UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE
To be published as HC 519-ix

Justice Committee

The Role of the Probation Service

Tuesday 24 May 2011

Sonia Crozier, John Steele, Leighe Rogers and Linda Beanlands

Chief SuperintendEnt Graham Bartlett, Lisa Dando, Jason Mahoney and Claire Brown

Evidence heard in Public Questions 492-555

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Justice Committee

on Tuesday 24 May 2011

Members present:

Sir Alan Beith (Chair)

Jeremy Corbyn

Chris Evans

Ben Gummer

Yasmin Qureshi

Elizabeth Truss

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Sonia Crozier, Chief Executive, Sussex and Surrey Probation Trust, John Steele, Chair, Sussex and Surrey Probation Trust, Leighe Rogers, Operational Director, Sussex and Surrey Probation Trust, and Linda Beanlands, Brighton and Hove City Council, gave evidence.

Q492 Sir Alan Beith: It is a pleasure to be in the magnificent surroundings of Brighton’s Town Hall. It is a very fine building. We are grateful for Brighton’s hospitality in allowing us to use it today. I remind Members that when they speak to ask a question they need to press the microphone button and switch it off again when they are finished.

We have come here today to take evidence from people and bodies who are involved in probation and dealing with offenders in the area, and we are very grateful to the witnesses who are coming before us today who can tell us of their experiences. There are two panels of witnesses, and we are going to begin the questioning of the first panel of witnesses, which consists of Sonia Crozier, Chief Executive of the Sussex and Surrey Probation Trust; John Steele, the Chair of the Sussex and Surrey Probation Trust; Leighe Rogers, the Operational Director of the same Trust; and Linda Beanlands from Brighton and Hove City Council.

We are the Justice Committee of the House of Commons. We have been engaged for some time in looking at the role of the Probation Service, and that in turn follows on from the work that we have done previously about Justice Reinvestment, looking for ways in which we can use the money that we spend in the criminal justice system to reduce reoffending and reduce offending in the first place from those who become involved in crime. I am going to start by asking members of our first group-please answer as seems appropriate, whichever of you seems like the right person, and hopefully you all mean to say the same things.

I wanted to establish first of all whether there was a shared understanding of what offender management means among Sussex and Surrey Probation staff and local partners. Is it a confusing term? Has it become confused with Integrated Offender Management in broad terms?

Sonia Crozier: Sir Alan, shall I start by answering that question? Good morning. I’m Sonia Crozier, Chief Executive. I don’t believe the term is confusing locally. I think there is a clear understanding that the offender management model requires one individual who holds responsibility for the administration of the sentence and that they are then supported by other partners in terms of delivering interventions to ensure that that individual’s likelihood of reoffending is reduced. With the arrival of Integrated Offender Management, the model has now been developed in the sense that it is not always a probation officer who actually acts as the offender manager, and in fact, in the multi-agency teams that we now have located in Brighton and Hove, we have on our books individuals who aren’t actually subject to a statutory order of the court but have been sentenced to prison and then offered a voluntary contact after release, and are then assigned an offender manager, who can be a probation officer but may equally be a police officer, for example. It just depends on who is the most appropriate person to have oversight and offer contact with that individual. So I do believe there is clarity in terms of the model and what it is designed to achieve, but I don’t know, Leighe, if you would like to offer any other advice on that.

Leighe Rogers: Yes. I would just like to endorse what Sonia said. I agree with her that there is clarity about the offender manager being responsible for that whole offender journey. Who that is actually does vary, so in terms of the Probation Service, who are increasingly working with higher-risk offenders, that tends to be a probation officer, but obviously there is a continuum, and some of those lower-risk offenders are managed elsewhere. A good example of that, I think, in Brighton, is where we have a partnership with several women’s organisations that come together under the banner of Inspire, and they work with our women offenders. With that particular group, there are stand-alone orders made by the court for specified activity requirements where, in essence, the offender manager is actually the worker from that group of women, so there was a clarity about the role, but the role was not necessarily invested in any one particular person-for example, a probation officer.

Q493 Sir Alan Beith: There is a balance to be struck between professional standards, professional judgement, professional autonomy, and the setting of externally determined standards, the bounds of which have changed. Are you comfortable with the way that has gone or is going?

Sonia Crozier: In respect to some of the changes that have been made to Probation National Standards?

Sir Alan Beith: Yes.

Sonia Crozier: We’re absolutely delighted. Surrey and Sussex Probation Trust has been the host area for the national pilot, so we were asked in May of last year to develop a framework whereby we would give our probation officers and probation staff more freedom in terms of how they would make decisions around how they would manage individual offenders. Rather than following a one-size-fits-all model, they were given the autonomy back to ask, "How do I want to spend my time? What’s going to have the best impact in terms of the offenders I’m charged to supervise?"

What we have learned over the year of running what has been called the "Professional Judgement Project" is that the probation staff feel more in control. They feel they have been given the right to apply common sense in terms of how resources are allocated, and they can also be more responsive to the offenders, so if people’s circumstances change, they can either up the contact because it seems clear that more contact is required or they can make a sensible decision to reduce contact if in fact there is clear evidence that progress is being made. It has been absolutely welcomed and endorsed, and it has now informed the implementation of the revised National Standards that were released on 1 April this year.

Q494 Sir Alan Beith: Where does the tiered approach to determining the level of resources, frequency of contact and content of interventions fit in with that?

Sonia Crozier: The tiering model: there were four tiers. Tier 1 is for your lowest-risk offenders, where you would be looking at a sentence that requires punishment or simply the administration of the sentence, like a stand-alone community payback order, and then it goes up from there to tier 2, tier 3 and tier 4. What the Professional Standards Project has allowed for is more creativity, more thought given about how the change component in tier 3, which is about rehabilitation, is delivered, so it hasn’t undermined it and required a significant shift to it, but it has required us to think a bit differently about how the different components of the tiers are delivered.

Q495 Sir Alan Beith: Local area agreements and the duty for local partners to reduce reoffending: how is that developing since you made the Trust?

Linda Beanlands: It might be helpful if I take that one.

Q496 Sir Alan Beith: Just explain what your role is.

Linda Beanlands: I am a Commissioner for Community Safety, so in essence I fulfil the statutory duty on behalf of the local authority but also on behalf of the whole of the community safety partnership to deliver all those duties that came with the Crime and Disorder Act. The local area agreements, which of course for the first year are not in place now, I think were hugely important to all the partners within the community safety partnership, police and probation in particular, in terms of making sure-enabling a process of being really focused on the big outcomes that make a difference for the city. It was the vehicle through which we were able to engage local authority services right across the piece in the work of probation services to reduce offending, so it was hugely important. Within the local area agreement, we had the particular experience, through the local public service-the LPSA process-of then being able to develop the Priority and Prolific Offender Project, and that became a very important way of us being able to share responsibilities across all services for some of those core activities of probation and police services, so it was very important and very useful.

Q497 Sir Alan Beith: Did the system that you had up until now make it more difficult to achieve those sorts of developments because of the silo separation in how you deal with it?

Linda Beanlands: Yes, I would say that it certainly did. The local area agreement really enabled us to change that whole process. I would say that that process of change is now well established and we are continuing to build on it, so I don’t see the fact that local area agreements have now come to an end as being a problem. It did its job at a very important time, when we really needed to focus all our shared activities around particular indicators, and we carry on building on that within the community safety partnership.

Q498 Sir Alan Beith: In Breaking the Cycle, it is argued that the "Whitehall knows best" approach has stifled innovation at both national and local levels by concentrating on a process. Was that the experience of this?

Sonia Crozier: As Linda has said, the local area agreements were important for their time, but with the passage of time, I think, certainly in my experience, they were somewhat over-engineered in terms of the whole raft of national indicators that at local level we are expected to pick up. Also, Government Office often used to mandate down to local areas which of those national indicators we were required to pick up rather than it being perhaps a more bottom-up approach, with local authorities and police and probation knowing their communities and make those decisions for themselves. So yes, it was over-engineered, but it did serve a purpose and, as Linda has said, it’s also given us a very strong foundation now in terms of that collective responsibility to reduce reoffending, but now we have greater freedom to determine exactly how we do that and where we prioritise.

Q499 Sir Alan Beith: Obviously, Brighton would have its own particular characteristics and problems because of the kind of economy it has and the activity it generates. Has this meant that you have wanted to do different things in Brighton than you might do even elsewhere in the Trust and certainly in the country? Have you been inhibited from that by the way the system has traditionally operated?

Sonia Crozier: The answer to that is yes, because essentially the imposed targets that were put upon us gave us very little flexibility in terms of doing something different, and an example of how we have now changed that is that the centrally imposed targets around programme delivery have been lifted, to some degree, which has given us some resource that we’ve now been able to convert into delivering a service that is more locally tailored. An example of that is the introduction of specified activity around hate crime that is going to be available to our local courts. You mentioned things that are quite different about Brighton and Hove, and as I’m sure you’re probably aware, Brighton and Hove has one of the largest gay and lesbian communities in the country, and there are incidences of homophobic crime in this area-hate crime-so we are actually able to introduce the sentence of the court that is very tailored to that particular local crime issue, and that is a freedom we have that we didn’t have previously. Leighe, I don’t know if you wanted to add to that.

Leighe Rogers: What I would add to that is that what partners are doing, I think, more than ever and what has helped us in this is the duty for agencies to co-operate around reducing reoffending-in particular, I might say health in terms of bringing health into that agenda-is that we’re all sharing the data that we have, perhaps in a way that we haven’t done before, to look up the services we have in different localities, map those services, talk to people in terms of what those needs are and then begin to build services that actually respond to those needs in a very joined-up way. It is much more looking at outcomes for real people and for the community, and that is a journey, in a sense, we have been fully on now probably for about the last two years, in truth, in terms of building that structure, which is very firmly embedded in the community and responds to what is going on in different localities.

