Lord Ramsbotham writes for ePolitix.com ahead of his oral questions on the state of Her Majesty's Probation Service.
The criminal justice system consists of four distinct but interdependent parts – courts, police, a service responsible for the custody and rehabilitation of those awarded prison, and a service responsible for the supervision and rehabilitation of those awarded community sentences. The system itself, like any other system, is only as good as its individual parts, and as strong as the way in which they work together.
Probation, the service responsible for administering community sentences, essentially is all about face-to-face contact between a trained supervisor and an offender. It can only carry out that work effectively if it is provided with the appropriate number of trained supervisors, backed up by a sufficiency of programmes, to work with the given number of offenders. That provision is the essential responsibility of government, in the context of resourcing the criminal justice system as a whole.
All that may seem very simplistic, and prompt questions about why anyone could possibly doubt the logic of the requirement. Unfortunately Jack Straw, almost as soon as he took office as home secretary in 1997, made it abundantly clear that his, and the government's, goal was to merge the prison and probation services, something that he finally achieved as justice secretary in 2008. There is no longer a director of the National Probation Service, and so no professional head of an organisation responsible for four times as many offenders as the Prison Service.
Frequent attention is drawn to the overcrowded state of our prison system. The only sensible alternative, of course, is to award community sentences, which the public are confident represent satisfactory alternatives to the punishment of loss of liberty. This confidence has to be earned, and will only result from a sufficiency of trained probation officers, having sufficient time and resources to deal with the rehabilitation of the ¼ million, or more than three times the number of offenders in prison, for whom probation is currently responsible.
At present, thanks largely to the demands of the micro-management-obsessed National Offender Management Service (NOMS), almost entirely staffed by the Prison and Civil Services, frontline probation officers can only devote 24 per cent of their time to face-to-face contact with offenders; that time, according to the Ministry of Justice, including time spent with them on the telephone. This amounts to between 15 and 30 minutes only per week.
This situation has got to stop, as has the government's repeated refusal to listen to the evidence from the ground. No business could afford to operate at 24 per cent efficiency.
The purpose of the debate I have tabled for January 21 is to draw attention to this situation, in the hope that whichever government wins the forthcoming election, they realise that unless they rein back bureaucracy, desist from micromanagement, and empower trained probation officers to supervise and rehabilitate those for whom they are responsible, the public is being protected by a maimed criminal justice system.
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd