ilawrence@napo.org.uk's blog

A resounding ‘no’, was the not altogether surprising answer from the many stakeholders present at the Justice Committee seminar that took place in Parliament last Tuesday chaired by Robert Neill MP. Now Mr Neill is someone whose recent line of questioning of various members of the MoJ high command suggests he isn't exactly convinced about the outcomes of one of his government’s erstwhile flagship policies, and that he has noticed how tawdry the ensigns are looking these days.

A resounding ‘no’, was the not altogether surprising answer from the many stakeholders present at the Justice Committee seminar that took place in Parliament last Tuesday chaired by Robert Neill MP. Now Mr Neill is someone whose recent line of questioning of various members of the MoJ high command suggests he isn't exactly convinced about the outcomes of one of his government’s erstwhile flagship policies, and that he has noticed how tawdry the ensigns are looking these days.

We have secured more oral questions through the Labour Front Bench Team for next week’s justice question session in the Commons which relates to prison safety, access to justice and probation.

This is just one example of the parliamentary activities we are involved in as we approach a week where I will be making a contribution to an informal hearing being organised by the Justice Select Committee, and where Napo will be taking up an offer to meet with Probation and Prisons Minister Sam Gyimah in lieu of him not being able to personally attend our recent AGM.

As I said last week, events in Probation are getting a pretty good airing within Parliament and occasionally outside as well (see BBC story below).

Yet another sign that Parliament is showing serious interest in the shambolic state of the probation landscape arrived yesterday. The Justice Select Committee (JSC) have sent me a personal invitation to speak to them on November 1st  on the implementation of reforms to the delivery of probation services under the Transforming Rehabilitation programme.

Your new Officers Group convene next week alongside Napo Officials for our first meeting after what was by anyone’s standards, an absolutely fabulous Annual General Meeting in Cardiff.

How timely, just ahead of our AGM, come two damning reports. The first by HMI Probation into the performance of private provider RRP in Derbyshire and the second, from the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee into what they describe as the failure of Transforming Rehabilitation.

I hope that followers on Twitter noticed the regular snippets about proceedings that Yvonne Pattison and I sent out over the course of the Trade Union Congress in Brighton this week. If you didn’t see them then let me tell you that Napo played a pretty full part in the proceedings with three keynote speeches from us on prison reform, probation provision and the role of Cafcass in the Justice System (I will see if we can get the recordings up on the website next week) and two appearances by me at fringe meetings on the need for a debate among trade union members on Electoral Reform.

There will not have been anyone (except perhaps the architects of the E3 programme) who was not hoping that the outcome of the three appealed jobs (AP Manager, AP Residential Worker and Victim Liaison Officer) that were the subject of fresh evaluation panels would have come out with the results that we were hoping for. We issued news at precisely the time we had previously agreed with NOMS and Unison but the NOMS intranet went down in one of their 'can go wrong will go wrong' scenarios, so I decided to press on and issue.

It’s very clear that a number of CRC owners are having some difficulty with NOMS over the impact of the Weighted Annualised Volumes (WAVS). This is the measure which shows the actual numbers of clients on the CRC's books (which NOMS says are falling drastically in some areas) and are a key component of the complex payment mechanism that helps to determine how much tax payers money the CRC contractors can claim for the services they provide.