 Llyr~~Yddoch chi'n meddwl amgylcheddol i chi gweithio'r Ffgolwg Llyrdd. Mae'r Llyfr Roedd yn gweithio bod gennym ni'n gweithio'r ffordd i chi'n gweithio'r allan. Mae gweld yn gwneud yr alu'r bwrdd gwirio'r resechtyn i'ryson Llyrddol ar y momentu byddai i ddigon o'r hwn yn argynnu a'r llyfr dros cymwyntau cymwyntol. Ond oes yn gwneud, mae'r Beirwyr wedi bod yn rhan o'r ffordd o'r gweithio ar y maes. First, o'r John King, o'r Tony Bottons, oherwydd o'r Bill McWilliam, oherwydd o'r cyd-dechrau ddechrau. Rhaid i chi i wych ar y ddyfodol ymlaen i'r gweithio gweithio'r cyfnod, ond rwy'n ffwrdd, rwy'n gweithio'n ei ddau o'r Llyfridol phil yng Nghymru ac yn gyf-gwysig ac yn gyf-gwysig. Rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'r cyfnod o'r gwcwysig yw'r gwcwysig o bwysigol ymlaen, ac yn gweithio'r gwcwysig o'r cyfnod o'r gweithio'r gwcwysig. ac yn ystod o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod yma, rwy'n rhaid. Is the probation service to die was a question asked in an article in probation published by NAPO, the National Association of Probation Officers, in 1968? A different era, a different context, it was a question asked when the Scottish probation service shifted probation practice to social work. Which leads me to say that the institute is very proud to announce that it now houses the NAPO archives and indeed some archives from probation trusts. A small exhibition, a small collection of materials were on display at lunchtime and I hope that you managed to look at some of them. In due course we will have new and bigger displays of materials in the institute library. NAPO are fully involved in the NAPO collection in the institute library and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future and we hope that's a long time. Our enthusiasm for the task of storing probation archives, collecting them, becoming a national repository if you like, is a measure of our interest in and of the value we place on the records of probation policy and practice. And I think in a way we see this as but a small contribution to the spirit of probation. Perhaps it's a very important contribution though in such a sea of change. So let me turn to our speaker, our distinguished speaker. Paul has had a very long and distinguished career in probation practice and probation studies and having mentioned NAPO I think Paul has been a long standing critical friend of NAPO, a very important friend too. In 2002 having developed a robust criminology and community justice presence within Sheffield Hallam University Paul started the Hallam Centre for Community Justice, a research centre specialising in offender management, resettlement and restorative justice, where he's now a director. Paul's been very innovative, he launched a community justice portal which then in conjunction with De Montfort University led to the creation of the British Journal of Community Justice and I think it's a journal which you continue to co-edit. So I think in some Paul's career has been linked to policy, practice and research in and around probation and with probation partners in criminal justice and he's written on many aspects of probation practice and community justice. Two books include understanding modernisation in criminal justice and moments in probation. So I think you've had some 38 years of work in this area and Paul, it is indeed an honour that you have agreed to give this lecture. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Lorraine. Can I check that everybody can hear me at the back? Yep, lovely. It reminds me a little bit of the feelings I had when I first gave a big speech at a NAPO conference about 33 years ago when I was full of the same slight trepidation. I was speaking then on withdrawal of probation officers from prison and now we're speaking about the withdrawal of probation officers for most things to do with the criminal justice system. So we've not come a long way in those 33 years. I'm very honoured to be given this opportunity to do the 16th Bill McWilliams lecture and I'll say a little bit more about my connection to Bill in a few minutes. The one thing you could say about probation with absolute certainty is that change is a constancy in the probation service. You could pick up a quote from anywhere. I picked this one up. Even a cursory glance at the recent literature of the probation service suggests that change of a fairly substantial order has always been a dominating feature of his existence. You said that? Well, it was Bill McWilliams in 1981. Since then, change has been and still remains a feature of the way in which we practice. The longer you can look at probation service as simply an organisation that's here to advise, assist and befriend. In some respects, it's now vouched as enforcement, rehabilitation and public protection. It's a long way from advise, assist and befriend. The title of my lecture was deliberately chosen. We have been here before. We've worried about the end of probation on many occasions. Maybe too many times. Maybe we've tried wolf on occasion. Is this fundamentally different? Are we facing something which is fundamentally going to destroy the probation service as we know it? And if it is different now, in what ways is it different? I'll explore a little bit about that. I put in my title, is the probation service much cherished? I put this in because that's what I believe and I'll say a little bit why I believe that in a minute. But interestingly, this title has been challenged in a number of arenas, including the MOJ, who wanted to get me to change it, but were relieved to let me go ahead when they saw the question mark at the end. But George Mayer, in his inaugural lecture at Liverpool Hope University, actually questioned with me the notion of, is it much cherished? His lecture, which you can see on the YouTube, rather paints a dimmer picture of probation. I will say why I think it is much cherished. I think I'm speaking to an audience that will agree with me in large part. Does the retention of a national probation service challenge the notion that probation is disappearing? Are we really just playing around and the probation service will continue? In what other ways might the institution of probation be preserved? That will be in the essence where I'm taking this lecture. I want to look at what is the institution of probation, how it's grown up, how it functions and how it can be preserved and in what ways. Does it matter and to whom? Well, I'll leave that question for discussion at the end. I think it matters. I dare say quite a few people in this audience think it matters. For some out there it