A good example of that would be Brighton in terms of mental health. We know from our mental health colleagues in our forensics team who work in our cells in Sussex that Brighton has a particular prevalence of people with mental health problems, so we were there in response to a national pilot around a mental health court, which came to Brighton probably about 18 months to two years ago. What we are looking to do with that is take the next step post-Bradley as a partnership to take that further and take it pan-Sussex in an even more joined-up way than we have before by also incorporating drug and alcohol abuse into that one assessment. You can see that would be a much more efficient approach, and I think the partnership structures we have here now actually allow us to do that, even allowing for changes in commissioning. We have to talk to GP commissioners, and obviously we need commissioners coming into public health, and sometimes they are split. For example, in Brighton we are having a mental health commissioner who sits with the GP Consortium, and substance misuse, which sits with public health. We have those challenges, but I think what really helps is the strength of the partnership that we’ve built and also that clustering around reducing reoffending, which everybody has a duty to do, and that has really helped us.

Q500 Ben Gummer: I just have a quick point on the issue you were raising earlier, Ms Crozier, about your probation staff. I understand from other trusts that there was almost a generational difference between the staff’s reception to changes. Those who were older remembered more freedom and welcomed this, and some of the younger members of your probation staff who had been brought up in a more target-driven culture found it quite difficult to adapt. Clearly, this is a problem for management, and you need good management to make this independence work. Do you think the probation trusts across the country have the qualities and skills of management you have clearly shown here in Brighton?

Sonia Crozier: Part of the process of hosting the Professional Judgement Project was that we were able to create the learning and the information to enable other probation trusts in the country to make the decisions about the impact of adopting more freedoms for their workforce. That information is now out in the public domain, and probation trusts have a year by which to make decisions about how far they want to introduce the freedoms that we have deployed. I believe that probation trusts will make that transition safely, informed by the information that we were able to gather through the pilot. We are also able to give some very clear indicators of things that trusts will need to put in place to bridge that generational gap and give freedoms to a whole generation of probation officers who were trained in a very rule-based approach.

It might be interesting at this point to ask John Steele, Board Chair from Surrey and Sussex, to give his view, because clearly boards will be holding that responsibility in terms of the safety issues as well.

John Steele: Thank you. Just to add a slightly different perspective on that, clearly it is a concern when you go into new territory. I sat on the programme board, in fact, for the project, and it was interesting to see the journey, and there were anxieties among some staff about letting go, but we helped them through that. We helped them through that with a number of techniques, one of which was to ensure that they record what they do, and actually, they haven’t been used to having to record what they do. They had to tick the box. Now they have to write down what their thought process was, and that has been a learning exercise. Sonia knows it better than I do, but one of the things that some different probation officers have said is that the nature of supervision changes. The nature of what makes a good probation officer has changed. It used to be the person who ticked all the boxes and got everything in on time. Now you’re looking for slightly different skills and a slightly different approach.

It has been a very interesting and exciting journey, and I’m sure, as Sonia says, other trusts will pick this up in a way that is appropriate to them and that maintains public safety, and they won’t all adopt exactly the same approach or exactly the same freedoms. It will depend on where they are in this journey, but it was a really exciting journey and I think this is definitely the way forward. I would far rather have fewer really well-qualified professionals using their judgement than large numbers of staff. You really do need professionals to exercise that judgement.

Q501 Elizabeth Truss: I just want to move to the delivery of Probation Services. I would like to understand how you measure success of your organisation and what impact the new working arrangements have had on reoffending rates.

Sonia Crozier: How we measure success is in a state of change at the moment as a result of new outcome measures being developed, but the current situation is that we have headlined a reducing reoffending measure known as NI 18, and then we have a series of proxy measures that sit underneath that. How many orders or licences are successfully completed is a really important measure, because we know there is a relationship between an offender’s compliance with their sentence and that indicating that they are changing through that compliance. We also have other proxy measures around some of the schemes that we run, so, for example, our PPO scheme measures reduced reoffending over a two-year period. We have measures about how many offenders we get into employment or stable accommodation. You have your headline measures and then your proxy measures sitting underneath that.

Q502 Sir Alan Beith: Do you actually use those? It is an interesting point, because it was raised by someone in a session yesterday. Do you actually use accommodation and employment as a proxy measure for reoffending?

Sonia Crozier: Absolutely, yes. Those are important measures to show whether we are doing what we are paid to do, which is rehabilitation and protecting the public. In terms of how the new freedoms are impacting upon that landscape of outcome measures, the Professional Judgment Project only commenced last May, so I think it may be too early to come up with some very hard indicators, but we have seen some increase in offenders’ compliance with their orders and licences above the national average, but I would put a note of caution around that. These are still very early days in terms of the full impact of professional judgement.

Q503 Elizabeth Truss: Can I ask what reoffence rates are and have been historically?

Sonia Crozier: The national indicator set at the moment-I can give you the statistical figure. It is what they would call "statistically neutral" at the moment in terms of there neither being a positive impact or negative impact on reduced reoffending, but I have to say that measure, as I think you’ve heard from previous people who have given evidence, is under review. The methodology has been criticised. The measures that I look at, which I think are more interesting, are the reduced reoffending measures particularly around our PPO schemes. I think they are more robust. I think they are more easily understood, and they do clearly show that we have an impact in reducing crime with those offenders who commit the most crime in our local communities, because that’s the important thing about PPOs.

Q504 Elizabeth Truss: Would you be able to give me the figures both for the reoffence rate and for the prolific offenders as well?

Sonia Crozier: For the PPOs? Yes, I can do that.

Q505 Elizabeth Truss: The overall reoffence rate would also be interesting, even if it is flawed.

Sonia Crozier: Right. For the prolific and priority offenders, for the cohort in 2009/2010-because remember it is a two-year follow-up-would you like just Brighton and Hove?

Elizabeth Truss: Yes.

Sonia Crozier: Would you like the whole Trust? Brighton and Hove: in that cohort, we targeted 86 offenders for the PPO scheme. They had been responsible, in the year before they came into the PPO scheme, for 322 crimes locally. After a year of being on the PPO scheme, they had committed 169 crimes collectively, which demonstrated a 48% reduction in the amount of crimes they had committed. I can give you the same detail for the whole Trust, but does that give you sufficient-

Q506 Elizabeth Truss: How would that compare to the previous probation success rates? If you look at reoffence rates, it is not the case that everybody will reoffend, so what I am looking for is a comparison with the past, so how that has changed with the PPO scheme. What I would like to know is the headline rate of reoffending for all perpetrators, just to understand what the baseline is.

Sonia Crozier: Okay. The 322 was the baseline for that particular group, which dropped then to 169 in actual terms. In respect of NI 18, the national indicator-sorry, I have to look in my file.

Q507 Sir Alan Beith: If you subsequently discover that they would be more helpful to what you are saying, please pass them on to us.

Sonia Crozier: Yes. I can give you the NI 18 data, if that would be more helpful to submit that.

John Steele: If I can just comment on that, the PPO scheme is a small cohort that can be tracked, so we know very accurately what their performance was before they went on to the PPO scheme and we know what there is afterwards. They are a small cohort. An awful lot of the problems about measuring reoffending lie in actually knowing whether you are measuring the right things and the right people. With the cohort, you know what you are doing with a relatively small cohort, and you follow them through, so we know those figures are right. They are a lot more robust than the majority of reoffending statistics. But it works because it is a small cohort.

Sonia Crozier: In fact, the IOM schemes that have now been introduced have been developed on the success of the PPO scheme, so we have broadened the criteria of the people that we bring into the IOM schemes but continue to use the same methodology to actually say, "Well, have we made a difference in terms of the amount of crime that these individuals commit?"

Q508 Elizabeth Truss: Thank you for that. I want to ask about your relationships with other partners. I am interested in prisons, first of all. Do you think there is more opportunity for collaboration with prisons to reduce that reoffending?

Sonia Crozier: The introduction of Integrated Offender Management and the greater freedoms we have now to make decisions ourselves about how we deploy resources have in fact built and developed the relationships with prisons. A very good example locally with HMP Lewes is that we are now targeting offenders sentenced to Lewes who are sentenced to less than 12 months, and as we know, they have one of the highest rates of reoffending post-release. With the governor at HMP Lewes we have agreed a scheme of work whereby we interview those prisoners when they come into Lewes. They are supported while they are in prison in terms of signing up to voluntary contact with us on release, and for this year, I have also used part of my budget to fund two prison officers from HMP Lewes, whose job it is to engage with those prisoners when they come in on reception, and then to literally follow them through the gate on the day of release and to work with them as part of the Integrated Offender Management teams back in the locality. We know from other parts of the country that the direct involvement of the Prison Service in this form of management has had some very good results, so yes, the freedoms are there, and I have a very good relationship with our local prison.

Q509 Elizabeth Truss: In some of our other inquiries we’ve heard about the different cultures in the Probation Service and the Prison Service. Do you think there is more that prisons could be doing in this local area to help rehabilitate offenders? You talked about walking out of the gate, but from what you are saying, it doesn’t sound like there is a lot of integrated activity within the prison. Could we do more to merge the cultures of the Probation Service and the Prison Service so that the entire focus is on an integrated package to reduce reoffending?

