realistically, we see no future for Carillion without a rights issue of at least £500m as we believe the group will find it increasingly difficult to win support services work with the balance sheet in its current state”.
What is Carillion – and how did this happen?

The company is an intrinsic part of the UK economy, being one of the major contractors to the Highways Agency and to Network Rail, and is essentially set up around three businesses. Firstly, it is perhaps best known for construction, where it has just completed the expansion of the main stand at Anfield and is working on the conversion of Battersea Power Station.

Secondly, there is a support services arm, which includes maintenance on buildings and cleaning services. And, thirdly, there is PPP, where it might fund and manage the building of a new NHS hospital. PPP is one of those financial inventions that was sold as being a win-win for both sides. The government might get some new infrastructure more quickly and without having to to pay the huge upfront costs of building it, while the private companies financing the deal gained a valuable long-term income stream - often over 20 years or so. At least, that was the theory.

Just three Carillion PPP contracts – thought to be the Midland Metropolitan hospital in Smethwick, Merseyside’s Royal Liverpool hospital and an Aberdeen road project – are behind the bulk of the £375m losses that relate to the UK.

Industry watchers say that project delays – caused by such astonishing occurrences such as cold weather in Aberdeen over the winter – have introduced huge extra costs. Construction of the Royal Liverpool hospital has also been beset with hold-ups, most recently after after workers found “extensive” asbestos on site and cracks in the new building.

Meanwhile, just before the profit warning, it was revealed that another Carillion project – an experimental tram-train linking Sheffield and Rotherham – has cost more than five times the agreed budget and is running almost three years late. The government has been forced to compensate tram operator Stagecoach for the delays with a £2.5m payment.

These types of setback are frequent complaints of investors in the sector and is one of the reasons the City has long taken a dim view of Carillion. For months, the company has been one of the UK stock market’s most shorted companies – meaning that investors have been placing bets on a fall in the company’s share price.

The short-sellers have also been motivated by Carillion’s dependence on support services, which account for about 70% of operating profits and an area where companies regularly embarrass themselves with overly optimistic profit forecasts. All of which means that City analysts are now speculating that the company could run out of cash – with those at Liberum wondering if it might breach a banking “facility”, effectively the company’s overdraft. Carillion also has a pension deficit of £587m to deal with.

The company has outlined a plan to avert all this, including accelerating a plan “to reduce net borrowing” and disposals to raise up to £125m in the next 12 months. By pulling out of construction in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, it is withdrawing from its business in the Middle East almost entirely. Further annual savings will be announced following a “strategic and operational review”, while the firm also plans to get better at collecting money that it is owed.

Will that be prove to be enough? Analysts at UBS say the company can potentially be recapitalised, but it is predicting more hefty share price falls in the short term. Its worst case scenario is particularly frightening: the Swiss bank reckons the shares could fall to zero.

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This from the Independent:-

What we should learn from the crisis at Government contractor Carillion

How long can it be before a crisis at a Government contractor turns really nasty, and the National Audit Office’s warning that the big guns have become too big to fail proves prophetic? The week in the City has kicked off with yet another finding itself in the midst of a very big mess. This time it’s Carillion.

Having trumpeted it’s “high quality order book”, reassured that performance was “in line with expectations” and repeated a pledge to reduce debt in March, things have taken a dramatic turn for the worse. The company, that does everything from catering to construction, and employs 47,000 people worldwide, has issued a brutal profit warning and suspended its dividend in a bid to save cash. Chief executive Richard Howson is on his way out and a “comprehensive review” of the business is to be launched (KPMG is already poking around the construction operations).

Amid longstanding investor concerns about its finances, debt continues to rise, despite the actions that the company has taken to stop the rot. They include exiting construction public private partnerships in this country, pulling out of construction in the Middle East, and being ultra careful when it comes to taking on new projects.

It looks awful, and it’s interesting to note that Mr Howson is supposed to be sticking around to help keep the show on the road with his interim replacement Keith Cochrane while the company tries to find someone to get it back on an even keel. The thing is, we’ve seen this sort of thing before, and on repeated occasions. As the mania for outsourcing took hold on the part of Government and in the private sector, a host of companies like Carillon grew and got fat.

They used the vast revenues they earned to expand overseas, taking on more and more diverse streams of work in more and more parts of the world. Jacks of all trade, masters of… well it hardly needs saying. Pick a contractor, any contractor, and Google will probably be able to find you a crisis like the one at Carillion. Just last year, Capita’s shares hit a ten year low after the second profit warning in three months. Meanwhile Serco, which appointed Winston Churchill’s grandson to sort out its financial mess, has found itself smack in the middle of an operational foul up. 

Having taken on a big contract at the four hospitals overseen by the Barts NHS Trust (ironically Carillion previously handled part of it), perhaps evidence of renewed official faith in its abilities, it managed to provoke a strike among cleaning staff at the Royal London Hospital after just three days.

Three months on, and 1,000 cleaners, porters, caterers and security staff, at the latter and the other hospitals, are poised to begin industrial action. And so it goes on. And on and on. Badly managed finances, badly managed contracts, unhappy staff, unhappy customers, unhappy workers.

You’d think, given all this, that someone would ask seriously whether it’s really such a good idea to have handed such a wide range of state services to companies that operate in this manner, and that keep falling flat on their faces. Yet, with the notable exception of the NAO, it’s not happening.

