Written evidence from the Local Government
Association (PB 52)
1. The Local Government Association (LGA) is
a voluntary membership body and our 422 member authorities cover
every part of England and Wales. Together they represent over
50 million people and spend around £113 billion a year on
local services. They include county councils, metropolitan district
councils, English unitary authorities, London boroughs and shire
district councils, along with fire authorities, police authorities,
national park authorities and passenger transport authorities.
The LGA is one of the constituent bodies in the Local Government
Group (LG Group).
2. Our response does not cover all the questions
raised by the committee, focusing as it does on the key issues
for local authorities.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
3. Effective management of offenders is not just
the responsibility of probation and councils have a key role to
play in helping manage offenders and reduce re-offending. This
role needs to be understood in the context of the Government's
plans for a "rehabilitation revolution".
4. The current commissioning structure for probation
services is driven from Whitehall. It would be better, and more
efficient, to have commissioning driven at a local level. The
Government's proposals for reducing the budget deficit and the
reduction in budgets for public services means the duplicate spending
and inefficiencies, arising from the current "silo"
based approach to re-offending, needs to be replaced by an approach
that sees local budgets pooled so outcomes that more efficiently
and effectively result in reduced re-offending are delivered.
Probation budgets should be added to these pooled resources.
5. The probation service in many areas works
effectively, but this is not uniform, and the service also struggles
on its existing resources to engage with its partners, so councils
report patchy engagement with probation in Community Safety Partnerships.
6. Crime and anti-social behaviour needs to reduce
further, and the LGA believes that this outcome can be delivered
by a range of bodies including the private and voluntary sectors.
Whatever body is commissioned to deliver offender management activity,
there must be safeguards to ensure that they are capable of doing
so without the offenders they are responsible for creating further
victims of crime. Such commissioning also needs to be undertaken
at a local level, rather then at a national level.
7. The LGA believes that the shortcomings of
the short sentence regime need to be addressed as prisoners on
short sentences have high re-offending rates. However we need
to guard against this increasing crime, so a risk based approach
will need to be adopted to dealing with offenders under any replacement
for short sentences. If this replacement to short sentences is
a move to greater use of community sentences, then some of the
savings for the prison service need to be fed in to the probation
service and councils to assist them in meeting the cost of delivering
community sentences.
8. The LGA supports the greater use of restorative
justice, which councils have been at the forefront of developing.
CONTEXT
9. A significant amount of crime is carried out
by ex-offenders. For example, a National Audit Office (NAO) report
from earlier this year noted that short-sentence prisoners have
on average 16 previous convictions, and around 60% are convicted
of at least once offence in the year after they are released.
This re-offending has a significant cost—in 2007-08 the
NAO estimated re-offending by recent ex-offenders cost between
£9.5 billion and £13 billion. Effective management of
ex-offenders is therefore vital in the LGA's view in reducing
crime and making communities safer.
10. Councils are now under a statutory duty to
reduce re-offending. As of 1 April 2010 a new duty was placed
on CSPs to formulate and implement a strategy to reduce re-offending,
and the duty on councils under Section 17 of the Crime and Disorder
Act 1998 to have due regard to the likely effect on, and to do
all they reasonably can to prevent crime and disorder, anti-social
behaviour and substance misuse in their area, was extended to
reducing re-offending.
REDUCING RE
-OFFENDING LOCALLY
11. The LGA does not usually support placing
additional duties on councils, but we welcomed the new duty to
reduce re-offending. Successful offender management depends on
the provision of a range of services to deal with the housing,
employment, substance misuse, mental health, unemployment and
other problems. A partnership approach is therefore vital in reducing
re-offending, though there can be flexibility on who provides
the services needed locally. These services can be provided by
the voluntary and community sector as much as by the statutory
sector. Councils, however, are likely to be major local providers
of these (and other) services that will significantly reduce the
chances of an ex-offender offending again. A genuinely localist
approach to reducing re-offending would hand over responsibility
to local public services and local communities to deliver or commission
offender management services.
Are probation services currently commissioned
in the most appropriate way?
12. The LGA believes that the current commissioning
system stands in the way of delivering effective and efficient
offender management outcomes. This is because it relies on three
tiers—national, regional and local—with the inefficiencies
that come from unnecessary bureaucracy and central control of
service provision. The probation service has been structured by
the Ministry of Justice and the National Offender Management Service
(NOMS) on a national basis when the issues they are dealing with
very much occur at a local level. Currently the service has to
fulfil nationally set performance criteria while working within
local partnerships (and being accountable to them), with all the
potential conflicts this creates between national targets and
local priorities.
13. The localist approach advocated by all three
major political parties in the run up to the general election
is, we believe, the right one for the probation service. Commissioning
of offender management services should be undertaken locally and
not nationally or regionally. It does not require significant
legislative change to achieve this, as the Offender Management
Act 2007 created a model based on probation trusts that is ready-made
for taking a more local approach to the provision of probation
services. Such a local approach is much better placed to drive
down re-offending and deliver savings and efficiencies. Instead
of answering to NOMS, probation trusts should be answerable to
local communities and partners for the services they are responsible
for delivering. At the same time the Government's efforts to reduce
bureaucratic pressures on the police and councils need to be replicated
for the probation service. Monitoring, audit and inspection need
to be reduced so that the probation service spends as much time
dealing with offenders as it can.
