It's All Going Jolly Well!

Thanks 'Getafix for reminding us to look at the latest update from HMPPS HQ and contrary to popular belief, it's all bloody wonderful:- 

Probation Service Change Bulletin 21

1. Foreword

Welcome to the bi-monthly Probation Service Change Bulletin – keeping you updated on what is happening across the Probation Service. I am Amy Rees, Director General CEO HMPPS.

As we approach the end of 2023, I am delighted to see a real boost in recruitment into probation. There is a lot of great work going on in this area and to see numbers of senior probation officers increase by 13 per cent and also the recruitment of 1,514 trainee probation officers in the 2022/2023 financial year is a really positive way to end the year. We want to keep building on this positive trend and continue to recruit staff and, of course, retain them and their invaluable experience. We are also launching a Probation Alumni Network and you can read more about it below.

It is an exciting time for us as we recently launched our new recruitment campaign, which runs again in the New Year. The campaign’s strapline is ‘An extraordinary job. Done by someone like you.’ You may have heard the ads on radio or perhaps seen them at sports events, on television or online. The Probation TV advert and the Prison TV advert were created with valuable insight from people working for HMPPS, ensuring they reflect the reality of our work. We hope they will encourage people to join the service, helping to make an impact on reducing reoffending and protecting the public.

You can watch both adverts on the HMPPS Youtube channel.

The Probation Exhibition continues its tour across England and Wales and is currently in Wrexham before moving to Cardiff in the New Year. Please do go along to one of the venues if you can and let us know what you think.

We are also reaching the end of our 50th anniversary celebrations for Community Payback and I am delighted to see prisons and probation working so well together to improve the environment at Medway Secure School in Kent. I have enjoyed hearing about the great work being done and thank our staff for their tremendous efforts which make a difference to communities and lives across England and Wales every day.

I’m pleased we have all our Area Executive Directors (AEDs) now in place and you can read on for more information about One HMPPS, Courts and Electronic Monitoring.

Finally, I wish you a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year for 2024!

2. One HMPPS update

Work continues to progress well with the HQ redesign and the area model has now been live since early October. HQ restructuring will commence in early 2024 following consultation with our recognised Trade Unions.

David Hood commenced his new role as Area Executive Director (AED) for the Southeast and East Area in November. He joins the 6 AEDs who formally started their posts in early October, who are:

Helen Judge, Northeast
Sarah Chand, Midlands
Sarah Coccia, London
Alan Scott, Northwest
Chris Jennings, Southwest and South Central
Ian Barrow, Wales
David Hood, Southeast and East

David joins us from the Ardagh group, having previously held commercially focussed roles within the MOJ and recently holding the role as Vice President and Managing director of MTC, which was the parent organisation for the Community Rehabilitation Companies for both London and Thames Valley.

David’s arrival cements another significant step in the development of our area model, which sees Regional Probation Directors (RPDs) and Prison Group Directors (PGDs) (outside long-term high security) come together under the line management of the new Area Executive Directors for England and Wales.

We have launched the OneHMPPS to make sure our Probation and Prison frontline staff have the right support to be able to deliver the very best services.

The new Area Model will bring the probation regions and prison groups together under 6 new geographical areas in England, and Wales. This will provide increased ‘join up’ between prisons and probation by bringing responsibility for both together at the area level, with more devolved authority to the areas to facilitate innovation and faster decision-making, closer to the point of operational delivery. It will also deliver a strengthened operational voice in both central decision-making and national services, and smarter organisation of area and regional resources to strengthen and better support the frontline.

3. New learning and development for Probation Court staff

We are really pleased to have launched a new learning and development package designed specifically for court staff in the South Central region on November 6. The learning and development modules focus on court skills and pre-sentence report practice and have been developed as part of the ‘Pathfinder to Improved Pre-Sentence Advice’ pilot that is being tested in the South Central region.

The Pathfinder pilot, being delivered by the Probation Court Strategy and Change Team, is testing a new delivery model for pre-sentence advice in 16 courts in the South Central region. The focus is on improving the quality and timeliness of pre-sentence advice, both in informing sentencing and providing the right start to the defendant for their journey through the criminal justice system.

This comprehensive learning and development package has been developed as part of this project to ensure probation court staff have the right court craft skills to deliver the high-quality pre-sentence advice required by the judiciary. The learning and development package will be reviewed based on feedback from South Central probation staff to help inform the final design and content prior to wider national rollout.Probation exhibition touring England and Wales

‘Root and Branch – How five shillings, faith and belief inspired the beginning of the Probation Service’ continues its tour of venues across England and Wales.

Following its opening in Cheshire in August the exhibition moved onto Keighley in Yorkshire and Nottingham.

Throughout December you can visit us at our first venue in Wales – Wrexham Catholic Cathedral. We then move to St John the Baptist in Cardiff from January 3 to 14.

The journey of the Service is told through a timeline and includes the initial donation, the links with Primitive Methodism, the hostels set up to help residents and teach them skills such as farming and gardening.

The work of the modern Probation Service, including Approved Premises and the work of Community Payback, currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, also feature.

The exhibition is run in partnership with Englesea Brook Chapel and Museum, in Cheshire.

We’ll share more details and information around forthcoming venues and dates in the exhibition blog.

4. Electronic Monitoring update

The contracts to deliver the Electronic Monitoring service from May 2024 have now been awarded. Serco Ltd has been awarded the Field and Monitoring Service (FMS) contract, and G4S Monitoring Technologies Ltd has been awarded the Monitoring Devices and Systems Service (MDSS) contract.

Through delivery of the MDSS contract, G4S will be responsible for providing, configuring and repairing the equipment, as well as the systems used to interpret data from them.

Through delivery of the FMS contract, Serco will be responsible for installing and removing tags from those required to wear them, as well as monitoring the data generated by them.

The new contracts will last for six years and will allow us to continue delivering our innovative tagging scheme to better protect the public and help divert offenders away from a life of crime, whilst ensuring best value for the taxpayer.

The Ministry of Justice will be working with Serco and G4S over the next year to implement the new contracts, which will be fully operational by the end of 2024.

5. Recruitment Rise and launch of Probation Alumni Network

We’re pleased to report the focus on recruitment and retention is delivering positive results and an upturn in numbers across the Probation Service.

The recent HM Prison and Probation Service workforce quarterly: September 2023 report demonstrates that the approach is working with the workforce growing by over 4,856 across HMPPS since September 2022.

In the past year, 2,138 probation services officers were appointed, some of whom will be training to become qualified probation officers. As of September 2023, we saw an increase of:

174 Senior Probation Officer (13.0%)
304 Probation Officers (6.9%)
267 Probation Services Officers (4.2%)

The Probation Service will also launch a new Alumni Network by January 2024. This initiative follows the successful launch of a similar program in prisons in 2023, which resulted in a significant increase in the number of staff returning to the service.

The Probation Service Alumni Network will foster a community of former employees by keeping them informed of what is happening in the service.

It will also facilitate the building of business and personal connections and provide a vehicle for promoting career opportunities to alumni staff who may be interested in re-joining the service, as well as acting as advocates and promoting available roles to their own networks.

6. Community Payback celebrations

Community Payback teams have been helping to maintain a zoo in Hampshire and planting trees at a secure school in Kent as part of this year’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

Throughout 2023 we’ve toured the regions - beginning in London in January and reaching South Central in November and Kent, Surrey and Sussex this month -looking at our projects and people.

We’ve focused on a variety of work from beach and river cleans to maintaining a tourist railway and historic ship and cooking lunches and looked at how our projects benefit communities and allow people on probation to pay back their communities while learning new skills.

A thousand trees have been planted by people on probation to improve the wellbeing and outlook at a secure school in Kent.

Community Payback teams have planted a variety of species, including large cherry trees, at Medway Secure School near Rochester.

The project was part of the Queen’s Green Canopy initiative (to plant trees as part of Her Late Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee) and also celebrated this year’s 50th anniversary of Community Payback.

Throughout the project – which started in March this year - Probation worked in partnership with the Prison Service.

Teams have been carrying out maintenance work, such as strimming, mowing, mulching, replacing unsuccessful trees and replanting any that required attention.

Teams in Hampshire are working at Marwell Zoo, a not-for-profit organisation set in parkland near Winchester with tigers, rhinos and giraffes among other animals.

Community Payback teams help to maintain the 140-acre site, clearing animal enclosures, repairing fencing and constructing drainage ditches.

The teams work in the meerkat and giraffe enclosures, as well as completing maintenance work on the site where there are tigers, sloths, hippos, white rhinos, snow leopards and lemurs among others.

7. Would you like to nominate a community project?

Would your local community benefit from help with a project such as clearing wasteland, planting trees or removing graffiti?

If so, we’d like to hear from you.

Our Community Payback teams are seeking nominations for projects in your local area. The newly revamped Unpaid Work Nominations Website is now live and we want you to have a say in the work we carry out.

Unpaid Work is carried out under supervision as part of the punishment of offenders, but also enables people on probation to give something back to their community while learning new skills and enhancing their employment opportunities.

We want to increase the number of nominations to give our communities a greater opportunity to improve their local area through Unpaid Work activity.

The work we carry out must benefit the local community, not take paid work away from others, and not make a profit for anyone.

We take on multiple tasks and projects, which include removing graffiti, clearing wasteland, improving and decorating public places and buildings (such as a community centre), repainting communal areas, pathways made accessible, alley clearing, grounds maintenance and gardening, tree-planting, and litter picking.