Sonia Crozier: All I can say is that I have an exceptional relationship with the governors who run our local jails, so with HMP Lewes, HMP Highdown and the women’s prison in Bronzefield, and it’s through those relationships that we have agreed schemes of work and collaboration to support the process of rehabilitation. Another really good example-Leighe, I don’t know if you want to come in here to talk about the Preventing Offender Accommodation Loss project, which is a collaborative project between HMP Lewes and Brighton and Hove Council and us.

Leighe Rogers: Yes. I agree with Sonia here. We have an excellent relationship with our local prison, just to start. We have keys to go in and interview people on landings and in cells if we need to. We have a relationship where there are children and families going into Lewes Prison, where our staff and social services staff get involved with those parents and children. Those are good examples, but in terms of Integrated Offender Management, they also have a shadow or a matching IOM team in Lewes Prison, and that team includes, as you would expect, drug and alcohol workers, but also people coming from Brighton in terms of the Benefits Agency, and, as Sonia has just described, POAL.

POAL, as we’ve said, is a partnership between the housing here in Brighton and East Sussex, ourselves, and the prison. The Health Service is also involved in that, as you may hear later from our colleagues in health, who also recognise the link to accommodation with people with drug and alcohol problems. What we all do is work together to ensure that tenancies, where possible, can be sustained, or if they need to be closed down then they need to be closed down. We have rent deposit monies there to get people into accommodation when they come out, and this is all very firmly supported by the governor of that prison.

Looking slightly further afield, we also have a very good relationship with our women’s prison, which is Bronzefield Prison. Obviously it’s some distance from here, on the other side of the M25, and the governor of that prison comes down and sits on our reoffending board down here and also on our Inspire women’s project in Brighton. Yes, it is a journey we are all on in terms of seeing where that goes and how we can all make things better, but we are definitely on that journey and absolutely understand what we are all here to do in terms of reoffending.

Q510 Elizabeth Truss: Do you think it would be better if we moved to more of a system of place-based budgets, so you have more single-point accountability? What I am hearing about is a lot of different organisations, and sometimes it can be-although partnership can help-not necessarily the most efficient way of working and it can mean that you have different objectives from different organisations. What is your view of place-based budgeting and how that could help make offender management even more seamless?

John Steele: I think place-based budgets might have a role to play, and I think we have been involved-Sonia may have more on that-in Sussex’s experiment on that. I think we could get too tied up with trying to get process. I think what actually matters is that the people locally who have the funds and are accountable for deliveries get together and decide how to spend that money. Personally, I think the process by which you do it is less important. I think it is working very well in Brighton. Maybe there are things we could change, and maybe we will move to pooled budgets. Maybe we will decide them ourselves, but I think it’s much better to devolve locally to meet local needs than to have a one-size-fits-all approach.

Sonia Crozier: We have, in fact, through the Sussex Criminal Justice Board commissioned a one-year piece of research to understand our cost collectively around Integrated Offender Management, so all the services that are engaged in delivering services within the IOM framework will be assessed in terms of the cost of that and the outcome, and I think that will really inform us in terms of whether we are collectively spending our money in the best way and what is having the greatest impact in terms of the connectivity between the agencies working together.

Q511 Elizabeth Truss: May I ask one final question, which is about the provider/commissioner split? Is there an issue, when the Probation Trust is commissioning services and also providing services, that there is a conflict of interest there, and that essentially one will not necessarily want to appoint other people if that means a reduction of work for the Probation Trust itself?

John Steele: I don’t think there is a conflict of interest. Potentially, there is, but I don’t think there is in practice. We are commissioners and providers. We provide a service to NOMS against a contract and we commission service from others. We co-commission; we work across. It’s a complex environment. There is one example where, in Surrey, we deliver the drug rehabilitation requirement on a contract from the DAAT, whereas, in the Sussex side, that is contracted out; it’s not part of our work. If we were to compete for that work in Surrey again, we wouldn’t take part in that commissioning. We would be competing to be a provider. We won’t sit both sides of the table at any one stage, and in relation as we move forward to the-It might help if I say that as a board we have agreed what we believe to be the core business, which is the assessment, the administration of the sentence, and delivering the interventions to high-risk offenders, but the rest of the services that we do to lower-risk offenders we have said is not our core business, and we will continue to look ourselves and with partners at better ways of delivering those services, so we may well go out of and commission some of the services that we currently provide ourselves, but we won’t sit on both sides of the fence. We will ensure that.

Q512 Jeremy Corbyn: Thank you for helping us with our inquiry. My questions concern Payment by Results and localism. My first point is: what is the quality of the evidence base on which you determine which services to commission to reduce reoffending by existing offenders in the community, and have you encountered any difficulties in collecting evidence on the effectiveness of these complex partnerships and arrangements?

Sonia Crozier: I think the short answer to that is "yes". It is a very complex picture in respect to when you bring the agencies together and who is having the most impact in terms of reducing reoffending. As I said earlier, one of the pieces of work that I’ve commissioned with the Sussex Criminal Justice Board is to better understand how all the different agencies together have an impact on reducing reoffending. The research, as I say, that we have commissioned will start to help us to unpick that, and when that information becomes available, I will certainly want to engage with NOMS about the kind of learning we have gained from that, because I think we are all on a journey around Payment by Results. Certainly, if you interview the key policy leads from NOMS, this is fairly groundbreaking stuff, so I think it is up to the Trust with their partner agencies, really, to take the initiative and to understand how we can build a Payment by Results framework to fulfil that Government agenda.

Q513 Jeremy Corbyn: Really for both yourself and the local authority, how do you measure the costs of reoffending in terms of your staff costs, local authority staff costs, possible social services, education and so on, and also the general effect on policing costs and the cost to the community as a whole? It is quite a complex area.

Sonia Crozier: It is very complex, and it’s for that reason that I, with the Sussex Criminal Justice Board, have commissioned a one-year piece of research from Sheffield Hallam University to create a costing framework around our local delivery models, because one doesn’t currently exist. There have been some place-based pilots around the country. We weren’t part of that, so we’ve taken the initiative. I’ve taken the initiative, with my senior colleagues, to understand that costing and what we’re actually achieving.

Q514 Jeremy Corbyn: When do you expect the report from Sheffield Hallam to be ready?

Sonia Crozier: It’s going to be published in January 2012.

Q515 Jeremy Corbyn: Could I ask the local authority what their views on this are?

Linda Beanlands: Sonia mentioned that we are on a journey with this, and clearly we are. Part of that journey is that we have carried out three intelligent commissioning pilots in the city, which are particularly relevant to Integrated Offender Management. One of those was on domestic violence, one on the harm that comes from alcohol misuse, and one on drug-related deaths. It’s a process that is very akin to establishing place-based budgets. Within that process, we made the first attempt for the first time to assess the cost impact of each of those activities or crime types. For domestic violence, for example, we estimate that the cost of domestic violence in this city is £132 million. It was incredibly difficult to estimate, but it was done as robustly as we could. We used something called a negative costing tool and another cost/benefit model, models that-

Q516 Jeremy Corbyn: Could you give us a general idea how you arrived at that figure?

Linda Beanlands: Forgive me if I can’t quite remember the breakdowns of the exact figures, but it was estimating the cost, for example, to probation services, to police, to the NHS, to children and family services, to adult social care, and also we added in a quality of life factor or indicator, and we do have individual costs for each of those components. That was on the basis of us estimating that something in the region of 25,000 women were estimated to potentially experience domestic violence in the city in any one year. They are estimates, but at this point where we are doing the business of working out how to apply those costing mechanisms, which is obviously a very important task, those are the estimates that we came up with. That was just a stage in a process, but a very important stage, because what it means is that we can then get around the table and talk about it: "If that is how much that is costing us, for example, what do we think about the potential for reinvesting so that we are actually preventing?" It makes the case very strongly, obviously, for being able to invest in early intervention and prevention services. That sort of modelling exercise and practicing doing that sort of exercise across the partnership as a whole is hugely important to moving to doing that sort of thing for Integrated Offender Management.

Q517 Jeremy Corbyn: What are the outcomes that you think would be appropriate for probation services to be paid by? Which outcomes would you measure before paying them?

Sonia Crozier: Obviously to reduce reoffending. The issue with a payment system around reduced reoffending is that you often need a time lag of up to two or three years to be able to say robustly that the reduced reoffending was a direct consequence of this level of intervention, which could pose difficulties in terms of cash flows if you have to have that level of time lag around any Payment by Results system. While reduced reoffending, absolutely, I think sitting below that are your proxy measures, which could also feed into Payment by Results and wouldn’t require that length of time-so measures around compliance. When an order is imposed, do we ensure that it is rigorously enforced and the individual completes it? And to measure that against, potentially, a baseline, so are some probation trusts more successful, for example, in getting their offenders to comply with their sentences and receive the interventions that that sentence offers?

Standing aside from that, I think there were some other measures that I mentioned earlier around employment and accommodation. This does then start to pose an interesting question about who is actually responsible or accountable, because I think we have to accept that with some of the measures that I’ve mentioned, there has to be joint accountability because the Probation Service doesn’t do it all on its own. Accommodation would be a very obvious one. I don’t own houses and I’m not an accommodation provider, so if a Payment by Results system is introduced then the Probation Service, in a sense, would become part of a collective that either benefits or is punished if they don’t achieve those results, and that’s going to be quite an important mindset shift. I don’t know, John, if you want to add anything to that.

