Transforming Rehabilitation inquiry
Closed
What the inquiry looked at
“Reforms by the Ministry of Justice to transform the rehabilitation of offenders have successfully restructured the probation landscape within ministerial timescales and without major disruption to services, but operational problems and risks to further service transformation need to be resolved, according to the National Audit Office (NAO) in a report published on the 28 April 2016. Probation services were divided in 2014 into a public sector National Probation Service (NPS) and 21 new Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) owned since February 2015 by 8, primarily private, providers. The NPS advises courts on sentencing all offenders and manages those presenting higher risk of serious harm, while CRCs supervise offenders presenting a low and medium risk of harm. National Audit Office report The NAO report found that probation services have been sustained throughout a period of major change, with 77% of service users surveyed reporting that they had not noticed any change in the overall service they had personally received. Service users were most dissatisfied in obtaining help with housing, help with finding employment and having to repeat information to different people; aspects influenced in part by factors outside the control of probation services. The different organisations established in the reforms have different incentives, with unsurprising frictions between working level staff at the NPS and CRCs. Many junior staff at CRCs told the NAO that they considered their NPS contacts to be unduly critical and dismissive, while their NPS counterparts thought CRC contacts were often not providing them with necessary information and had become too focused on commercial interests.”
The committee's words, from the inquiry page on parliament.uk ↗.
What it found
In 2014, we reported on the significant changes then underway to probation services in England and Wales and outlined several risks and challenges. The Ministry of Justice is now more than two years into these ambitious reforms, intended to reduce reoffending, but they are far from complete. There is still no clear picture of how the new system is performing in important areas of the reforms. The failure to deal with ICT problems and serious uncertainty over the impact on providers of lower than expected business volumes have also undermined the pace of change. Both pose a threat to achieving the required performance levels and outcomes by the end of 2017 as planned.
We are very conscious of the scale of the challenges facing the Ministry of Justice in the next few years, in particular the ambitious reforms of the courts and prisons systems, which must be met with increasingly constrained resources. But it is crucial that the Ministry completes the “rehabilitation revolution” it has started and makes good on its promise to reduce the huge economic and human cost of reoffending.
What the government said
No government response is linked to this report.
How the inquiry ran
Each dot is a dated item listed on this page, from the inquiry's opening on 7 June 2016 to its close on 4 January 2018.
- Oral evidence 4 Jul 2016
- Report 23 Sep 2016
What it recommended
The committee's recommendations are not listed here yet. Read them in 17th Report - Transforming rehabilitation ↗ on parliament.uk.
Evidence
Oral evidence sessions 1
- 4 Jul 2016No witnesses recordedparliament.uk ↗