doesn't appear to matter. And of course I'll try and answer the question I pose in my title, is this probation's death now? Lorraine beat me to it when she quoted from the 1968 probation journal, Is the probation service to die? Which of course in Scotland it actually did shortly afterwards. But we've heard those remarks many times. In 1974 we talked about the death knell of rehabilitation, sounded by Robert Martinson's Nothing Works essay. I started work in probation in 1975 when the very first NAPO newsletter I received had the title The Death of the Rehabilitative Ideal. I didn't think I'd be in a job for long. However, we seem to recover from those down days in the 70s and through the 80s. I picked up this from 1992 from Probe, the NAPO Action Members magazine. This is from the editorial. The move to the operation of a punitive service in the community marks the death of the traditional humane, helping and caring probation service, which was one of the country's greatest contributions to civilised, penological thinking throughout the world. Just in February of this year, Mike Teague said after 105 years of world-first rehabilitative intervention, the probation service in England and Wales is about to be effectively dismantled. May not quite amount to probation's death now, but it will be a qualitatively different service. When I first started in probation, I needed concepts and ideas to revolve around to help me to make sense of the world I've found myself in. It was through meeting people like Bill and others that I came with concepts of reflective practice and this notion of a constructively critical culture. Bill as research officer in South Yorkshire Probation promoted this intensely. He said, the objective is to create an organisational culture in which the official goals and the operational goals become one. This is far from easy, but is most likely to be achieved in a culture which places high emphasis on healthy and constructive criticism. Bill of course had a very unique way of having constructive criticism and it composed a number of particular processes. The first one for me was to get an invite to Bill's home for what he called a sware. I arrived not quite sure why I'd been invited. I was not of the same thinking as Bill. I was seen as somebody from a different kind of intellectual thought but nevertheless Bill invited me to his home. He then gave me a hot chilli, home cooked of course with big chunks of homemade bread. This was liberally followed by home brewed beer. A very heady concoction I seem to remember. These two got the discussions flowing but he put together a completely random group of people. Bill was not somebody who would talk to people who agreed with him. He would set himself out to find others who disagreed with him and I was there because he regarded me as the red under the bed in Doncaster. I was someone who was coming from a very different intellectual tradition so I was there to try and defend what the difference of a radical position was to this. Of course I lived out of Sheffield. I lived in Doncaster as I still do and so therefore after the home brewed beer it was necessary to go to bed. I think that was the end of the evening but not so. You then tried to sleep to the tap tap tap of a time writer. I didn't know the first time what was happening but this went on seemingly for hours. Eventually you woke and you had a nice hot breakfast. At breakfast you didn't relax, get your bearings for the day, Bill shoved a paper into your breakfast table and said these are the ideas I've come up with from our discussions last night, what do you think? You earned your breakfast. That was the constructively critical culture that Bill tried to engend in his own work and in others and I think we've seen that being part and parcel of what probation is about right through to this day. I took three random quotes from the 15 previous lectures that give some indication of that. Peter Reiner in 2012 talked about what works being fed by culture of curiosity. Guy in 2006 talked about having a more holistic understanding of the moral complexities of criminal justice and last year Steve Collich said if probation is a morally significant activity not simply reducible to the techniques of correction it requires a competent critical and reflective workforce. These notions are inherent to the way that probation is as an institution. It is reflective, it is critical, it is innovative, it is constructively so. It breeds on research, on evaluation, on personal engagement and it's those characteristics that have carried it forward in the past 105 years and I hope for a while to come. I want to apply that constructive critical analysis to what I'm going to go on to do. The question at the beginning of the title is quite important because I don't yet know, I may know by the end of the lecture whether indeed this is probation's death now or not. Sometimes when I've been reading stuff I felt there's very little hope and other times I think there are some straws in the wind so I want to keep that question floating during the session. I'm going to talk in three phases. The first is to try and understand and triangulate what I call the institution of probation. What is it? I think it's a combination of ideas, policy and organisational arrangements and I want to talk a little bit about that in the first 10 minutes or so. I then want to talk a little bit about transforming revolution. This lecture is not essentially about that but I think I need to say some comments about it and where probation might or might not stand in that. The final part assumes that transforming revolution will take place. If it does, I want to ask the question where will probation rest under those new arrangements? Is there a role for the institution of probation under the new arrangements? I've forgotten that was there. Just before I move on, I just wanted to say that I was at a concert recently when a magician came on stage. I was with Philip Proctor who some of you will know from probation service. This magician asked for a volunteer from the audience to come on stage and help him with his magic act and foolishly I agreed. Whilst I was on stage, Philip drew a cartoon of what happened and it was interesting because I'd always believed this but it didn't actually realise it until it happened. The magic trick was to cut me in half and as he cut me in half, that's what it revealed. And I think that that's important although I am trying to be objective and led by the evidence before me. I am motivated by a commitment to the probation service that I've carried all my professional