 Ynwedig wnaeth ystod, mae'n ddwylo'n cymryd i'r hyn yn ymddydd i'r cymryd yn gweithio'r Llywodraeth. Mae'n ddwylo'n cyfryd yn gweithio'r Llywodraeth i'r llyfr ymlaenysau honno, ac rydyn ni'n credu i'r cywydd i chi ddweudio'r llyfr o'r cyfryd i'r llyfr yn y syniadol, ac dysg ymddych chi'n meddwl â'r llyfr o'r cyfrwyng hwnnw i'n gweithio'r cyfryd i'r teimlo i'r cyfrwyng hwnnw i'r hyn. i'r gael i'r gwneud hynny. Mae'n fwy fwy fydd yn ymweld yw'r gweithio ar gyfer y gweithio. Bydd y Llyfrgell Williams, wedi'u gweithio yn 1997, a'r cyfnodd ymddangosol i'r gwirionedd yw'r cyfnodd i'r hynny'r gweithio'r cyfrifio, yn y gweithio'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio, yn eich cyfrifio prysgol a maestried mewn chwn yn, a a gwrethio a'r Flyger. Ac iron i chi ddwy, sprud falle y maen nhin hwnnw hefyd hefyd yn rhoi gennymach gyda mewn eich cyfrifio spanith heddiw i mi br یaw ei gweithio mewn cyfeithio at equipment. Gallen nhw, datblygu chael parlir. Fel pwy fydd e patience a mai gwyl accountability o ddiwedikolyw cyblheaded peidio a adnod yn яwreilio cyrraed o'r cysylltu'r eu ranall o amser profiadol Fyrau'r Ysgriforth. Mae'r profiadol fynd i gynghol ein bodai'n arweinyddol i'r pryd yn ei gweldol yn ei gwneud i'r pryd. Mae'n gyrêl i'r cyfrannu cymryd hwnnw wrth gen i'r cyffredinol i wneud – o'r cyfrannu cyfrannu'n cyfrannu'n cyfrannu i wneud i'r cyfrannu'n cyfrannu, yn y cyfrannu cyfrannu o'r cyfrannu arweinyddol. Mae'r ysgoledau'r ysgoledau yn y gwybod y gynhyrchu'r rhwng, os yw'r ysgoledau ac y gynhyrchu. Mae'r ysgoledau sydd wedi'i'n gwneud bod ynddyn ni'n ddweud bod yn rhywb i'r ffordd o'r ysgoledau bylmatau yn y cyfnodd crithigol. Nid ydych chi'n gwybod yn cyfnodd trwy'r ysgoledau ynghylch i'r hynny. Ac os ydw i'n ddweud 5 oed ynghylch, ond os ydw i'n ddweud 10 oed ychynhyrch. Here we are at the 20th lecture, which I think shows that there is still great hunger for rigorous debate, creative ideas and critical reflection in practice and on practice. This afternoon we're promised critical reflection, first from Fergus McNeill and then from a panel of service users and service practitioners and then dialogue amongst the panel members and then a chance for anyone who would like to comment or ask questions. That will, overall, will take us up to about four o'clock, just before four o'clock perhaps when there will be tea available. So let me first of all introduce Fergus McNeill and then my colleague Jane Dominie, a member of the academic staff at the Institute of Criminology and another member of the steering group will introduce the other panel members. So Fergus McNeill is Professor of Criminology and Social Work at the University of Glasgow and prior to becoming an academic in 1998, Fergus worked for a number of years in residential drug rehabilitation and as a criminal justice social worker and I think that very practical experience is going to be pertinent to this afternoon's conversations. Now, Fergus does extensive research on a wide range of topics and also teaches both undergraduates and postgraduates. His main research interests revolve around sentencing, community sanctions, ex-offender reintegration and youth justice and various research projects and research publications have explored cultures and practices of punishment, particularly in the community. So there are too many books for me to go through more but I will pick out in particular reducing reoffending social work and community justice in Scotland published with Bill White and then youth offending and youth justice published with Monica Burry. But more recently there have been numerous publications on resistance and including a publication on community punishment European perspectives and a number of publications too on offender supervision. So that's the starting point for this afternoon's discussion. So over to Jane to introduce the other panel members. We have three other panel members from whom we'll be hearing this afternoon and I think that one of the things that I'd like to acknowledge is that some of them have had more notice than others of their elevation to the panel and to particularly thank the couple of them who've had an extraordinarily small amount of notice of the greatness that has been thrust upon them this afternoon. But we're in the lovely position of having three panel members with a real breadth of experience of probation supervision between them. We have Mark, someone who has fairly recently been a probation service user, now involved in projects looking at service user involvement in probation. We have OA, a current probation officer involved in fact in the same service user project as Mark. And we have Kim who brings her extensive experience as a practitioner and a manager in the probation service. OE is currently working with the National Probation Service. Kim is a director of inter-serve justice and the organisation that