14. There is a substantial risk, in the LGA's
view, in not moving to a localist approach. Reducing re-offending
requires a collaborative approach, in which the probation service
plays a lead role, with other agencies and bodies like councils
providing support. Continuing with the current commissioning structure
would mean re-offending activity continues to be delivered in
a "silo" approach. The Total Place pilots showed the
costs and processes associated with "silo" delivery
of re-offending services and the savings that could result from
a true partnership approach. For example, the Bradford Total Place
pilot found that offenders currently have between five to 10 separate
assessments conducted by a range of agencies as they move in and
out of prison, and these could be reduced to one, with resulting
savings in budgets. The LGA therefore believes it is particularly
important for local public service budgets to be pooled which
would improve the quality of service and reduce costs. The LGA
has developed a model to achieve this through place-based budgets.
15. The probation service, through probation
trusts, could be brought within a place-based budgeting approach.
Commissioning responsibility could be handed from the Secretary
of State to each trust to provide local probation services either
directly or by sub-contracting or commissioning them. Probation
trusts would also have a place on the local governance arrangement
the LGA has suggested have responsibility for place-based budgets
in any area. This would mean probation trusts were working alongside
other partners on joint priorities for reducing re-offending and
would be able to make significant savings from more efficient
and effective decisions on what services were needed in an area.
How effectively are probation trusts operating
in practice? What is the role of the probation service in delivering
"offender management" and how does it operate in practice?
16. The probation service works effectively in
many areas, but it is not uniform. As has already been explained
offender management is a collaborative exercise with probation
trusts providing a lead. There are already a number of very good
partnerships between probation and other agencies in CSPs, such
as those links forged by the Rutland and Leicestershire Probation
Trust. However this is not universally the case, though the Probation
Association's Local Partnership Strategy specifically addresses
this area.
17. Councils have raised concerns about the level
of engagement they have from the probation service in CSPs, and
there have to be concerns about their ability to engage with a
range of other local bodies such as such as Drug and Alcohol Teams,
and domestic violence forums. In a survey conducted at the end
of last year for Local Government Improvement and Development
(part of the LG Group) and the Home Office, 24% of the councils
that responded said that probation was not at all, or not very
involved, in their CSP. This is particularly the case at district
council level in England, around which CSPs in two-tier areas
are structured. The same survey found that compared with 100%
involvement in probation on county-wide community safety structures
there was only probation involvement in 77% of district council
CSPs.
What role should the private and voluntary sectors
play in the delivery of probation services?
18. Crime and anti-social behaviour needs to
reduce further, and the LGA believes that this outcome can be
delivered by a range of bodies including the private and voluntary
sectors. Whatever body is commissioned to deliver offender management
activity, there must be safeguards to ensure that they are capable
of doing so without the offenders they are responsible for creating
further victims of crime.
19. There is also a considerable risk that national
commissioning of probation services from the private and voluntary
sectors (such as the piloting of payment by results at Peterborough
prison) will merely duplicate the "silo" based approach
to delivering offender management services that the LGA would
like to see replaced. As previously stated, the LGA believes that
responsibility for commissioning should be held at the local level
through a place-based budget approach to bring together a range
of public services under democratically and locally elected governance
structures. This would mean that responsibility was handed over
from the Ministry of Justice to local communities for payment
by result schemes.
Does the probation service have the capacity to
cope with a move away from short custodial sentences?
20. The LGA supports a change in the regime of
short sentences, given their ineffectiveness in reducing re-offending
by ex-offenders. However, improved communication about release
dates and locations is important if support is to be provided.
Given the restrictions current resources limitations place on
the probation service, the LGA has concerns about the capacity
of probation to cope with a move away from short custodial sentences,
and the impact this could have on crime. If there is a move away
from short sentences a risk based approach needs to be taken to
the management of offenders to ensure that offenders do not as
a result pose a threat to society by being moved onto community
sentences, and being left at large in the community.
21. Of course any move away from short custodial
sentences will have implications on other public services. If
short custodial sentences are replaced with greater use of community
sentences then there will be an impact on councils, as their assistance
in providing community sentences does not come cost-free. Any
savings resulting from reductions in prison expenditure as a result
need to be feed back into the provision of community sentences
and those involved in their provision like probation and councils.
Could probation trusts make more use of restorative
justice?
22. The LGA supports the use of restorative justice,
and councils have been at the forefront of developing restorative
justice projects such as the community justice panels established
in Somerset and Sheffield. These have been relatively cheap to
operate and have reduced re-offending rates. A large number of
councils use restorative justice approaches especially in relation
to youth offending.
23. A restorative justice approach not only helps
reduce crime by making offenders aware of the consequences of
their crimes, it also provides reparation to the community, increases
local understanding of offenders thereby reducing the fear of
crime, and builds confidence in the criminal justice system.
24. We would therefore support greater use of
restorative justice, with probation trusts working with their
local authorities and other partners to make greater use of it,
and provide the funding needed.
October 2010
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