When Chris Grayling announced the sell-off of probation services, he was told it was unnecessary, dangerous and needlessly complex.
Grayling ignored the criticism and pressed ahead regardless, but ramped up the timetable so that he could get the contracts signed before the general election and prevent any future Labour government from reversing it. Today we got an initial assessment of how that process is going by Paul McDowell, the chief inspector of probation, and it appears to validate the concerns of those who had warned the justice secretary off the idea.
We need to have some caution over McDowell's reports. His wife is the deputy managing director of a private justice company which runs some UK probation services. Grayling has repeatedly defended that arrangement and there is no evidence whatsoever that McDowell would let it affect him. But it would be absurd for us to ever allow a report to proceed without mentioning this fact.
In any sane world it would be considered untenable and something would have to be done – not because there is evidence of wrongdoing, but because these reports should be above the sorts of questions we now have raise when they are released. But we do not live in that world and anyway, it's worth observing that, while it is tempered, McDowell's report is actually very critical.
The result was predictable. "Splitting one organisation into two separate organisations had created process, communication and information-sharing challenges that did not previously exist," the inspector said, rather understatedly. "Many of those issues will remain a challenge for some time to come and need close attention."
What does this mean? The point where probation meets the courts is in a state of disarray, or as the inspector puts it, there are "significant challenges". The lack of staff at the national service, for high-risk offenders, is having "a detrimental impact on the delivery of some of the services". Given the seriousness of these offenders, this is very dangerous. Probation union Napo has already warned that one murder could have been avoided if not for the reforms.
Read the full article here:
https://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2014/12/15/probation-privatisation-looks-to-be-as-big-a-disaster-as-we-thought-it-was/