life and I'm sure many others here if cut in half will find that they have probation written through them. So probation, big ideas and policy. Bill McWilliams and Ken Pee said way back in 1990 does probation need a transcendent justification for its activities. Indeed the famous quartet of articles by Bill explored the changing relationships between probation policy, practice and big ideas. Bill focused on eras where the oneness of the probation officer and the probation service in terms of policy and practice gave it internal and external coherence. The probation officer was the probation service and the probation service was the probation officer. Therefore you could read off what it was about comfortably. By the time he wrote his last piece Probation Pragmatism and Policy in 1987 Bill began to tease out what became the beginning of changes which are still reverberating today and important when we try and understand what the institution of probation is. Bill identified three elements in constructing the probation world or institution in the late 1970s. The impact of ideas was continuing on probation practice though they were now more varied than they had been in the earlier eras. Policy was emerging as an independent variable on probation practice and in particular we began to talk about alternatives to custody as an overarching policy objective. And the organisational arrangements within which probation took place varied over time, was moving and changing. It is these three elements a combination of ideas, policy and organisational arrangements which characterises what I call the institution of probation. That was a diagram that Bill used in that final paper to illustrate the change in dimensions of probation in the 20th century up to the end of the 1970s. What we see in his third era, what she called pragmatism was the breaking down of big ideas. Indeed ideas in conflicts with each other. He identified managerialism in his early days the radical school and personalist approach which was the one that he championed. I took those ideas and moved them forward and very briefly want to share that with you so that in the 1980s one had an extremely youthful probation officer as an example of 1980s. I know it's hard to believe that all those years have passed and try to look at each of these eras in relation to policy, organisation and big ideas. In the 1980s alternatives to custody were still a policy objective but for the first time we see policy objectives being imposed on probation and this was most clearly exemplified in SNOP the statement of national objectives and priorities which came in 1984. It's interesting though that in South Yorkshire probation a constructively critical culture that Bill had created made us sit down and look at this paper called aims, objectives and priorities and made the chief change that to aims, tasks and resources. So South Yorkshire would not go with the notion that there had to be priorities in practice. That would not happen today. And as of course the 1980s moved on SNOP and SLOPs and TOPs became at the order of things and if you weren't gilpin blacked and understood management by objectives then you didn't know where probation was in those days. The outside was imposing its policy on probation it was no longer simply able to decide for itself. On top of all that on a political level we saw the law and order ideology of Thatcher and the development of the early days of new public management and her notion of value for money. The organisation began to change. Bill had identified the increasing role of management against the professional autonomy so loved of probation officers but it's a long time since we've experienced that. Within probation, grade and role diversification gathered pace. Probation officers from being 95% of the service were down and now are around 50% of the probation service. Who did what changed and was up for grabs? The big debate in NAPO was about the boundaries between roles. What did so-called probation ancillaries regarded as a term of insult in those days do and what did probation officers do? Lots of uncertainty about who led on probation practice. The big ideas that were around were diversification and what I've chosen to call eclecticism. Anything went in the 1980s. I started as a training officer in 1982 and I would be rung up and asked could I put on a course on Heimler social functioning? Could I put a course on behaviour modification? Could I do a group work course? Of course in those days we said yes. So even if only four people came we did a Heimler social functioning because I still don't know what it's about. But a great guy from Manchester was apparently accredited came across to do that course for us. There was lots of versions of the big ideas and I and Peter Rayner wrote different versions of how that broke down in relation to practice. From Marxism to Correctionalism via of course the famous non-treatment paradigm of Bottomsom at Williams. When we moved into the 1990s we went into an era where there was something a night about it. This was a difficult era for probation. Punishment in the community was the policy idea and that was not at all wanted by the probation service. Public protection and just desserts were the predominant policy steers. But probation was the move centre stage. Something we didn't grasp wholeheartedly and wanted to shy away from but certainly was offered in the brief period of time. Law and order continued to motivate political decision making and of course Michael Howes famously came up with his 27 points for why prison worked. What we saw in the organisation of probation was a reducing level of discretion. If we thought the 1980s had seen that the 1990s saw it advance at a pace. National standards came in in 1992. At first a very worry, woolly educational document. That was partly because NAPO and other organisations were involved in making it. We didn't want to tie ourselves down. But later versions, 95 and 2000 and so on became ever more prescriptive about what practice should be about. To the point at which it became very difficult for a probation worker to do anything when he got in in the morning without consulting the national standards to see if he could sit at his desk and could answer his phone. Many times he had to see somebody what he should say to them and so on and so forth. Audit and monitoring also began to be the norm. 1989 saw the Audit Commission emerge as a body that was going to look over value for money in probation. And of course we saw in 1996 the ending of social work training. And this was, if anything, an important point in