How Can The Circle Be Squared?

So, here's the thing. No mention of Probation Officers or Probation Services Officers any more. OMiC is talking about 'Key Workers' and TOM is talking about 'Probation Practitioners'. As the job continues to change beyond recognition, role boundaries are are disappearing. But as the HMPPS bureaucrats tighten their grip, I want to pose what I see as a fundamental philosophical question that goes to the heart of things. If TOM expects this:- 

i) Build a trusting relationship to promote compliance, increase hope and sustain motivation. To achieve this, the Probation Practitioner will: 

▲ Build a positive, collaborative and trusting relationship that communicates respect and encourages self-respect. 

▲ Express confidence in the individual’s ability to give up crime and make different choices. 

▲ Build motivation and a sense that they (the individual subject to probation services) have a role in managing their rehabilitation. The period of supervision should allow the individual to become an increasingly active participant. 

▲ Be realistic that it can take time to change life-long patterns of behaviour and underlying problems, so expect relapses and don’t give up hope. 

▲ Recognise and reward efforts to give up crime and encourage and reinforce positive change.

and this is to be delivered as part of HMPPS as a civil servant within the MoJ, a ministerial department of the British Government and at the same time the following is going on in another ministerial department of the British Government, how exactly does a 'Probation Practitioner' square this particular circle? Not only how do they sit comfortably within this governmental structure, how do they earn the trust and respect of the people they work with when this is going on:- 

DWP accused of offering disabled people 'take it or leave it' benefits 

'Cover-up': DWP destroyed reports into people who killed themselves after benefits were stopped

Or the story in the Guardian I personally found the most distressing:-  

'Judge me fairly': man who starved to death's plea to welfare officials

Errol Graham, a desperately ill man who died of starvation when his benefits were cut off, wrote a moving letter pleading with welfare officials to “judge me fairly” because he was overwhelmed by depression. The handwritten letter, seen by the Guardian, was released by Graham’s family as they launched a legal attempt to prove that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) acted unlawfully and put him at risk by failing to put in place effective safeguards to protect vulnerable benefit claimants.

His relatives say Graham’s letter is a heartfelt and humble attempt to describe the agony of his long-standing mental illness, which left him frequently lonely, cold and hungry. It was never sent, but was discovered in his flat by his family after he died, aged 57, in June 2018.

The letter describes how illness turned Graham, a keen footballer in his younger days and a doting grandfather, into a withdrawn and anxious person for whom daily life became a torment. “On a good day I open my curtains, but mostly they stay shut,” he wrote. “I find it hard to leave the house on bad days. I don’t want to see anyone or talk to anyone. It’s not nice living this way.”

His family’s legal action piles fresh pressure on the the government, which is already facing demands from MPs and campaigners to launch a public inquiry into benefit-related deaths amid concerns that hundreds of vulnerable people may have died in recent years after their payments were stopped. Alison Turner, Graham’s daughter-in-law, said: “The government owes it to Errol, his family and the country to explain why the DWP has failed repeatedly to learn from these tragedies over many years. We need an independent public inquiry.”

A pre-action letter from lawyers for Graham’s family has been sent to the work and pensions secretary, Thérèse Coffey. It says that although the DWP knew Graham was highly vulnerable, it failed to take reasonable steps to obtain evidence that his health had improved before removing his only source of income because he had failed to turn up to an appointment.

“In consequence there was a real risk, of which the DWP knew or ought to have known, that terminating his benefits would put him in serious danger. The decision to terminate [his benefits] deprived him of the means to live, and led to him slowly starving to death. It caused him inhuman and degrading suffering,” the pre-action letter says.

Although the DWP was aware many vulnerable claimants had died after their benefits were withdrawn, it had failed to identify and correct flaws in its safeguarding guidance to staff, the letter adds. “Over 20 months on from Mr Graham’s death (and nine months on from the inquest) … decisions carrying a risk of death continue to be made based on scant and insufficient information.”

A National Audit Office report published this month found the DWP had investigated at least 69 suicides linked to benefits problems since 2014 although the true figure is likely to be much higher. It said that despite this there was no evidence the DWP had learned from its reviews or improved its processes.

In Graham’s note, which is believed to have been prepared for his DWP assessor, he describes how his illness had made him reclusive. He believed no one would understand his illness and was terrified that DWP officials might rule he was fit for work.

