Recommendation 151

We heard that the Probation Service “needs the local empowerment and local multiagency links that can make a difference for the people they are supervising”. 279 Justin Russell told us that “regional directors would welcome more devolution, and more power to innovate and do things a bit differently” and added that some of those in charge of Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) that existed under the Transformation Rehabilitation scheme “rather miss the days of CRC, when they had more control over the services they could buy, the way they did recruitment or the way that they organised their workforce”. He recommended that “regional directors or local probation should have the flexibility” to commission specialist support and “have it in their offices, rather than necessarily do it through an externally commissioned contractual arrangement”. 280