the history of probation which I could discuss at length on another occasion. I think it was more symbolic in terms of what that meant about the independence of probation officers rather than in itself being a problem. Because the curriculum of the new probation award was actually very similar to the curriculum of the old social work awards. I don't think the content of training changed but the image certainly took a dip. And of course corrections was the philosophy that was gained in the 1990s. Probation was more about gatekeeping and intermediate sanctions. There was some bottom up what works. And this is very important because that was lost at the turn of the century as it was taken over by the establishment. Risk assessment and management became the tool by which probation managed their practice. The institution was beginning to shape. At the millennium I think we could see a good version of the future. What I'm going to choose to call community justice. Community justice was a potential modern rallying call for the future of the probation service. Although the modernisation agenda was introduced in managerialism at a pace and marketisation of some services and risk and public protection were still being pushed by a Blairite government at the same time the social exclusion unit was offering alternative vision of what practice should be about and offered pathways to change which were taken up enthusiastically within the probation service. For the probation officer and worker multiple accountabilities but in the way of their work national standards were in one sense on the centre central control regional and local accountability made it very difficult to know who you should listen to in developing your practice and approach. I remember particularly one example of this the street crime initiative which Tony Blair introduced from the centre. This stood against all the local developments around resettlement and local practice. Everything had to stop and change to account for that national agenda. Probation officers and probation workers didn't know who they were accountable to. The service introduced training the diploma improvisation studies which again had multiple accountabilities. The student was both student, trainee and employee at the same time a difficult and demanding role although it was described as the role growth of training. The big idea was really community justice. Resettlement pathways were enthusiastically developed. Community safety partnerships are coming in 1997 and although probation status in relation to them remained uncertain it was a way of moving forward in developing partnerships and integration. Restorative justice almost did it's once a decade return to centre stage. It's now back coming to centre stage again. Someone one day will write the policy history of restorative justice because it's been very popular in 1985 some people will recall although NAPO's policy document against it did rather help to take it out at that point. Victim focus certainly came in those days and stayed in the probation service. Community engagement was still a hope in some of our practice. Many of the speakers in the Bill McWilliam's lecture at the turn of the century talked about these themes more so than John Hardin who talked about this vision for community justice. This looked like a positive vision. We developed the British Journal of Community Justice to speak to this vision. We're still going 10 years later but I'm not sure the vision is going. Indeed it was only in the following year and in the rest of the first decade of the 2000 that we see quite a sea change in the institution of probation. Modernisation accompanied by penal populism reducing re-offending becomes the policy aim but North American style. Tuffong crime became the yardstick by which we should be just and the word contestability reared its somewhat ugly head. It was just another name for competition but it was certainly to be decisive in the way probation went forward. Probation was no longer the sole provider of services a mixed economy of provision was developing. Partnerships, the voluntary sector probation as broker. Performance indicators and targets and standardisation were all over the work that we did. Amongst this they tried to change the organisational structure and I remember coming in here I think to see Judy McKnight do the 2000 in which year it was 2007 I think Bill McWilliam's lecture in which he showed us about nine different organograms as she tried to make sense of the structure of probation. Has it changed from the national probation service to NOMS and finally to the probation trusts? Psychology became the big idea once again as he'd had been in the mid part of the 20th century rather differently this time. Cognitive behavioural therapies predominated and the role of the accreditation panel became crucial in deciding what activities probation officers were engaged in. Oasis as a tool for risk assessment became absolutely central and risks, needs and responsibility came off the tongue of all probation practitioners. There was lots of work going on in pathways for the community safety partnership but it was difficult to keep pace with the change of direction towards programmes. And Mike Nellis talked engagingly in the Bill McWilliam's lecture about the growth of techno corrections too. So we come to the present institutional setup for probation. Which way will it go? We're at a crossroads I think again. This time I think the big policy idea is clearly market economics. We can't get away from that. That's what this is all about. And that's what governs the way in which the proposals are coming out. It means privatisation because the private sector is seen as a sector that can deliver in a more cost effective way. It means austerity because the government has a austerity policy package. It also means process innovation. It means changing the way in which services are delivered. And we're no longer going to have a probation service. The organisation of probation service as an institution seems to be going to be disappearing. What we're going to have are contract package providers in contract package areas. And this is quite interesting. This is going to be outsourced in 21 chunks. You may wonder why I use the word chunks. I could have used co-terminus with PCCs but they aren't. I could have used co-terminus with police but they aren't. I could have used co-terminus with local authorities but they aren't. They simply aren't co-terminus. There are 21 chunks picked out with scarcely a lot of thoughts the existing arrangements in those areas. And clearly