Examination of Witnesses (Questions 359
- 379)
TUESDAY 11 NOVEMBER 2008
IAN PORÉE
Chairman: Mr Porée, Director of
Operational Policy and Commissioning at NOMS. We are getting a
bit bogged down in initials today and you may find that we spell
them out from time to time. You are doing a double shift today,
taking part in two sections of our evidence and we thank you very
much for that. I am going to ask Andrew Turner to ask the first
question.
Q359 Mr Turner:
Good day. We were told by Roger Hill that the Commissioning and
Partnerships Framework is no longer applicable. Could you tell
us if that is true and, if so, no subsequent framework has been
developed and could you tell us how regional and local commissioning
is now intended to take place?
Ian Porée: I am happy to
do that. The comment by Roger Hill that the Commissioning and
Partnerships Framework is no longer applicable was more about
the timing of when I think he appeared before the Committee. The
new NOMS agency was just about to be formed, I believe, and in
April of this year it formed the agency and so that Commissioning
and Partnerships Framework was published shortly before the NOMS
agency was developed. Essentially the changes which were made
in the new NOMS structure was essentially to bring together the
delivery components of prison and probation under one executive
agency and it is still called the National Offender Management
Service but it is an agency of the Ministry of Justice. In doing
that we also then very quickly got on with developing the role
of the key commissioners in the new delivery agency and they will
be directors of offender management and we will have 10 of them—nine
in the English regions and one in Wales. That work has now been
done and they are currently being recruited—the advertisements
are out to recruit them, June and January. So essentially the
Commissioning and Partnerships Framework which was developed previously
is essentially being reworked to be applicable in the new delivery
agency, and it will apply to those roles, the directors of offender
management. Essentially there are many common elements to the
Commissioning and Partnerships Framework which will roll forward
into the new structure, but they are being redeveloped. So what
will happen is there will be a commissioning strategy published
by the Ministry of Justice, which essentially sets the key principles
and parameters within which the delivery agency will operate.
Then we will have regional directors who will then essentially
implement the delivery of commissioning; they will have the budgets
delegated then for a particular region and then they will be responsible
for the performance of all prison and probation services within
the particular region. So that is where you will create the relationship
between NOMS and local delivery partners, both in prisons and
probation.
Q360 Mr Turner: I am somewhat lost
following that answer. So the Commissioning and Partnerships Framework
is going to be applicable but it is not yet, and the framework
is published by the Ministry of Justice; so have things further
down already been constructed or are they to follow?
Ian Porée: I guess the
Commissioning and Partnerships Framework is being adapted to be
applicable for the reorganised Ministry of Justice and the reorganised
NOMS delivery agency. So the basic principles that were laid out
in terms of a commissioning system for prison and probation services
essentially needed to be re-looked at and to be applicable. Essentially
the old NOMS' structure was set up with NOMS in a purchaser role
and then you had the prison service as a delivery agency and the
probation service at a little bit of an arm's length but still
managed from within NOMS. Essentially NOMS is now commissioner
and deliverer and the strategy and the priorities are set by the
Ministry of Justice. So the Commissioning and Partnerships Framework,
as I say, has not been discarded, it has just needed to be adapted
to be applicable for the new structures.
Q361 Chairman: We will park that
for a moment and press a little and find out is there any kind
of flexibility in the hands of local and regional commissioners
under this, so far as I can tell, unpublished new framework? Is
there sufficient flexibility there to enable them to do new things
or are they going to be struggling to do the basics?
Ian Porée: There certainly
is flexibility. Essentially the design that we have come up with
is that you would write a national service specification which
focuses on what needs to be delivered, taking into account the
outcomes we are trying to achieve and the level of quality of
service that we are looking for, and essentially the costing for
those services; so you have a clear understanding of what needs
to be delivered, what we are trying to achieve and the level of
resource allocated to those services. What that then allows at
a local level is delivery partners to work out various ways of
how they deliver those outcomes, and so the flexibility is in
how things are delivered within a set of national specifications
and some clear outcomes. So there is flexibility delegated down
the delivery chain to a local level and to allow, for example,
a local unpaid work service to be adapted to the needs of a local
community, so that it appropriately reflects needs at a local
level. But it is just done within a set of national agreed standards
and a national service specification.