“Sometimes I can’t stand to even hear the washing machine, and I wish I knew why,” he wrote. “Being locked away in my flat I feel that I don’t have to face anyone, at the same time it drives me insane. I think I feel more secure on my own with my own company, but wish it wasn’t like that.” He adds: “All I want in life is to live normally, that would be the answer to my prayers.”

Graham’s emaciated body, weighing just 28kg (62lb), was discovered by bailiffs sent to evict him eight months after all his benefits were stopped because of his failure to attend a fitness for work assessment. His Nottingham flat had no gas or electricity supply and no food apart from two out of date tins of fish. His family argue Graham would be still alive had the DWP, which flagged him up on their systems as highly vulnerable, taken more care of a man it was aware had a history of severe depression and anxiety, self-harm and suicide attempts.

Officials failed to take reasonable steps to establish the state of his health before taking the drastic decision to remove his benefits, they argue. Having done that they in effect washed their hands of him without bothering to contact family, police or Graham’s GP to explain what had happened, they say.

The letter to Coffey by the family’s lawyers, Leigh Day, says: “Terminating benefits is a momentous decision which will often deprive the claimant of the means to survive. It is obvious that withdrawing benefits for a vulnerable claimant who has no other means to live may lead to his/her death.”

The DWP argued at Graham’s inquest last June that it had followed its processes and policies to the letter, according to a transcript seen by the Guardian. An official told the court it had done “the maximum” to try to contact Graham before stopping his benefits.

It said it had written to Graham to ask why he had not attended the assessment, made three unanswered phone calls and texts, and made two “safeguarding” visits to his flat on successive days, which elicited no response; having failed to make contact with Graham it had fulfilled its duties and stopped his benefits.

Asked by the coroner whether this was a reasonable decision to take about someone it knew to have a long history of serious mental illness, the DWP official replied: “I think at the time with what we had, yes, it was unfortunately sad, but the right decision … for us to have made.”

Tessa Gregory, of Leigh Day, said it was alarming that this was DWP safeguarding at its best. “This isn’t a case about DWP officials who made one-off mistakes, it is a case about a government department whose policies and systems are tragically and systematically failing the vulnerable people they are meant to protect.”

The pre-action letter said DWP policy and guidance was in breach of its duties under the Equality Act, which requires it to make reasonable adjustments to ensure vulnerable and disabled claimants are not disadvantaged by its rules and regulations.

A DWP spokesperson said: “Our sympathies are with Mr Graham’s family. It would be inappropriate to comment further at this time.”

--oo00oo--

It's clear to me the circle cannot be squared. 'Probation' as a concept, a profession, an honourable and once-proud endeavour, borne of charitable goodwill and concern for mankind over 100 years ago, has absolutely no place at all in HMPPS and must regain it's former distinct identity, quasi-independence and local accountability. If it does not, then surely it is simply destined to become yet another part of the problem. 

TR According to Chris Grayling

I notice the Institute for Government have published an interview with Chris Grayling about his time as Minister for Justice and hence responsible for the omnishambles that was TR:-

Tim Durrant (TD): You worked in a number of roles in the shadow cabinet before the 2010 election. Did they inform your time in government?

CG: Yeah, basically the jobs I did in government and the jobs I did in opposition married up almost totally. I was in the Home Office rather than in justice, but basically the jobs I’ve done in government have been the jobs I did in opposition, so there’s been a very close correlation. In none of them have I turned up as a total stranger.

Nick Davies [ND]: In September 2012, you became secretary of state for justice and lord chancellor. Can you talk us through the appointment process, the conversation you had with the prime minister, whether it was something you were expecting?

CG: I thought it was quite a good possibility because there was a lot of commonality with the reforms I’d been talking about [at DWP]. The coalition agreement envisaged a fairly similar approach in employment and in the rehabilitation of offenders. I had not been involved in shaping the justice piece in opposition, but I had been involved in shaping the work and pensions piece in opposition, so there was an obvious correlation between the work I’d been doing in DWP and the work David Cameron asked me to do in justice. And David Cameron gave the standard, you know, “come along, see the prime minister,” and he said, “I’d like you to go to justice.” He gave me two instructions, he said, “firstly, I want you to deliver the rehabilitation revolution commitment in the coalition agreement,” because his view was that it hadn’t really been delivered. Both the Conservative manifesto and the coalition agreement envisaged a significant outsourcing of the rehabilitation of offenders. And he also said, “I want you to get rid of the soft justice narrative,” which had been quite visible in the previous couple of years.