Faced with situations like those above, the Government shrugs its shoulders, perhaps because, ultimately, the companies concerned have always just about found a way through their difficulties. It seems we might have to wait for a truly dreadful crisis, one that really hurts people, for this to change. It always seems to be that way in modern Britain.

Prison Musings 3

I suppose we should have realised what Wednesday night's ITV documentary on HMP Norwich was going to be like given the enthusiasm with which it was plugged by Andrew Selous and the MoJ publicity machine. I couldn't help noticing that there appeared to be a healthy number of staff present at all times and a twitter comment drew attention to the new clothing that seemed to be available from stores. 

Surely it would be far too cynical to suggest that the whole programme was stage-managed by NOMS, including the police raid on the visitors car park, in order to highlight the problems of drug-smuggling? Any casual viewer might be forgiven for appreciating that in fact there is a massive issue with prison staff bringing drugs, phones and simcards in. Anyway, as prison documentaries go, I found it pretty dull and as a bit of MoJ spin to convince us there's no crisis - well, it was unconvincing. There's a report here in the Daily Mail. 

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Despite the impression created by the film in HMP Norwich, here's yet another article on our prison problem in the Guardian yesterday:- 

Tough talk on crime has led to a crisis in Britain’s prisons

Britain’s prison population has gone beyond 90,000. This is a massive increase since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister three decades ago. In fact, in the 45-year period 1950 to 1995, the numbers in prison doubled, before doubling again in less than half that time. Meanwhile, over the last 15 years, Britain has increased the lengths of its prison stays by 33%. Now, one in seven prisoners serves more than 10 years, while the number of lifers and other long termers has doubled to 18% of all prisoners. Lifers’ and other long termers’ average lengths of stay have risen from 13 to 17 years in little more than a decade.

These are familiar problems to me: I used to run the New York City jail system. The United States incarcerates a larger proportion of its residents than any country on Earth. Almost 2.2 million people are locked up today, an almost eightfold increase from the 295,000 who were in jails in 1970. That’s almost 700 per 100,000 people. At the opposite pole are Finland and Sweden, with rates of 57 and 55 per 100,000.

How did we get here? We “got tough” on crime. So tough that over the last four decades sentences were dramatically increased and long prison terms required for hundreds of crimes; discretion was removed from judges; “second” or “three-strike” laws were mandated, so that decades or life in prison had to be served for second or third convictions, even non-violent ones. But we also got here by ignoring every piece of evidence about what did and didn’t work to reduce crime.

I recognise that some people pose a threat and need to be removed from society. But in the US we default to prison for terms so long we now have geriatric prisons for people who cannot go to the bathroom by themselves, much less pose a safety risk.

Today an almost universal academic and expert consensus has been reached that our policies regarding “mass incarceration” have failed. And it is not just progressives who have come to that conclusion but conservatives too.

So what can Britain, or any country for that matter, learn from us? Above all: don’t even think of doing what we did. It is wasteful, unjust, hugely expensive, inefficient and diverts funds from other essential areas of government such as social services, health and education – all of which can have a far greater public safety benefit than more prisons. But, sadly, Britain is repeating our disastrous, harmful and failed experiment.

Britain now incarcerates growing numbers of people at a cost of almost £3bn annually. No good can come of it – neither for public safety nor for crime control. Indeed, 46% of those who leave British prisons are reconvicted within a year of their release because incarceration has not remotely addressed issues that got them there in the first place – and in all likelihood made them worse.

Yet there is no “easy” solution to downsizing. British prisons will not get back to Thatcher-era population levels without tackling the issue of sentencing reform and length of stays head on: prison numbers cannot be meaningfully reduced merely via simple, politically safe policies such as diverting low-level offenders (who stay only briefly and take up little space).

In addition, the Ministry of Justice’s plan to significantly reduce the prison population by a reduction in reoffending has almost no chance of success. Most research indicates that even the best designed and implemented re-entry and rehabilitation programmes achieve only 10-15% reductions. This is important and worthwhile but would only reduce the reoffending rate to 41%. In the face of the rapid prison growth and increased sentence lengths, such a reduction will not have a large impact on numbers.

British prisons are now seriously overcrowded, operating at 111% of certified normal capacity on average – some at over 160%. Alongside this there have been huge cuts in prison officer staffing and, most disturbingly, suicides in prisons in England and Wales have skyrocketed, along with rates of in-prison homicides and assaults.

The number of suicides is a hugely important indicator of the health of any prison system. One with a high rate of suicides invariably manifests problems that go beyond the suicides. And suicides in English and Welsh prisons have almost doubled in just three years.

These statistics are shocking. Both the size of the increase in such a short period and the number itself – there were 100 suicides during the 12 months ending March 2016, compared with 52 for the 12 months ending March 2013 – means that there is a suicide rate of 117 per 100,000 prisoners, one of the highest rates in the world. The comparable rate in the US – hardly known for its progressive prisons nor for its low number of mentally ill prisoners – is 15 per 100,000. India’s rate is 18 per 100,000, and Canada’s 22. The number in England and Wales suggests a system in massive distress, and conditions of confinement that are badly deteriorating.

I am sure Britain’s prison governors and staff are valiantly trying to deal with all of this: but the Ministry of Justice’s plan to build prisons to ease overcrowding will not happen fast enough. As we in the US well know, you simply cannot build your way out of this problem. The US tried that and failed miserably.