Q362 Chairman: What are you doing
about the Public Accounts Committee's conclusion that the Ministry's
current method of funding probation areas is unsatisfactory and
slow to respond to changes in demand from the courts. There is
a need, they said, for a more flexible system of allocating funding
and moving resources between areas in accordance with local need.
Ian Porée: The description
I just gave of a clear national service specification is a programme
of work set up directly to respond to that challenge, where we
do need to have a very clear understanding of what we are expecting
people to achieve in terms of outcomes and delivery. The director
of offender management, that I mentioned earlier, has the opportunity
to essentially do that moving resource around to get a better
fit for local delivery because they would have delegated authority
within a particular region, and they would do that with a clear
national service specification so that they understand how they
are reallocating resource to achieve the desired outcomes. So
that flexibility is being built in through specification and costing
of services.
Q363 Chairman: One of the things
that concerned both the Public Accounts Committee and ourselves
is information and data from which to make these kinds of decisions.
The framework itself suggests that not enough is known about the
costs of activities or the needs of offenders at local or regional
level to support cost and volume commission. Is there really a
gap there?
Ian Porée: There certainly
are gaps in the granularity of detail, which again there are a
couple of important pieces of information you need in order to
commission. One of the pieces of information is clearly an understanding
of need and so an assessment of the needs of all the individuals
who are receiving services in a particular area, and essentially
our needs assessment has focused largely on high and medium risk
individuals and we need to extend the coverage of needs assessment
to understand at a basic level the needs of every offender in
the system. So that is a programme of work to expand needs assessment.
The specification and costing programme is developing a more detailed
set of information for every service across prison and probation
and it will arrive at a costed service specification for every
element of service across prison and probation. So, again, that
would give us the granular information that you were talking about.
Q364 Chairman: Is local needs mapping
going to play any part in this because that affects not just probation
but also crime reduction more generally. Does that fit into this
process?
Ian Porée: Yes. The local
needs is a contribution that NOMS makes to a local agenda; so,
as you say, in the crime reduction partnerships or the local criminal
justice boards you have the opportunity for NOMS to contribute
an element of need and provision, information into a local broader
pool of information from other agencies and other services. So,
yes, certainly the participation in particular of the probation
service in those local structures means we ensure that we contribute
the local NOMS' specific needs information into that broader pool
and then share that clearly with the relevant partners in those
structures.
Q365 Alun Michael: The question of
measuring value for money and effectiveness, which are not necessarily
the same thing; do you have adequate data to assess cost effectiveness?
Ian Porée: Again, the service
specification is a really important starting point to be clear
about what are you trying to deliver and what are you trying to
achieve in order to be able to assess how effective it is.
Q366 Alun Michael: Lots of organisations
who would agree with that as a starting point do not have adequate
data to measure whether they are actually doing that though.
Ian Porée: As I say, the
fact that we have a large programme to actually develop costed
service specifications across prison and probation is evidence
that the information we have we think we can improve upon, and
so essentially we will complete the full spectrum of services
with the necessary detailed information. For example, we do have
a good understanding of the cost information to deliver various
interventions we have. Some of them are formally accredited interventions
and so we would have very good cost information about those sorts
of parts of our system and these other parts of our system where
we still have a range of costs to deliver a similar set of services.
So through the directors of Offender Management we would essentially
be removing that variation of cost so that we are clear about
the value of service or effectiveness of a service being delivered.
Q367 Alun Michael: You moved away
from talking about cost and effectiveness to just talking about
cost.
Ian Porée: Yes. The effectiveness
clearly is understanding a clear set of outcomes that we would
want to achieve and is the basis against which we would assess
the amount of resource allocated to achieve that outcome.
Q368 Alun Michael: The outcome is
very often related to how you set about doing the work that is
aimed at those outcomes; so you cannot separate them out, can
you?