Projects are assessed following nomination and we will then contact you to let you know if and when we can commence work.

Visit the website to make a nomination or to read more.

A Great Idea Screwed Up - Again

Here we go again then with Rishi Sunak announcing more bloody orange - jumpsuits this time not just tabards - in the drive to create the UK version of the chain gang in order to win votes. The original concept of Community Service - a 'constructive penalty' - was thoughtful and intelligent, as we discussed in 2019, but has all but lost any serious and beneficial purpose thanks to politicians of the left and right:-   

Unfortunately politicians just can't stop themselves tinkering with criminal justice policy for political gain and John Harding wrote this for the Guardian in January 2013:-

Forty years of community service

How did a measure that required offenders to carry out socially beneficial work turn into a form of punishment?

The first community service order was made in Nottingham crown court 40 years ago this month for Peter, a cannabis supplier.

On 2 January 1973, Mr Justice James ordered Peter to undertake 120 hours of community service. As the senior probation officer responsible for initiating a Home Office community service order pilot scheme in Nottinghamshire, I was summoned to the judge's retiring room before the sentencing decision was announced. The judge wanted to know what the new measure involved, where the offender would be placed and how accountable the service would be if Peter failed to respond. I told him that Peter would be working for an old people's home run by Nottingham social services, assisting staff and residents. If he failed to turn up for community service, Peter would have been returned to court for being in breach of the order.

This revolution in community-based sanctions was the creation of a subcommittee of the Advisory Council on the Penal System (ACPS), set up in 1966 by the then Labour government to advise the home secretary on "matters relating to the prevention of crime and the treatment of offenders". The ACPS non-custodial and semi-custodial penalties subcommittee was chaired by social reformer Lady Barbara Wootton.

Probation pilots

Following its recommendation, community service was piloted in six probation areas: Nottinghamshire, inner London, Kent, Durham, south-west Lancashire and Shropshire. Six senior probation officers/community service organisers were appointed by the pilot areas to negotiate a range of tasks with local public services and non-governmental organisations, set out criteria for the assessment and matching of offenders to work assignments, and prepare magistrates and judges for the new powers that, from January 1973, would be available to crown and magistrates courts.

I asked the only surviving member of ACPS, Sir Louis Blom-Cooper, where the idea of community service came from. He said that, by chance, the committee's attention was drawn to a newspaper article about an experiment conducted by a criminal court judge in Darmstadt, Germany, in the 1950s. The judge exercised his discretion by ordering an offender, convicted of dangerous driving, to work for a certain period of time under nursing supervision in a local accident and emergency hospital. The knowledge that the judge, under German criminal law, could impose a legal requirement on a convicted offender to carry out such work provided the spur ACPS needed to develop their thinking of community service as a court sanction in its own right, Blom-Cooper explained. Yet, without Wootton's inspired chairmanship and forcefulness, community service would not have emerged as a distinct penal sanction, he added.

ACPS believed that community service should be a constructive penalty whereby the offender took on the burden of social responsibility towards others. They saw great merit in merging the majority of offenders with non-offender volunteers so that the offenders could be inspired by the volunteers.

When ACPS published its report on non-custodial penalties in 1970, it took the view that community service would appeal to the punitive-minded because it involved deprivation of leisure; to the retributive, because it would compel the offender to make some repayment to the community for the damage that he had done; and to others, mainly because it would be cheaper and probably a more hopeful alternative to a short period of imprisonment, or because it would make the punishment fit the crime.

The pilot areas were left with relative freedom to develop community service in appropriate ways. I was much influenced by the New Careers movement in the US, which was part of President Lyndon Johnson's anti-poverty programme. It used some offenders as a community resource in the belief that, instead of becoming recipients of help, they could become dispensers of service and, in doing so, gain status and approval. Within three months in Nottinghamshire, we had hundreds of potential tasks for offenders in the community, from helping at clubs for disabled people or young people and at old people's homes, to canal preservation and supporting A&E units of local hospitals.

When the two-year pilots ended in 1974, the Home Office research unit's final report was a superb illustration of official caution punctured by unfettered enthusiasm. The researchers said the scheme was viable and, despite their doubt about its overall impact on the size of the population, revealed that, at its best, community service was an exciting departure from traditional penal treatment.

By the end of 1977, community service was rolled out across England and Wales. And over the next 20 years, Europe, Australasia, parts of Asia and the US all adopted community service orders.

In the UK alone, millions of hours of community service have been carried out by thousands of offenders at a fraction of the cost of imprisonment. The latest figures from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) show that community sentences outperform prison sentences for 18- to 24-year-olds by 13% in terms of reducing reoffending. Even when offenders of all ages are closely matched in terms of criminal history and offence type, the performance gap remains 8%.

Yet, in a retributive age, the image of community service has been ratcheted up by politicians to match penal populism. And a demand for tougher community penalties has been paralleled by the rebranding of community service to community punishment, then community payback, and now to unpaid work. Today's offenders wear fluorescent tabards over their clothes to indicate that they are offenders, easily recognisable by members of the public. In reality, I suspect, despite the hardening rhetoric, nothing much has changed in terms of nature of tasks undertaken, though the rigid enforcement of orders leaves little room for discretion.

Further, probation staff have handed over responsibility for unpaid work schemes to private companies such as Serco, which in October was awarded a four-year contract in London. The justification for this is to ensure a more efficient and cost-effective service. There are no evidential grounds for this degree of optimism. Serco promises to cut costs. The probation union, Napo, warns that this will be achieved by changing the employment conditions of existing supervisory staff and cutting salaries.

The MoJ intends to put out to tender £600m worth of probation services, about 60% of the entire budget. It is a far cry from the Wootton committee's founding principles that a private company should not make profits on the back of offenders while they are repaying their debt to society. Blom-Cooper, for one, is saddened that we have moved to an acceptance that profit, not a sense of public service, is the prime driver for certain parts of our criminal justice process. "Penal reform," he remarked drily, "is not necessarily penal progress."

In addition, the government proposes, in its crime and courts bill currently going through parliament, to introduce a mandatory punitive element to every community order. This could include a fine or a curfew, which penal campaigners are warning may undermine community sentences' success in reducing reoffending.

Whether the foundation stones of community service, laid down over the past 40 years, will survive under fragmentation and privatisation is open to question. Those of us fortunate enough to have been involved in its conception and present at its birth, believed that probation could make a difference in offenders' lives, provided that hard work, and clarity of purpose and vision underpinned all our efforts.

John Harding was pioneer senior probation officer/community service organiser for Nottinghamshire, 1972-74, and chief probation officer for inner London, 1993-2001

--oo00oo--

The dreadful Louise Casey had stuck her oar in of course. This from 2008:-

Revolt grows over 'community payback' jackets

Offenders facing abuse, say probation officers Minister insists garments show justice is being done

Evidence is emerging of a growing boycott of the government's compulsory scheme for offenders to wear high-visibility orange jackets when they are carrying out unpaid work in the community.

Napo, the probation officers' union, will claim today that one Midlands probation service has suspended implementation of the scheme after churches and charities involved in 28 out of 32 work placements said no to the jackets.

The introduction of the compulsory "community payback" jackets on 1 December has provoked a row within the criminal justice system with the government's crime adviser, Louise Casey, citing probation service opposition as yet another example of its "institutional reluctance to put the public first".

The justice minister, David Hanson, fuelled the debate last night by saying he rejected the results of the Napo survey and expected all 42 probation areas to implement the introduction of the high-visibility clothing. "The public expects to see justice being done, and this is what the jackets achieve," he said.

The justice ministry has bought more than 10,000 vests or jackets with the "community payback" logo on them for use by offenders in England and Wales.

Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of Napo, said organisations, including churches and charities, that offer unpaid work placements for offenders had become wary of using the vests after incidents of offenders being abused by the public, including missiles being thrown at them. "Many of these organisations are faith-based groups who believe it is not their role to oversee humiliation," he said, adding that in one area a group of youths had chanted "nonces, smackheads, lowlifes" at one work group.

Fletcher said in one south Midlands probation area, organisations involved in 28 out of 32 placements said they did not want the vests, while in another area in the north-east 11 out of 20 rejected them. He added: "Most have said that unpaid work is punishment in itself and that the addition of the vests was humiliating and demeaning. About a third of placements involve working in charity shops and organisers there have said the wearing of vests would deter members of the public and affect their takings."

The Napo survey says there have been a number of incidents involving members of the public intimidating and abusing offenders wearing the orange jackets. It also cites two incidents involving firearms being discharged at offenders before the scheme went national this month.

More than 55,000 people a year are sentenced to carry out unpaid work in the community, with most placements involving environmental, decorating and cleaning works including litter picking and graffiti cleaning. One third involve individual placements working in charity shops, in day centres for the elderly and homeless people, and supporting adults with learning difficulties.

Hanson, however, has challenged the survey's findings. He said: "The violent incidents they refer to had nothing to do with the jackets. They happened before their introduction so the offenders in question weren't even wearing them."

He said hundreds of community-payback projects across the UK were complying with the requirement to ensure offenders wear their vests. "This survey appears to be based on a handful of deliberately selected cases," he said. "Early indications are that communities are pleased to see offenders giving something back."

Nothing To See Here!