ND: What lessons did you take from overseeing the work programme to the implementation of TR [transforming rehabilitation]?

CG: I think the big difference between the two, both big reforms, both requiring a little bit of tweaking once they got up and running, is that in the case of the DWP, the team who had set up the work programme were still there. Whereas in 2015, pretty much everybody who had been involved in the transforming rehabilitation programme left. The ministers all left, the senior officials all left, and it did not get the tweaking and fine-tuning that it needed. In both cases, in the case of the DWP and the MoJ [Ministry of Justice], the statisticians got their numbers wrong. They misjudged the number of referrals that the third-party contractors would get. In the case of the DWP, they were able to make early adjustments to the contracting structure to make sure that wasn’t an issue, and by the time the programme finished, an analysis in 2016 said it had outperformed the expectations of the department based on previous programmes, and at a lower cost than previous programmes. With transforming rehabilitation, from what I could see, they sat there like rabbits in the headlights, saying: “Well, I don’t quite know what we do about this.” The referrals were much lower than expected to the outsourced companies, whose business models then were fatally weakened from the start, and they didn’t make the adjustments they needed to make earlier on.

ND: Knowing what you know now, is there anything that you would do differently to avoid some of those problems?

CG: Yeah. I think, with hindsight, it’s an interesting problem. Arriving halfway through a parliament with a mandate to deliver major reform sets you, to some extent, a timetable. You might think two years and nine months was more than enough to deliver reforms, and in most worlds it would be. But the public sector moves pretty slowly and there’s huge amounts of process involved. I would probably have done it in stages, I wouldn’t have just done one pilot in one part of the country. Because for transforming rehabilitation there had been a pilot in Peterborough of outsourcing the support of offenders to the private and voluntary sectors, which had a measurable impact on the level of re-offending. But I’d probably have done it in two or three stages.

ND: What was the advice from the civil service like on the programme?

CG: Oh, they were very hard working on it. There is a myth floating around that the civil service advised against it, which is not true. The civil service, at all stages, was very, very engaged in delivering it.

ND: More generally, what are the key challenges entailed by taking the step up from minister of state to secretary of state, and what was the support like for you from the civil service when you moved up?

CG: Pretty good. I think the key difference is you suddenly take on financial responsibility in a way that you don’t necessarily as minister of state. The financial position at the Ministry of Justice was very challenging. We had to take out something like a third of the budget over a three-year period. That was implementing reforms that Ken Clarke [the previous secretary of state for justice] had legislated for but not done, so most of the cuts in legal aid had been legislated for before I arrived but came into force on my watch. So, the budget pressures were enormous. Actually, one of the great hidden facts about probation is that the probation reforms insulated the probation service from what would have been significant budget cuts, because we were looking to expand the remit of the probation service to incorporate all the short-sentence prisoners. The Treasury did not insist on significant cuts in the way they did with the prison service, legal aid and the courts. So, I think the dominant feature of my time as secretary of state for justice was huge budget pressures. One of the great ironies, which wasn’t spotted at the time, was that because Michael Gove [Grayling’s successor as secretary of state for justice] was due to be George Osborne’s campaign manager in his leadership bid, when Michael took over as secretary of state the department’s budget went up by £500m, which took away a lot of the budget pressures we’d been dealing with in the last 12 months.

ND: Given those pressures, what was your approach like in managing a team of ministers and how did you go about identifying priorities for the department and the team?

CG: Well, the first thing I did was decide to not privatise the prisons. What I inherited from Ken Clarke was a rolling programme of prison privatisation but, looking at the plan, it was very clear to me that whilst it theoretically delivered savings, those didn’t arrive until the mid-2020s, which wasn’t a lot of use for us back then. I had bids from the private sector, but I also had a counterbid from the in-house team, from prison governors and prison unions, to run the prison service according to a different template. They took what they saw as best practice from across the estate and applied it to the prisons that were in line for privatisation, saying: “We can deliver for you.” The savings were smaller, but they were more immediate. So, the decision I took was to stop the privatisation process of the prisons but to say to the governors, “what I need you to do is to put in place the benchmarking that you’re talking about for these prisons more broadly across the estate, because that’s the only way I can meet the financial targets without really driving aggressive privatisation,” which I didn’t think was right.

