The revolving door of reform
| Author | Ravinderjit Kaur Briah,James Tangen |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0264550518768398 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice
Probation Journal
The revolving door of
2018, Vol. 65(2) 135–151
ª The Author(s) 2018
reform: Professionalism
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DOI: 10.1177/0264550518768398
and the future of
journals.sagepub.com/home/prb
probation services in
England and Wales
James Tangen
and Ravinderjit Kaur Briah
De Montfort University, UK
Abstract
Reform of probation services in England and Wales has been a frequent feature of its
history, though the pace of review, restructuring and modification has increased
exponentially in the last 30 years. This paper provides a brief history of changes to the
National Probation Service since its inception in the Criminal Justice and Court Ser-
vices Act 2000 to the recent announcements of the merger of prison and probation
services into a new agency, Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. Common-
alities are identified between the various programmes of reform instigated throughout
the last 17 years, drawing on insights from Pollitt. The paper addresses the implica-
tions for the future of a public probation service in England and Wales after the
National Offender Management Service (NOMS) ceased to exist in April 2017 and
Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service was inaugurated.
Keywords
community justice, probation, National Offender Management Service (NOMS),
organizational change, privatization
Corresponding Author:
James Tangen, Division of Community and Criminal Justice, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester
LE1 9BH, UK.
Email: James.tangen@dmu.ac.uk
136
Probation Journal 65(2)
Introduction
Reform of probation services in England and Wales has been a frequent feature of
its history, though the pace of restructuring and modification has increased expo-
nentially in recent years (Burke and Collett, 2016). Driving these reforms is a
recurring concern with cost efficiencies and concerns about the efficacy of reha-
bilitative interventions – common elements of the New Public Management frame-
work (Mair and Burke, 2012). Of less concern has been understanding probation
work as a morally-oriented duty with a unique place within criminal justice practices
(Whitehead, 2016a). This paper provides a brief history of changes to the National
Probation Service since its inception in the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act
2000 to the recent merger of prison and probation services into a new agency, Her
Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS). Commonalities are identified
between the various programmes of reform instigated throughout the last 17 years.
The paper principally analyses the implications for the future of the public probation
service in England and Wales after the National Offender Management Service
(NOMS) ceased to exist in April 2017 and was replaced by HMPPS (Ministry of
Justice, 2017c).
The National Probation Service was established through the Criminal Justice and
Court Services Act 2000. It was a significant reconfiguration of the functions of the
post-conviction elements of the criminal justice system. For several years prior to
New Labour’s rise to power, probation officers resisted attempts to develop a more
punitive ethos for probation practice (Nash and Ryan, 2003). Following the
separation of probation officer training from that of social workers in the mid-
1990s, the new National Probation Service was governed by a policy frame-
work that symbolically represented a further step away from the legacy of liberal
welfarism in criminal justice policy (Annison et al., 2008). This is not intended to
suggest established practitioners, or even those in training, felt their work was any
less oriented towards the probation tradition of focusing on person-centred work to
reform and rehabilitate offenders. Indeed, Canton (2011) offers an engaging
argument against the kind of history presented here, because it presents a reductive
account of changes in probation practice based too much on official documents and
not enough on practitioners’ experiences of living through such changes. This
account, whilst recognizably partial, focuses on the institutional reforms and
organizational restructuring to offer some insights into the changing context of
probation services over a little more than a decade and a half.
In 2001 Eithne Wallis, the first Director of Probation following her successful
management of the process of transitioning probation to a (semi)national model,
presented a strategic plan for this new service (National Probation Service, 2001).
The rhetoric of the time still echoed with the New Labour edict that their government
would be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, though history has shown
this to be an unbalanced promise focusing more on the former than the latter (Burke
and Collett, 2010). The new vision of probation focused on public protection, law
enforcement and rehabilitation delivered through an evidence-based framework
(National Probation Service, 2001).
Tangen and Briah
137
Two years after A New Choreography, a review of correctional services in
England and Wales, Managing Offenders, Changing Lives (Carter, 2003), pro-
posed the extension of competitive markets to both the prison and probation ser-
vices. Notionally an attempt to drive up the quality of interventions, the review
conceptualized the separation of the key probation functions: supervising offenders
and delivering interventions (Burke, 2016). The National Offender Management
Service (NOMS) was established as a new agency within the Home Office,
intended to centralize responsibility for the punishment of offenders and reduce
reoffending through a single Chief Executive (Carter, 2003). During this period,
local services lost their ability to operate independently, becoming Probation Areas
with direct accountability to the National Probation Directorate within NOMS
(Annison et al., 2008).
Bringing the strategic responsibilities for penal and community justice policies
together whilst retaining a local operational model in both branches of NOMS was
lauded as a revolutionary approach to breaking down the ‘silos’ of punitive and
rehabilitative practices in the criminal justice system (Gale, 2012). The idea of
sentences planned to be ‘seamless’ from custody into community was augmented by
the identification of seven pathways out of reoffending, and the introduction of the
Offender Management Model (Robinson and Raynor, 2006). This new model was
intended to promote consistency across the country, whilst simultaneously support-
ing individualized programmes of intervention based on local services (Maguire
and Raynor, 2013). However, these reforms were criticized for introducing a more
technicist approach to probation work, emphasizing bureaucratic methods of
working with people with complex needs, and a strong regime of accountability to
centralized management at the expense of the individualized, one-to-one working
of traditional probation approaches (Annison et al., 2008).
In 2007, Probation Areas regained a level of autonomy, ostensibly by modelling
the organization of probation on the National Health Service. Probation Trusts were
tasked with balancing localized operational priorities with centralized concerns
about efficiency and value for money (Gale, 2012). Simultaneously, the strategic
organization of probation services underwent one of several reorganizations to
integrate the original Regional Offender Managers with Prison Service Area
Managers, creating Directors of Offender Management (DOM). Only one of the
newly constituted DOMs had experience of probation practice and the role of
Director of Probation disappeared from the NOMS organizational structure when
the DOMs were introduced (Burke and Collett, 2010). Consequently, by 2010 the
probation voice was all but lost at the highest strategic levels – a situation reinforced
when a reorganization of the nascent agency brought the Director General of
Prisons to the head of NOMS as Chief Executive (Oldfield et al., 2010). Even at
lower levels, probation staff formed a small cadre (3.2%) within NOMS head-
quarters, numbering barely over a hundred compared with nearly 3500 Prison
Service staff working for NOMS in 2010 (Whitehead, 2016b).
As the financial crisis emerged, the UK government announced probation
funding would decrease by 3 per cent each year between the 2009 and 2011
fiscal years (Oldfield et al., 2010). While £40 million was later announced to
138
Probation Journal 65(2)
support the delivery of community orders, in a public service where expenditure is
dominated by staffing costs, budget decreases inevitably meant reductions in
operational staff resources (Oldfield et al., 2010). Notably, this was introduced
during Gordon Brown’s time as Prime Minister, pre-dating the coalition govern-
ment’s austerity agenda (Painter, 2013).
The introduction of ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ (TR) in May 2013 heralded the
abolition of probation trusts and the provision of community justice services by
private providers (Ministry of Justice, 2013). The coalition government claimed it
was opening up community justice to the voluntary sector, though in reality the penal
voluntary sector was already well established in the UK (Tomczak, 2013). The value
of introducing contestability into criminal justice practices, to create a ‘market’ of
providers, has been challenged as a distraction from developing greater under-
standing of the way interventions are delivered (Rowe and Soppitt, 2014). While
private companies have been involved in the...
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