The team here at Falcon Road have been busier than normal this week with briefings for activists and members on issues such as our campaign to defend collective bargaining and the launch of our new workloads initiative with supporting material for members and branches.
We have also been trialling some of the thinking behind our recruitment campaign in various visits to workplaces and branches and have held important meetings of our Trade Union Organisation and Health and Safety Committees with lots of good ideas being produced.
If you want to know what Napo is really doing then do look out for our regular mailings to your preferred email address and check out the updates to the website.
Most importantly, do take the opportunity to speak with your branch reps or Link Officers and Officials if there is anything you are not clear about or want to check the validity of.
Operation ‘Long Grass’ - or a sign that things will change?
Here is the gist of some exchanges this week during Oral Justice Questions in the Commons. This is what was asked about Probation
Commons Justice Oral Question 24-01-17
PROBATION
Kate Hollern (Blackburn) (Lab)
What recent assessment she has made of the effect of the volume of probation officer caseloads on the effectiveness of the probation service. [908345]
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Sam Gyimah)
We are currently conducting a comprehensive review of the probation system so that it reduces reoffending, cuts crime and prevents future victims. A wide range of factors impacts on the effectiveness of probation services, including not only caseloads but the nature of supervision and rehabilitative support.
In October, a joint report by the prisons and probations inspectorates found that “high workloads meant that there was no time to think about cases in prison” and that
“workloads for resettlement workers meant that they spent very little time working with individual prisoners”.
Is not that evidence that the Government’s mistaken privatisation of the probation service is failing prisoners, failing to prevent reoffending and therefore failing to protect the wider community?
Our ambition for the probation system review, due out at the beginning of April, is clear. We want a simple probation system with clear outcome measures, such as getting offenders into employment and housing. Outcomes, rather than inputs, are the best way to judge our probation service across the board.
It’s cold in here, but you don’t have to suffer it
The current cold snap is no doubt making working life (and let’s not go there with travel) a tad uncomfortable for some members.
But it’s as good a time as any to remind ourselves that there is a legal limit on minimum temperatures, and that you have a more than reasonable expectation that wherever you work it needs to be in a decent environment to match the prevailing weather.
One example I came across this week from a CRC included a radical suggestion by a seemingly harassed and unsupported manager that people huddle together in the warmest and smallest office, albeit that it was admitted this was not an ideal solution.
Aside from it taking the concept of team working to its outer extremes, it was just another example of the failures of privatisation at even the most basic level and when I later learned that it was not possible to fix the boiler in said premises because of the asbestos presence around it, then that just about took the biscuit.
As usual it was the union reps that put the pressure on up the food chain to get some temporary respite before staff walked out, but I guess this type of thing is not an unfamiliar story for all too many people.
Lest we forget
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day: http://hmd.org.uk/page/why-mark-27-january-holocaust-memorial-day
As the last example of 20th Century mass genocide that still has a number of survivors who can testify to its horrors, it rightly retains its place in the list of shame of contemporary history. Yet it seems that the lessons that the Holocaust provided, and just as importantly, the events and political rhetoric that gave rise to it, still go unheeded by supporters of the far right.
The commentary in the link says it far more eloquently than I can manage, but society cannot afford itself the luxury of forgetting what happened back then and for that matter, the many examples from regional conflicts that have occurred in other parts of the world since, including those where the United Nations have turned their backs.
It’s another reason why I was proud to speak to the ‘stand up to Trumps racism’ event on a freezing last Friday evening which was part of a mass movement that saw millions of women across the globe hitting the streets to show their revulsion about the way that their gender was portrayed by this person on his way to the most powerful position in the western world.
If you want to show how you feel then try this link https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/may_and_trump_meeting_1/?bYakpbb&v=87379&cl=11735202357&_checksum=fed42218aa9a7351f2ee4a8e839bcff9f8f5482fae1fb63bbc6d64478234eda0
- ilawrence@napo.org.uk's blog
- Log in or register to post comments