Ian Porée: If the outcome
is sustainable employment, as an example of an outcome measure,
I think you can achieve that measure through a number of different
ways of delivering it. So as I said earlier, we are not constraining
how our providers can deliver the service but we are clear about
how much resource they are using to achieve it and we are benchmarking
those services across prison and probation so that actually not
only do we understand what it did cost, we have a sense of how
would that benchmark across peer groups deliver a similar service
and a similar set of outcomes.
Q369 Alun Michael: That is all right
if you are buying nuts and bolts and you want the shape of the
things that you are buying to be the same in every circumstance
but there are two problems with that, are there not? One is that
what you are purchasing needs to actually produce outcome, so
if you are only looking at price and how you commission you do
not get there. The other thing is joined-up thinking, so if you
are just purchasing one bit—just to give an example, and
this is from a few years ago, I saw a centre in Plymouth, the
Trevi Centre, that was intervening with young women who were going
through the cycle of drugs, and/or alcohol, prostitution, prison,
back out again and unable to care for their children. The intervention
was about saying if you put these people together in a group for
mutual support, where they can have their children and they then
have the motivation you can crack that cycle. How would you set
about dealing with that sort of issue, which is not just about
drug eradication, it is not just about employment, it is not just
about children? Do you see what I mean?
Ian Porée: I absolutely
do. Structurally the organisation of the NOMS agency is fundamentally
designed to achieve what you have just described, which is actually
instead of having silos of prison and probation or through the
gate as you may describe it, services are delivered. Essentially
we have integrated prison and probation into the NOMS agency.
So the director of offender management is responsible for the
performance across both prison and probation, no matter who is
delivering it. So their performance is not measured on did they
have one of the silos in the system doing their bit—and,
as you say, do a really good drug treatment service whilst you
are in custody but not worry about the fact that when you leave
you have not been connected into mainstream support—and
they are accountable for the whole performance of prison and probation.
So when they allocate the resources which they would have for
their region they will be measured against overall performance,
much more of an outcome measure. As I have said, from the centre
of the NOMS agency we would not be prescribing how you would achieve
those outcomes, we would allow some flexibility to invest that
resource to achieve a better outcome for those women. The formal
measure we are still using is reoffending and so we will be measuring
if you have been into the criminal justice system do you get reconvicted
again? There is clearly a series of other measures like accommodation,
employment and others which are components of a better re-offending
outcome.
Q370 Alun Michael: I question the
way that you moved from a question I asked about cost effectiveness
to just talking about cost but what you have just said now sounds
much more positive in the sense that it sounds as if you are saying
you would be measuring outcomes first and cost as a very important
element but as secondary in a way to the delivery of outcomes.
Did I understand you correctly?
Ian Porée: That is correct,
and so as I was describing the specification programme we had
worked out. You have to actually have a look at how someone is
delivering something in order to properly cost it, so in their
programme we are deconstructing right down to a unit zero based
costing of how you would deliver a service, but we are not imposing
that delivery model on providers; we are using that as a way to
benchmark, to say, "Are you using resource effectively to
achieve the outcome?"
Q371 Alun Michael: So is the starting
point to say, "This is the outcome we want" to bidders,
and "Tell us how you could achieve that outcome?"
Ian Porée: That is correct.
I must add that for some parts of our service clearly we do specify
in a little more detail and with the security systems within prisons
we are probably quite specific about how something is treated.
Or with some of our whole system measures like how you would assess
an offender we need the whole delivery system to use a common
methodology because we each need to use it all the way through
the delivery chain. So there are some things mandated but by and
large the how is the flexibility a provider would have and the
what is what we would be clear about.
Q372 Alun Michael: I understand you.
I think what you have said is quite helpful in the last reply
and I think what would be helpful to us perhaps is to give us
some more detail outside the meeting on how you put those expectations
on the commissioners and service providers to be focused on the
outcome and measure that those are adequate.
Ian Porée: I would be happy
to do that.