ND: You mentioned the injection of cash the department received under Michael Gove. Can you describe what relations were like between you and Number 10, and the Treasury, during the time you were at MoJ?

CG: Generally, pretty good. Probation reform, as far as Number 10 and the Cabinet Office were concerned, was a priority. I mean, Nick Clegg described it in one cabinet meeting as one of the most important reforms the coalition was doing. This was a fairly fundamental part of the coalition agreement, the rehabilitation revolution, and so Number 10 was always very keen and positive about it. The Treasury was fine and helpful but process; everything takes a very long time.

TD: What would your advice be for ministers dealing with those two parts of government, the Treasury and Number 10?

CG: Try and remain friendly with everyone. I don’t believe great bust-ups in Whitehall help. Understand where they’re coming from, have good relations with the other ministers. Although it does annoy the civil service sometimes when ministers phone each other up and agree things without the civil service being present! But just maintain good relations all around, would be my best advice.

TD: You mentioned earlier you’d visited a large proportion of the prison estate. What can you take from those visits as a minister, how does it inform your decision making in Whitehall?

CG: Well, what it does is it shows you the reality of life on the ground. For example, you are always dealing with accusations that the prison estate is overcrowded. I mean, in all the briefs I’ve had there’s usually a relentless attack from the left, who want the world to look very different. If you’ve done a walk around the prisons to see what it’s like and you’re told the prisons are hideously overcrowded, well yes, it is true that we did not provide a single cell for every prisoner, but it would have been impossible to do so. So, the question is, are we putting people in completely inhuman conditions, given these are prisons? And most of the estate was, in my judgement, sufficiently okay to be justifiable. Some of the older estate improved very little. In fact, I closed more prisons than any other justice secretary has ever done, or home secretary has ever done, and some of the ones I closed were a problem. There was one on the Isle of Wight in particular that I went around and thought: “I’m glad I’ve closed this because it’s not fit for use as a prison.”

You Pay Your Money and Take Your Choice

Seeing as the General Election campaign starts in earnest today and responding to suggestions that I broaden the scope of the blog a bit, lets take a look at one aspect of life under the 'nasty' party in austerity Britain and that particularly affects many of our probation clients: benefit sanctions.

I was interested to see that the issue came top of Guerilla Policy's most read blogs of 2014 and that the Tory faithful are really proud of Iain Duncan Smith's 'tough' approach at the DWP. Here's Peter Oborne writing on Christmas Eve in the Torygraph:-

The sheer scope and audacity of its ambition take the breath away. Cameron and Clegg have reshaped the relationship between individual and state in a way which neither Margaret Thatcher nor Tony Blair ever dared to do. Iain Duncan Smith’s achievement at the Department for Work and Pensions, in particular, has been monumental. He is returning social security to the arrangement envisaged by Sir William Beveridge in his famous 1944 White Paper.

Mr Duncan Smith has liberated hundreds of thousands of people from the humiliation of state dependency and given them the opportunity to live independent, responsible and fulfilling lives. His historic reforms, as evidence is now showing, have changed the dynamics of the British job market, removing many of the obstacles which used to prevent men and women from moving from benefits into work and thus reducing the long-term rate of unemployment.

The economic significance of this is profound, but the human importance in terms of restored dignity and self-worth is beyond calculation.

But by way of astonishing contrast, the Observer highlights the cost:-

Suicides highlight the grim toll of benefits sanctions in austerity Britain

Less than two years ago, 50-year-old David tried to take his own life in a council house in Salford. You can still see the scars when he stretches out his arm to light a roll-up cigarette.

“Everything just builds up after a while. I was walking around thinking where I was going to get money from, what [was] I going to do about the kids, how was I going to survive?” says David, as his two daughters sit quietly next to him on the sofa. “I’ve been through the bins and all sorts, trying to make ends meet. I’m not proud of it, but needs must at times.”