has responsibility for five of our new community rehabilitation companies. So each of those panellists will talk a little bit more to you over the course of the afternoon about their particular experience, their particular lives, but it's lovely that we have all three of them with us today. The next person to hear from is indeed Fergus, so thank you. Thank you both and thank you Lorraine for the introduction. Those of you that know me will know that I very rarely speak from a text but carefully planning this event I wanted to be sure not to talk for too long so I had a text preferred which I will try not to depart from. Apologies if that makes it a little bit less fluent than I would hope. So I want to thank you all for coming here first and foremost to remember and celebrate the legacy of Bill McWilliams and I want to thank the organisers and especially Brenda and John for the invitation to play a part in this event. I really do consider it a very great honour. I never had the opportunity to meet Bill but I feel that somehow I've come to know him a little through Brenda and through his friends, especially Tony Bottoms and Mike Nellis. And of course we can all have the pleasure of knowing Bill through his writing. Those writings have been very important to me and many other probation scholars for several reasons. Perhaps most fundamentally Bill's work is significant in terms of what it stands for and for me it exemplifies three key virtues that I think all researchers and scholars in the broadest sense of the terms should seek to cultivate. Firstly, Bill was a genuine scholar. The depth and quality of his writing reflects I'm sure the depth of the intellectual curiosity that made him so well read. It also reflects in turn the care, precision and rigor with which he fashioned his thoughts on his ideas and his arguments. Secondly, Bill was a proper social scientist. In some of Bill's empirical research papers that I've read for the first time in preparation for today, I've been hugely impressed both by the sheer volume of the field work involved and by the attention to detail that his meticulous analysis of data evidences. So, for example, in order to understand what serving prisoners understood about and wanted from the new aftercare services introduced in the late 1960s in England, Bill, working alongside Martin Davis and Ian Earnshaw, interviewed no less than 407 prisoners in 14 prisons across the country, securing a 96% response rate from men imminently due for release from those prisons. That mammoth undertaking tells us something about Bill as a social scientist and about the value that he placed on comprehensive and careful listening. Thirdly, and just as importantly, Bill's love of and gift for scholarship was never detached from his commitment to public service. Bill applied both his considerable intellect and his energies and diligence to using research and scholarship to improve probation and therefore to improve society. For me, these three qualities, these three interwoven commitments to scholarship, rigorous social science and diligent public service are at their most compelling in Bill and Tony's remarkable 1979 paper on the non-treatment paradigm for probation practice. It's not the best title. It's a wonderful paper. If you haven't yet read it, you must read it. I read it first as a social work student in 1992. I can more or less remember the moment. I was coming to terms with my own journey at that point from the humanities where I started in philosophy and history to social science and then to social work practice in the criminal justice system. Here was the paper that mapped a path for me, offering compelling arguments from normative principles alongside honest confrontation of empirical realities, at least as we then understood them. Just as importantly, rather than allowing the pessimism of that moment, the nothing works moment when faith in rehabilitation had more or less collapsed, rather than allowing that pessimism to dismantle the case for probation and for rehabilitation, Bill's and Tony's genius and creativity made an opportunity out of a threat. In fact, they literally made a moral virtue out of an empirical necessity. I won't restate the case here, but in some they argued firstly that even if there was then no evidence that treatment or rehabilitation worked to reduce crime, that was not a good reason to deny people help. Secondly, that if the idea of social diagnosis no longer made sense, then shared and respectful dialogue should shake the forms of help that were provided. And thirdly, that if it was wrong and unhelpful to construct clients as depending on professionals to fix them in some sense, then better to plan and offer help on a more collaborative basis. Furthermore, even if none of this help could be proven to reduce re-offending, that didn't mean there were not compelling moral and