In one way, it is too late: Britain has started down this road. But in another, the scale of imprisonment is geometrically lower in Britain than the US and, in a broad historical sense, you are just at the beginning of the failed journey we started over 40 years ago. If there is to be a course correction in Britain, now is the time.

Michael P Jacobson is a former NYC corrections and probation director and currently a professor at the City University of New York. He is the author of Downsizing Prisons: How to Reduce Crime and End Mass Incarceration.

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Alan Travis in the Guardian reveals that things have been so bad at the Medway Secure Training Centre that the MoJ will take direct control:-

Justice ministry to take over Medway child jail from G4S

The Ministry of Justice is to take over the management of a G4S-run child jail in Kent that has been at the centre of allegations of abuse and use of excessive force by staff, the Guardian has learned. The Medway secure training centre, which has been run by G4S since it opened in 1998, is to be taken over by the National Offender Management Service, which runs public sector prisons and probation services.

The decision, due to be announced next week, comes in advance of publication of an improvement board report for justice ministers that was expected to be published later this month detailing the future options for the child jail. Four members of staff were arrested on charges of child neglect after undercover filming exposed staff appearing to use excessive force to restrain youngsters, children being bullied by staff and officers lying when reporting incidents.

The private security firm announced in February in the wake of the allegations that it was selling its UK children’s services business including two secure training centres, at Medway and Oakhill, and 13 children’s homes. G4S’s existing contract to run Medway had been extended to July while the improvement board reported to justice ministers. The Ministry of Justice confirmed in April that G4S would not be taking on the new contract to run Medway that it had previously been awarded.

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Our priority will always be the safety and welfare of young people in custody – that is why the justice secretary set up an independent improvement board to examine the running of Medway STC. This sits alongside a wider review of youth justice, led by Charlie Taylor. We are considering a range of options and will announce the next steps in due course.”

A G4S spokesman said: “The behaviour of some of our staff at Medway revealed in January was completely unacceptable. We have given our full support to the review being conducted by the ministry’s improvement board and will consider their findings carefully when they are published.”

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Finally, but off the topic of prison, I notice that the MoJ still have a major problem with the interpreter contract. This from the Guardian:- 

Thousands of court cases adjourned due to failures in interpreting services

More than 2,600 court cases have been adjourned over the past five years because of failures in the interpreting service, according to figures released by the Ministry of Justice. The extent of the problem was confirmed as doubts emerged about the viability of the troubled contract for interpreting services after the outsourcing firm Capita declined to bid for its renewal in October.

A war crimes trial at the Old Bailey collapsed last year and has had to be rescheduled because of problems over the quality of interpreting offered to the defendant, a Nepalese army officer. The figures for the number of cases rescheduled since 2011, when the new contract paying lower rates came into effect, have been provided by the justice minister Lord Faulks.

In the magistrates courts, 2,524 trials have had to be adjourned because of the lack of an interpreter over the past five years. In the crown court, where costs are far greater, 137 trials have had to be adjourned because of interpreter difficulties. The cumulative expense of the adjournments was not recorded.

Commenting on the failures, the Liberal Democrats’ justice spokesman, Lord Marks QC, said: “It goes without saying that every time an interpreter fails to turn up, either injustice is done, because the case goes on without one, or the case has to be adjourned, leading to delays and a waste of everyone’s time and costs.

“Even with improvement against targets, the number of court cases adjourned owing to the lack of interpreters has remained stubbornly high. As one judge put it, the only just target is 100% attendance. With the next contract the government must ensure effective and efficient attendance of high-quality interpreters at court to enable justice to be delivered.”

Capita, which has held the contract to provide interpreters in England and Wales for the past four years, has been heavily criticised in the past. Last year it was ordered to pay £16,000 by the most senior judge in the family courts for its “lamentable” failure to provide interpreters seven times in the course of a single adoption case. In 2013, the justice select committee described the manner in which the court interpreting service was privatised as shambolic.

Asked why it had decided not to bid for the main contract after being shortlisted, a Capita spokesperson said: “We took the decision to bid solely for Lot 2 [the more predictable ‘written translation and transcription’ service]. It would be inappropriate to comment further at this stage.”

Geoffrey Buckingham, an executive member of the European Legal Interpreters and Translators Association, said: “The available pool of interpreters is already limited, and the word is that many now have enough experience to move on to better-paid work. If borne out, then quality will continue to fall.

“The MoJ has not learned any lessons. The team names have changed, but the process is so flawed that one of those shortlisted in December has walked away. Capita Translation and Interpreting recently wrote to their interpreters saying they had taken the ‘strategic decision’ to withdraw from the procurement [process].”

Following Capita’s withdrawal, the two remaining bidders for the main contract are the Leeds-based translation company thebigword and the US firm TransPerfect. Earlier this week, thebigword won a £15m contract to provide telephone and face-to-face interpreting and translation services to UK central government organisations.

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “We are absolutely committed to improving performance and ensuring the highest standard of language services for those who need them. “Our latest figures show a 98% success rate in 2015 – the highest since the interpreting contract began – with complaints about the service at a record low, down 30% on last year. Since this contract was introduced, we have also spent £38m less on language service fees.”

Interpreters are self-employed and under no obligation to accept job requests. A boycott by interpreters three years ago, in protest at low pay rates, failed to persuade the government to abandon the contract.

