More on the Offender Management Bill

In the run-up to last Wednesday's Third Reading of the Offender Management Bill, the prisons minister Gerry Sutcliffe was on the Today programme to support the legislation. The Probation Boards Association website has a transcript (a pdf file) of the piece, with Martin Sergeant of the PBA given a chance to have his say about the Bill.

As we have now come to expect from this Government, the minister rather disingenuously painted the Bill's opponents as being against any change of any hue, completely dismissing a number of very valid concerns about the proposed reforms. If he, or his boss, actually bothered paying any attention to the criticisms that have been levelled (something like 99% of the responses received to the White Paper were critical, let's remember), they would discover that actually there isn't a great deal of opposition to new ideas and new methods of working. Probation officers do actually want to try to prevent re-offending - that's why we're in the job - and the service has a proud tradition of innovative work with offenders. However, this has been lost over the last decade or so after a series of reforms brought Probation under much greater centralised control, and subject to National Standards, targets and so on.

This is, as I'm sure I've said before, precisely the problem with the Offender Management Bill. Yes, there are a good number of non-state organisations trying to do work with offenders, particularly in prisons. In the past I've mentioned St Giles Trust, and the Inside Out Trust are another good example of positive work being done in partnership with the statutory services.

However, the Government has completely missed the point that their work has been a success not because of central control, but because of individual governors and the organisations themselves identifying a need and finding a solution to it. The Offender Management Bill removes control of commissioning services from probation boards, and places it in the grasping hands of the Home Secretary, who then devolves it to the ten Regional Offender Managers. Neither NOMS nor the ROMS can possibly have any idea of what the problems are at a local level - the ROMS' responsibilities will cover vast geographical areas, lumping them all in together - and they will simply end up driving through Service Level Agreements with big private companies like Group 4 and Securicor, and the few charitable/voluntary sector organisations that can cope at that scale. Smaller and more specialised groups, which may have been operating very successfully for some time but on a very specific and localised level, will be squeezed out because of the competition; the playing field is only level for those with the biggest teams.

If this bill was genuinely about improving the work that is done with offenders, it would devolve more power to probation officers, not reduce it by centralising control, and give us more authority - and more money, of course - to identify services for offenders as individuals, rather than threaten our jobs and sap our morale. We want to innovate, we want to work with offenders in the most effective ways that we can to protect the public and to reduce re-offending; but we're constrained by inflexible central government targets and bureaucracy.

Despite all this, and contrary to the image that is put out by ministers, we still manage to perform well against those targets, and re-offending rates are coming down. I noticed a very even-handed report in The Economist this week: I'd expected it to be in favour of the bill and in competition in service delivery, and to some extent it was; however, it also puts forward a good case for holding back from further change in order to see whether the last set of reforms worked. The current data on re-offending rates dates back to 2003, so there is no actual way to see if all the money that has apparently been "thrown at" the Probation Service since then has had any impact. At that time, the last set of changes to hit probation officers were only just bedding down, and even according to those figures there is a 13% gap between the level of reconviction for community supervision and prison. So why the need for further measures, if not for ideological reasons?