Select Committee on Home Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 758 - 779)

TUESDAY 21 APRIL 1998

MR HARRY FLETCHER, MS HELEN SCHOFIELD AND MR RICHARD BARTON

Chairman

  758. Mr Fletcher, Ms Schofield and Mr Barton, welcome. Before we go through our programme, can I just ask you if there is anything which has been said by the Inspectors just now which you have a burning desire to challenge? I do not mean I want a blow-by-blow critique of what they have just said, but is there anything that you really felt strongly that you disagreed with?

  (Mr Fletcher) I do not think I do. Do you have anything, Helen?
  (Ms Schofield) No. I think there are issues which may come out as we speak on which we have a slightly different perspective.

Mr Cranston

  759. I just have a couple of questions on organisation. In your submission you said that there were problems with these 54 separate probation services. A national service has been put to us.
  (Mr Fletcher) I certainly think that the Prison/Probation Review which was set up last year has focused our minds on this and we have spent some time now discussing and considering the structure of the Probation Service and have concluded that the case for 54 separate services is no longer viable in its own right anyway. For example, there are three Glamorgans, there are two Sussexes, so I think the case for reducing the number of probation services is made in its own right. I think there is a second argument which comes into play which is that of coterminosity. All the staff representing the various unions in the criminal justice system have been meeting for the last year and a half discussing this issue and we are agreed that it is not viable to have 43 police services, 90 magistrates' court committees, however many crown courts there are, 13 Crown Prosecution Services and 54 probation services. That is not a model that lends itself easily to inter-agency co-operation, so I think the case for reducing and rationalising is made.

  760. But as an organisation, you have not gone for a national service?
  (Mr Fletcher) Well, the jury is still out. We are expecting a consultation paper in the next few weeks from the Home Office on this issue and I would agree broadly with what Graham Smith said. There are certain obvious advantages that would accrue from a national service, like consistency of practice which was an issue, I think, which dominated Graham Smith's evidence, the need for consistency. I can see advantages and my colleagues can see advantages in having a director general who would fight on our behalf in public expenditure rounds in the future. At the moment there is not any one person who has that role and I think we suffer as a result. I think the evidence of Richard Tilt who has managed to get lots more money out of a tight Treasury, three times, I think, since late 1996—

  761. I think you put that in your submission.
  (Mr Fletcher) Yes.

  762. Time is short, so perhaps I can cut through and move you on to the Prison/Probation relationship. I assume you would agree with Mr Smith on that, that you do not want a merger of the two Services, but how might the two Services work best together?
  (Ms Schofield) I think we do very much agree with Mr Smith. I think we feel that the culture, the positive, constructive culture of the Probation Service would be in some jeopardy, the particular culture, but we do see there are a number of areas in which improvement should be made in terms of working together. One of the hardest impacts that was taken over the Prison Service cuts in fact was the probation officer establishment in the prisons which actually took something like a 25 per cent cut in the last four years (we did a piece of research) and I think that has been very undermining of the probation officer establishment in prisons. They have felt that they have been far more harshly cut, I think, than the prison officer establishment and that has been a matter of prison governor choice of where to impose cuts, so to try to redress that would be very important in the sense of morale. One of the things we have also been very interested in is this issue of continuous assessment of individuals going through the courts, having pre-sentence reports written about them, quite considerable expense and quite considerable time dedicated to the pre-sentence reports, proposals put before the court which the court feels it cannot accept in terms of community sentencing, they then go into custody, serve their prison sentence and all the thought and assessment and planning which was made for that pre-sentence report is just set aside and there is no follow-through in the prison sentence. There may occasionally be a correlation in terms of the programme which the individual arrives on in the prison, but it is not a pre-planned and carefully thought-through plan and certainly when they come out again—

Mr Corbett

  763. Forgive me, but does the prison see that plan?
  (Ms Schofield) It will arrive in the probation department and it will get into the sentence planning situation if there is sentence planning, but of course sentence planning has been more dedicated to longer-term prisoners than short-term prisoners who in a sense are the greater problem because they are a higher percentage of the prison population, so there is very little continuous planning from court through sentence to post-release that joins the work and the assessment and the care and attention that the probation officer puts in and in a sense it is just put back in the file, which we think is regrettable. There has also been a very important shift in the focus of the Probation Service working in the prisons from what we might call the welfare orientation that the probation officer had in the 1960s and 1970s which has very much moved in a sense insofar as welfare issues are now picked up by the Prison Service itself, and the kind of programme that Mr Smith was describing, the accredited, evaluated programme, in the best scenarios is being jointly run by the Prison Service and the Probation Service together in the prisons and that is where you are beginning to see a real benefit of this type of programme, so we would like to see more of that.

Mr Winnick

  764. Can I just ask the two officials of the organisation, were you yourselves involved in the probation service prior to your appointments?
  (Mr Fletcher) I joined NAPO in 1984, prior to that I was at the National Council for One Parent Families. I trained at Bristol University and did probation placements in Weston-super-Mare and before that was a quantity surveyor.

  765. So though you had a placement you were never actually—and this is not a criticism—a probation officer?
  (Mr Fletcher) I was discouraged by my experiences in Weston-super-Mare! I went into Walthamstow Social Services instead.
  (Ms Schofield) I was a probation officer for 20 years in fact before I was appointed by the National Association of Probation Officers.

  766. Do you take the view that first and foremost your job is not to look after the offender but to protect the public?
  (Mr Fletcher) Yes, definitely, and we would do that via preventing re-offending, working with victims and rehabilitation. I would want to say fairly early on in our evidence that we believe that core task of protecting the public is in danger of being undermined if the continued cut-backs which Richard Allan referred to continue in the next couple of years. We would agree with Graham Smith that we are on the edge at the moment. Some probation areas are suffering more than others, but the cut anticipated for 1999-2000 I think will make some probation areas virtually unviable.

  767. I have no doubt the Committee will bear that in mind when we come to write our report. Would you describe your organisation as anti-prison? I ask that question because we have had evidence, as no doubt you know, from former probation officers who consider that the probation service has been largely undermined in fact by your organisation, always placing the interests of the offender before anyone else. That is the view of those who gave evidence. They said that your organisation in particular, though they named one or two others, are anti-prison. Would that be a fair description?
  (Mr Fletcher) No, I do not think so at all. We work actively with the Prison Governors Association, with the Prison Officers Association, and have done for the entire time I have been associated with NAPO. You kindly sent me a copy of the evidence in January from those ex-senior probation officers, and it was not a Service that any of us recognise. We certainly took offence at being referred to as "conspirators who were trying to undermine the rule of law". It certainly caused a lot of amusement within our circles that that is what we were being accused of. But, no, I think it was an almost ridiculous criticism of our role and a complete over-statement of any power we might be able to exercise.
  (Ms Schofield) I think we are an organisation that genuinely believes that within the constraints of the protection of the public the most effective way of reducing offending is to engage the offender constructively in change. Actually on the ground, where it takes place, the individual offender, the individual probation officer, will tell you that actually the offender does not change until she or he is actively engaged in a decision so to do. We have generally felt you have more chance of that, if it is safe and proper to do so, constructively in the community than in the prison where the offender does not feel constructively engaged in change in general. That is more how we would describe ourselves than anti-prison.

  768. When you say your role is to protect the public, and you agreed first and foremost, evidence which has been given to us by a professor of criminology, Ken Pease, suggests that "by the time a prisoner having served an average sentence is released, some 28 per cent of those given a community service will have offended again, at least once." That is a rather important aspect, is it not?
  (Mr Fletcher) That set of statistics we found difficult to understand.[2] The statistics we have used are based on those produced by the Home Office, they are prison statistics, crime statistics, and quarterly bulletins which the Home Office helpfully put out. What Professor Pease and his colleagues seemed to be saying was that those on community penalties—and it is all reproduced in an article which was faxed to me quite recently by the people who gave evidence to you in a magazine called Freedom Today where they run these same arguments—the 200,000 people who are on various community penalties at the moment, are committing thousands and thousands of crimes, but if you compute that it adds up to more than the entire recorded crime in Britain. They also criticise the sort of programmes which were outlined by Graham Smith earlier, saying again these have enormously high re-offending rates, but my colleague, Richard Barton, is involved in Glamorgan in many of these programmes and I hope he will have the opportunity to describe what the real figures are. The ones which were produced in this article and in the evidence bear no relation to that reality.

  769. What you are saying basically is that you refute the figure which has been given to us, am I right?
  (Mr Fletcher) Yes.
  (Mr Barton) The article which Harry Fletcher is referring to does make specific reference to a programme run in Mid-Glamorgan, which was mentioned in the Inspectorate Report which Andrew Underdown wrote and the Committee have seen, called the STOP programme, and it is probably one of the better evaluated programmes in the country. The figures from that programme show clearly that over the first 12 months of a probation order the reconviction rates are approximately 10 per cent down, which are consistent with the figures Graham Smith was referring to, over a control group who were given prison sentences post-release from prison. What the article refers to is that there has been a dropping-off of the improvement over the second year, so that by the end of two years the reconviction rates are about similar although slightly less than those in the control group who have been to prison. What the report says, rather than just look at those bald statistics, is that the conclusions which the research has drawn is very much that the figures prove the programme works, in the sense that over the first 12 months, when the intervention is happening, it is changing, it is having a positive effect on changing criminal behaviour. Where it is falling down is that there are not sufficient resources to reinforce those changes over the second year, so that if that intervention could be continued at that level over the second year, the figures would continue to be an improvement.

  770. We are looking at alternatives, as you know, to custodial sentences and there is a feeling—whether it is widespread I do not know but I suspect it is—amongst many people in the community at large that community service and probation is really a soft option. They are plagued, up and down the country, particularly on certain estates, by hooligans, vandals and the rest, their lives are made a misery—and that is no exaggeration, we could all give stories from our own constituencies—and they say, "Well, they go on probation but it does not add up to anything, why don't you put the hooligans, if they are found guilty, in prison?"
  (Mr Fletcher) That accusation of being soft is something which the probation service has faced no doubt since it was invented in 1912. What I would say is that no matter what we do, we will never be as tough as incarceration, it is impossible for us to be as tough as incarceration, but over the last 15 years, the years certainly I have been monitoring probation work, I think there have been significant changes, and I am sure Helen can elaborate on that.
  (Ms Schofield) Yes. I think we go back in a sense to the ground Mr Smith covered in terms of the quite radical change which is taking place in terms of thinking about the work of the service. I am not sure I entirely agree with him about the concept that nothing worked, but I do think that all the activity the service undertakes needs to be evaluated against criteria which needs to demonstrate its usefulness, its effectiveness, that it is taking hold in a very real way, and that I have to say is quite a new departure. If I could just go back to the issue about the community perception—you did mention this when you were discussing with Mr Smith and I think the question was whether they could be seen to be taking the plastic bags off the trees in a sense—the public perception is not helped, I do not think, in general by the media about the effectiveness of community sentencing. I am always struck by the extent to which community service is used to redecorate schools, paint the inside and outside of schools, currently. This is an extraordinary fact and I do not think the public knows how many schools have been painted by people undertaking community service. We are nervous of telling the public this because what kind of reaction will we get. Will it be said that this is not acceptable, to have offenders painting schools? Will it be said, what kind of situation are we in that we need to use offenders to paint the schools? But in fact if we could be open and honest about the fact that this work was done by this group of offenders, talk to them about what they did, have them in the local papers describing the impact on them having gone through that constructive activity, then I think the public would not have quite that sense of "It's a soft option". I think there is a tremendous lack of information for the public about the overall activity and the overall impact of community sentencing.