--oo00oo--

Stop Press 10.25am Photo from Howard League - staff at HMP Wormwood Scrubs have walked out over safety concerns at the prison.

Of Mackerel and Dumplings

For a psychopathic bully like Chris Grayling, it must be very annoying not to be in control of people, situations and events. He must be extremely irked that the now infamous 'mackerel and dumplings' disobedience last October at HMP High Down was not in fact a case of prison mutiny, but rather a legitimate demonstration against his draconian, harsh and unfeeling austerity measures at the prison.

He likes to think he can control, intimidate, silence and ignore most of those opposed to him, but he cannot influence courts and twelve ordinary citizens convened as a jury at Blackfriars Crown Court delivered their verdict on his new harsh prison regime and found all eleven defendants not guilty. 


Mr Burns


Chris Grayling

                                                 
The Epsom Guardian has the story:-

Prisoners cleared by jury of staging 'mackerel mutiny' at High Down prison

Eleven men have been cleared by a jury of staging a mutiny at a prison after Government cuts sparked an uprising among inmates. The men, who were all imprisoned at High Down in Banstead last October, were accused of taking part in a prison mutiny and causing criminal damage over October 21 and 22 last year. They had claimed they were protesting Ministry of Justice cuts and denied trying to overthrow lawful authority at the prison by barricading themselves into a cell for seven-and-a-half hours.

Pyrotechnics were eventually used by prison staff to startle the inmates when specialist prison officers stormed the cell to restore order to the prison. The jury returned a not guilty verdict today at the end of a three-week trial at Blackfriars Crown Court. The court heard their demand note, which was passed under the door, read: "The reason for these capers is we are not getting enough food, exercise, showers or gym and we want to see the governor lively." They also said: "If we get mackerel and dumplings we will come out."

Andrew Jefferies QC, one of the barristers representing the men, said this afternoon: "By its verdicts, the jury must have accepted that the defendants may have been legitimately protesting rather than intending to overthrow the prison authority. "During the trial, the jury heard about the independent monitoring board report and the growing complaints within the prison, particularly since the implementation of the cuts in September 2013."

Andrew Neilson, director of campaigns at the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “This trial has highlighted the serious problems that can arise when overcrowded prisons are forced to implement major changes while struggling to overcome budget cuts. “As the governor of High Down said during the hearing, the government has ‘got it wrong’. Prisons are in meltdown. “It is unfortunate that so much money has been spent on this ultimately failed case when there are prisons across England and Wales crying out for more staff and resources.”

During the trial prison governor Ian Bickers took the stand and told the jury that the Government had admitted that it "got it wrong" after introducing reforms to the prison system. Mr Bickers said the prison had undergone "significant change" in the period leading up the uprising. The charge of mutiny is normally linked in popular imagination to the high seas but the charge can also be used in prisons and other correctional facilities.

It's interesting to see that former Tory prisons minister Crispin Blunt was quick to rub salt in the wound, but the MoJ spin doctors are strangely quiet. It's all in the Surrey Comet:-

Following the acquittal of 11 prisoners accused of mutiny, a former Tory prisons minister has attacked Chris Grayling’s prison policy and warned the verdicts could spark unrest in other jails. The men were cleared by a jury this morning of staging a mutiny at High Down in Banstead last October after Government cuts sparked an uprising among inmates.

Banstead’s MP, Crispin Blunt, who was the prisons minister until September 2012, said: "In the light of the evidence from the governor the acquittal is unsurprising. "This is reinforced by the reports of the Independent Monitoring Board. They reflect the consequences of prison policy under the current Justice Secretary. "I am surprised this prosecution was brought. The protest did not appear to cross the threshold of ‘mutiny’, which is an extremely serious offence.

"The failure to secure a conviction will make prisons, which are now very tautly staffed, at greater risk of disorder, with some prisoners possibly misled into thinking they have some right of protest. "They don’t and their interests will be best served by helping their prison regime help them make the best of their time in prison."

Earlier this year a damning report revealed a prison "pared to the bone and beyond" where staff cuts had sparked safety fears, undermined rehabilitation and left prisoners in their cells for long periods. The report, by the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB), described 2013 as "a dreadful year" and said many changes had produced an "unhappy prison".

Its findings mirrored complaints to this newspaper this year by worried ex-officers and relatives of prisoners - although the Ministry of Justice repeatedly denied the prison was in crisis. Concerned about what was going on Mr Blunt visited the prison himself in May. Afterwards he said: "The prison appeared to be settling down after a difficult period, to a new and more tightly staffed regime. I haven’t heard anything to contradict this."

Speaking about prison policy today, Mr Blunt said: "Previously the ambitious savings targets were being found by putting prisons out to competition. "This was parallelled by rhetoric around sentencing that was accompanied by a drop in offenders being sentenced to custody and a greater focus on rehabilitation and work in prison."Whilst every prison is different it was my experience after over 70 prison visits that the private sector prisons were overall significantly more efficiently run.

"As far as rehabilitation of offenders is concerned they generally had more imaginative regimes and a greater commitment to meeting my objectives of getting prisoners put to useful work inside prison. "This programme would have been expanded under Ken Clarke. "Instead Chris Grayling decided, at the behest of the Prison Officers Association and Public sector prison service management to find the savings from stopping the competition programme and just making staff cuts in the public sector prisons. "At the same time his message to the courts has been unambiguously robust and this has seen a rise in the number of offenders being sent to prison. This has exacerbated the problem."

