Recommendation 58

Dr Cracknell drew a link with the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms (see Box 4), through which the management of least-serious offenders was outsourced to private organisations, known as “Community Rehabilitation Companies” (CRCs), between 2014 and 2021. He explained that “these reforms have damaged the trust that sentencers have” in the Probation Service’s “ability to deliver effective community sentences.” 88 Box 4: The ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ reforms “Transforming Rehabilitation was a major structural reform programme introduced shortly after Chris Grayling MP became Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice in 2012. The programme implemented in 2014–15 introduced fundamental changes to how probation was organised and delivered. The primary change was the division of service delivery into two parts: The National Probation Service (NPS)—responsible for manging offenders who posed the highest risk of harm to the public and who had committed the most serious offences. The NPS was organised into seven geographic areas. Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs)—run by a mix of providers from private, statutory and voluntary sectors, contracted to deliver community sentences for medium and low-risk offenders, and paid, in part, for results achieved in reducing reoffending. In 2014, private companies (including Sodexo, Interserve, and MTC Novo) won bids to provide services in 21 CRC areas.” 89 In June 2020, CRC contracts were terminated and the Probation Service unified. 90 The House of Commons Justice Select Committee responded: “We welcome the decision to unify the Probation Service once more. We warn, however, that, after the disruption of the past seven years, changes proposed and begun to the probation system must be fully thought through, properly funded and expected to remain in place for a period of decades rather than months or a few years.” 91