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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