driven with a greater involvement for sub-partners particularly the voluntary sector, payment by results which I'll return to a much reduced role for probation. I have to say in concluding this look at the ways in which the institution of probation has changed is that at the same time that these organisation and policy changes are afflicted in the probation service we have I think for the first time in a long time a developing coherence about what good practice is about. It seems strange that we can't bring the three elements together. I put this distance as the key idea but there are many things around that which we are familiar with. I'm not going to talk about this in detail. The offender engagement program has been interesting in bringing probation workers back into good case management practice. Integrated offender management has and is been a success built on co-operation, pooling of resources and partnerships and notions of justice re-investment have been particularly successful in one or two parts of the country. At a time when I think we know more about what we want to do it does seem strange that we can't find an organisational structure to support that. So to my second part transforming rehabilitation I want to talk briefly about historical backdrop. I want to reject the polarization between private bad and public good or public good and private that's the same thing. Private good and public bad I want to talk a little bit about the role of the voluntary sector. I want to talk about probation's own role in its own downfall and I want to talk about whether transforming rehabilitation means the dismantling of this institution of probation. Brief historical picture I looked at over 40 nation states Some probation services started as private institutions I looked carefully at this this actually meant volunteers and charitable organisations. As services that developed in the 20th century they became professionalised, government funded and governmental executive bodies. Newer probation services particularly in Eastern Europe have state driven services. The literature talks of private organisations and actually this is about foundations or non-governmental organisations not private for profit. There are multiple state formations of probation but they are all in all 40 nation states states driven. I want to reject the polarization that's been going on between the private and the public sector. I want to start by saying there are no examples globally of private for profit organisations running for probation. That's why I think this polarization is growing up. There are some specialist services in the USA and of course in the techno corrections area around electronic tagging and so on there are private sector driven processes. Global organisations that we've come to love to hate G4S, Circos and Exo we go on Twitter they're being attacked most of every day have a justice section that runs all sorts of things from prisons and maybe through to legal aid too. They also have healthcare and education but they are for profit organisations with diverse portfolios designed at the end of the day to provide dividends for shareholders. Now the research is mixed about performance benefits and disbenefits but it is hard to say that the private sector in the work that it's done here the two, particularly in prisons has not had some success. The own research that I've been involved in the research done here at Cambridge shows that you cannot always distinguish between good quality practice between the private and the public sector. We can't wish away the private sector it's almost too late to do that about 25 years too late to do that and indeed some of the work that goes on can be groundbreaking and innovative some of it is problematic but so is the public sector and we sometimes forget that I think. I think the private sector that we're dealing with understands the values of the sector but it's not their prime driver that might be a particular issue. I think also the campaigns that are going against their efficacy are limited and doomed to failure. I want to give an example of this by going back to the early days of electronic monitoring. Electronic monitoring was attacked by the public sector organisation on the grounds that it would not work. Lots of campaigning going on talking about people turning over in their beds blocking off the signal and having the monitoring agency charging to their house as if they've been on the loose on the streets. The argument was that technology would not be up to it. This was always a flawed strategy because eventually the technology gets it right and I think we're in danger of doing the same thing now. There are bad practices in the private sector but there are some very good practices and we cannot just hone in on the bad practice in one sector when there have been problems in all the sectors over the past 10, 15 years. I think it's a limited approach and I don't think it's very helpful. I do not want the private sector to run probation but they may already have a role to play. I want to come back to this last point at the end and do we know whether the ones that we are most familiar with will actually be the key bidders that you have. The role of the voluntary and community sector we see voluntarism in many present day global probation services. Voluntary sector organisations, the use of volunteers as lay supervisors and of course the use of volunteers as mentors and peer mentors and so on. But there's no example of where the state does not have a controlling state in the delivery of statutory services. The benefits of the voluntary sector is as an adjunct, supplemental or additional services which is strong when it's localised and community driven. All the research points to the benefits of the voluntary sector in this area. In the UK I think there's been a real sense of mission drift amongst the voluntary sector particularly amongst the larger voluntary sector players which compromise their core values which distinguish them from the statutory sector. Are they going to be a real influence in the course of the next 18 months or are they merely going to be bid candy for the private sector? I also want to make a brief point about innovation. Contrary to what is continually asserted innovation is not the preserve of the voluntary sector not only possible in a competitive environment. Incentivisation is not only a quality associated with cash reward. We've seen plenty of examples in the research that we've done particularly even around payment by results where probation and other staff are incentivised by doing a good job by