John Steele: I’d like to add one comment specifically about probation trusts and payment by results. Payment by Results is the holy grail. If we could achieve that, that would be wonderful. There are huge obstacles in the way, and specifically for probation trusts, to have payment by results means there must be a risk of not being paid, clearly. Probation trusts are not allowed to hold reserves. We’re not allowed to put on hold any reserves at all, so there’s no indication, as far as I can see, how we could possibly sustain the loss that would come with failing, because we’re not allowed to build reserves. The private sector has shareholders and equity and they can eat into their profits. Even the voluntary sector is allowed to hold reserves. We can’t, therefore I don’t honestly understand how it would work.

What you can have, which in my view is the worst of all worlds, is bonus by results, and the Probation Service for many years did have that. If you met your targets, you received some more money next year. I have never understood why the taxpayer should pay more a second year when the public sector has delivered what it was paid to deliver the first. I think you need to be very careful about how you introduce it. I think we’re clear that we want to be part of that, but we need to be allowed to hold reserves. It can’t work otherwise.

Q518 Jeremy Corbyn: The local incentives scheme pilot has not received any additional funding. Is this a problem? From what you’re saying, it sounds like it is. Can you still deliver outcomes without any additional funding, or is this proving to be a problem for you?

Linda Beanlands: Do forgive me. Can you just define the local incentives scheme? I’m familiar with the LPSA framework where we received the reward for exceeding the targets on the Prolific and Priority Offender Project, but I’m not sure that is what you’re referring to.

Q519 Jeremy Corbyn: Local incentive pilots have not received any extra money, have they?

Linda Beanlands: No.

Q520 Jeremy Corbyn: Is this a problem?

Linda Beanlands: No.

Q521 Jeremy Corbyn: Do you think they should?

Linda Beanlands: Do forgive me; I’m struggling to answer the question because I’m not sure what the definition of the local incentives scheme is.

Leighe Rogers: I don’t think it is about more money, I think, is the first thing to say, because we all know the money isn’t there, so what we’re looking to do is build structures that are sustainable, that everybody takes responsibility for in terms of their different agency coming in, which is why I go back to the fact that everybody being responsible for reducing reoffending really helps us. Because other agencies have that as an outcome, for us that is a way into services. If they didn’t have it as an outcome, it would be much harder to persuade a commissioner from health or accommodation services to actually invest in offenders. They’re not always top of the tree in terms of people’s priorities. If we talk about what Linda was talking about in terms of domestic abuse, the view is that perhaps the victim, quite rightly, needs all that support and attention, but the perpetrator is a little bit further away than that.

If you’re asking us if we need more money, if that would help, it can help us in a seed way to start and grow things. That definitely can help. We’ve just been selected Sussex-wide as one of the pathfinders for the post-Bradley developments in terms of mental health and how we progress that in partnership with the police and health and others. That money coming in will help us, but we’re putting together a model that will be sustainable, that all those partners sign up to contribute to and is effective and efficient and delivers what we want it to deliver, so we’re not actually looking, other than as seed money, for pots of money to be sent towards any of us, because we recognise it’s not always the answer. In fact, it’s very rarely the answer. What is much more important is how people work together so that they understand what the outcomes are, whether they involve the end user, whether they inform the community and whether we are really working in a very effective and joined-up way. Going back to the earlier point about partnerships, I think the strength of partnership is the expertise and the knowledge that is brought from those different sectors, and I think that is the strength when it works to achieve those real outcomes. I actually think it is stronger, in a sense, than one agency out there trying to do it alone and perhaps getting lost in the local picture.

Q522 Jeremy Corbyn: Do you feel you get enough support or co-operation from, for example, local housing authorities and organisations like that? Obviously there is an impact on the likelihood of reoffending in that sort of area.

Leighe Rogers: The strength of probation, I would say, is that we are the voice of the offender and that we can go in-this is my job. I go in and talk to heads of supporting people, adult social care, about offenders and housing. You can have those conversations. We are having them as we speak in Brighton, and you’ve heard that with them we have the POAL project. We have temporary accommodation in Brighton’s city centre for people coming out of prison. We have accommodation for more serious offenders to move into. I suppose what I’m describing is that yes, it can work. In East Sussex, we’re about to co-commission with small amounts of money-not huge amounts of money-services for high-risk offenders and more troublesome offenders, if you like, who would not be dealt with by way of floating support or housing support. We both have small amounts of money. We’ve done our surveys and we are trying to look at how we do things differently, not just necessarily by buying property and putting people in it with a 24-hour cover. That is not always the best way of doing things.

I suppose what I am saying to you is that the conversations are going on. We’re looking to do things in different ways by involving service users and other partners and trying to achieve the ends we need in quite different ways. My experience-and I think my fellow directors would say it-is very positive in terms of other agencies, both voluntary and public sector, in being engaged in that task, and I do think, centrally, it has helped us that Government departments are doing that as well. The Government department initiatives in doing that have been really helpful.

Q523 Ben Gummer: Just to flesh out the answer a little in how it relates to PbR, one of the things that are troubling us on this Committee is the relationship between PbR when you have many PbR contracts going on at the same time. For an offender, there might be a draft rehabilitation PbR contract. There may well be in the future mental health PbR contracts attached to them, certainly a welfare to work contract. Who gains at the end of this? Who makes the profit or sustains the loss, and do you think it is possible for a probation trust to bring these contracts together so you have an holistic approach to an offender?

Sonia Crozier: I agree we would be locally in a very good position to take that role on, partly because obviously we supervise the offender from end to end in terms of the different types of sentences and orders. Absolutely, we would be very key to that. I think your concern is right in terms of who should benefit, because, as I mentioned earlier, if you had a PbR scheme that focused on accommodation, for example, or getting someone into employment, there are probably going to be a range of different agencies that would have contributed to that, so the way that I would see PbR developing is to probably have a coalition of providers who would all benefit because of the complexity of the problems you’re trying to solve rather than, say, a single agency. If you reflect back on the way that the PPO schemes were introduced under the local area agreements, they were very much modelled on that kind of approach. You had the different agencies coming together, and if we were able to demonstrate reduced reoffending around PPOs, there was, at that time, a reward scheme, and everyone benefited from the reward that was gained.

Q524 Ben Gummer: Leading on from that, this is being introduced at a time of considerable savings in public expenditure. Can we deal with that first of all? There are well-publicised concerns about probation trusts and about their capacity to deal with an increase in non-custodial sentences, let alone their current workload, while budgets are being trimmed. Could you comment on that specifically?

Sonia Crozier: In terms of our workload and capacity?

Ben Gummer: Yes.

Sonia Crozier: We have been very successful actually locally in reducing our workload. Last year, we reduced the occurrence of community orders imposed by our local courts by 8%, and we continue to bear down on demand, in an appropriate way though, because the approach that we’ve taken with our local sentencers is to say to them that there may be occasions where other disposals are more appropriate for the lower-end offender than a community order. For example, we’ve introduced two senior adult attendance centres into Surrey and Sussex to scoop up those younger adult offenders where a brief intervention may be more appropriate. We’ve also been encouraging our staff to think more creatively about the use of curfews as a disposal that the magistrates again may want to impose for that lower-end group, so we’re not just sitting here as a victim of demand. We’re being very active in terms of thinking about how we can work with our magistrates to manage that at a time of shrinking resource, which has then enabled us, with the precious resources we have, to target those in the upper-end offender population to get the best outcomes.

Q525 Ben Gummer: Do you feel that the cuts are impacting upon private, not-for-profit and voluntary organisations? I suppose this is a question also for local authorities. Or have you been able to sustain those partnerships and relationships while managing demand as you’ve just been describing?

Sonia Crozier: We have seen a decrease in the funding that we have received from other agencies, but as I say, because of our own internal demand management programme, that hasn’t at this stage had a dramatic impact on the services that we are providing, but perhaps I might, as you suggest, hand this over to Linda.

Linda Beanlands: I think the important issue here is that a true test of the partnership is at times when savings or cuts have to be made, and I think what we have seen in recent months when the local authority and all its partners have had to sustain cuts is a real commitment to taking on each others’ issues, to taking on shared priorities. In fact, if we just look at the community safety partnership pooled budget, which is perhaps a small example but a very important one, we had to find a cut in the overall services that we commission from that, and the PPO project was one of those. We made very good, very easily joint decisions between the local authority, the police and probation about how we would do that together jointly so that in fact the integrity of service delivery was sustained. I would say that I think the local authority were absolutely committed, recognising the importance of not making cuts that would then cause difficulties for its key partner, the Probation Service.

Q526 Ben Gummer: I have three questions for Mr Steele, very quickly. First of all, you made an interesting allusion earlier to the fact that you would rather have fewer well-qualified professionals than many. Could you flesh that out a bit? We didn’t quite pick up what you were trying to say.

John Steele: I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear. It goes back to this question of cuts. I think it’s important to realise that the Probation Service was told, I think, in 2008 that it faced a series of years of cuts, and when we had to apply for trust status, we had to put in our application to show how we would deal with significantly reduced budgets, and it’s fair to say that this year, 201-12’s budget for Surrey and Sussex is about the same as the worst-case scenario we were planning for. We had three years to do that planning, so in that time we have had a strategy for ensuring, as Sonia says, that resource follows risk, so we invest in the high-risk offenders and we disinvest in the lower-risk offenders.

We have also increased in that time the number of probation officers and reduced the number of probation service officers, because what we are saying to ourselves is that if we want to concentrate on the higher risk, we need the fully professional probation officers.

