Despite what the Justice Secretary tried to argue at the beginning of his speech, the Bill is part of a wider programme that changes probation services as well as how the offenders with which they deal are handled. As such, it is important to understand the background of the Bill in order to understand its intent, the provisions and the wider programme.
To do that, it is necessary to look at the policy routes of the consultation reports that precede the Bill. The coalition’s first criminal justice consultation—“Breaking the Cycle”—was in December 2010. It promised to open up probation services to the market. The second report, of July 2011, proposed six new pilots of a payment-by-results method and at the same time pledged not a comprehensive rehabilitation strategy for offenders, nor a comprehensive reoffending rates reduction strategy, but a
“a comprehensive competition strategy for…probation services”.
There is an obsession with the market, competition and privatisation. This is not the means to an end; it is the end. It is the purpose of the Justice Secretary’s programme—that and perhaps burnishing his credentials with the wilder right-wing of the Conservative party for the future.
If the policy end was to reduce reoffending rates for short-term prisoners, the means are in place—probation trusts, which have been responsible for overseeing falling reoffending rates for those they have supervised for 13 years.