The MOJ has been contacted for a response to the trial verdict and Mr Blunt's views but has yet to respond.

Nice as it is to see a bit of discord within the Tory ranks, Crispin Blunt is way off the mark about private prisons being 'more efficiently run' and it's probably as good a link as any to mention some recent stories about privatisation in general. Here is the Independent pointing out how bizarrely foreign governments are making money out of the British taxpayer:-  

Revealed: How the world gets rich from privatising British public services

Foreign governments are making hundreds of millions of pounds a year running British public services, according to an Independent investigation highlighting how privatisation is benefiting overseas – rather than UK – taxpayers.

Swathes of Britain’s energy, transport and utility networks are run by companies owned by other European governments – meaning foreign exchequers reap the dividends while UK customers struggle with increasing fares and bills. In the past two years alone, overseas taxpayers have taken dividends totalling nearly £1bn from companies which make their profits from UK households and passengers.

The figures unearthed by The Independent in corporate filings will fuel calls for the Government to rethink its privatisation agenda – and boost those who argue that the railways should be opened up to publicly owned UK operators, or even renationalised.

An analysis of companies’ financial filings for the last financial year shows that currently 20 national train lines are run or owned by foreign state-owned or controlled companies. Only last month, the ScotRail franchise was offloaded to the Netherlands’ state-owned Abellio.

Christian Wolmar, a rail industry analyst, said: “It is a completely daft situation where state-run companies in foreign countries can bid for our rail services but UK ones can’t. It is specifically banned by law for the likes of Transport for London, or Directly Operated Railways to bid for UK rail contracts.”

Of course it will be recalled that Probation Trusts were not able to bid for the contracts to run probation services in England and Wales, but the likes of French catering companies were, and here is an article on the thirdsector website warning members to tread very carefully indeed:-   

Probation scheme enters crucial negotiation period

The Ministry of Justice was keen to emphasise the voluntary sector's involvement in the consortia due to be awarded contracts potentially worth a total of £450m in the latest stage of its Transforming Rehabilitation programme.

The government trumpeted this as a ground-breaking success, with a headline on its press release announcing the bids that read "Voluntary sector at forefront of new fight against reoffending". However, fears were raised that the real winners were the private firms leading most of these consortia, and that the charities and voluntary groups involved would carry too much risk. The Howard League for Penal Reform and the National Coalition for Independent Action have condemned the privatisation of a previously public service. Others wondered if the MoJ had learnt any lessons from the travails of charities in the Work Programme.

Mike Pattinson, executive director of Crime Reduction Initiatives, a charity involved in two of the CRCs through a joint venture called the Reducing Reoffending Partnership, says CRI wanted to bid in its own right. He says scale would not have been a problem - "some of the health sector contracts we've run are bigger", he says - but felt a sole bid would have been unlikely to find favour with the ministry. The partnership CRI is involved in is led by the private firm Ingeus UK and includes the St Giles Trust. Pattinson will not reveal CRI's stake in the partnership, beyond saying it is small.

"There are some safeguards built in to the programme, which they have learnt from the Work Programme, such as the use of an industry standard partnerships agreement," he says. This includes a pledge by private firms not to pass on excessive risk to charities, but Pattinson says a full assessment of how charities stand cannot be made until final negotiations are complete.

A spokesman for Clinks, an umbrella for offenders' charities, says these negotiations are key. "It will be vital for organisations to have good legal advice when negotiating contractual terms, and to be sure they understand the contract they are signing," the spokesman says. "We cannot ignore the widespread disappointment that we haven't got a voluntary-sector preferred bidder. We will explore why this happened."

Finally, here is a piece in the Guardian that should serve to remind the preferred probation bidders what a risky business it is they are entering and why Capita decided to give it all a miss:-

Risky business: no wonder Capita wants to avoid public service contracts

Among the outsourcing firms, Capita has always been one to watch. The growth of the £3.8bn company, founded in the 1980s when the Thatcher government forced councils to contract services, has exemplified the modern public services industry. So when Capita’s chief executive, Andy Parker, says it is now turning its back on government work you know something is up. The markets were shocked and share prices fell.

It’s not the end of outsourcing for difficult customers – Capita has landed a big customer services contract for the struggling Co-op Bank. Better that, it seems, than taking on probation contracts being let by the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, or doing work capability assessments on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions. Those are examples, the company said, of excessive risk. Either a government changes its mind, upsetting price and cost assumptions and jeopardising profit, or – as Atos and G4S have found – companies run a big risk with their wider reputation when there is political protest or the media start running headlines about service failure.

Omnishambles Update 76

Such is the chaos in the case allocation system between NPS and CRC, Napo issued the following yesterday:- 

Guidance Note from National Professional Committee on using the Case Allocation System Screening Tool (CAS)

1. The Case Allocation System (CAS) tool is designed by NOMS to screen for information concerning risk of serious harm and other relevant information so that cases are allocated correctly to NPS or CRC. NAPO continues to argue that the separation of case management following the ‘split’ is bureaucratic and potentially dangerous, but we would be failing in our duty to members not to give advice concerning the completion of these tasks.

2. Staff using CAS are under enormous pressure having completed PSRs to indicate whether there ‘was sufficient information (verifiable) available at the time of completing this form’ to complete all of the sections that refer to significant events, risks to children, known adults, ‘at risk’ adults, self and others.