 Probation Service Change Bulletin - Issue 11 March 2022

1. Amy Rees, Director General Probation, Wales and Youth

Welcome to our re-launched Probation Change Bulletin for 2022. This bi-monthly bulletin will look to spotlight the latest news in Probation, covering all our portfolio change programmes - Reform, Workforce, Reducing Reoffending and Electronic Monitoring, as well as keeping you updated on any key developments across our business as usual areas.

A lot has happened since our unification on 26 June 2021, when we launched the new Probation Service, bringing together staff from the previous National Probation Service (NPS) and 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). As a new unified organisation we have been able to integrate the services we deliver alongside core supervision - working in partnership to address the needs of people on probation and support the government’s ambitious agenda to cut crime. All of this while dealing with the backdrop of a global pandemic, ensuring the continued delivery of probation across England and Wales. Probation achieved a lot in 2021 and 2022 is set to be another year of enhanced delivery and continuous improvement, building on our unification.

Our next edition will be published in May, so please keep an eye on this page for further updates.

2. Responding to COVID and Recovery

Great strides were made towards the end of 2021 to move from operating on Probation Exceptional Delivery Models (EDMs) to all probation regions in England and Wales delivering to full or light National Standards. EDMs are a suite of documents that were created to adapt how the Probation Service delivered from March 2019, responding to the impact of Covid-19. EDMs looked to set out the level’s to which probation could deliver, dependant on government restrictions and staffing levels. This allowed for flexibility of delivery across England and Wales dependant on local circumstance.

Due to the upsurge in the Omicron variant, Probation Gold Command was reinstated in late December, and the decision was taken to reintroduce the Probation Supervision EDM across England through January. In response to Welsh Government announcement, Probation in Wales also reinstated the Probation Supervision EDM, as well as range of EDMs relating to service delivery for the month of January 2022, this did not include Community Payback and 

Accredited Programme delivery.

As of 31 January 2022, all regions in England and Wales have now successfully exited EDMs again and will be operating on the new ‘Prioritising Probation Framework’, allowing for a steady increase in delivery and providing Regional Probation Directors with a robust tool to help regions adapt to how they deliver probation locally according to numbers of available staff. The aim is to move towards full delivery as soon and as swiftly as is safely possible.

All Approved Premises across England and Wales also exited their EDM on 31 January 2022, unless they were classified as an outbreak site, in which case they will exit their EDM once the UK Health Security Agency / Public Health Wales declares the outbreak closed.

3. Reform and the Target Operating Model (TOM)

The path to Target Operating Model sets out Probations intentions for the future of the service over the 18-months post-unification. The initial focus up to June 2021 was to unify the service, ensuring the transition of around 8000 staff to the Probation Service from the NPS and CRCs.

The focus since June has been to stabilise the service and embed the structural changes across the organisation against the backdrop of Covid-19 and Omicron. The focus now is on delivering more consistent management and delivery of sentence plans, better assessment and management of risk and more balanced caseloads, with an improved case allocation process to support this.

For Unpaid Work, Accredited Programmes and Structured Interventions changes are starting to be implemented that that will drive up completion rates and deliver better outcomes. Much of this will be through making programmes available locally, making improvements to the assessment and induction process and more regular reviews of active cases.

As set out in the TOM, the Probation Service is utilising commissioned rehabilitative services, working with external partners to meet key areas of rehabilitative needs, including: Accommodation; Employment, Training and Education; Personal Wellbeing; and Women’s Services.

Within Courts there is a focus on improving the pre-sentence reports in order to deliver quality advice to courts and improving sentencer confidence in the delivery of community sentences.

Probation is also working to modernise its digital tools to better support probation staff in supporting people on probation. The aim is to reduce duplication in systems, streamline processes and enable better data recording and analysis, to support workload management, decision making and engaging people on probation. Tools have been reviewed that were used to good effect in the NPS and CRCs prior to unification, and are being adopted and improved, as well as identifying gaps and building new ones.

4. Workforce

To support the reforms being undertaken in Probation and to meet the demands of society, in particular the response to the government campaign of recruiting 20,000 new police officers. Probation launched an enhanced recruitment campaign and are pleased to announce that the recruitment target of 1000 PQiPs (Professional Qualification in Probation) for 2020/2021 was met and Probation are looking to increase levels of recruitment even further in this financial year (2021/22) to 1,500 trainee probation officers. As well as PQiPs, there is a real focus on the wider recruitment of staff across Probation, ensuring the organisation recruits and retain the best staff possible. The continued work around recruitment has been a real achievement to help attract the staff needed to meet the growing demand of the wider justice system.

5. Community Payback

The importance of Community Payback was further recognised in the recent Spending Review announcement, with the government providing an additional £93 million of funding over the next three years. This is key to supporting initiatives to provide training opportunities for those on probation, helping them to develop skills to boost their employability.

A new approach to delivering Community Payback will see the Probation Service develop a range of partnerships with national organisation over the coming months to deliver projects across England and Wales. Many of these partnerships will look to focus on outdoor projects that help improve the environment across England and Wales.

Probation recently launched a recruitment drive to attract 500 extra Community Payback staff to join the service, helping to support the ambition to deliver an extra 3 million hours of Community Payback each year. For more information on the recruitment campaign and how to apply for a role in Community Payback, check out Recruitment drive to ensure offenders pay back for their crimes - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).

Probation will continue to highlight the work undertaken around Community Payback via the HMPPS Twitter account – please check this out regularly to see the latest updates.

6. Reducing Reoffending

Last year’s spending review provided a substantial investment for reducing reoffending over the next three years. £200m a year will be invested by 2024-25 to improve prison leavers’ access to accommodation, employment support and substance misuse treatment, and introduce further measures for early intervention to tackle youth offending.

Work is now well underway on the delivery programme to provide prisoners and prison leavers with the support they need to lead a crime-free life. This includes:

• Delivering a Prisoner Education Service in England which equips prisoners with the numeracy, literacy, skills and qualifications they need to get jobs or apprenticeships after they leave custody;
• Transforming the opportunities for work in prisons and on Release on Temporary Licence, creating a presumption in favour of enabling vetted and appropriate prisoners to take up work opportunities;
• Scaling up specialist roles tested in the Accelerator Prisons project that provide the support that prisoners and prison leavers need to turn their back on crime;
• Introducing new Resettlement Passports that bring together into one place the essentials that prison leavers need to lead crime-free lives on release;
• Ensuring that every prison leaver at risk of homelessness can access the new transitional accommodation scheme.

7. Electronic Monitoring

Electronic Monitoring continues to be a core part of probation service delivery. We currently monitor over 13,000 individuals every day and are looking to increase the caseload to c.25,000 by March 2025. Further investment from the government of £183m for the Electronic Monitoring expansion projects highlights the vital contribution Electronic Monitoring makes to the justice system.

Alcohol Abstinence and Monitoring Requirement (AAMR) is an additional tool available to the judiciary to address alcohol related offending and support rehabilitation. To see more about the new initiative to cut alcohol-fuelled crime, check out Offenders to be banned from drinking to cut alcohol-fuelled crime - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) and No Christmas tipples for 770 alcohol-tagged offenders - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). An Alcohol Monitoring on License (AML) pathfinder was also successfully rolled out in Wales and 3 women’s prisons on 17 November 2021, leading to a complete ban or monitored consumption when a person is released from custody. AML will be rolled-out across England in the summer.

A Gem Of An Idea

May I recommend “The Outlaws” on BBC 1, all available on iPlayer.

I matured professionally and personally In Community Service (what a positive concept) in Bristol in the 1980’s. I spent a lot of energy inviting a well-known but reluctant playwright to visit “my” projects. He taught me about the structures of sitcoms. For instance, the need to have a Trap, unlikely characters confined to a particular space. It seemed to me then that a Community Service project was a perfect trap, and a thing worth celebrating.

While I was dragging him fruitlessly around my workplace, admin Elaine Merchant was busy typing away on our state-of-the-art golf ball typewriter in the Fishponds (Bristol suburbs) Probation Office, while her husband Ron supervised clients on placements. Their boy has done not so badly and has a show on the telly which I highly recommend. It’s a slow burn and the blend of really funny (whitewashing an actual Banksy from the wall of a community building) with suspense and grit is unsettling. The Guardian review is here, and I won’t compete, but here are a few comments.

If you are looking for a fly on the wall observation about unpaid work, this isn't it.

It however gets the spirit of Community Service as I first encountered it. A joyful embracing of the weird and disparate people we were and worked with. An understanding that the State is not going to solve individual problems, mainly of its creating, only good connections and care can go anywhere near that.

Having said that, most of our clients were impoverished young men, badly dressed for the weather, rightly cross about the indignity of their situation with us. Aggressive and vulnerable in equal measure in their denim jackets in the freezing wind in a Bristol winter, more vulnerable than threatening. Back then, we would have formed a line with them against any suggestion that they wore hi viz jackets with a label on the back.

The head of Probation Administration (these were powerful people in those days) used to complain that the CS staff were indistinguishable from our clients. I always rather liked that. We identified so much more with them than him. We were alive to the reality that our clients had been failed by the system, had failed the system, and needed us - albeit agents of the system - to try and reconcile this.

Pearly Gates

Chain Gangs?