reducing re-offending by helping offenders into better situations. Cash reward does not enter into that a lot of the time. I am not starry-eyed though about probation service and if we have to look at the mess we're in now we have to look at our own place in that. Ken Pease asked in 1999 in the first of these lectures how well has it justified its claim that it's an efficient means of processing offenders. We have inconsistent management and autonomous practises. We've lost sight of the community context which John Crawford talked about in this lecture in 2011. We no longer see home visiting as key to the way in which we do the work. Community engagement is merely a word used rather than something actively engaged with. The short lift era of the national probation service greatly diminished its standing in the UK. Loss of leadership half the chiefs of probation retired in 2001 and poor leadership in the early days of the national probation service. Crawford talked in 2011 of a culture of learnt dependency. And also we saw the unintended consequences where big ideas become to dominate. The fate of what was was an organisational mistake of the merits of the evidence base promoting it. In the non's world we were outmaneuvered by prison leaders. NAPO was a lone voice in those early years because ACOP decided to put itself out of existence. When the PCA came in in 2011 the voice did improve and they've done a good job of putting probation before the public. So to transforming rehabilitation itself and the dismantling of the institution of probation. Most of the prescriptions for change in transforming rehabilitation probation would and have endorsed. However nearly all the proposed mechanisms are not backed by evidence. We do not have a situation in which change is governed by what we might call evidence informed practice. Sometimes people call that evidence based practice. I think it's much more policy based evidence. I want to give you three brief examples of this. We're about to see the creation of four new work centres promoted by government. These are to be modelled on the nice model for medical research. And there's to be one in crime reduction centred at the College of Policing. This tends to show that the government is committed to evidence based policy. It's very interesting though if the model was to be followed, why it is that so much of the evidence presented in the return on transforming rehabilitation has been totally ignored. The evidence base is extremely strong about the problems involved in some of the changes. Let's take payment by results as an example. Payment by results is unproven as a mechanism of practice. Even the results of the first and only major violence in criminal justice in Peterborough and Doncaster that recently came out were not wholly positive about the changes that have occurred. But nevertheless, Chris Grayling said I'm a reformer. I don't need to wait for more research. I'm going to implement it anyway. It's very interesting. Had he worked for nice and nice come along with a new cancer drug that had new side effects, but they thought it's actually making people better at it having a few problems. Let's not wait for further tests. Let's not wait for further evidence. Let's just impose it on anybody. Of course not. Nice would not approve such a thing. So we can't be committed to what works and then actually not wait for the results of their own pilots to see how they're working out. The third example would be community payback in London. All the rumours emerging from that experiment, and that's what it is, it's a small experiment of what's to come suggests there are problems in implementation. Suggest that practice has not gone according to how it should have done. This should and must have been evaluated to look at how it works. This would given us some real evidence of whether these changes were based on good policies. But no, they're moving ahead on a national model. We know and Bowie talked about this in 2006 that speed always undermines implementation. He talked about it in relation to what works at the turn of the century. The ridiculous speed at which we're expected to put people on programmes, 60,000 I seem to remember, actually got in the way of that experiment being a success. The speed that we're talking about now is extremely risky. People will have seen the paper today. This would have been in my speech had I read the paper this morning. But let me just read one bit. This is a risk register linked to the Guardian. There is more than 80% risk that an unacceptable drop in operational performance will lead to delivery failure and reputation damage. The report says the failures could be caused by industrial action, failing staff morale, staff departures or probation leaders disengaging from the world. There is a huge risk and that article is worth reading. The three key elements that Grailine talks about are reducing re-offending, saving money and innovation. But actually this is all about money. And the marketisation of public services, treating offenders as commodities. This is not about reducing re-offending. There are other ways you can achieve that. For Heaven's sake, the probation service of the last decade has reduced re-offending by 10%. This can't be about reducing re-offending. And it can't be about innovation because there's plenty of examples of innovation around an assistant environment. Those are nice aerosol words that we can spray on. And it's all actually about saving money. George Mayer said in his inaugural lecture, fragmentation, loss of expertise conflicts of interest inconsistency of practice the gains of the last decade will all be negated by these changes. The institution of probation as I've tried to demonstrate has been here for a long time. There's social structure that gained a high degree of resilience. They're composed of cultural, cognitive, normative and regulative elements that together with associated activities and resources provides stability and meaning to social life. They change. They adapt. They move on. That's absolutely the case. But they are important as a stable force in delivering practice. Peter Rayner though warned us in 2012, institutions and their purposes cannot be infinitely elastic. With changes unlimited there comes a point where it no longer makes sense to regard them as the same entity. He believes there are essential and contingent characteristics associated with what probation is about and it itemises them there. One of the best books that I've read in probation recently is Doing Probation Work by Rob Morbyn and Warren which interviewed 60 former