Q373 Alun Michael: The second thing
is—and we have had evidence on this previously—about
the complexities involved in partnership approaches. On the other
hand we know fully that it is actually only partnership approaches
that can really be effective in reducing crime. So how do you
see what was described I think by Roger Hill as greater value
for partnership arrangements being achieved at a local level?
What are the most significant barriers, how do you overcome them,
what are the tensions between local priorities and regional commissioning
for probation?
Ian Porée: We have readily
agreed with Roger's point that actually we do need to continue
to leverage and enhance how we get those partnerships to work.
Some of that is some things we can do at the centre which, for
example, agreeing common outcome measures for sustainable employment
or for accommodation; ensuring that all the big government departments
are joined up in terms of what are we trying to achieve in terms
of an outcome, and they show up in the various PSAs, and we have
targets which mean that you cannot any longer behave just in your
central government silo—clearly all of us need to succeed
together and reducing re-offending is clearly one of those measures.
If you are clear about some of those commitments from all the
relevant parts of government—and if I used as an example
a set of health outcomes and a set of justice outcomes, both health
and justice would end up having some common measures in terms
of what success meant all the way through the chain, including
at a local level. Essentially what we then enable is for people
to work outside of the historical boundaries from within the organisation—they
are working to achieve that outcome. So in the probation world—and
we are in a process of moving from probation boards to probation
trusts. One of the ways you demonstrate that you are an effective
trust is that you make use of a full range of partners to deliver
effective local services—and I mean very local services.
So we would at the centre pay attention to how effectively are
you delivering at a local level. Then you do need to be properly
engaged with local partners because some of those—I use
"unpaid work" again—services are very, very local,
small, tiny, voluntarily sector organisations which provide you
with those opportunities to have a couple of places for unpaid
work in a way that is really serving a local community. So you
have the effect of the payback, you have the effect of engagement
very locally and local communities see the value of services being
delivered like that. So we have a structure clearly embedded in
the responsibilities of the director of offender management in
the region is to make sure that both regional partnerships are
taking place—a little later we will talk about the LSC structure—and
the LSC and the NOMS regional structures clearly need to work
very closely together to facilitate effective local delivery in
each of those regions.
Q374 Alun Michael: Our current preoccupation
is with justice reinvestment and I wonder what scope there is
for justice reinvestment within the structure. For instance, do
you have the capacity and do you do in practice, going back to
the local partners that you have, for instance, and say, "Look,
this is the experience that we have of people coming into the
probation service or coming into the prison service," and
feeding back into the local partnership the evidence of what reaches
you. Do you see what I mean?
Ian Porée: The complexity
of our system where essentially the prison system runs a bit more
like a national system and the probation system runs very local
does mean that that is a challenging balance to achieve in terms
of what is working effectively out of the national system. So
to give an example, many of the prison governors would release
individuals into all of the 42 local probation areas. So finding
models which allow you to get from national to local in one seamless
step where for the offender it feels like nobody has dropped any
of their services or needs in that process is complex. An example
is to have—and many of the prisons would have—national
employers working in the prison doing prison industry work, training
prisoners with a commitment that actually upon release they would
guarantee that individual a job, and because they are national
employers they can get a job pretty much wherever they are released
anywhere around the country. So you begin to have a set of relationships
which actually work both at a national and a local level, and
the opportunity which now exists with the integration of prison
and probation within the new NOMS delivery agency can facilitate
that seamless handover of having the kinds of partners who can
get you from national to local. Some of those clearly would be
regional to local because there are some big regional employer
bodies who actually allow you to have the same kind of effect
from regional to local.
Q375 Julie Morgan: A number of the
Members of the Committee are from Wales and obviously there is
another structure in Wales. Could you tell us how that works in
terms of partnership working?