These things all link together with things like caseloads. Again, caseloads are an emotive issue. I know others have mentioned caseloads to you in their evidence. I think caseloads are a bit higher than we would like them to be, but at the same time, with the Professional Judgement Project and the new standards, what we are saying is that professional probation officers, using their discretion, using their resource of themselves and their fellow resources, to make the most impact, is the sort of service that I think we will deliver well. That is what I meant about having fewer, if necessary, highly qualified people, because it is the highly qualified people that we need in order to deal with the higher-risk. We also need these sorts of people to have the discussions with the local authorities and the other partners, because they are professionals too. It is a joint meeting of professionals. Does that help?

Q527 Ben Gummer: Very much so. Thank you very much. Finally, you in your trust have similar characteristics to my own in Suffolk and Norfolk. We have a large rural population with some significant urban centres. Could you please describe to the Committee how you manage those contrasting populations, and also, within the context of the cuts, how you deal with specific issues around minority groups and the impact of savings on that?

John Steele: Can I ask Sonia to answer that first? That last bit isn’t an operational issue.

Sonia Crozier: In terms of how we manage the metropolitan and the rural, I think again this is where your partnerships come in, because in your rural areas where you have your community safety partnerships, you’ll be looking to those partners to see how they can work together to meet that need, in contrast to the kind of negotiations that Leighe will be having in a metropolitan area like Brighton and Hove. Remember, other services in rural areas have also had to adapt, so you share that learning about how, for example, people can be given access into services where they may have difficult in travelling, or how you perhaps share your buildings in more rural areas so that you’re not requiring people to travel long distances into the towns. It’s about using that local knowledge and information through the CSP framework.

In terms of meeting the requirements and diverse needs of the population, that’s where our regular reviews of our caseloads and the indicators about how many women we have in our caseload, how many Black or ethnic minority offenders we have on our caseloads, and then with our partners understanding whether we have services that would best meet those particular needs. It was in fact through that process of needs assessment around our women offenders that we were able to successfully bid for the Inspire project that operates in Brighton and Hove, because we were able to show that we had a group of women there, some of whom were coming out from prison and some on community orders, where there needed to be a better kind of collaboration in terms of the way we worked with them across a range of services, and particularly with the women’s voluntary sector in this locality. It comes back again to that process of understanding the need, commissioning to meet the need with our local partners and understanding how geography affects local service delivery.

John Steele: Can I just add one point to that? As we said earlier, we are on a journey. One of the things the Professional Judgement Project has done is to increase the number of home visits, something that had almost died out because of the pressure of following process all the time, and I think, increasingly, we’ll look at new ways of working, as Sonia says, perhaps much more located in local communities. I think the days of having large offices where everybody comes in for an interview may well be beginning to disappear now, and I think the evolution of the Professional Judgement Project and the probation officers thinking to themselves, "How best can I deliver this service?" will move us into these local areas rather faster than we might have thought it would, and I think if you look at the service in five to ten years’ time, the way we deliver it will look very different.

Q528 Chris Evans: In our evidence sessions, there seems to be a real problem with public trust in information services. What has your probation trust done to improve public confidence, and can you give us some specific examples of what has worked and also what has not worked, in your view?

Sonia Crozier: One of the key initiatives for building public knowledge and confidence in what we do is that we have for some time now been delivering the Local Crime and Community Safety Scheme, which is known as LCCS-

Sir Alan Beith: And then you have problems with the acronyms as well.

Sonia Crozier: Yes. Even I forget them sometimes. The LCCS, put very simply, is a Ministry of Justice scheme whereby there is a training package that probation officers and magistrates are given access to. Magistrates and probation officers then go out to community groups and together they deliver this programme to educate people about sentencing and what sentencing actually means. We know from our experience of delivering this for some time in West Sussex that it’s been really well received, so that with the agreement of Her Majesty’s Courts Service locally, we’re now extending it across the Trust. What works is that kind of reaching out and giving people direct access to us.

In terms of what doesn’t work, I’m not sure. I think what doesn’t work is simply being passive about the whole process. I think it is a case of saying, "Well, actually, you have to get out there and engage with your communities and your public". I do think, with the introduction of the community safety partnerships now, there may be more of an opportunity to do that, because talking about probation on its own often doesn’t make sense when you disconnect it from the other partnerships that we work with. So I think that engagement strategies with our local CSPs will be a very positive platform going forward.

Leighe Rogers: And we’ve done that in Brighton. If you’d have come probably about 12 months ago, we had a big billboard campaign going on that showed just how many people in the city were involved in community safety in a very real way for residents here to see, and obviously that involved probation. Linda may want to say a bit more about that.

Linda Beanlands: I do think this is one of those areas where there is a shared responsibility, and it is the job of the community safety partnership to profile and to take out the work of all its partners right into the community, and we have many ways in which the local authority is well placed to do that. For example, we have a network of about 40 local action teams that represent all the neighbourhoods in the city. They are led by community members, and we make sure in solving particular community safety or crime problems, that we bring in our partners and that those community members are able to work with us in terms of developing solutions, and that the role of individual partners, whether it is the police, probation or the Courts Service, is clearly articulated and understood. Obviously we are moving to things like community resolution. Restorative justice is part of that, also all help. We can talk about that more, if you would like to.

Q529 Chris Evans: Perhaps I am being a bit naive here, but what actually do you do to reach out to the community? How would you engage a community? How does that process begin, if you see what I mean? Obviously you speak to the community, but how do you start the process? I think you’re allowed collaborate.

Sonia Crozier: One of the methods that is very well established is the delivery of community payback, unpaid work, in the sense that my staff who currently work around that sentence of the court have very good community networks in terms of getting local groups to nominate work, and we do now have to keep a record of how many projects our local communities have said, "We’d like you to clean that park up" or "We’d like those alleyways cleared". That is a very obvious way in which we connect with the community, and as I say, there are some very well-worn routes by which we do that. That is not to say we couldn’t get better in terms of publicising that, but a really nice example here locally is that every year in the summer, we are responsible for painting all the railings along the seafront, so you have the gangs of offenders out there with their orange bibs on doing that work, and it is very public, and people come up and they know what they’re doing, and that is great.

Q530 Chris Evans: That leads us on to the breach. What is the breach in the community orders that occur? The Government has been hugely critical of the breach in our community orders. Is that a specific problem in Sussex?

Sonia Crozier: We have a target for the successful completion of orders and licences, which is 75%, and we have consistently achieved our target over many years. You might then come back at me and say, "25% don’t complete". That, for me, is the challenge going forward. It is about pushing that boundary. The highest at the moment in the country, the best-performing probation trust, I think, is sitting at 80% in terms of compliance with orders and licences, which again means 20% don’t complete as they should.

Q531 Chris Evans: That is a concern, 25%. You have a target of only 75%. That is very concerning. What do you think the reasons are for the breach? Is it, as we have heard in the past, sentencers put in community orders too high and too hard to the point that you have offenders saying, "I’m not bothered. It’s too hard; I can’t complete it"? Is there any evidence you can give of that, or examples?

Sonia Crozier: I think it is a combination of things. At the heart of all of this, the reason that people are offenders is because they don’t follow rules and they don’t always comply, so there’s that challenge of working with this really difficult group. Let’s not forget that by the time they’ve got to the Probation Service, they have often been failures in every other Government organisation. They have failed at school; they haven’t engaged in health; whatever. Let’s not ever forget the difficulties of the group that we are working with. That being said, the reason for that 25% could in part be due to the effectiveness of sentence targeting, so there is always a very important job for a probation trust to work with their sentencers so that the magistrates or judges at the point of sentence are putting the right person into the right set of interventions.

The other rationale for why people perhaps have failed in that group comes back in part to some of the nationally imposed targets, so when probation trusts and the Prison Service were being shoe-horned into delivering X of Y, then your attention is achieving Y rather than perhaps "Is that the best programme or provision for that individual?" So that may well have contributed to the 25%. Actually, the freedoms that we have now been given in allowing us to have more say in terms of the interventions, I would hope, over time will also improve that compliance rate. Again, also thinking about the Professional Judgement Project, in the past we were very tied in to this very rule-based approach: "This offender has to be seen: ABC". Now we can say, "Actually, what is the best bit in terms of the supervision?" The Professional Judgement Project and the freedoms of new national standards have also given us an operating model in which to perhaps incentivise offenders more. We could say to people, "If you do this, if you really show me proper change, I can reduce some of the contact that sits around you or some of the prohibitions", so that is important as well in terms of strengthening that carrot and stick.

Q532 Chris Evans: My sister works in Probation Services. She says that really the problem comes down to what I think you’re touching on: the lack of a personalised service. Two weeks ago I was talking to someone who was a methadone dispenser, and his observation was that drug and alcohol addicts went around and around the criminal justice system, and they would go in to him for detox and then they would disappear, and he wouldn’t see them again until they came back into the criminal justice system. Do you think that there is not enough recognition within the criminal justice system that many of these offenders are living very chaotic lives and that they do not have any fixed point in their life, and that is why there seems to be a lot of breach and a lot of reoffending?

Sonia Crozier: I think the very rigid and rule-based approach to some degree did create the environment you have described. That is not to say there were not probation officers who despite that rigidity were operating to a very high degree of professionalism and giving it everything they could, but I do think there is now, as you say, the opportunity to have a more personalised and more intelligent decision-making process about what is going to best fit that offender. Actually, one of the findings from the project that we have been running is that probation officers will say, through the surveys that we have been running in Surrey and Sussex, they feel that they are more in control and that they are now doing the job they feel they came in to do; not just inputting data into computers but actually spending that face-to-face time with offenders, which is what we are here to do.