Just like a child being naughty, our Prime Minister does it deliberately of course just to get a reaction and in the hope he can recover some of his former popularity. It's probably partly to distract our attention as well because Rob Allen mentions in passing here that another Tory favourite, tagging, is in trouble:- 

Pulling the Chain Gang

Boris Johnson can’t see any reason why lawbreakers “shouldn't be out there in one of those fluorescent-jacketed chain gangs visibly paying your debt to society”. If that isn’t a nod to Britain First whose policies include the introduction of chain gangs to provide labour for public works- it’s at least an evidence free appeal to the public’s baser instincts to punish and humiliate people in conflict with the law.

The Prime Minister is probably unaware of Recommendations made by the Council of Europe about prison and probation services, but if he is serious about this chain gang proposal – which I doubt- they provide a number of important grounds for avoiding it.

The 2010 European Probation Rules, developed by leading international experts and approved by the 47 CoE member states including the UK, make clear that probation agencies must respect the human rights of offenders, with all their interventions having due regard to their dignity, health, safety, and well-being. Community service, in particular, “shall not be of a stigmatising nature.” The Commentary to the Rules say that “uniforms that identify community service workers as offenders at work are unlikely to support reintegration”.

In 2017, the CoE adopted Rules which require community-based sanctions to be implemented in a way that does not aggravate their “afflictive nature”, because to do so would be unjust. Gratuitously punitive measures “can also be expected to create resistance and unwillingness to co-operate in any attempt to secure the individual’s law-abiding adjustment in the community”.

The 2017 Rules also require adequate safeguards to protect offenders from “insult and improper curiosity or publicity”, because community-based penalties may expose them to the risk of public opprobrium or social stigmatisation.

In fact, many people doing unpaid work already wear bibs- Jack Straw introduced the idea in 2008 in one of its many rebrandings as “Community Payback (CP) ”.



A 2016 inspection of unpaid work found that “a small number of offenders expressed concern at having to wear the high visibility tabards as they felt it was stigmatizing” . One told inspectors that “some members of the public see the CP vests and look down on you. I bet they think ‘what’s he done’ or ‘is he a sex offender’. I have said good morning to people and been ignored. But others appreciate what we are doing so that’s good.”

While the Beating Crime Plan may amount to less than the sum of its parts, it actually contains one or two good ideas. The best unpaid work is already delivered in consultation with local partners so requiring schemes to support community objectives and meet identified needs should bolster public confidence. As the CoE say, “work should have purpose and wherever possible should be of genuine benefit to the community.”

More problematic is the pledge to increase the use of electronic monitoring. Expanding EM has been promised countless times since then Home Secretary David Blunkett launched the pilot “Prisons without Bars “ in 2004. Will this finally be the time for satellite technology to take off?

In their latest assessments of confidence in various government programmes, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) rated the MoJ’s EM project as amber/red. That means it’s in doubt, with major risks in key areas. Urgent action is needed to address problems and/or assess whether resolution is feasible.

The IPA mention specific concerns about delays & the quality of case management being provided by suppliers. Apparently “the Project is working collaboratively with suppliers to identify contingency options”. This does not sound like the strongest basis for the promised expansion.

--oo00oo--

Comment piece from Guardian:-

Crime always pays for the Tories – that’s why they turn to it again and again

The government’s law and order crackdown displays the performative cruelty that Priti Patel has made her own

It is not difficult to see why Boris Johnson’s first post-isolation photo op was to appear alongside the home secretary, Priti Patel, and talk tough about crime. Ministers are keen to wrench the political argument towards a post-Covid domestic agenda. Yet there are fierce internal arguments in government about public spending, taxes, health and social care. What better way, meanwhile, to signal a return to supposed political normality than to reprise that old Conservative favourite, a dose of law and order?

There is also an immediate reason for that choice. July’s opinion polls have not been as good for the Tories as those of the spring. The lead over Labour, which was often double-digit in June, is mostly in single figures now, and was down from 13 points to four in YouGov’s survey last weekend. The decline of the earlier vaccine bounce seems to coincide with the messy ending of England’s Covid restrictions. A crime crackdown is a way of reassuring the voters that, whatever the appearance otherwise, the government really is in control.

Except that actually the government is not exercising control over crime. This week’s package is for show. To dignify it as a real anti-crime strategy is to miss the point of it, which is rhetorical. The object of the exercise was to create headlines and to frame public debate. Johnson duly obliged with his racially freighted remark that antisocial offenders should be “out there in one of those fluorescent chain gangs visibly paying [their] debt to society”. The headlines and the argument duly followed.

In reality, the so-called “beating crime plan” that Johnson and Patel announced on Tuesday is not about doing anything innovative, difficult or expensive to address the problems of crime. It is about looking as if they are doing so. The plan is a rehash of old and existing ideas, such as more hi-vis clothing for community service offenders, electronic tagging on prison leavers and the relaxation of restrictions on stop-and-search powers, and very little else. It will not work because it has not been designed to work. It has been designed to be noticed.

The plan hasn’t even been discussed with the police, which is a giveaway about its lack of seriousness or content. On Tuesday, chief constables queued up to give the Guardian’s Vikram Dodd some scathing private judgments. “It is like there has been an explosion in a strategy factory,” said one. The Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers and which last week expressed no confidence in Patel over the latest police pay freeze, dismissed the whole thing as a gimmick.

You would never guess this from the way Johnson and Patel talk about crime and the police. “This government is utterly dedicated to fighting and beating crime,” Johnson announced. This is not actually true. What is true, however, is that British governments have long become addicted to doing what the American criminologist Jonathan Simon calls “governing through crime”, in which the sorts of measures that Johnson and Patel announced this week – often modest and even pantomimic by some American comparisons – are accepted as necessary responses to unacceptable public risks.

There are particular crime crises in Britain. These range from rape prosecution failures and child abuse scandals to the pandemic explosion of fly-tipping. Policing reform has also been allowed to wither on the vine. But if the Johnson government was as engaged with crime and policing as it claims, it would never have snubbed the police so conspicuously as it has done over pay, or made such deep cuts to the police and the criminal justice system more generally. Patel’s claim in the Daily Mail this week that “From day one as home secretary, I’ve made clear that I will back the police” does not withstand scrutiny in policy terms. But it makes total sense in terms of political theatre.

Political campaigns like this are best described as performative cruelty, a policy-light approach whose central purpose is to savour the potential anguish of those it defines as threats. Donald Trump was a master of it; for him, the cruelty was all. Among all current British politicians, performative cruelty is also Patel’s particular stock in trade. It is to be found everywhere in her politics: in her approach to asylum seekers in the Channel, to the penal system and to crime. It is there in her approach to officials – a charge of bullying against her was shamelessly overridden by Johnson. It was there when she was international development secretary – a department whose role she made little secret of despising.

It is a reasonable bet that a framed copy of Tuesday’s Mail front page will soon be on display somewhere in her office. The headline – “Priti: I’ll make yobs clean the streets” – incarnates what she aims to achieve. It shows not just that the government machine mounted an effective bid for the public’s attention this week. It also shows that Patel has been granted the rare press accolade of being identified by her first name not her family name. It will certainly bolster her belief in the political rewards of performative cruelty. Where Maggie first trod, and Boris more recently followed, there now arrives, if she has anything to do with it, Priti.

Patel is not the sharpest pencil in the drawer. But she has the huge advantage of being focused on becoming Conservative leader. This singlemindedness would give her a considerable advantage if, over the coming months, the party becomes consumed with the possibility that Johnson may quit before the next general election. This is far from a certainty, and it is important not to believe every piece of gossip and to avoid wishful thinking. Nevertheless, the coming year may see the start of a leadership battle. And, in that battle, Patel will be a contender.

Patel would at present be an outsider in that contest. Her ratings among activists have declined this year compared with last. She would struggle to win as many nominations from MPs as Rishi Sunak, Sajid Javid, Michael Gove and Liz Truss. Some prejudice is also probable. But her popularity at the grassroots level is high. This week it will have got a little higher, not least because of her press support. If she has a big party conference success in the autumn, on which she will now be focused, it will rise again. Her chosen route to the leadership owes much to Johnson’s own. The question is whether the Tory party of the 2020s is willing to be defined by another ambitious populist and by the performative cruelty that Patel is making her own.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Extract from another Guardian opinion piece:- 

But the Oxford Street pile of mud did its job. It got people talking. In that respect, Boris Johnson’s Tuesday crime strategy announcement was also a pile of mud. Expect to see “fluorescent-jacketed chain gangs” of offenders, the prime minister declared, the words immediately ringing my woke alarm bells. I consulted humanity’s hive mind. As I thought. About 65% of the Google image search results for the words “chain gang” were shackled black men, while 4% were of a convict Mickey Mouse, and of some chained babies, doing time for cheese theft and milk concealment offences respectively.

Boris Johnson may of course have invoked the hot potato of race here deliberately, under instructions from his culture war guru, the former sex party fixer Dougie Smith (though it’s understood Smith may have been reined in now the government are being blamed for the football racism they actively encouraged). Was the chain gang idea announced to appeal to horrible Tory voters knowing that it would have to be quietly withdrawn later, a classic strategy of the Boris Johnson government?

In the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper, an unnamed spokesperson swiftly clarified that “chain gang” was just “a turn of phrase”, like “piccaninnies”, “watermelon smiles”, and “bum boys”. But one could be forgiven for thinking there were plans to shackle litter-pickers, given that the home secretary floated stashing child migrants on Ascension Island and is in the process of criminalising lifeboat volunteers if they assist drowning foreigners. If Priti Patel announced she was personally going to tar and feather shoplifters it would seem plausible.