Ian Porée: From the NOMS
agency perspective we will have a director of offender management
in Wales and clearly their role is slightly different to some
of their English counterparts because actually they do need to
be properly engaged in the Welsh Assembly Government's priorities
and obviously some of the services are slightly different. But
from our perspective we would see most of our national service
specifications being relevant for delivery of services within
Wales, simply because actually we are not down at the level of
specifying how you would deliver them; we have been clear about
the outcomes we are trying to achieve. In that sense the NOMS
structures will facilitate a very similar delivery of outcomes
even though there are clear different in terms of how services
are funded in the English regions and in Wales. Of course many
of the offenders are not ring fenced geographically within Wales—they
have probably spent a lot of their time in prisons in England
and then are resettled back into Wales. So the complexity of again
a national versus a local system means that it probably would
not be fair to those individuals to receive a completely different
level of service whilst they are in an English prison, simply
because their release location is back to Wales. So in that sense
the standardisation of the system is probably the fairest way
of running the system. There are nuances in terms of specific
services with regard to skills and health which are different
between England and Wales, but by and large the delivery design
is to still be clear about some commons that we are trying to
achieve with all offenders because those are based upon our best
evidence to date of what works.
Q376 Julie Morgan: Is the partnership
with the Welsh Assembly Government formal? Is there a formal structure?
Ian Porée: Wales and London
were the first two areas or regions where we started straight
away within the NOMS agency with a director of offender management,
so we have essentially piloted the role in London and Wales and,
as you can imagine, those are two very different jobs in NOMS.
But we have learnt a considerable amount from piloting them and
so the current director of offender management for Wales has a
very strong working relationship—she has located herself
essentially within the Assembly Government's structures and works
very closely embedded in that region. That is the value of the
regional director role with responsibilities in the region and
then they are tasked with making sure that the local delivery
structures work. There are a handful of prisons and a number of
probation areas in Wales.
Q377 Julie Morgan: I know that she
is based in the Assembly Government but is there a formal arrangement
about how she relates to the Assembly Government? Are there any
joint ministerial groups or anything like that?
Ian Porée: She is definitely
represented on a number of committees but I would be happy to
give you more detail on exactly how she has set up her structures.
Chairman: It is only fair to point out
that Mrs Morgan is married to the First Minister, but you are
probably aware of that.
Julie Morgan: I should declare that,
should I?
Chairman: I have done it for you! Mr
Heath has a supplementary question before I turn to Mrs Riordan.
Q378 Mr Heath: It is touching on
what you have just been speaking about, Mr Porée. I understand
regional structures in probation; what I do not really understand
is given that the prison population is thrown around in this kaleidoscope
of the national prison service, so that people are moved around
constantly in the prison estate, how you can possibly derive any
meaningful assessments of effectiveness in the service when actually
nobody has effective ownership of the service being provided to
an individual. I suspect within the prison service, and I am still
not convinced but perhaps you can convince me, that there is real
continuity even within the prison estate of the sort of educational
opportunities and school opportunities that prisoners are being
given.
Ian Porée: The performance
of that system—and I include whether it is the prison system
or the probation system—shows that over the last number
of years we have year on year significant improvements in reducing
the levels of re-offending. So we have reduced the levels by 23%
through the system you have just described which, as you say,
is a very full to capacity prison system, having necessarily to
move people about to cope with the very full prison system. So
is that the most effective way of delivering rehabilitation and
reform for offenders? Clearly that is not the most effective way.
The outcome measures are that even with all those complicated
operational challenges running the system at maximum capacity
we are having a significant improvement in terms of the re-offending
levels within the prison system. So it is a very impressive performance
to achieve those levels of reduced re-offending. But does that
mean, now that 39% of the population still re-offend, that is
good enough? Clearly there is a lot more we can do to reduce that
number further because that 39% represents a significant number
of people churning through the system and re-offending. So your
description that regional is not entirely meaningful if the individual
is nowhere near the region they are from and could have moved
through several geographic regions within their time during the
prison system—
Q379 Mr Heath: Or within a week.
Ian Porée: Or within a
week, with London being probably the biggest culprit of displacing
volume through the system and it pushes people to the Midlands
and from the Midlands further north. The complexity of how do
you find a space when you run a system at maximum capacity is
clearly a huge challenge.
Mr Heath: The logical position would
be to have some form of regional prison service which is approximately
conterminous with the probation service and where the offender
actually serves their time in their region, would it not? That
would be the way it would work most effectively.
| 