practical reasons for working in this way to support people. Any of you who have read my work or heard me talk will by now have cottoned on to my guilty secret. In very much of what I've written, I've simply followed this lead, sometimes updating these arguments with new evidence, particularly about desistence from crime, and sometimes trying to develop aspects of the ethical or normative arguments. Now central to Bill and Tony's argument in that paper and in both of their work I think more generally lies a position or a stance that I've also tried to adopt and develop. One that centrally refuses to objectify people who have offended and been penalised. One that rejects policies and practices that construct people as damaged or diminished or deficient and in need of expert correctional intervention. Instead, in the last of that famous quartet of essays on probation history published in 1987, Bill articulated what he termed the personalist approach to probationary. Invoking, but typically refining earlier philosophical thinking, and in this case improving on no less a figure than Emmanuel Kant, Bill insisted that people must be seen as ends in themselves and never merely as the means to some other end, even if the ends in question were laudable ones like reducing victimisation or building a fairer society. With remarkable foresight, Bill identified the dangers both of managerialism and of the then fashionably radical Marxist school. Bill identified in both a willingness to treat people as objects to be manipulated for some other purpose, whether the preservation of the existing social order or the creation of a new one. In that last of the four essays reflecting on the collapse of confidence in rehabilitation, Bill quotes David Millard. He was himself reflecting on the work of Paul Halmas when he said, however much the councillors explained their work in the language of technology, ultimately they placed their faith in the spontaneous power of love within a relationship. The technology was an attempt to give an extra dimension of respectability to what was basically a moral enterprise. In the paper, Bill continues to cite Millard, this time drawing on the work of R. D. Lang, to argue that we should not worry too much about what you've been calling professionalism. Trust the clients, believe what they say about their experience and trust the immediacy of your own responses. In other words, be human. Clients then are neither to be managed on behalf of the state nor mobilised to overthrow it, rather they are to be heard and respected and yes, loved. Though I suspect the language of love here is not intended to invoke soft or sentimental feeling, but rather the page that I'm missing. But rather the hard work of seeking and finding solidarity with one another and subsidiarity for one another in support of our mutual betterment and our reciprocal and collective interests. Against the backdrop of this brief resume of some of Bill's work, I hope you'll see why it seems fitting that today's memorial lecture is not a lecture at all. It seeks to embody Bill's personalist values by enabling a dialogue between people with different forms of expertise related to probation supervision. But before we move into that dialogue, I want to offer just a few final observations in an effort to bridge the gap between Bill's work and the present day. Firstly, it's worth noting that it's taken probation research much of the last 20 years to catch up with aspects of Bill's thinking. In spite of the long history of social work and probation claiming respect for persons as a core value, it's really only in the last decade or so that sustained and proper attention has begun to be paid to studying the lived experience of supervision. Both for those whose responsibility it is to supervise and arguably even more crucially for those who are subject to supervision. We've borrowed the title of this event, Helping Holding Hurting, from a public lecture that I gave in Scotland in 2009. That lecture presented findings from an oral history of Scottish probation in the 1960s. A study itself inspired in large part by Bill's writing, but also driven by my own curiosity to see whether first hand retrospective accounts of probation then complemented or contradicted the version of history that emerges from analysing documents. More recently, I've worked with colleagues in 23 European countries to develop and pilot new methods for studying probation both as a lived experience and as a constructed practice. The photographs that are rotating in this presentation and in the reception areas are drawn from one of these pilot studies. They depict how some English, German and Scottish supervisees chose to visually represent what it feels like to be supervised. Secondly and relatedly, this shift towards studying how supervision is experienced has been mirrored and far exceeded