3. When pressed for time and faced with yet another seemingly bureaucratic task the temptation may be to tick that sufficient information was available or may be inferred from what little was provided to complete all sections in full. Our advice to members is to ONLY tick ‘yes’ if you are confident you have enough relevant information to complete each section accurately. When in doubt, tick ‘no’ in all circumstances.

4. We have been trained and educated in an integrated system that has enabled us to allocate cases safely within the same local organisations. The creation of a two-tier system leaves members exposed to potential danger if they indicate that sufficient information was available to inform their decision when there may have been significant gaps. When in doubt, tick ‘no’.

When in doubt tick 'no'. We had a discussion about this as very few cases seemed to be allocated to CRC, even ones that were obviously CRC cases and ones such as IOM cases that appear in court for new minor offence only to be then allocated to NPS when we were expecting them back in CRC.

Ticking 'no' is being done because staff are busy in NPS. Perversely however this will generate more work for NPS. If one ticks 'no' the system is formatted so it will then err on the side of caution if there is missing data and therefore the case will automatically go to NPS. We have been tracking this in our area and CRC are completing own RSR/CAS and proving this very point especially with IOM cases when it has been puzzling as to how one new offence has resulted in a sudden transfer to NPS? This is concerning, in our area at least, as it is generating unmanageable workloads in NPS and low cases in CRC which will impact on jobs.

In my area over 95% of cases are going to CRC, having discussed this with colleagues in other areas they assure me that this is true for them too.

About the same in my area although some are HIGHLY questionable to the extent that, once some digging is done (which should have been done at PSR stage but wasn't), they were re-allocated from PSO to PO. Makes me wonder just WTF is going on behind the scenes at assessment stage? Or indeed if ANYTHING is going on judging by the cases coming over!

Critical few. Trivial many.

Are we all completing the same documents? By far the larger number of cases are directed to the CRC.

Then we learn this:-

Durham Tees Valley area yesterday informed that all Prison cases to be re-tiered to T1. This to be reviewed 3 months prior to release. Today informed under 12 month supervision for prisoners will commence Feb 15, but if I understand correctly will only be for those sentenced from February 15 so perhaps no instant impact - time will tell. 

Any other areas being asked to retier custody cases to T1? Any other areas been informed under 12 month supervision from Feb 15? CRC bidder contracts not yet signed, let alone ink dried, so staff unable to be told of delivery plans. Apparently due to commence some briefings re RAR and training re new N-Delius (God help us). Will it ever STOP?

How the fuck do we retier 3 months prior to release if they only get one week custody? How the fuck do we decide who gets the intervention needed whilst in custody (as some are unlikely to re-offend on release) given that they are all T1 and prisons will not allocate resources to them due to this? How the fuck do we manage with MORE Delius training?

I saw a memo yesterday clarifying the process for starting the u12m cases and what CRCs will be required to provide in prisons. F**k me! They are going to be busy! How are they going to pay for that lot? I think CG is taking the piss out of them as well.

We now have 59 different Risk Registers in N Delius. How the hell are we supposed to keep that all up to date?

More Delius training is definitely coming up for all staff in December.

All this frustration and head-scratching on our part is down to one thing. As we said from the start, the Target Operating Model is written by people who are ignorant about the nuances of the role of Probation and its relationship with courts and prisons. It will fail because it fails to take into consideration all of the variables at play.

A blog from Cheshire Greater Manchester CRC gives an idea of timescales and some fascinating IT issues:-

Dear Everyone,

As mentioned last week, I attended a Contract Signature Workshop with members of our Board of Directors last Thursday which was helpful in confirming the exact timescale of activity through to contract signature. I will therefore be meeting with Interserve Justice for a preliminary discussion on 19 November, in the company of a colleague from the contracts team. I then expect to receive Schedule 8 of the Service Agreement on (or close to) 24 November and this will contain the Service Delivery proposals put forward by Purple Futures at the bid stage. Schedule 8 will provide important background to our second meeting with Interserve Justice/Purple Futures which will take place on 28 November. This meeting will include Xxxx Xxxxxxx, Non Executive Director as well as members of the Senior Leadership Team. We will receive a presentation of the proposed new operating models ahead of a Board of Directors meeting on 1 December 2014 at which we are expected to approve and sign the end state Services Agreement. At the workshop, we were informed that the successful bidders would then be announced around 5 December followed by the 2 week standstill or ‘alcatel’ period, with final contract signature in the week before Christmas. As I have indicated previously, I expect it to be January before we are able to enter into detailed conversations with Purple Futures about the wide range of matters we are all keen to explore. As ever I will keep you posted.

In the meantime there are a number of important CGM CRC issues which require our attention. Firstly, you will be aware that we have all been asked to participate in a mandatory exercise to move CGM CRC and NPS documents into separate folders on the S: drive. I am happy to report that this work is progressing well but I need to remind you that any electronic files on offenders held in My Documents and as e-mail attachments must also be transferred to the individual offenders folders under this new folder structure on the S: drive. (If you have any documents which are needed by both the NPS and CGM CRC then please create a copy of the document in both the NPS and CGM CRC folders). In addition, if you hold any electronic offender documents which are no longer required then these should be deleted. This work must be completed by 21 November. At some point, post 21 November, documents that have not been moved will no longer be available. Please contact your Business Manager/Business Administrator if you have any difficulty in completing these document transfers.