The shoe repair millionaire James Timpson took to Twitter to say he employs lots of ex-offenders and makes them wear not shackles and luminous waistcoats but a shirt and tie – “same people, different approach, a much better outcome”. Come the revolution Timpson will be home secretary while Priti Patel will be in a booth at Oxford Circus tube station reheeling a pair of Topshop sling heels and burping.

Next we learned that a Boris Johnson crackdown on drugs will focus on London, Liverpool, Bristol, Newcastle and Wakefield. But surely this must include Westminster itself where, in 2019, Vice magazine found cocaine in four out of nine parliamentary nooks – toilets mainly – that could only be accessed by passholders, or their guests. That can’t all have been Michael Gove in the 1990s, or the young Boris Johnson, sneezing his way through his single ineffectual snort.

Black Lives Matter want to defund the police and invest instead in community resources to keep people out of crime. Doing the Marxists’ work for them, the Conservatives have been defunding the police generally since 2010 (officer numbers still have not recovered), and personally in 2021 by refusing them the pay rise given to other public service workers. But dumping the mud of these unworkable new law and order pronouncements has worked. A prime minister who as London mayor allowed £126,000 of public money (£11,500 of which came from a City Hall-funded agency) to go to a pole-dancing businesswoman he was having sex with, and whose ministers routinely appear to have awarded without due process contracts worth millions to cronies, continually escapes imprisonment, while petty offenders will be paraded in fluorescent jackets, like Chinese thought criminals in the Cultural Revolution.

But it’s always edifying to hear a lecture on criminal behaviour from a prime minister who, after a simple YouTube search, can be heard agreeing to conspire with a convicted fraudster to have a journalist beaten up on the understanding that he remains anonymous. Done. Now, maybe I will go up that mud after all.

Stewart Lee

Napo At Work in London

London remains by far the largest Napo Branch and they had their virtual AGM on Friday. Although not quorate, which is understandable given present difficult circumstances, the comprehensive Branch Reports and draft national AGM Motions provide much insight into current events and concerns as Probation enters yet another period of upheaval and uncertainty.

I'm extremely grateful to the reader for forwarding the following and although a long read, I'm sure much will be of interest to the wider probation community as well as staff everywhere trying to cope with many of the same issues covered here. Material has been omitted where I feel it would be of little interest or relevance to a wider audience. 

Motions for National AGM

Motion 1 : Virtual Supervision?

This Branch believes the relationship between a client and their Probation Officer is one best built on face to face contact. This Branch understands the MOJ has recently interviewed some staff currently working from home about the effectiveness of ‘remote’ supervision.

This Branch has been left with the distinct impression the MOJ interviewers had limited knowledge about the depth and skills involved in managing Probation clients and may be seeking ways in which to justify shutting offices and moving towards more remote working outside of COVID recovery. This contradicts the findings of recent Inspection reports criticising various CRC’s for poor risk management via remote supervision.

We believe long term remote working, instead of face to face Supervision, will seriously limit our ability to assess and manage risk and impact on building relationships within which “interventions” and influence can take place. Thereby damaging our effectiveness and our personal and professional reputations.

We instruct NAPO officers and officials to ensure any move to dilute face to face Supervision is vigorously challenged unless backed up by evidence and appropriate training.

Motion 2 : Re-Set Unconscious Bias Training

The Black Lives Matter campaign/movement has highlighted the important issue of race inequality within the Criminal Justice System.

Training should provide the basis of support and knowledge to ensure staff are culturally aware of the diverse needs of the various communities we work with.

This Branch believes that the current NPS E- Learning module on Unconscious Bias is insufficient to effectively challenge or enhance cultural understanding/anti-discriminatory practice within the rich, diverse working environment of Probation and Family Court staff.

This Branch believes, in order, to achieve a level of cultural competence within Probation and the Family Courts we need to have additional class room learning to support, embed and enhance the E-Learning which is on offer. Truly effective race equality/anti-discriminatory practice training requires the opportunity to challenge and exchange individual experiences.

This Branch instructs Napo Officers and Officials to work alongside the Professional and Training Network to impress upon the HMPPS Learning and Development team the need to improve and enhance the learning experiences of all staff in Probation and Family Court settings.

Motion 3 : Homeworking

This Branch believes homeworking, across Probation and Family Court Services is becoming the ‘new normal’ as the result of the pandemic.

This Branch understands whilst homeworking has benefits for many it needs to be recognised not all people are able to work effectively from home and need better support and sometimes adjustments to workloads when required to.

We also note there is a vast difference between voluntary homeworking and lockdown homeworking.

This Branch instructs NAPO Officers and Officials to develop better, inclusive homeworking policies to support all staff under both voluntary and enforced homeworking situations and campaign and negotiate with our relevant organisations for their adoption.

Motion 4 : Prison OM Role Boundaries

This Branch believes probation staff working in prisons are not being properly recognised or valued for their roles and their role boundaries appear to be unclear to many probation, prison and parole board staff and colleagues. We believe all our staff should be equally valued.

This Branch notes redeployment of Prison Probation staff as part of the COVID-19 EDM demonstrated the lack of importance placed on their day to day work by the Organisation. Requests from Parole Boards indicate they are viewed as administrators. Other colleagues have used them as messenger services.

This Branch views reunification as an opportunity to clarify and reinforce the roles and boundaries for Prison Offender Managers.

We instruct the NEC, Officers and Officials and Probation Negotiating Committee to ensure that role boundaries are better defined and communicated to other agencies to ensure instructions and requests are role appropriate.

Motion 5 : Disability Support?

This Branch believes that it is unacceptable that disabled members continue to be discriminated against by our employer.

This Branch understands Disabled staff continue to suffer from significant delays in obtaining agreed equipment for reasonable adjustments. This is leading to unfair treatment with some staff being placed into capability procedures due to the delays. PQiP students continue to be suspended from the programme after 6-12 months of undertaking the training when the service has failed to provide identified equipment designed to level the playing field between disabled and non-disabled PQiP students. We believe this is discriminatory practice that NAPO needs to challenge.

We call on NAPO to ensure Reasonable Adjustments and procurement/purchasing procedures are included and given a high priority in the reunification process. We also call for NAPO to push for the uncoupling of HR policies from those of prisons and for HR policies to return to be the remit of Probation and Family Court only.

Motion 6 : The Rocky Road to Recovery: Health & Safety in the COVID Workplace’

This Branch notes: As we start the recovery stage, there is an unseemly rush to open offices, courts and other premises. Building risk assessments are being undertaken by sometimes Inexperienced managers with little or no health and safety knowledge or experience often without consultation with the union reps.

We believe this places staff and client safety at serious risk as necessary protections are being overlooked in the rush to return to ‘normal working’

This Branch views the recovery as an opportunity to clarify and reinforce the roles and boundaries for Napo H&S reps.

We instruct the NEC, Officers and Officials to ensure that H&S issues are clearly defined and communicated to all managers to ensure that legal requirements are always adhered to.

This Branch instructs Napo to work to ensure that staff safety is paramount in formulating the future move forward from the emergency measures and to take immediate action where this is not happening.

Motion 7 : Paperless Office At What Cost?

The current pandemic has seen a rush to remove filing cabinets. Admin staff are scanning remaining paper files into NDelius and discarding the file contents.

Staff have seen handwritten notes from recent interviews and historic information not included in the ‘documents to be scanned list’ discarded and lost.

This information for the most part is irreplaceable. Repeating an interview due to missing notes can cause damage to the OM /client relationship as well as delays to Parole reports and other assessments that can damage professional reputations.

This Branch believes we need to include the case managers in decisions about what is scanned into the electronic case file. Admin staff need better training and guidance in what information needs to be retained. Case managers need to write notes and there must be a way they can retain them safely until such time, as they are incorporated into their work. We feel this situation could escalate with reunification and the amalgamation of different information from different companies and different working practices.

This Branch calls for Probation negotiators to raise this matter at reunification meetings to improve processes for scanning information whilst retaining hand written information in accordance with Data Protection measures.

Co-Chair CRC Napo London Branch AGM 2020

Introduction

Looking back over the last 12 months it would be an understatement to say that a lot has happened, but we should look back a bit - perhaps not as far as the start of TR in 2014 but rather to 2018. Few people seem to discuss this stuff so if you find politics boring simply skip this bit and feel free to read it whenever you have difficulty sleeping.

A bit of history

In April 2018 Napo secured NPS employees a significant pay rise that sent shock waves around the probation world because most CRC owners were not in a position to match it although some, including MTC, said they would if they could afford it but they could not. July 2018 when the then Justice Secretary David Gauke announced that CRC contracts were to end two years early in 2020, greater alignment between CRC and NPS areas and more money to keep services going we knew that TR1 was pretty much at and end not least because no commercial operation can deal with a couple of years hacked off the end of a contract like probation with no prospect of renewal. The complexities of contract culture make that situation unviable. It certainly was not the u turn many had hoped for, but it was perhaps a sign that the tide appeared to be turning. From a CRC perspective plans to work differently and innovatively that were supposed to be up and running earlier were now being rolled out later with the prospect of being abandoned before they had been completely rolled out and tweaked – but things still trundled on requiring huge efforts from CRC staff in London in particular.