  Mr Winnick: If it is any encouragement to you, I spent two weeks with the Probation Service in Harrow on a placement course in 1973 when the Probation Service was supposed to be under militant leadership and all the rest. All I can say is that I saw no evidence of that and I was extremely impressed by the work undertaken and, like you, Mr Fletcher, if I had had any inclination, which I did not, to work in the Probation Service, I was put off simply because of the difficulties of dealing with people who are very, very difficult customers indeed.

Chairman

  771. What is your opinion of this new youth offender centre which has been opened, I believe, in Kent?
  (Mr Fletcher) Oh dear! What we have said consistently since Michael Howard introduced the secure training centres in, I think, 1993 was that, first of all, we did not think that they were needed because powers already existed to incarcerate very dangerous children under 1930s legislation and, secondly, that other children could be held in secure conditions under local authority orders, so we have argued consistently that we did not think they were needed. We understand or we understood why they were invented because it seemed to us that they came on the back of the horrific Bulger case, but powers existed to deal with the two children who were involved in that horrible case then, so our view is in 1998 as it was in 1993 that the powers already exist. It is going to be a very expensive form of incarceration and figures of £4,000 or £5,000 a week have been talked about and not been denied and we are certainly concerned and we consistently have been concerned about the question of Group 4 or whoever making profits out of incarcerating what could be as young as ten-year-olds.

  772. It is not the same thing, is it, as the secure training centres for smaller numbers of children which everyone agrees there is a shortage of, or most people agree there is a shortage of and are being built in different geographical locations? This is something different, is it not?
  (Mr Fletcher) That is correct. Something around about 400 extra places were promised by, I think it was, Virginia Bottomley when she was Secretary of State and virtually all of those are now on stream. I think there have been half a dozen places added since the change of government, so no, that is totally separate.

  773. That is something you would agree with, would you, for a corps of persistent offenders?
  (Mr Fletcher) Yes. There is an argument which has been going on for ever about whether young people who need to be incarcerated should be under the jurisdiction of the Home Office or the Department of Health and our view has always been that the element for the Department of Health is the welfare model and the element for the Home Office is the punishment model and our feeling has been that for the very young, the welfare model is the more appropriate one.

Mr Allan

  774. Just to give some feedback on community service before going on to the national standards, schools in Sheffield, including my daughter's, are queuing up to get painters and decorators in and the elderly people are queuing to get into the community service lunch clubs, which are very popular, and everybody knows who the people are who are doing the job.
  (Mr Fletcher) Good.

  775. In terms of the national standards, I would be interested to know how probation officers on the ground have responded to the national standards and also what your view is of the rate of compliance or non-compliance, firstly, with the standards in general and then on to the issue of breach.
  (Mr Fletcher) Perhaps I could just give an overview and then bring in Helen and Richard. The national standards came in in 1992 and then were revised in 1995. We believe the conditions on the ground have changed quite dramatically since then both in terms of high caseloads and in terms of there being less officers. There are something like 700 less probation officers now than there were four years ago, so I think, and I think Graham Smith hinted at it, one of the prime reasons for failing to comply as much as we would want to is this resource question. Just by coincidence, yesterday I met somebody who had been involved in a random survey of 200 cases in the South East, measuring them against five key standards and what was found was that the overall majority made two or three, but only a handful, and this was done in January this year, actually made all five and I think that is an indication of the pressure that has been felt by probation officers who are trying to comply with more and more rules, more and more bureaucracy.