practitioners and current practitioners in the service. It's a statement about what probation is about and illustrates the complexity and the nuances that make probation such a difficult agency to describe to those that don't know it. She talks about the square of probation. I can only talk about it briefly. She recognises that probation is what she calls dirty work, a socially tainted occupation working with undeserving groups. She recognises that probation has always worked in turbulent conditions and we've seen those in the first part of my lecture threatening constantly the domain of probation. She talks about the occupational identities and cultures that have developed to deal with some of those changes. Finally she talks about individual probation worker responses, some exit, some use their voice, many are loyal. She talks about edge work, about moving around on the edge of good practice when you're not happy with how things are going to create positive change. In her book she identifies three distinguishing people, sets of people, ideal types. One she calls life as. One she calls second career. Career is in the third offender manager. And she says that actually if you pull together the best characteristics from each of those three sets of people actually you get an ideal probation worker and probably someone fit to deal with the present circumstance. So she talks about the idealism, vocationalism and intellectualism of the lifer. The life experiences, transferable skills and commitment to making a difference of the second careerist. The victim empathy, concern for public protection and willingness to challenge offending behaviour of the offender manager. It is a combination of those elements which actually makes probation attractive institution today. It's difficult to describe in a soundbite that probation as an institution is complex and she demonstrates that with Rob in this excellent book which I would certainly recommend to you. So the arguments for the retention of the institution of probation. No example exists of probation being organised in the manner which is being suggested throughout the world. It has been hugely successful, particularly in the last decade, in terms of external kind marks, in terms of reductions in re-offending and in terms of worker satisfaction. I haven't talked about this much today because I'm almost taking it as red but practice capability with regards to rehabilitation has never been so extensive and evidence informed as it is today. Probation often acts as the social glue for commissioning and avoids arbitrary patchwork of provision creating fragmentation, loss of continuity of care which must ultimately heighten risk and threaten public safety as in the Guardian today. Probation trusts are accountable, integrated with private and voluntary providers locally sensitive and comprehensive. Bottom-up initiatives could of course be extended. Why have separate mutuals? Why not have employee-led engagement within probation trusts? Co-production with service users has developed a lot in recent years. Innovation is there and flexibility is there. Probation is an organisation which passes the test of being an institution. In the last few minutes I want to though go on and assume that the worst case I hope that it won't on the basis of what I've discussed. But I want to do some brief thinking about the future contracting in England and Wales. At the moment, as far as I can determine this, there will be three tiers of operation. Tears is a good word here. There will be prime contractors in 21 areas or chunks shall we call them. Which actually will take 88% of the work. It's talked about 70-30. But when you add 50,000 people being supervised under new under 12 month orders it's 88%. And they will be a lead provider possibly a consortium even less likely but possibly a mutual or a partnership. Tier 2 will compose the national probation service, the run of public probation 12% of the work. We're responsible for reports, risk assessment, risk management of high risk cases. At some point in the near future there will be a little bit about the parting of the waves. When the 12% will go one way into the national probation service and the rest will go into these or limited life organisations which are currently either being called GFCOs or new codes. This is the majority of the probation staff in each area. They will form themselves into a temporary organisation called a new code and they'll be within these 21 areas so it will mean probation staff joining from different trusts. And they will be protected and then bought for a pound by the provider that wins the contract. They will be their staff resource when it comes to starting the new work. More of that in a minute. The third tier are potential mutuals who might be brought in to do parts of the work, voluntary sector partners and small subcontractor voluntary sector organisations locally and possibly a probation institute. So can we stop the death knell sounding? I think there are four straws in the wind. The new national probation service mutuals new codes and probation institute. A few remarks on each and then I will finish. The new national probation service the size will be small and their reach will be extremely limited though they will have high level responsibilities. But when you know the numbers of people that were involved in the MPS in any region you realise how challenging their job will be. There will be a lack of local presence there is no chance that they will be able to maintain the integration and partnerships that they have had to be involved in. They simply won't be enough of it. There will also be civil servants and therefore effectively suffer the corporate silencing we have already seen in the last few months and therefore will hardly be able to talk about the problems that have occurred. They also, because they are so small will have no substantive infrastructure to resurrect probation in the event of these proposals being disastrous. How will they provide leadership? There will be one national figure and six local areas. We have a successful history of national leadership in NOMS. I don't see how that will change particularly now. So in terms of the future probation they are an uncertain home for the institution of probation. They have lack of cultural and practice independence. The mutuals. Mutuals are being proposed as somehow the way forward for probation. I think they are there because Grayling can't quite convincingly tell us why probation trust can't apply for these contracts in the first place. So they will say what course you can but you have to