David’s story is not uncommon in austerity Britain. In July 2013, David Clapson, 59, was found dead in his flat in Stevenage from diabetic ketoacidosis, two weeks after his benefits were cut. And new information provided by the Disability News Service via a freedom of information request has uncovered that the Department for Work and Pensions has carried out 60 peer reviews following the deaths of customers. A peer review, according to the DWP guidance for employees, must be undertaken when suicide is associated with DWP activity to ensure that any DWP action or involvement with the person was appropriate and procedurally correct.

This week the work and pensions select committee will hold its first oral evidence session for its inquiry into benefits sanctions policy following last year’s limited Oakley review.

Many of those visiting Salford Central food bank, run by the Trussell Trust, have experienced benefits sanctions. The refuge provides half a tonne of food each week to Salford’s residents and was expected to have fed more than 3,500 individuals by the end of 2014. More than 60% of those who come there have had their benefits sanctioned, according to an internal report by Salford city council. The report concluded that sanctioning could lead to extreme hardship, reliance on loan sharks, shoplifting and depression.

“A lot of people at the moment are just struggling to make ends meet. We’re here in a moment of crisis,” says 41-year-old Scott Tulloch, the local food bank coordinator. “We had a gentleman walk seven miles for three days’ worth of food and then walk seven miles back. Another family who came through the doors couldn’t even afford nappies for their child and were actually using a carrier bag and kitchen paper. Things are tough.”

Peter Oborne's proud reference to IDS returning to the principles of the Beveridge era are nicely unpicked in this blog:- 

This may illicit hollow laughs all round, but it highlights something I have heard a lot over the last four years from people who like to talk about ‘something for nothing culture’ or ‘dependency’. These people say the welfare state should come with responsibilities – the responsibility to look for work (or jump through whatever hoops some bright spark at Policy Exchange or whichever the latest fashionable Thinktank may be can come up with). To ‘get back to Beveridge’ then we need more conditions attached, workfare, sanctions and jobseeker ‘contracts’ to ensure those responsibilities are enshrined.

What these people forget though is that alongside his proposals for the welfare state and the responsibility on individuals – or social service state as Beveridge himself preferred – he also set out the responsibilities on government with regard to the economy which would ensure this social service state could function as designed. A prerequisite was full employment. Beveridge actually wrote three reports, although we only ever really talk about the first.

His second was entitled “Full Employment in a Free Society”. A summary of the report written by Beveridge himself has been reproduced here, and is quite an interesting read. His recommendations on economic policy are pretty far removed from those asking for a return to the principals of Beveridge today. He writes:

“The first condition of full employment is that total outlay [spending] should always be high enough to set up a demand for products of industry which cannot be satisfied without using the whole man-power of the country; only so can the number of vacant jobs be always as high or higher than the number of men looking for jobs…

…Who is to ensure that the first condition, or adequate total outlay at all time, is satisfied? The answer is that it must be made a responsibility of the State. No one else has the requisite powers; the condition will not get satisfied automatically. It must be a function of the State in future to ensure adequate total outlay and by consequence to protect its citizens against mass-unemployment, as definitely as it is now the function of the State to defend the citizens against attack from abroad and against robbery and violence at home.”

He then goes on to write about how governments should budget, rejecting balanced budget mantras by saying:

“What is the essence of the new budgetary policy required for full employment? It is, first, that the Budget becomes in the fullest sense a National Budget, designed to guide and influence and guide the activities of the whole nation, and not simply to raise taxes and spend them on the purposes of the Central Government. It is, second, that the Budget is made with reference to available man-power, not to money; that it becomes, in Mr Bevin’s phrase, a “human budget”.”

He then writes, which chimes quite strongly with some things we see today:

“To submit to unemployment or slums, or want, to let children grow hungry or the sick and old untended, for fear of increasing the internal national debt is to lose all sense of proportion”

Much as the Conservatives boast of ‘creating’ 1.75m new jobs and of returning the welfare state to the principals of Beveridge, the truth is they (and let’s face it the other parties too), have abandoned one of Beveridge’s key messages and full employment and where responsibility for its achievement and maintenance lie. Left to the market, the quality of job creation has been poor and still vastly short of what’s required.

But according to Peter Oborne in the Telegraph:- 

David Cameron has an impressive story to tell as the election approaches. He has led a remarkable government with some outstanding achievements to its credit. Its historic talk of reform and consolidation is not yet complete. He and his colleagues deserve the chance to finish the social revolution they launched five years ago.

Especially in election year, 'you pays your money and takes your choice'.