  776. Is it your view that they agree with them in principle and they would like to implement them, but it is whether or not they are physically able to which is the problem?
  (Ms Schofield) I think there is always a tension when you impose a set of rules on a group of people who regard themselves as professionals. We saw it in the schools with the National Curriculum imposed on the teachers and you go through a period of tension. Mr Smith in a sense under-described the activity that is involved in compliance with the enforcement standard. What in fact it involves is not quite as simple as going back to court, but actually the reason why it is so very intensive in terms of time and what the standard actually requires is that there is a very great deal of focus on whether this is an acceptable absence, finding the person, getting them into the office, finding out why they did not come in, what they are going to do about it, asking them whether they are going to come in next time, so if it were as simple as, "You didn't come in twice. Here is the summons", then I think it would not take so much time, but actually we would not make any progress with anybody and we would just clutter up the courts in fact with people who had not managed to get into the office and that would not necessarily correlate to anything very effective, and I think the senior civil servants in the Home Office will tell you about that. I think that enforcement is really as much about keeping people to task, keeping people complying effectively with the order as it is about taking them back to court and failing them in a sense, and I think we have all tried to put that kind of constructive interpretation on the implementation of national standards. It makes it harder in a sense and in an under-resourced service it makes it very hard and I know that in the implementation of some of the "What Works" programmes, there are questions about whether the current national standards are actually helpful in terms of the difficult expectations that we are setting on some offenders to consistently come in to some very difficult programmes to face themselves and talk about themselves and change and then turn up again the next day and the next day and if they do not come in, what do you do. So there are some complex questions about enforcement at the moment which need to be looked at.

  777. But do you welcome the review that the Inspectorate was talking about and will you be fully participating in that?
  (Mr Fletcher) Yes.
  (Mr Barton) In terms of the view of probation officers on the ground about national standards, clearly from the point of view of credibility, then I have never yet met a probation officer who believes they can work well with an offender who does not come to the office, but I think probation officers' worries are that national standards can be seen simply as a mechanistic device, counting the number of times somebody comes in, and I think it is probably a view that the Inspectorate would share, and I have heard these views expressed by the Inspectorate, that the national standards perhaps need to be reviewed in terms that they may well measure the quantity of work that is done with some offenders, but they are not particularly good at measuring the quality of that work and I think that is even more an argument now that with newer methods of intervention following along the effective supervision of the "What Works" programmes, the national standards perhaps need to be revisited to see how they can measure the quality of work that is done with offenders and not just the number of times they walk into an office.

  778. Are there problems in terms of prioritisation? It seems analogous in some ways to the waiting list initiative, to get all things done whether the condition is serious or not rather than let the professional decide what is important.
  (Mr Barton) Again I think that is a view that a lot of probation officers would share and I have certainly heard expressed frequently, that probation officers are frustrated that they cannot be doing some more constructive, more time-consuming effective work with some of the more high-risk offenders because they are having to see the lower-risk offenders on a much more mechanistic basis.

  779. How do you feel it is going to be affected over the next couple of years with the falling budgets that you have indicated are there and do you actually see a crisis building up in some areas?
  (Mr Fletcher) Yes, I was just looking at the five criteria that the little study of 200 used and it was a first appointment within five days, a sentence plan within ten days, 13 visits in 13 weeks, the enforcement procedures we have talked about, and the risk assessment. Well, the risk assessment can be a 15-page document with 60 odd questions in it. Now, three or four years ago when officers did not have to do that and had 35 or 40 cases, it may have been possible to comply, but now they have got 45, 55 or 60 cases, and it varies from area to area, and some people yesterday from Nottingham were telling me that they now had 80 cases to supervise and it was 50 or 60 just 18 months ago. If the budget constraints go ahead in 1999-2000, it must get more difficult, more difficult for those officers who are left to comply with all these standards. Another fear is, and it happened to the Prison Service in the 1992-93-94 period when they were faced with a large cut, that those who go will be the more experienced officers. I think we are going to face the same problem. The ones who take early retirement in the next couple of years are going to be some of the more experienced, better officers.


2   See Appendix 17. Back


 
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