Then just as we were getting used to one change then there was another big change. In May 2019 Gauke made a further announcement tearing up what were termed ‘irredeemably flawed’ reforms. It meant some services returning to the public sector but not all. So began the planning for TR2 with all the great effort that that has taken. Most of us thought that that was as far as the government were willing to go and that although probation was not going to be completely unified at least most of the core work would be undertaken by those working in the public sector with a significant number of staff prepared to stay in the private sector and continue to develop services such as Community Payback and Interventions including programmes and resettlement. However, as evidence continued to stack up that Transforming Rehabilitation had produced enormous problems pressure increased on ministers to act.

Most of the irredeemable problems seemed to be as result of the split in services as well as some service providers attempting to provide services despite the fact, they did not have adequate resources to do so. Commercial operations cannot run without some significant profit or at a loss for long as those with vested interests get twitchy. For the CRC owners there just was not any money in it and it was not sustainable. Probation was always run lean. Although there are ways to run operations leaner commercially using technologies etc when you are delivering a quality service that relies heavily on human relationships to bring about desired changes and you need to keep the workforce happy and motivated in order to work with their emotions effectively you cannot also pile on the work relentlessly and pay your staff less than their friends and colleagues doing a very similar job in the public sector – even if they are pseudo civil servants.

None of us truly thought BREXIT would cause the seismic changes that it subsequently did in the political landscape propelling Boris Johnson to power let alone the impact upon our little corner of the criminal justice system. In July 2019, Robert Buckland (former Solicitor General and Minister for Prisons and Probation and an ardent Remainer turned equally ardent Leaver) was appointed Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor by incoming Prime Minister Boris Johnson for his eventual BREXIT loyalty as Johnson set about purging his new administration of any who were still supportive of remaining in the EU leaving himself a reduced pool of talent. Buckland did at least have experience before taking his place as fifth
Justice Secretary in three years and the first barrister to take the role since Ken Clarke (who was shuffled off to the back benches in 2012).

Buckland was therefore in danger of being the first Justice Secretary since Clarke who knew anything much about the criminal justice system and had actually met probation staff when he was a working lawyer. Another significant development was the appointment of South East Cambridgeshire MP Lucy Frazer who transferred from Solicitor General, a role she had taken up in May, to take up Buckland’s former junior minster brief with responsibility for prisons and probation. Fraser has followed Buckland up the greasy pole. Napo were keenly interested in what might transpire with BREXIT dominating the agenda and little expectation of the Ministry of Justice pushing forward much of a policy agenda. Early indications from Buckland were that he was his own man with his own ideas but most thought that unlike his
predecessors including Gauke and Rory Stewart he was not expected to do anything, brave, surprising, or radical.

The surprise came of course in June 2020 when it was announced that probation services in England and Wales would once again return to the public sector as part the NPS. This was a cause for initial celebration for many, who just want to be back working with their friends and colleagues, but also something of a disappointing blow and not an entirely satisfactory outcome for those who were working hard to establish innovative services that would remain in the private sector and also the growing number of people who dread becoming pseudo civil servants rather than local government officers - but again this development was more than was expected. Others lament the expected loss of CRC developed cutting edge software tools such as OMNIA and do not trust the MoJ to come up with anything as good in the near future.

Consultations

Before the announcement last month there have been several consultations that have taken place over the last 12 months including a reorganisation of CP that resulted in no redundancies for members. The resulting new structure was agreed in consultation with the unions and features strong H&S support. The new structure was broadly welcomed by members and the wider CP staff group. An interventions consultation has just restarted after being put on hold due to COVID

Representations

All members who requested representation and were eligible were at a bare minimum provided with advice and support and usually a much higher level of support. The quality of representations remains high and all representations carried out by Napo Reps in London and indeed Napo’s hard-working National Reps have been conducted with the utmost professionalism getting satisfactory outcomes for members in all but a very small number of instances. We have successfully appealed both disciplinary and ill health retirement matters, helped resolve numerous disputes, and negotiated hard for individual members to get settlements they would not otherwise have been awarded.

Representatives

We are short of union representatives on the CRC side and it is not hard to imagine why there are fewer union reps in a private company than in the public sector. However, we do have activists throughout the CRC that are supportive of the union in other ways without necessarily stepping into the spotlight. I am grateful to Christopher Morris for being an excellent Vice Chair and safe pair of hands and who has taken on every representation task with enthusiasm.

Pay Negotiation

We have made relatively little progress on substantive pay mainly because MTC have not been able to match or come sufficiently close to the NPS pay deal – that remains Napo’s benchmark – despite indicating that they would like to do so. Unions have persuaded MTC to improve upon offers made but the 2017-18 pay settlement remains unsettled and the 2019-20 settlement is still being negotiated. We will continue to discuss with employers how they might be in a position to move closer to matching pay with other CRC’s and with the NPS before transition. The departure from Napo of Assistant General Secretary Dean Rogers did impact on pay negotiations as it does take a while to build up a rapport with employers and Dean’s advice was always invaluable but I am grateful to General Secretary Ian Lawrence for picking up the baton and more recently AGS Annoesjka Valent.

Transition

As you would expect we are engaging with the employers regarding Transition. Everyone in Napo wants a satisfactory Transition agreement that will see a smooth and fair transition. It would be an understatement to say that there is lots to consider, lots of unanswered questions, and lots to do and the months ahead are going to need all the experience and negotiating skills Napo has available as the devil is always in the detail and there are lots of contractual and other complexities to sort out and not many of us to do it. We have some good relations with HR and senior leaders, so I am hopeful we can get through this. The good news is that the employers seem to be realising at this stage that they will very much need the unions on board from the outset at every level of the process or they may risk making their own tasks a lot more onerous. We will of course continue to safeguard the interests of all members and meet every challenge head on.

BLM

One of the more positive things to come out of the appalling murder of George Floyd is that the spotlight has been turned on the criminalisation and negatively differential treatment of BAME people in various jurisdictions including England and Wales. There have been several reports including the Lammy Report and the government’s own statistical analysis but the information available and the recommendations of reports have not been acted upon calling into question the seriousness of successive governments in tackling the problems discussed. What is needed therefore is not another report describing the problems but rather a commitment to act. I am happy that Napo and other trade unions are urging the government to act rather than commission yet another report. I am proud that Napo is a diverse and inclusive union that fearlessly stands up for our members who may have experienced prejudice or discrimination.

H&S + COVID19

Napo in both LCRC and TVCRC have been working with employers and UNISON to safeguard probation staff since March. As you know COVID19 presents a range of challenges not least because there are sometimes conflicting messages from official sources. MTCs response to the crisis has generally been well received by staff. Napo have been key in ensuring that the employers planned actions are pre- discussed, thought through, put safety of staff and Service Users (SUs) first, and are constructive in all cases. One of the positive things about MTC is that it has always invested well in health and safety with top quality H&S staff. This is understandable as CP for example traditionally generates most serious incidents. We also have HR staff in the CRC who are responsive towards what is going on both at the coal face and by policy and decision makers. We can also make decisions rather than being directed that makes managing arrangements to deal with a crisis a little easier.

Operations have continued with essential reporting of SUs taking place at hubs where I am told safety arrangements are working reasonably well. CP is now restarting in earnest, and this has been done in a planned careful and considered way with few concerns raised – there is always a human element and also pressures from further up the chain who may never have worked in CP to do things more quickly. The unions have obtained assurances that no one will be required to work in a workplace that has not been risk assessed and signed off as safe enough. Members can be reassured that safety comes first as we gradually return to business as usual but there is a long way to go and no doubt many more meetings to come. As you would expect the CRC being a little more technically advanced and faster paced in IT implementation are using technology to check on staff and track concerns including a tool called AssessNet that we can recommend.

That is all folks

I could probably go on for another thirty pages, but I really need to stop. I would like to thank all those members, who have been active in Napo as you are the union. We are a better union for you being an active part of it whether you are working in probation or retired. Now is the time to be in a union and encourage others to join. Many thanks to the rest of the Napo team in London and to, Katie, Ian, Annoesjka from big Napo and also Bev & Dean who have been good friends to London Branch over the years and who are missed.

David Raho
CRC Co-Chair London Branch
30/07/2020

Co-Chair’s Report (NPS) for Branch AGM 2020

This is my final report to AGM, in my current capacity as London Branch NPS Co-Chair. I am not sure where four years (two terms) have gone but it’s here.

To say this year has been strange, is an understatement. The last time we all met as a Branch was in November 2019. How I long for those good old days!! If you remember, the Brexit debate was in full swing and a General Election was underway. Well I will not comment about the election results, suffice to say, I was completely disappointed.

On reflection, I think my year became gradually worse, when faced with the reality that our wonderful Beverley Cole, was going to retire in January 2020. In addition to this was the warning notice from Terry Wilson, that he too was leaving to work closer to home.

By the end of December 2019, the world’s attention was drawn to China and the presence of the deadly Coronavirus. By January 2020, we all watched in dread, the spread of this virus as it moved around the world, infecting and killing people at an alarming rate.

Our decision to cancel the March Branch Meeting, was not made lightly. However, it was the right decision to focus on the health, safety and welfare of our members. London went into Lockdown a few days later as the Pandemic took hold.

The Branch reps, witnessed heightened anxieties amongst staff at work. The focus turned to our family/friends and keeping ourselves safe. I know some of us lost close work colleagues/family and friends and faced the reality of the impact of the new rules as it applies to funerals. I believe we have all become accustomed to the “new norm” with its terminologies, of ‘quarantine, self-isolation, shielding and social distancing.