As it was announced that Interserve look likely to win vast contracts to build new roads:-

Interserve, the international support services and construction group, has been awarded a place on the Highways Agency £5 billion Collaborative Delivery Framework (CDF), the largest ever framework for the improvement of England’s motorway and trunk road infrastructure. The company is one of five contractors that will be selected to undertake schemes with values of up to £25 million, which may be extended to £50 million, within the total £450 million indicated spend allocated to Lot 2 of the CDF. The CDF will last for four years, with the option to extend for a further two years, and will enable the Highways Agency to invest in England’s major roads through four separate Lots encompassing 26 suppliers.

one wonders why they even bothered with the probation contracts that others turned down. This snippet gives a clue to why Capita didn't win a TR contract:-

A failure to win controversial government work accounted for much of the decline, including the loss of a deal to run probation services for the Ministry of Justice. Rivals Interserve, Sodexo and GEO Group picked up the £500m-a-year contracts after Capita refused to accept a clause that prices could change should the Ministry of Justice amend policies. A second contract to run work capability assessments for the disabled went to the US work programme provider Maximus after Capita withdrew as a result of “unattainable” targets and the risk of reputational damage.

I can concur with this information. Capita have been unwilling to play ball on prices and so got the heave ho - this would reflect the general belief that the competition is entirely based upon the cost of the contract and not the quality which will undoubtedly lead to tears before bedtime!

The problem with the 70% inspector rumbles on:-

That report is currently sat at the bottom of NOMs in tray and will not be published until well after the contract signing and perhaps after share sale. I suspect that it is entirely critical of the who sham that is TR, hence its slow progress through the system. The inspector surely must have given the nod to his missus about what he thinks of the system and could that lead to a more advantageous pricing approach???? But that wouldn't happen would it?

Good point. If the report was critical of TR, to the point of being a potential deal breaker, Mrs would have warned Sodexo to pull out, wouldn't she? So why wait to publish? Or is it being re-written? It's like Le Carre!

That is the point - not whether McDowell was involved in selecting the bidders (the suggestion that he had some sort of advisory role - which he did not), but whether anything he knew or learned as HMIP could have found its way into Sodexo's bid through his wife and given them an unfair advantage? That is what the conflict of interest is about.

As for not inspecting his wife's company, well that doesn't wash, because whoever does do the inspection has to report back to McDowell as he's the head honcho, and as such his signature is needed on everything. Ultimately the buck will always stop with him!

Can you imagine a deputy director for Sodexo who is involved in the preparation of a bid NOT discussing the contents of that bid with her ex-NACRO/Probation Inspector husband? Sodexo have been compromised. McDowell has been compromised. Grayling has been compromised. The MoJ has been compromised. Mrs McDowell has been compromised. Nothing but rot at the core of this. Conscious corruption? Bad. Unconscious corruption borne of incompetence? Worse.

Can you imagine a deputy director of Sodexo not sharing her performance related financial incentive (MONEY) with her husband?

Paul McDowell has brought the Probation Inspectorate into disrepute. Should he ever have the privilege of inspecting my work, I will tell him were he can shove it. Chris Grayling has said "overzealous enforcement of conflict of interest rules could risk driving 'extremely able' couples from public life." The man clearly has no idea what he is talking about.

What he really means is, "over-zealous enforcement of any rules could risk us not being able to do exactly whatever the hell we want."

Mark Leftly in the Independent highlights how much the consultants for TR have cost, together with the private worries of the CRC chiefs:-

Fury over £15m bill for consultants on probation deal 

The Justice Secretary Chris Grayling has been accused of wasting more than £15m on consultants advising on the “crackpot privatisation” of the probation service. The accountant EY, management consultants PA Consulting and Collinson Grant, and outsourcer BancTec were among those to have bagged roles on the Ministry of Justice’s Transforming Rehabilitation programme over 13 months to the end of April. Nearly £4m was spent on legal services.

The shadow Justice Secretary Sadiq Khan wants to overturn the privatisation if Labour is elected last year and his Freedom of Information request revealed the cost of the outsourcing. He said: “Everybody warned that this crackpot privatisation would create chaos but did Chris Grayling listen? No he didn't. Instead he arrogantly brushed aside concerns and pushed ahead with this botched privatisation. This is a grotesque and unnecessary waste of money."

Separately, The Independent has been shown minutes from a meeting of 15 CRC heads of operations, representing areas such as West Yorkshire, Northumbria and Hampshire & the Isle of Wight, in September. These seem to confirm many of the problems that have been reported since the service was split in June, such as staff “muddling through” because of IT problems and an over-reliance on agency staff as management struggles to fill vacancies. The minutes also reveal that 65 per cent of CRC staff are “not vetted properly”. This means that nearly two-thirds of officers are not vetted to work in prisons, where they prepare offenders coming to the end of their sentences to resettle back into the community. 

If 15 CRC heads have raised concerns, then why hasn't HMPI reported on it?

Imagine what could have been done with just a fraction of the money wasted on the probation privatisation ominshambles?

This is exactly why staff have no faith in senior managers. Why can't they simply be honest with staff instead of us reading about their concerns in the Indie? They really do add insult to injury by their duplicity. They DISGUST me.

