The trouble with privatising probation

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/03/paul-mcdowell-resign-privatisation-probation

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When the chief inspector of probation Paul McDowell’s links with Sodexo became public last October, it was obvious he would have to resign sooner or later. The Guardian’s home affairs editor, Alan Travis, revealed that McDowell’s wife’s private justice company had won the largest number of contracts to run probation services in England and Wales.

How could he possibly be seen as an “independent and authoritative source of fair comment” on probation when his household income might depend in part on his judgments? When ministers made it clear that it was to him they looked for any warnings that the rehabilitation reforms might be in trouble, his number was up. These reforms, known as Transforming Rehabilitation, have seen 70% of probation service work transferred to private companies – among which Sodexo is the largest player.

It’s a disaster that he delayed until Monday his decision to go. Had he departed three months ago, progress could have been made in recruiting a replacement. As things stand, probation is undergoing the most fundamental and most controversial changes in its history with a much weaker level of scrutiny than is needed.

To its credit, the McDowell inspectorate called some major risks and challenges in its report on the early implementation of Transforming Rehabilitation in December. It concluded that “what happens in this next period of implementation, and particularly the way it is led and managed, is crucial to ensuring the longer-term development of quality and innovation in probation that the public expects”.

There are widespread concerns that both the government’s National Probation Service (which continues to write reports for courts and supervise the most serious cases) and the newly privatised community rehabilitation companies (CRCs), which do the rest of the work, are under-prepared and under-funded for the changes that came into force on Sunday. These see the overall workload of the probation sector increase by a quarter with no new resources. The lack of a high-profile independent monitor for the community supervision of offenders could not have come at a worse time.

Although the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, said on Monday that the appropriate pre-appointment processes were followed when McDowell got the chief inspector job, something went badly wrong. The justice committee claims it was not told about his conflict of interest when it interviewed him in 2013. But did it ask? We need more robust scrutiny in future.

McDowell is a former chief executive of the criminal justice charity Nacro. Arguably, this provides an additional conflict of interest, since the charity will henceforth play a major role in the probation landscape alongside, as it happens, Sodexo. While the success of the Sodexo/Nacro partnership in winning CRC contracts could not have been foreseen when McDowell was appointed, their interest in bidding was well known.

There is a strong case that in future the probation inspector should be drawn from outside the fields they inspect. This has always been the case with the chief inspector of prisons, a post for which the Ministry of Justice is currently seeking a successor to Nick Hardwick. After a scathing series of reports about the impact of cuts on the state of prisons, Hardwick declined to reapply for his job when his term was not automatically extended.

The advertisement for the chief inspector of prisons post makes it clear that the MoJ “would particularly welcome applications from those currently working in, or with experience of, the private sector, and those who have not previously held public appointments”. That’s fine – as long as there are much more rigorous checks in place to ensure that candidates and their families for these and similar posts are independent not only from the services they inspect, but from the companies that increasingly provide them.