The NPS restructured Service Delivery and implemented the Exceptional Delivery Model (EDM). This allowed staff to work from home, following strict guidelines, in terms of undertaking ‘Planned Telephone Contact’ with Service Users, in line with risks/control measures. I think it is fair to say, that this model brought more challenges to the daily work most Probation staff were already doing. Morning meetings on Skype/Teams, spreadsheets galore and the 4.00pm afternoon deadline became our ‘new norm’. It just seems that someone, somewhere in the centre dreamed up how to make us all work harder during this already stressful period.

HMPPS, issued various guidance covering lots of scenarios during the Lockdown period. However, confusion reigned amongst NPS staff when the notification came out about a range of COVID-19, Special Payments which were set up for Prison, Probation and HMPPS frontline staff. This was further complicated by the provision of an excess hours’ scheme which the NPS could access, but never did in London.

After much discussion HMPPS decided to pay all NPS staff members £150 (danger money) once they are on the rota in a Reporting Centre. True to form HMPPS/SSCL are yet to pay the full back dated amount to staff. It is important to note that Napo did not agree to this payment, as we would have preferred it for everyone to receive some recognition for efforts made during this stressful period.

In term of Branch work, this spiralled through the roof, before and during lockdown. All Napo Branch Officers and Reps have done their best to give timely advice and support to members via emails, telephone calls and over, Skype/Microsoft Teams. The one thing I have learned over the last six months, is the number of meetings one can fit into a day and a single week!!

Most of my 50% facilities time was quickly eroded trying to fit everything in. However, help was on hand from Charron, Peter and Richard, in particular on the NPS side. As a Branch Exec group, we have endeavoured to keep in touch via various social media platforms most Monday’s of every week.

Member Representations:

London continues to be a busy Branch. I have lost count of the number of representations that has come to the Branch. We appear to have a constant stream of colleagues, in need of support, and are subject to various formal HR processes. Attendance Management, Disciplinaries, Grievances and Performance Management continue to be the top four.

Over the past year we have seen an increase in Disciplinary cases from the ‘Early Look’ case review process after a Serious Further Offence. Please be warned that there is no easing of this process on the horizon and NAPO membership has never been more important than it is today. I do believe this Branch prides itself with the high quality of support/advice and representation to members across all staff grades.

Probation Reform – Reunification

The 11th of June 2020 will undoubtedly be a date to remember in Napo’s history. This was the day, the Secretary of State for Justice, Robert Buckland MP formally announced that all Probation Services will be brought back into public ownership, including Unpaid Work and programmes. This was a complete U turn in government policy, and a “we told you so” bitter/sweet victory for Napo.

I know that some CRC colleagues, are not elated or jumping for joy, in terms of joining NPS. However, the one thing to admire is the way this union fought the Government and was literally the lone TU voice in the campaign against Transforming Rehabilitation (TR). The Great Mistake!! All that wasted money which could have been invested into back into the Service and Criminal Justice partnership agencies. I know the fight is not over yet, with more work to come to get the NPS out of the Civil Service and back into the public sector where it belongs.

Probation NPS Pay Award

It was really disheartening to learn in April 2020, that the NPS would not be able to pay the 2020 increment as promised in the 2018 pay modernisation award. In my view Probation always appears to be at the back of the queue, when it comes to our employers paying us what we deserve and on time. This has caused further misery to staff and has served to decrease staff morale. National Napo will continue to raise our pay concerns at the highest levels and we hope the matter is remedied sooner rather than later. They really need to get it right before the Probation Reform programme is completed.

National AGM 2019

National AGM 2019 was in Cardiff in Wales. Whilst we had booked forty rooms at the Travelodge Hotel in Queen Street, 38 members attended and each year I say with pride that we were the largest represented Branch at National AGM and indeed the most active. All London Branch Motions were carried and have become part of NAPO policy 2019/20. I have always gained a sense of pride to see our London members taking an active role by either contributing to the debates or moving motions.

However, it is all change this year. Due to COVID-19, AGM will not take place at Eastbourne in October 2020. The event will be a virtual event, so this will be interesting. I have now cancelled London Branch room booking with the Cavendish Hotel in Eastbourne.

NPS Joint Consultative Committee JCC

I have attended all the scheduled JCC meetings with Charron. Most of these meetings are now held on Teams and became a weekly occurrence during the first two/three months of lockdown.

We have continued to make strong representations on a range of issues regarding practice and workplace employee matters. Over the past four years, I have seen an improvement in the way we engage with the NPS. This Branch also has a good working relationship with our Director Kilvinder Vigurs and her Senior Leadership Team. Whilst it did not happen overnight, steadfast dedication, hard work, commitment and energy has helped to get us to where we are today.

We currently have a Senior Leadership Team that will listen to our concerns when they are formally raised within this forum. I have seen numerous changes in organisational practice, for example more completions of stress risk assessments (SRA), regular RAAP’s/Work place Passport reviews. All London LDU’s are tasked with collating monthly data, re: sickness, grievances, conduct and disciplinaries, so potential unintended trends in inequalities or potential discrimination can be quickly addressed.

In between the JCC meetings London Branch has been invited to participate in several NPS London All Staff Teleconference, which has been another way of raising the visibility/awareness of London Napo Branch and our activities. I have also taken part in an All London NPS BAME staff Teams event, as part of the organisational response to the Black Lives Matter movement. I was recently elected to the post of National Black NEC Rep in earlier this month. I have also contributed to the NPS Wellbeing Magazine, which is available to all NPS staff.

First Tier Trade Union and Management Meetings

It is now two years since NPS Director Kilvinder Vigurs devised a new structure of TU engagement across London with the aim of promoting TU engagement across the London Clusters. She also wanted to embed the practice of TU engagement with her Senior Management Team. These First Tier Meetings gives each respected HoS, the chance to Chair and resolve local employee related issues before the matter is escalated to the main JCC. We still want to encourage more members to become workplace reps to assist us in representing the two Cluster areas groups in London.

Lastly, I wish to congratulate and welcome the incoming NPS Co-Chair Charron Culnane. We have been together for a decade in the Branch and I dare say, we will be together for a few more years to come.

Unity is strength

Patricia Johnson
Branch Co-Chair NPS
30/07/2020

Annual Report - Vice Chair NPS

To say it has been a strange year is an understatement. Our Branch AGM last year was held in a real meeting place, with members able to attend in person with drinks and socialising afterwards. We are starting the new Branch year with a virtual Branch AGM via Zoom and for many of us this is the ‘new normal’.

The main challenge facing us last year was reunification. The challenges facing us now are how we safeguard the lives of all of our members and service users and meet their individual needs during the COVID-19 situation as we progress from lockdown to getting offices re open and staffed again as well as dealing with the reunification process.

The last physical Branch meeting we held was November 22nd 2019, at Mitre House. Understandably we had to cancel the proposed meetings in March and May due to the restrictions placed on public gatherings by COVID-19.

Pay:

As far as I am aware at the time of writing this report there is no news regarding the outstanding NPS pay award. I understand National NAPO are in ongoing negotiations. Emergency payments during Emergency Delivery Measures (EDM) are just for NPS staff who are front facing. This has caused some ill feeling within NPS with those forced to homework who feel undervalued. Our CRC colleagues are also feeling left out. These differences need to be addressed in future as they can lead to discord at a time we need to be unified. The proposed overtime agreements seem a little more inclusive for NPS staff but there was a very short response time that may have led to many not feeling able to participate.

Representations:

Most of my work this year has been supporting members with advice or representations. Initially we used to do the occasional rep meeting via telephone usually when we had been made aware of a meeting at the last minute. Since lockdown all of our representation work has been done over Skype or Teams. This has brought new challenges but seems to be working well in most cases. Usually when I visit an office for a rep case I tend to do a walkabout, introduce myself and NAPO and leave handouts as a means of profile raising. As we are now virtual we can’t do this and are having to find other means of getting NAPO awareness out there and ensure we continue to maintain visibility.

JCC:

Patricia and I have been attending meetings, via Teams, with senior management and our sister Unions on an almost weekly basis during the COVID -19 emergency giving us the platform to discuss safety concerns around new working patterns as well as support and wellbeing for all of the homeworkers and office rota workers delivering EDM. The meetings around reunification have understandably taken a back seat but are now resuming along with regular JCC’s. We have raised many issues brought to us by our members including home working, shielding, the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on BAME staff and problems with individual and workplace risk assessments.

Inductions:

Patricia and I were attending and speaking at corporate inductions in person. By the time of the Branch AGM we will have delivered our 1st virtual induction to PQUIPs. This is a vital means of raising our profile and recruiting new members.

Homeworking:

Most people are working from home now and those attending offices are only there one or two days a week at the moment. We have adapted but issues have arisen that now need new guidance and policies as a response. We have noted there is a world of difference between those who voluntarily work from home and those who have been forced to by the current situation. Some of our members have home environments that are not conducive to home working, and this needs to be acknowledged and supported by our respective Organisations. We have also noticed there is an assumption that if you are working from home you are available for Skype calls/ meetings etc at any time and members have felt pressured to work longer hours in order to justify, what they are doing.