Meanwhile Ian Dunt on the politics.co.uk website makes the point that, despite efforts by the MoJ to hide what's going on in prison, information is coming out:- 

Despite the censorship, reports emerge of security collapse in prisons

The most effective tool the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has for covering up the prison crisis is censorship. Prisoners can't talk, former prisoners can't talk, guards can't talk. The only reliable information published is from the chief inspector of prisons and the independent monitoring boards, who Chris Grayling can't shut up. That information is a snap shot of a system in chaos, falling apart under the combined weight of funding cuts, staff shortages and Grayling's "right-wing solutions" to reoffending.

Today the report came in from an unannounced inspection of Elmley prison on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. It is dangerously overcrowded and understaffed. There has been one major disturbance a month for each of the last 11 consecutive months, with prisoners refusing to go back to their cells. This compares to zero disturbances the year before. The offender management unit is "overwhelmed".

Almost 200 of the men there spend 23 hours a day in their cells. Fights and assault are up 60% in the last year. Vulnerable prisoners are being abused without staff intervention. Five people have committed suicide in the last two years. Rehabilitation has completely ground to a halt. Of the cases looked at by probation inspectors, not one showed meaningful work being done to address the offending behaviour of the prisoner.

In Brixton prison, the independent monitoring board report also noted "unacceptably high" levels of drug use, citing positive test results and anecdotal evidence from prisoners. Staffing levels are so low they "wholly ignore the requirements of running a prison effectively, safely and humanely".

Over at Bristol prison, where another independent monitoring board report has just been published, it was the same. They found staffing levels were "insufficient" to ensure a safe environment. "The financial constraint has had a clear detrimental effect on many aspects of prisoners' lives", they found. The prison is at "bursting point".

Chillingly, they found some officers and staff "feel unsafe when prisoners are out of their cells". That's the point of total collapse. Once staff feel unsafe, none of the things prisons should be doing – such as training, educating, maintaining family contact or offering therapy - are possible. Security in a jail is like oil in an economy: once you remove it, everything else grinds to a halt. Classes, family visits, medical tests – they're all affected. Nurses, for instance, were advised not to unlock cells in C wing because the number of prison officers is too low and they felt unsafe. The health implications are potentially grave.

No omnishambles update would be complete without reference to Chris Grayling. According to the Huffington Post, he's had to endure the humiliation of correcting a recent Daily Mail article:-

Chris Grayling Forced To Correct His Daily Mail Human Rights Article

The Daily Mail has been forced to make a humiliating correction to a piece written for the newspaper by Chris Grayling about the European Court of Human Rights. The tabloid published the piece from the Justice Secretary last month where he claimed that judges in the European Court were not all "legally qualified" and suggested that rights to freedom from torture were subject to a caveat.

Human rights lawyer Shoaib Mahmood Khan, who is also currently in the process of taking Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), complained that the piece was deeply misleading, but told HuffPost UK that the piece took over a month to correct.

The Mail correction read: "Justice Secretary Chris Grayling wrote in a recent article about the European Court of Human Rights that not all of its judges are ‘legally qualified’. "We are happy to clarify that he meant that although they all hold legal qualifications, they are not all qualified to be senior judges in the UK.

"The article also said that, under the Convention, ‘states should not torture, nor imprison people without trial. It set out the right to free speech and to marry, and to hold religious views – but always with the caveat that the interests of society as a whole had to be respected too.’ "We are happy to make clear that the right not to be tortured is an absolute right, not subject to any caveat."

Finally, Eric Allison of the Guardian poses a question:-

How can Chris Grayling apologise to MPs while ignoring the prisons Crisis?

On Tuesday the justice minister made a solemn apology to the House of Commons. Chris Grayling’s mea culpa moment followed the disclosure that some telephone calls made by prisoners to their MPs had been monitored and, in 15 cases, listened to by prison staff. Clearly contrite at having to report this breach of parliamentary protocol – correspondence between MPs and their constituents is supposed to be confidential – the minister said he had “acted at a pace” to bring this to the attention of the house and was taking “immediate steps to ensure our confidentiality is respected”. I wonder if Grayling will apologise to the prisoners concerned in this breach of confidentiality rules? I doubt it.

Indeed, the news that Grayling knows how to say sorry will surprise many. He presides over a prison service in meltdown. One damning inspection report follows another. Only today, another report by the chief inspector of prisons reveals the scale of the problems besetting many jails. It shows a 60% rise in violence in Elmley prison, Kent, including 11 mini riots in as many months. Elmley holds 1,252 men crammed into cells designed to hold 985. There have been five suicides in the past two years. About 15% of the population, or almost 200 men, were unemployed and routinely spent 23 hours a day locked in their cells. This from a government that promised to make prisoners work for their keep.

This latest report follows a series of equally damning inspections of prisons and young offender institutions in England and Wales. Violence, bullying, self-harm and suicides are soaring; many young prisoners in particular lie idle behind their locked doors during the working day; there are reports of many elderly prisoners being unable to take a bath or shower for weeks or months on end – the litany of failures goes on and on. And yet Grayling repeatedly takes to the air waves to tell the world that all is well. Until something happens that affects the privilege bestowed on his parliamentary colleagues.

While he is in the mood to apologise, will the minister say sorry to the prisoners who repeatedly have confidential mail from their lawyers opened and read before staff hand it over to them? Staff at the estimable Prisoners’ Advice Service tell me this is one of the most common complaints received from prisoners, despite lawyers clearly writing “rule 39” on the envelope.