It will not surprise my hon. Friend to know that I do agree. I visited the pilots when they commenced and was impressed with the entrepreneurial attitude taken by trust chief execs and by the desire to
make them work. For all that the professionals involved had misgivings, the desire in the probation service to make whatever it is dealt work for the benefit of victims of crime and the offenders it works with is quite overwhelming. It is such a shame that those very organisations that have developed to become quite outstanding are going to be abolished.
Lord Ramsbotham said that the time scale paid no attention to practical reality and he is absolutely right. The Chair of the Justice Committee has said that there are
“significant risks in the pace at which the government intend to implement the programme.”
The Minister’s own officials describe the timetable as “aggressive” and a number of probation trust chairs have written publicly to the Secretary of State to advise that he must delay his plans or risk inevitable public protection failures. The chairs of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Warwickshire probation trusts have, in turn, warned that the timetable is risky and unrealistic and has serious implications for service delivery.
The Ministry of Justice’s own assessment of the implications for service delivery are bleak. A leaked copy of the Department’s risk register reported an over 80 per cent. chance of an
“unacceptable drop in operational performance.”
We have been over this—I have lost count of the number of times that the Minister and I have had this conversation —so I know he will reply that it is not the Government’s practice to publish departmental risk registers. But as the information is already out there, does he not think that it would be beneficial for the Secretary of State to come to the House to discuss the possible risks with Members? I would like to know what an
“unacceptable drop in operational performance”
might look like when we are talking about the supervision of dangerous offenders in the community.
The area of the proposals that has raised the most professional concern is the issue of risk management itself. These are people who are in the risk management business. The Government’s plans will fragment the service and split up offenders based on their category of risk, with low and medium-risk offenders being managed by new providers while those deemed to be high risk stay with the public sector. The problem with that split is that risk is not static and regularly shifts. Around a quarter of offenders change risk category during their order and they do not just change it once or in incremental steps. Low risk can become high risk almost instantaneously if an offender’s circumstances change. The Government are institutionalising into this system a break, which we think is dangerous, where offenders whose risk escalates will have to be handed over to a different provider at the moment they are most volatile, with all the risk that that brings in terms of time delays and communication failures, which we know from other areas cause real problems. That is an unnecessary and, worse, a dangerouslayer of bureaucracy that the Government should be doing all they can to avoid. The chief inspector of probation has warned that
“any lack of contractual or operational clarity between the public and private sector will, in our view, lead to systemic failure and an increased risk to the public.”
We find that deeply concerning.
1.45 pm
The Minister has previously given assurances that providers and the national probation service will be collocated to ease handovers but I am not hugely comforted by that. He cannot guarantee that that will be the case in a few years’ time when providers have taken over their own office management; of course he cannot. Anyway, does being in the same building mean that an officer of the national probation service will have the time to monitor the entirety of a community rehabilitation company’s cohort as well as their own case load? It is just not realistic. Will the national probation service be guaranteed the resources and capacity to take over quite a high percentage of CRC cases if that is what it needs to do? We are not reassured, and neither is the profession, that that will be the case.