Women:

I attended the Women In NAPO online conference via Zoom on May 20th 2020. This was a well-attended event. It was my 1st experience of a Zoom meeting with more than 10 participants and it was an eye- opening experience. I was very impressed by how well run it was and how smoothly the event was managed. It gives me confidence for our Branch AGM and the National AGM both being held this year on virtual platforms. I look forward to supporting the excellent work our Women’s Staff Liaison Officer. Sharon Brereton, is undertaking regarding raising awareness of the impact of the menopause on working women and the organisation. She has written an excellent article included in this Annual Report.

Black Lives Matter:

My report would not be complete without mentioning the Black Lives Matter campaign. All lives should matter equally. At the moment we are seeing clear evidence we are nowhere near attaining equality and Black lives need more support from everyone. NAPO has long recognised there are issues across all of the areas we cover.

Service Users are disproportionately from BAME backgrounds. Recall figures also demonstrate we are more likely to recall BAME service users. TACT measures are also disproportionate towards BAME clients especially the new measures put in as a response to the most recent London Bridge attack. Our organisational policies stem from a position of white privilege as does our law. The Union constitution is also one written from this viewpoint. NAPO is working with the NAPO Black Network to look at how we can recognise and remove any inherent racism in our system. NPS London already monitors the ethnicity of staff involved in organisational processes, there is work ongoing about SPDR’s and whether they discriminate against our BAME staff. There is also work ongoing about the impact of COVID -19 on staff from Black and Asian backgrounds in particular and how we can best protect and manage them during the ‘recovery’ period. The Unions are involved in all of this work and will continue to raise issues affecting our Black, Asian and other Ethnic Minority members. We are still at the ‘committee’ stage for a lot of this work and understandably many of our Black members are telling us we should be seeing action plans now not just talk. I want to thank Beverley Smith our Black Staff Liaison Rep for all her help and sage advice. I have a feeling we will be working very closely over the coming year.

National AGM:

I sit on National Steering Committee whose role it is to arrange business at AGM. This includes checking motions, allocating them to various committees or networks, compositing and arranging orders of business as we as overseeing Stewarding arrangements, ballots, emergency motions and constitutional advice for the AGM Chairs as well as timing and recording proceedings. This year is going to be a brand new challenge as we hold the 1st virtual AGM via a host platform. All of our Steering meetings have been via Zoom this year and we have got used to working in this way very quickly. Not bad considering the average age of Steering is 60+ If we can get used to new tech anyone can.

Farewells:

We have had to say farewell to several people who have passed away from COVID related issues this year from NPS and CRC’s across AP’s Court, Offender Management and the Prison Service. We have also lost friends and colleagues to non COVID causes whose loss we cannot mourn due to COVID restrictions. I will not name names but they will all be deeply missed and our thoughts are with their families at this exceptionally difficult time. One of the things NAPO has requested is when we do get back to ‘normal’ a memorial service is held to honour and celebrate all of those we have lost during this time.

Charron Culnane
NPS Vice Chair
20/07/2020

NPS Health & Safety Convenor Report for London Napo AGM 2020

This year has become all about COVID-19, the management response to it and trying to make sure that all members are being treated fairly and are safe, whether they are working at home or in the office. I have been working from home since the end of March and have been involved in H&S issues at the highest level within London NPS. All in all, I believe that we have managed to get the best possible outcomes for staff in terms of safety and preserving health across the region. Thankfully, the number of Covid-related casualties has been relatively low but we continue to be vigilant as the English government recklessly pursues policies which appear to be based on economic rather than public health reasons. Napo and Unison are both involved in policy and decision making ensuring that staff are best looked after. We are hoping to get more members involved in Covid based H&S work over the coming weeks.

In the longer term, it appears that there may be a shift towards more home working for staff and I have been pleasantly surprised that the NPS has been providing staff with all the equipment necessary for safer home working over the past few months. That said, I realise that people are finding home working difficult. Lack of space, lack of real contact with colleagues and the high levels of work are causing a great deal of stress and potential mental health problems to individuals and we are trying to stress the prevalence of this to management. The continued obsession with unrealistic targets throughout the pandemic is a great cause of stress and anxiety to many and this coupled with worry and anxiety about the virus has been taking its toll on staff. There are also many people who have not yet received the equipment they need for safe home working for a variety of reasons and this has resulted in a great many people suffering from musculo-skeletal problems. It is really important that everybody completes the Accident & Incident forms whenever they have problems as otherwise it is impossible to know the real extent of the problem and be able to raise it with management. One of the issues which has been raised is the disparity across the LDUs in terms of the management response to the EDM arrangements and staff wellbeing. These problems are now at the highest management level and we continue to hope that all managers will work to the policies rather than behave in a ‘maverick’ fashion, often to the detriment of their staff.

Prior to the pandemic, inspection of offices across London continued and the probation estate was generally in a sorry state. It does not appear to be getting any better although several offices have been closed, at least to NPS staff. However, some of those acting as hubs have been a concern with some offices having to be deep cleaned on more than one occasion since the EDM came into being. Conditions for staff continue to be unacceptable with some offices in serious states of disrepair. Heating and ventilation problems, rodent and insect infestations and just plain dirtiness still prevail unfortunately.

Overall, we still need at least another H&S rep in London as the volume of work is too much for one rep. There are currently negotiations with management regarding the need for Covid specific reps and the need for facility time.

As previously mentioned, workplace stress continues to be a major issue as does the issue of back problems being experienced by staff carrying around computers and performing ‘agile’ working. It is of great importance that members fill in Accident and Incident forms for all incidents and injuries including stress. I repeat from last year’s report that Kilvinder Vigers has said that the NPS has a duty of care to all employees wherever they are working whether the place is an NPS building or not; this includes staff homes now that many of us are actually working from our homes due to shielding etc.

The putting together of the CRC and NPS is going to be a huge exercise with regard to health & safety and one which does appear to have been acknowledged by senior management. The changes will also have an impact on the organisation of the Napo branch which, in terms of H&S and all other areas, will take into account the new structures.

I’d like to thank Ian Lander from the NPS for his swift response to requests and other issues throughout the year and particularly with regard to the Covid-19 issues. Also a big thanks to the other branch officers for their support and patience with me as I finally get to grips with remote meeting platforms such as Zoom and Skype. All these virtual meetings are fine but I really look forward to the time when I can meet you all in reality!! Even if we do have to socially distanced!!

I’d also like to thank the growing number of members who are contacting me regarding breaches of health & safety, as without them, many issues would be unknown, particularly at the moment when it is not possible for me to actually visit the offices.

Let’s hope the next year is less stressful and anxious than this one

Peter Halsall,
NPS H&S Convenor London Branch
Date: 30/06/2020

NAPO London Branch AR/ERO Annual Report

This is my first full year in post and it has certainly been a potentially progressive year. For society to require the death of a man for it to seem to start listening to the Black Lives Matter protests is a travesty and one many of us have seen gain momentum in previous decades to fade away with little progress being made. However, this feels different and I sincerely hope momentum can be maintained to make serious and long term sustainable change.

The COVID-19 crisis has added to the debate regarding disadvantage caused through links to protective characteristics and the undeniable data linking Black Asian and Minority Ethnic staff to an increased mortality rate need to be continually debated as to why. The argument linking disadvantages associated with protective characteristics to poverty, limited opportunities, crowded accommodation, multi-generational families living together as well as many other issues all relate to increased risk to COVID-19. To be a fully inclusive company lessons have to be learnt regarding all the disadvantages faced by people with protected characteristics so that plans can be put into place to make a move towards a more representative work force. There are ongoing issues that need to be resolved related to Black Asian and Minority Ethnic staff and staff with disabilities being disproportionately represented in staff receiving a ‘needs improvement’ grading in SPDR’s. This is an area that needs to be continuously discussed with senior management about what will be put into place to learn lessons and address this problem to understand why this is the situation. This will be an ongoing issue for me over the next twelve months.

There is an increasing amount of attention being paid by our employer to the wellbeing of us as employees, I’m pleased to say I have input into the monthly Wellbeing Core Groups and will be making clear points about how unfair treatment of employees with protected characteristics is a clear link to deteriorating emotional wellbeing with our members. It is unacceptable that members wait 6, 12 and sometimes 18 months for equipment for Reasonable Adjustments to be in place. It is further unacceptable that members are put on Performance Improvement Plans when Reasonable Adjustments are not in place or the Service has failed to purchase equipment to address disadvantage. This will be a focus of my work in the coming year and I intend to take a collective (anonymous) list of examples of this poor treatment of members with disabilities to the attention of Senior Managers to ensure that as a Service we are compliant with the Equality Act 2010. We cannot fulfil the MOJ’s desire to achieve Equality Accreditation if this practise continues. I hope I have your support to bring such examples to my attention at the earliest opportunity because if we address these issues early they are easier to resolve.

The branch has also paid for me to attend the National Discrimination Law Conference in January 2020. This was a fascinating opportunity which has provided me with a wealth of information related to legal precedents of discrimination cases lost by employers at Employment Tribunals to show the Service that their decisions are putting them in a vulnerable position. This has been a very effective way of making change happen.

Thank you for your time in reading this report and your ongoing support to make Probation an inclusive and supportive employer as we all deserve.

How about this, it is a bit of a political rant but it says exactly what I expect to be tackling in the coming twelve months.

Richard Clark
Disability Advocacy and Wellbeing Network (DAWN)
Area Lead for Probation: London
Date: 09/07/2020