do so in the form of a mutual. Visibility. Have mutuals the time to set up and implement. Stability. These mutuals will have a single customer. Is that a good basis for stability? Timing. The mutuals are vulnerable because they will be new. They will have no track record and they would need time to embed. Because they will be required to be part of the process within the next six to eight months. Risk. Mutuals could go bust in a competitive environment. Private contractors may not need them. There are risks to jobs and continuity of provision. Desirability. Why would private contractors wish to contract with mutuals and take on the risks? Pensions, redundancy, servicing. HR functions. When new codes would be an easier bet to do this. I think there is a possibility of specialist mutuals. Small scale mutual delivering specialist services. For instance say around accredited programs. But this is a very small scale. They become part of tier 3 buying in some services which can't be provided elsewhere. There's a good accredited program team. There's no reason why it can't become peripatetic and service accredited programs in a wider area. That's a real possibility I think for mutuals but it's very small scale. It's not part of the central system. So in my view mutuals are unlikely to be a major provider. Will be preoccupied with their own survival and almost inevitably small scale. New codes. This is the new kid on the block and it's only just becoming clear how this is going to develop. New codes will maintain the professional role intact through the transfer process. And there will be a key role for who is the pointed leader in transition. Because each new code will need some kind of equivalent to a chief executive. Who will win the 21 package areas? With assumed all along all the arguments in the papers have been this is going to be further private for profit justice sector providers such as Circa, G4S and Sodexo. And all the anger has been poured into those. I'm not sure that's correct. The evidence suggests that the people who are most likely to win out are not those providers but private business process outsourcing agency. Such as Capita, Unilink, Tribal, Mushell, Intasurf, Centrium, Campbell Page, Stereo, Carrion, Llew Andersson. There are loads of them. They're all attending the market. They're very different to private sector justice organisations. Because they don't have any understanding of criminal justice business. They can't come in and deliver probation as Circa and G4S might want to do as they've done when they're delivered in prisons and elsewhere. This means that they will rely absolutely because they do not know the business of probation, they'll need probation expertise. What they're good at is back-office functions. They will go. The staff in the sport staff will disappear. They'll be cooked during the first phase. But those that remain will deliver statutory orders, the A's with the MPS, and they'll be protected by MOJ, both pensions protection, but MOJ will keep the capacity to step back in and bring them back under control. This is a likely site of probation expertise in the big business of delivering 250,000 statutory orders. But, of course, no institutional identity. 21 new codes swallowed up possibly in 21 different ways by the private providers. So I come to my final point of where to want if you're going to keep the institution of probation, where do you maintain ownership, governance, accountability and cultural continuity? The only place I can see this is in some form of probation institute which interestingly has appeared in the transforming rehabilitation agenda throughout. As it says in the quote, if ownership of public services is distributed among the constellation of mutuals, co-ops, private sector companies, VCS and a residual public sector, where does responsibility lie to the maintenance and quality of those services? Contracting is a thread bear model of accountability. Quality assurance is threatened. This is all that's in this register here. The development of a statutory probation register will not happen. Greyling has already said so in the short term. But voluntary register is a key way to buying new providers to a recognisable kitemark. Given that they will be picking up for a pound the new coals who will already have relevant qualifications voluntary registration would be aware of getting a little bit extra in their bid preparation. The loosening of national standards which has been going on for a year or two might be seen as advantageous in normal respects for offender centre practises. But without regulation it eases the way for private providers simply to do it their own way. Why have a probation institute is the name probation a problem in the future? I actually think it's the brand I hope I've demonstrated that what probation has brought for over a hundred and five years is something that is meaningful something that people understand. In all the work we do all the research work we do with service users when asked they always talk about being on probation despite the fact that probation orders haven't existed for some seven or more years. They understand probation still probably more so than we've given credit for. I think by keeping the probation brand you preserve the institution probation. Key elements just very briefly they will be independent and inclusive open to all criminal justice agencies a professional register setting competence levels they would maintain professional standards and quality assurance repository of good practice enabling dissemination no commercialing confidence one of my worries about 21 contract providers is when they hit on a good thing when they do well in payment of our results will they share those results with other areas will they keep them so they can bid win the other area in the next round of bidding. We need evidence informed research to continue to mark out quality practice. Training education building on the consistency developed in the PQF and its predecessor depth. To get into post qualifying which has been sadly neglected in recent years. The future of probation possibly lies in a probation institute a constructively critical cultural repository for probation. So I've talked about the death of the rehabilitative ideal from 1975 to the death knell of probation service in 2013. I'm not sure we're there yet no one can quite see in the crystal ball of Chris Grayling is it a crystal ball or is it a political football. Time will tell but I think there's still enough straws in the wind to give us hope that the institute of probation has some time to go. Thank you.