Transforming Rehabilitation – teething trouble or structural problems?
The BBC reported today on a report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation, the fifth and final of a series providing an overview of the introduction of Transforming Rehabilitation – the largest reform of probation for a generation. The BBC report focussed on a number of issues highlighted by the report, including around ‘breaching’ probationers who have failed to meet the requirements of community orders or other conditions.
These reforms are of interest to Revolving Doors as many people under probation supervision face multiple and complex problems, including poor mental health, that can lead to a revolving door of crisis and crime. This post considers some of the questions raised in the HMI Probation report.
Briefly, the reforms comprise:
- The creation of a National Probation Service (NPS), which (among other things) is responsible for working with higher risk offenders;
- The reorganising of services for low to medium risk offenders into 21 community rehabilitation companies, or CRCs. The ownership of the CRCs was transferred to new owners in February 2015;
- The extension of probation to all prisoners on release, regardless of sentence length;
- Introducing a new payment by results (PbR) model for CRCs, which rewards providers for reductions in both binary re-offending (the proportion of people who re-offend) and frequency re-offending (the total number of offences). There is a ‘binary hurdle’ in place – providers only become eligible for frequency re-offending payments if they have met targets based on historical performance for binary re-offending.
PbR is an appealing approach to commissioning public services. The commissioner is only paying for things that have been achieved, which is difficult to argue with. It’s also an approach many of us are familiar with in our day to day lives: if I ask a builder to build me a garden wall, I’m unlikely to want to pay him if he leaves the wall unfinished but assures me he’s given it his best shot.
However, in practice, PbR has often proven problematic. Perhaps that’s only natural – it’s a relatively recent innovation not only in the UK but also abroad. Models vary so much that it’s difficult to draw many conclusions, although the consultant and blogger Russell Webster has pulled together much of the available evidence in a recent review.
In this case, the report from HMI Probation highlighted that CRC staff claimed to have discouraged against breaching people, for fear of facing a financial penalty. This could seem like an example of ‘gaming’ – providers responding to unintentionally perverse incentives in ways that are undesirable albeit often foreseeable and rational. Some of the most commonly cited examples of gaming PbR contracts have come from the DWP Work Programme in the form of ‘creaming and parking’, even though that programme, in some respects, has been successful.
Other PbR programmes have had mixed results. The London rough sleeping social impact bond appears to be working well, although it’s difficult to be confident that PbR has been the magic ingredient in achieving any improvement. The use of PbR for drug and alcohol recovery appears to have gone less well and, although the final evaluation has not yet been published, there have been signals from Government that interest has cooled on rolling out PbR nationally, even though individual local authorities may still pursue it.
To return to Transforming Rehabilitation and the news about breaches, the Ministry of Justice now has an opportunity to work with providers to improve services. We’ve previously argued that there may be merit in making probation voluntary for short sentence prisoners in the first place, and the HMI Probation report mentions that “because of discouragement by managers towards breaching offenders, a positive aspect to that approach was that responsible officers worked harder to gain the individual’s compliance” – possibly an unintended positive consequence. It may be too early to say that the sky is falling in.
However, it would take an optimist to regard the introduction of Transforming Rehabilitation as an unqualified success. The HMI Probation series of reports point to a range of challenges including training and poor morale, particularly in CRCs. Reports by HMI Probation and the National Audit Office have pointed to a range of issues, including high caseloads, a different to expected split between NPS and CRCs, administrative challenges, and a substantial shortfall in numbers referred, which will pose some serious challenges to some CRC assumptions and business models. Media reports based on documents apparently leaked from the Ministry of Justice, possibly point to other, serious problems with individual CRCs.
Does this need turning round, and is it possible? We’ve previously been (very) cautiously optimistic about the use of PbR, but it seems safe to say that at this stage in the development of PbR, commissioners rarely get it right first time. There are lessons from employment services in Australia where a large PbR initiative has been actively varied and modified as learning accumulates and conditions change.
If anything stood out for me in the HMI Probation report, it’s Through the Gate support, including employment and, in particular, housing. Within CRCs, they “assessed that sufficient progress was made in relation to both in slightly less than a third of the cases” singling Wiltshire out as the best performer.
The NPS, still in the public sector, didn’t fare much better. The report states that in the majority of cases, “accommodation, ETE, finance, benefit and debt were not sufficiently met pre-release” and that there was no “evidence of information sharing between the responsible officer, Through the Gate resettlement staff in custody and any others providing Through the Gate services”.
We’ve long argued – in fact, it’s pretty much our whole raison d’être – that providing an equitable and effective service to people in the revolving door cohort requires addressing needs relating to mental health, substance misuse, housing and employment. Without that, we’re unlikely to not see the full re-offending benefits hoped for.