I think we do also recognise that business about chaos around offenders, and one of the big initiatives we are certainly driving forward is to increase the number of volunteers and peer mentors that work with our offender population, because a probation officer cannot be and should not be with someone every day of the week unless it is in very exceptional circumstances. It is about getting the community to take more responsibility for these individuals who live in their midst, and bringing in more volunteers is a very useful way of doing that. We have a project locally that we run with the Prince’s Trust where we have current offenders acting as peer mentors to offenders on supervision, and that has gone down exceptionally well in terms of providing that additional level of support and, as I say, involving people in the community in the process of rehabilitation.

Sir Alan Beith: Thank you. We are going to need to move on. Can I thank the witnesses very much indeed for the very great help they have given us this morning and invite the other team of witnesses to come and join us?

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Graham Bartlett, Chief Superintendent, Sussex Police, Lisa Dando, Brighton Women’s Centre, Jason Mahoney, Hastings and Rother Primary Care Trust, and Claire Brown JP, Magistrate and Chair of Sussex Central Bench, gave evidence.

Q533 Chairman: I welcome Chief Superintendent Bartlett, Divisional Commander of Brighton and Hove Division; Miss Dando, who is the Director of Brighton Women’s Centre; Mr Mahoney, who is the Substance Misuse Commissioner for the Hastings and Rother Primary Care Trust; and Claire Brown, who is a Magistrate and indeed, Chair of the Sussex Central Bench. We are very grateful to you. We are going to have to move a little bit more briskly because our witnesses had so much to tell us; we’re going over rather the same ground, which I hope to hear from your perspective. Please resume your seat.

Q534 Jeremy Corbyn: What do you regard as the probation service’s greatest strengths and what do you see as its big shortcomings? Anybody?

Graham Bartlett: I think locally, one of the key strengths within the probation service is its willingness to participate very actively within partnerships. Leighe Rogers, who sat in this chair earlier on, is a full and active member of the community safety partnership. She also represents that partnership on the local strategic partnership, so speaks on behalf of community safety to the wider partnership of Brighton and Hove. We have a very strong track record of working with the probation service in terms of prolific and priority offenders and other more discreet projects and I think that’s a real testament to their understanding of the issues locally, their understanding of the drivers behind criminality and their willingness to work with others to try and intervene. So some early examples of that would have been the domestic abusers’ programme that they ran for men that’s been going on for a number of years now, leading right up to Integrated Offender Management and some of the work we’re doing around coordinating our services, collocating our services with probation around the multiagency public protection arrangements.

Q535 Jeremy Corbyn: On an entirely practical level, if you, as a police service, arrest somebody for an offence and you presumably fairly quickly discover they are on probation for something else, how quickly do you and can you involve the probation service, or do you just proceed with arrest, charge, prosecution in the normal way?

Graham Bartlett: We have four officers in three and a half posts working within the probation service on the Integrated Offender Management programme and they have full access to all of our systems within the probation office, so we have that direct and systemised link in there. So we can either do it directly with the probation officers ourselves, or more often, we will do it through our own embedded officers.

Q536 Jeremy Corbyn: And do you, or any of you really, what do you feel about the understanding of what an offender management programme means, because it’s a word that is very quickly bandied around and I suspect different agencies have their own interpretation of what it means? How do you see it-any of you or all of you?

Graham Bartlett: I’m happy to give my interpretation. I don’t think we’re in a position where we have a true, common understanding right the way across the police service and possibly across the partnerships either, but I think, at a specialist level, we understand it to be a programme whereby the different agencies within the partnership take responsibility for the bits that they can affect and bring that together into one overall programme. I think that’s better understood and more refined at a specialist level, so with our public protection officers and our embedded Integrated Offender Management officers and partnerships working within those collocated units, but I think wider we have some work to do.

Lisa Dando: Yes; I can speak on behalf of the Inspire Project. I think that we have a good understanding and a lot of clarity around offender management locally. We’re very engaged in strategic groups who sit on a reducing reoffending board. The workers within the Inspire Project, which is a voluntary sector organisation supporting offenders delivering community orders, work very closely with offender managers and I think anything that’s in relation to the probation trust locally is that there’s a sort of shared responsibility across the partnership for the management of offenders. There is a recognition that we come from a very women-specific way of working. We do have knowledge and skills around the specific needs of women and that responsibility does get devolved to us to ensure that we have the right kind of support and provision and programmes in place for those women.

Claire Brown: I think as far as the courts are concerned that our main link is with probation and the way that we do that is that we have a specific committee of some of our colleagues who work closely with probation to know what is available as far as sentencing is concerned and, therefore, to get more information behind that as far as what options are available. We have different presentations through probation to be able to see some of these options that are available to the courts. So that, I would say, is the way that we link up in knowing what is out there to hopefully address some of the problems of the people we see in court.

Jason Mahoney: For substance misusers in East Sussex where I’m a commissioner. I’d say the clearest links are through Integrated Offender Management arrangements, so we have very close working between the substance misuse services and the probation officers there, which enables offenders who are misusing substances, who will benefit from treatment to get access to that treatment very quickly and people who stop and go out of treatment and go back into offending, are able to be brought back into the Integrated Offender Management arrangements and then back into treatment or into contact with the police quicker than they would otherwise have done. They are also linked out of prison as well, very effectively with the Integrated Offender Management particularly for substance misusers who tend to get short sentences and wouldn’t necessarily get a statutory provision and then Integrated Offender Managements are brought into the arrangements and they get that kind of level of supervision. So they get picked up and brought back to treatment quite quickly.

Q537 Jeremy Corbyn: Lastly from me, do you think that the existing systems of risk management are sufficiently robust or do they need to be strengthened in some way? I would be interested, for example, if on the bench you feel they work effectively and do you feel the need sometimes to give advice on this, or do you just take it from the probation service and then make your judgements on that basis?

Claire Brown: Initially, having looked at-we do it based on a report from probation and that report is following the bench giving their views of what they think will be the right options for the person that we are dealing with based on the background of the individual and also the offence that’s been committed. We then rely on probation to feed back a report to us, but it is still the bench’s final say as to what they are going to give as a sentence and we, through the Probation Liaison Committee, have these very good links with the probation service and, as I say, have regular meetings with them. They come to bench-wide meetings, so it’s not just a small committee, but also when we have those opportunities, they often bring along some of the other agencies or partners to be able to explain in further depth what some of these options will be because as new ones get introduced, rightly we need to have a bit more information to know what it is we are sentencing that person to do.

Q538 Jeremy Corbyn: Any other views on this question?

Lisa Dando: Other views on risk management specifically? Again from a women-specific point of view, I think that risk management does need to be taken very seriously and I think, as another panel member has already said, accord is really important-that those presentence reports do involve consultation with a specialist worker so that risk can be addressed and particularly for women who have experienced domestic violence that that is considered in terms of sentencing and the type of provision that is put into place for that woman. Sometimes I think that with high risk offenders, it can be quite difficult if they are given a referral to a particular project for a community order; the risk can be great. There needs to be, I think, an opportunity for professionals to discuss how that risk is going to be shared and who takes ultimate responsibility for it. Again, I think that’s something that probation does do very well. We feel quite strongly that they hold the risk of offenders and if there is an issue, we can liaise with them very easily to ensure that the right sort of framework is put around that offender. They have very good links with safeguarding panels and boards; we benefit from that.

Sometimes I think there’s an interesting development, going back to what was being said earlier on about the journey, in terms of the culture between the public sector and voluntary sector, there is a different culture around issues but on life safeguarding, thresholds can be quite different around that and I think some of the challenges, but also some of the benefits of working in partnership, is that there’s that shared expertise, that shared knowledge that there needs to be an acknowledgement that these cultures do exist and we have some way to go to ensure that pathway through that is quite smooth.

Graham Bartlett: I’d agree with Lisa about the culture. I think we have a fantastic opportunity with the police and reoffending board and we have a truly multiagency governance body around Integrated Offender Management and other areas and I think we are now moving into a time where we can afford to trust each other more in terms of information sharing and in terms of commissioning. We have a hugely vibrant community voluntary sector in Brighton and Hove with a wealth of experience around delivering services to some quite vulnerable and challenging people and we need to capitalise on that and in terms of working together, what underpins that is information sharing and I think we need to explore as far as we can go in terms of providing the right information at the right time to the right people.

The second point also is having a common understanding of language. You know, what do we mean by risk? Are we all talking about the same thing when we’re saying a particular individual or a particular group are high risk, because practice has shown, certainly in my experience, that’s not always the case and we’re talking different languages.

Q539 Elizabeth Truss: Thank you. I am interested in understanding the impacts this partnership working is having on the ground. So amongst the pool of offenders and potential offenders, do you notice a change in the way that they view what they have done, the probation service? Is there a change in outcome in terms of reoffending rates as far as you can see?

Graham Bartlett: We have some real benefits in Brighton and Hove because most of the agencies work in coterminous ways, so it’s really useful to be able to build up those relationships and certainly in relation to the prolific and priority offender offending rates that other people spoke about earlier on, the 48% reduction in offending is the highest in the trust area and I think that’s testament to the way in which the partnership on the ground works. We’ve had police officers working within probation for at least six years to my knowledge on the PPO scheme, so a real joined up approach in terms of intervening and supervising within the higher risk offenders. We’ve run an operation around the drugs market in Brighton and Hove, which we do with the voluntary sector, with the council and with probation that’s had a huge impact on the drugs market in terms of getting people off drugs and into treatment and also dealing with the offenders. I put that as a real driver towards why Brighton and Hove doesn’t have a violent drugs culture. I think the partnership within Brighton and Hove has generated such a reputation within the higher-offending drug-addicted people who either live or visit here, that drugs markets have never been able to really cast their roots down. We have a high drugs death rate; we know that but our total crime rate over the last five years has gone down by some 26% and about a 23% reduction in acquisitive crime, which is the crime that’s often caused as a result of people trying to get money for drugs. Now that, for me, is as a result of the partnership working between all of the agencies including probation in identifying suitable interventions that work for people and also, on our side, targeting the people that are dealing drugs.

Q540 Chairman: Just to get that clear, are you saying that you have fewer people dependent on drugs and committing acquisitive crimes, or that you have just as many people dependent on drugs but you’re somehow persuaded them not to commit acquisitive crimes?

Graham Bartlett: I don’t know how many people we have dependent on drugs but what I know is that the reduction in acquisitive crimes is about 23% over five years, which is the period over which we’ve run our coordinated strategy towards the drugs market, but also, more notably, we don’t have a drugs culture-sorry, a gang culture around drugs. We don’t have a violent drugs market down here and I think that’s because we have this twin track strategy that gives the drug-addicted criminals the opportunity to go into bespoke treatment places, so getting them off drugs and into a life drug-free. At the same time, we run a rolling programme of targeting drug dealers, so we don’t allow the drugs market to settle. Our drugs death problem is recognised across the city and indeed nationally and it’s one of our intelligent commissioning pilots looking at how we can reduce the drugs deaths in Brighton and Hove. In terms of the drugs market in a city like Brighton and Hove, we’ve managed to prevent the roots being laid down.

Q541 Elizabeth Truss: Can I ask about the reaction of offenders to the way that things are being done now and how the attitude of offenders or potential reoffenders has changed? I am also interested to hear about women offenders in particular. You mentioned in your answer about how they have different characteristics or are best dealt with in different ways; I would just like to understand a bit more about how that is and also how women offenders have reacted to the new partnership working style.

Graham Bartlett: Certainly. The offenders that we deal with have a generally good compliance rate; 96% of our prolific and priority offenders who are deemed to have a need are in treatment and are engaging with treatment, so I think that’s a very good indication that there is a driver there. We heard about a 75% completion rate on orders and I think that’s another story, but because of the dedicated officers and staff from probation and other agencies that we have working, there’s a relationship that’s built up between them and the offenders and it’s by no way a cosy relationship. One could argue it’s almost a carrot and stick relationship-there is an opportunity for people to comply, there’s an opportunity for people to seek the interventions that they need to move them off a criminal lifestyle, but the consequences of not having that are that the police often have powers. Now, with an Integrated Offender Management, these are non-statutory offenders, so there’s not the threat of licence recall or order breach, but if the people are aware that the police know who they are and know what their drivers are to commit crime, then it gives them the knowledge that we’re in a position to do something about it should they not be willing to engage with other agencies. The preferred option is to win over their willingness and we have a tremendous success around that, but some people just don’t take the message and need to be dealt with in more conventional ways.

Lisa Dando: In terms of the specific needs of women offenders, I think we can acknowledge that traditionally there are seven pathways of offending and with women, as a result of the course and recommendations, that was expanded to nine pathways to include domestic violence, sexual violence and also children, families and relationships to take into account the impact on intergenerational crime, which I think is something that we take very seriously. There’s a reason why specific types of support need to be put in place for women because of the extrapolation from women committing crime and how that then translates across their families. So although the Inspire Project locally has only been operational for a year and we haven’t come up with any sort of statistics or figures around a reduction in reoffending, we’re working very closely with our probation colleagues to identify that and put appropriate monitoring and evidence-based frameworks in place to gather that information. What we do know anecdotally from talking to the women that come to the project is that they don’t reoffend as a result of the support that they get. They feel that with the intensive casework support where assessments are made right at the initial point of contact, and a support plan is worked up at that moment and then reviewed periodically, their needs are attended to in terms of their priority and how important it is to address the initial needs such as accommodation and finance problems and then going on to the more long-term underlying needs around mental health and, in a lot of cases, domestic violence and substance misuse. So by putting that intensive support in place and really building a trusting relationship between the worker and the woman offender, she then goes on to feel that she is supported, she can address the reasons for why she’s been led to that place of offending, so there’s a different approach being taken locally and nationally as a result of the course and recommendations, which seems to be working very well. Some of the national projects have had valuations done and their success rate of reducing reoffending has been stated.

Q542 Elizabeth Truss: I can understand the logic behind this intensive focus on what works, but does that impact on justice being seen to be done, so things that might work may not, in the eyes of the victim or the wider community, necessarily be the right approach? Do you think there is a conflict?

Claire Brown: Sorry; do you mean with the sentences that are given out?

Q543 Elizabeth Truss: Efficacious versus those that the public would want to see.

Claire Brown: I think the main result, particularly from the drug perspective, is that we have a designated court that deals with the drug rehabilitation side and we review these people each month and I think there are some very good messages that go out from that. Again, how much that’s publicised depends on the focus of the court but our attitude is very much that when they come back on a monthly basis, there is a thorough challenge of the report that’s before us to see how the person is doing and also just looking into, I suppose, projecting if they’re likely to be coming back through the system again. Predominantly the problems are lack of accommodation; when they get themselves clear, where do they go to then stay away from the people that will influence them to go back into it?

Q544 Chairman: Is there public awareness that this is going on and, therefore, a degree of approval of the way that the courts are handling it because of that awareness?

Claire Brown: I think it’s becoming more known that the court is following up where there are the drug problems. As you say, how much Joe Public will know about the interventions of the courts post-sentence, that will be something very much to promote because it is a monthly review where the people have to come back and explain themselves. It is getting it out to the wider audience.

Jason Mahoney: I imagine what people would like to see is fewer offences and certainly in terms of the partnership working between treatment services and the provision of drug treatment providers, that partnership means we can really shape services around what people’s needs are, so there are issues about housing, there are issues about employment beyond the psychological or treatment interventions that people might need to manage their drug misuse problems. One of the things Mr Evans mentioned earlier on was the expense of seeing people coming back through the system and certainly I think, I’ve been involved in this, I’ve worked for many years now, there are many people that do come round the system, but increasingly fewer. The police are seeing increasingly fewer people staying in treatment, going to prison, coming back out into the community. We are seeing a large increase of people for whom treatment is working, who are leaving treatments in a planned way, having resolved their housing and employment issues and having received the kind of support they need. That partnership between probation and other providers is absolutely critical to making that happen and to help shape the services in the way that is appropriate and help to bring people into treatment as soon as possible in their own drug-using career, if you like.

Q545 Ben Gummer: Can I return to Payments by Results, please? Can I ask, first of all, Miss Brown, about sentencing? I think it’s often where to look is really your first part of the commissioning journey and I wonder, if we have managed to get to a stage where Payment by Results is fully integrated into rehabilitation, if you can see what role magistrates might play in that first commissioning instance in deciding what kind of punishment, what kind of rehabilitation will be meted out to offenders.

Claire Brown: I think the main role for us is looking into the-the person comes before us. They either admit or are found guilty of the offence, which is the one that we are looking at. We then, if it is a community penalty, decide what we think is the right direction that we want probation to look at. It doesn’t totally eliminate. It might eliminate that we don’t think custody is the right option and that it is a community base, but then we are interested in what probation have to say to us but I think one of the factors that we need to keep in mind is how long we’re anticipating the sentence needs to be to be realistic for the different aspects, the different activities that we’re going to impose because there is no point in trying to achieve something if the timescale isn’t right. So I think from that, it’s very important that we take into account the recommendations of probation so long as it’s targeting the aspects that we feel the person needs to be addressing.

Q546 Ben Gummer: Is it not a common problem for probation officers that introducing a pre-sentence report quickly and with little knowledge of an offender, and a first offence especially, then after six months, they realise there is a whole host of other problems that are influencing their offending behaviour? In a good PbR contract, they will be able to adapt what they do to be able to make sure that they achieve the outcome that is required, and that might be different from the sentence that was passed on the back of a presentence report. I wonder whether that means that magistrates are being left with far more open sentencing, and far more discretion is given to providers. There might be a tension, therefore, between public protection, or at least the public expectations of public protection, and the outcomes after the end of the sentence.

Claire Brown: If it is a fairly minor offence and the person does not have a lot of previous, then it’s quite likely that we have a fast-track report, which could be oral, and, as you say, it is a quick turnaround; otherwise if we’re asking for a presentence report, there is a timescale that allows those interviews to take place and for probation to assess which are the best options to take. So I feel that, at the moment, those are the right ways of doing it because the other thing that the magistrates don’t necessarily know is all the options that are available and we’re seeking guidance from people with that knowledge to give us a guide as to which direction we should be aiming the sentence.

Q547 Ben Gummer: Thank you very much. May I put the question that was put earlier to the previous panel about integration of Payment by Results? For instance, this money, you may well be overseeing in one guise or another of Payment by Results along with healthcare, drug rehabilitation, and possibly mental health. I would ask, Miss Dando, whether your organisation might be involved in a similar model all of which would come out of the same pot, or maybe different pots. How do you see that relationship progressing and is it one that you’re looking forward to or slightly sceptical of?

Jason Mahoney: I’m not sure that I’m looking forward to it. There are, I think, six pilots nationally; Payment by Results, Drug Recovery pilots and it’ll be interesting to see how those work out and what ways people find of resolving those kinds of challenges and concerns. When I think about it, it’s very clear that it’s going to be very difficult to describe improvements in a person’s social environment, housing, employment; all of which will impact upon their recovery and to aggregate those and apportion particular improvements to one organisation or another and we’re often talking about organisations that are working very clearly in partnership. I don’t have a clear idea in my mind how that will work. I think very clearly we can talk about Payment by Results or we can talk about an area, which improves a person’s outcomes by having organisations that work jointly together, but I don’t think it’s possible to separate them all out in the way that it’s being talked about.

Lisa Dando: Yes, I understand that the women’s community projects nationally have called for an opportunity to run a pilot as part of the Green Paper’s discussion around Payment by Results. I think it would be quite an interesting pilot to analyse. I think a lot of the anxieties have already come out this morning about what that might look like. I think there will be a diverse understanding of what results mean in terms of different providers and what outcomes we want for offenders in terms of reducing reoffending, but in relation to women, it’s about ensuring that their needs are being attended to and that offending is being reduced by leaving the way clear that you’re supporting a woman back into rehabilitation into her community. I think those decisions around what we mean by results are going to be quite a challenge. Also there’s something about how does the Payment by Results work in terms of who receives that payment? If we’re being asked to work in a way that is clearly much more successful in terms of rehabilitating offenders, which is about working in a partnership way with our colleagues in the police service and probation and the council, at what stage, which intervention is being paid for? Is there going to be a shared payment across the partnership or is there something very specific about the type of intervention that is then paid as a result of working and what does that result mean? So I think, as people have been saying, it’s quite a complicated process and one that is at the very beginning stages.

Q548 Ben Gummer: May I ask one final question of Chief Superintendent Bartlett about results? We heard some interesting evidence yesterday from Martin Narey, who is the former Director General of NOMS, who said more or less that reconviction and reoffending rates, as currently mentioned, were pretty meaningless, and using a collection of proxies to explain whether someone has been reformed or rehabilitated was far more suitable. How do you feel in terms of public confidence? What is the best way of explaining to the public that someone’s reoffending or offending behaviour has come to an end and they are changed?

Graham Bartlett: I think there are risks in wedding oneself to the reoffending rate because there’s a very simple way of manipulating that and that’s just not arresting a person and not bringing them before the court, which is not something that we want to do for people that are offending. I share the other comments about there often being a basket of indicators that will help determine whether or not a person’s life has changed around, based around the seven pathways. For me, the most prominent ones would be around dealing with their substance misuse issues, being in stable employment, stable housing; those sorts of things coupled with any known offending that we, as a police service, are required to be picking up. I think it’s very difficult to use one particular measure and say that’s a success because I think that there are a range of complexities that mean that one or other of those measures can be skewed in different ways. I think it’s a very complex area and I think we need to be careful not to simplify it by saying, "Well, actually, if we sort this bit out, then that’s then on a crime-free life". I think we need to take a better look across all of the seven pathways plus the two that Lisa’s talked about in how they are doing in relation to those. Now, that might not be easy to measure but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do the work because that will give us the whole picture rather than just picking off something that’s convenient to measure at that particular time.

Q549 Chris Evans: I want to focus on the capacity issue. We heard earlier about living in the context of CPSs. How could the partnership approaches, particularly in terms of offences-I am thinking now of women, I am thinking of young adults-can be improved in the current climate? Or can they be improved in the current climate, I should say?

Lisa Dando: I think again, as we’ve already heard this morning, the partnership working has been embedded very well locally and there is an acknowledgement of the wealth of skills and experience of different providers in the city and I think a lot of work is done to ensure that people take responsibility for a particular piece of work that they deliver on. So, going back to what we were hearing earlier on about sentencing, Inspire is given responsibility for an order and is accountable for that offender during the period of time she’s with the project and the delivery of that order. When you’re given that amount of freedom and that amount of responsibility and you’re accountable, it reduces the issues around duplication and repetition of work, which I think can often be the case, particularly in a culture where we see a lot of silo mentality, of things being commissioned very separately. I think part of what’s happening locally, and has been for a while, especially more recently with the development of intelligent commissioning, is that bodies, agencies are being brought together, and especially under IOM, to look at how that shared delivery and shared responsibility will work.

It is, as we’ve heard again, a journey, but I think it’s something that has been working very well locally for a while. I think if we can really get joint commissioning, intelligent commissioning, embedded in, for example, in terms of women, we’re looking at the issues around domestic violence, mental health, issues with caring for their families. The women that we’re working with have multiple complex needs. The ways in which we work with them have to be dealt with in a very holistic, integrated way and that means we work in partnership with other agencies. We have to work in partnership with housing services, with mental health providers and substance misuse providers. It’s something that is integral to the way in which we need to be addressing these issues that are leading to people’s offending.

Jason Mahoney: I think when partnerships are working really well, it’s often about going further, doing more for less and about getting more out of working jointly than any individual organisation could by themselves. So things that really support strong partnership, having a real understanding of what you’re striving towards achieving together and working jointly around that with a common aim, with a common purpose. So I would say that in the context of CPSs, that’s an environment in which partnerships would expect to flourish rather than having adverse impact. I think one of the things that we have locally is very strong partnerships that then help to kind of protect and work towards achieving shared aims, shared outcomes-as long as people remain focused on what they can do jointly together and that seems to work well.

Claire Brown: I think the only thing I would add to that is that the courts and magistrates need to be robust that when any of these sentences are imposed and not completed and breached and brought back to court, we need to listen very carefully to the reasons why that has happened and decide, with some of the information that we’re given at that time, whether the services, probation who are particularly in front of us giving us the report are saying that it is still something that is worth pursuing or whether we need to rethink about the sentence, which almost comes back to what we were saying earlier, that we still have the right to revisit it at some point if it hasn’t worked.

Q550 Chris Evans: What I’m interested in with the Government’s desire to move away from short sentences is do you think locally the partnerships have the capacity to deal with the increased numbers of people they will have to deal with when short sentences enter into the equation?

Graham Bartlett: I think we have to have the capacity to do it because short sentences that don’t work just increase the burden, so with the efficiencies that we’re now having to make, we have to find a partnership way to break this cycle of offending. I was saying to some people the other day that I now hear about the children of the people that I used to deal with when I first started policing in the city 22 years ago, and that’s disappointing because it means something isn’t working there. We need to find a completely different approach and I think through intelligent commissioning and through giving the third sector the opportunity and the space to be able to work with offenders, sometimes under the umbrella of a court order, sometimes not, is our hope really of breaking the cycle because if we’re not able to break that cycle, then the demand on the public sector and the communities will continue but the capacity to meet that demand will diminish.

Q551 Chris Evans: I was a bit concerned when you said "we have to have the capacity". The question is do you have the capacity, and if you don’t, is there a way of driving up that capacity?

Graham Bartlett: Sorry; maybe what I said was a bit ambiguous. We do have the capacity. We have found the capacity to be able to deliver in a partnership way. I spoke earlier about having the officers embedded within probation. Previously they were funded externally; we have them. We relooked at my budget and my resourcing to say, "Actually, I believe this works so I’m going to dedicate this particular resource to do that". That’s against the backdrop of losing some police officers and police staff during the year but the freedoms and flexibilities that we have enable us to find the capacity to deliver what works and to deliver it in a different way. So when I said that we have to have the capacity, it wasn’t a negative comment; it was if ever now, then this is the time to find that capacity.

Q552 Chris Evans: Because time is short, I will finish with one last question. Are there any examples you can give me where you have stopped using voluntary organisations because of the present financial climate during the last year?

Graham Bartlett: I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Certainly the work that we do with the Inspire Project is absolutely critical around giving women offenders a better chance to break that cycle. The work we do with crime reduction initiatives who provide our drug treatment services is absolutely critical in this reduction of drug related crime and certainly with the intelligent commissioning pilots, there’s scope for more commissioning within the third sector and I look forward to that, but I can’t think of anywhere we’ve decommissioned on the basis of finances.

Q553 Chairman: Is there anybody else?

Claire Brown: I suppose I could just be a bit tongue in cheek and say, as magistrates are volunteers, is that our numbers are being reduced because of courts changing and, therefore, one aspect is making sure that we all do stay aware of all the facilities that are available to us so as we don’t lose the opportunities of making sure that we’re using the right options when we’re trying to sentence people.

Q554 Chairman: Just one final point which is that this area was one in which there was a pilot mental health scheme. Just briefly, can you tell us anything about your experience of that?

Claire Brown: Certainly the bench was involved with the pilot scheme to begin with and very much involved right from the beginning, which was very useful, and one of our members was part of that group that were overseeing it and I would say that the impression from the bench is that it has been very positive. It means that we have a CPN in court who is able to see people before they come into court, assess whether there are problems or not, which certainly has saved a lot of time because if someone or if the impression is that somebody might have problems-this is where we were talking about spending time, getting reports filled in, which might come back saying, "There isn’t an issue." By having that CPN in the court, which we do at Brighton, it certainly means that we can get on dealing with the person much more quickly and that the relationship there is fantastic. So we fully support it.

Jason Mahoney: If I may add, the pilot was very positively evaluated and as Leighe Rogers mentioned earlier on, we’re going to roll that out across the whole of Sussex now. To those that need it, we’re really looking forward to having that service available to the courts in East Sussex to successfully direct people into mental health services at an earlier stage and to signpost people who are still to be dealt with by the courts and signpost them to mental health services in order to bring about their sentencing. It just means we can get people to the right place with the right kind of support much earlier because we’re absolutely chokka block full of people with mental health problems and this is an intervention that helps to assist those people to be treated in the right way.

Q555 Chairman: So having been piloted, it is now being embedded in the system?

Jason Mahoney: It is being rolled out across East Sussex.

Chairman: Excellent. Thank you very much to all our witnesses and I just reiterate again our thanks to Brighton for letting us use their wonderful Council Chambers today. It is very much appreciated. Thank you very much indeed.