in fact by what is sometimes termed the narrative turn in criminology and social science more generally. The central importance of the analysis of people's narratives, their stories about themselves, will perhaps be best known to this audience in the work of desistance scholars like Shad, Maruna, Bethweaver and many others, who's careful attention to how and why people's stories change as they move away from offending has done so much to inform and influence probation practice and criminal justice reform more generally. More recently still, Sarah Anderson's award-winning probation journal article on the value of bearing witness to desistance centres on the importance of being present and being with another as an enactment of a moral responsibility to support a transition, a transition from object to subject and to recognise and endorse the humanity of those who have committed crimes. The echoes of Bill's work and its refinement in Sarah's argument are obvious and they make me think how wonderful it would have been to have heard Bill's analysis of an engagement with desistance research, though I suspect his influence is already inherent in Tony's work on desistance and certainly on my own. Finally, I wonder what Bill would have made of how these two bodies of work, focused on how people experience supervision and how they experience desistance, help us make sense of broader currents of social change. Just as I sometimes like to conjure up an image of Bill and Tony struggling in a study somewhere to confront and find a way through the nothing works era, in my imagination I can see Bill today angry and frustrated with the way in which probation is honourable, but imperfect traditions came to be produced and diminished by misplaced faith in managerialism, by the preoccupation with risk, and more recently by the ideologically driven, hasty and evidence-like pursuit of privatisation. I suspect Bill would have been a trenchant and compelling critic of the commodification and commercialisation of probation and of turning people into units to be efficiently processed in pursuit of profit. We may not have Bill with us now to face down the challenges of the harsh and amoral times in which we live, times in which the corruption by the market of the liberalism that his work expressed seems all but complex. But we do have the example he set, and we have the intellectual and moral resources that his work continues to provide. So in what remains of our time this afternoon, we're going to hear first hand about how our panellists experience supervision as a practice, which they have constructed, or as a practice that they have been on the receiving end of. Wether that practice is construed as helping or holding or hurting, we're going to try together to figure out how to make it better, and how to make society better at the same time. That seems an appropriate response to Bill's legacy. So, I shall invite first of all, if I get my order correct here, I'll invite Mark first to come up. What's going to happen is that the three panellists are now going to share for five or ten minutes, simply from their personal experience, what they have experienced in supervision for better or worse, wether as a personal experience or a personal and professional experience. And once the three panellists have spoken in turn, the four of us will constitute a panel, which will engage in a dialogue amongst ourselves for your edification briefly. And then I'll hand over to Heather, who's going to take charge of the Q&A part of the afternoon. So first we'll hear from Mark. Hopefully, I will hit on a couple of the points that have been mentioned previously. So, as being supervised by probation, certainly from my experience, it wasn't something I anticipated ever happening to me in my entire life. So, as you could imagine, there was a fair amount of trepidation, fear, and equally, having heard a significant number of, well, disinformation, misinformation, myths as to what it was going to be like, you know, you are understandably apprehensive. However, from my experience, the myths were the myths, but nonetheless, there are some harsh realities of supervision that hopefully through the course of this discussion will be addressed, and perhaps a way forward will be identified, because there are things that it could be doing better. That's not to say that it's not working, but society as a whole is quite happy to ignore this system, because they don't want to know, and as long as it doesn't impact in their lives, they're good. But nonetheless, it's a very real thing for so many people to have to live through and everything else like that. How to describe supervision? If I were in the Victorian age and I wanted to date someone, I would require a chaperone. And quite frankly, it's not too dissimilar. You need to be thinking constantly with this little shadow on your back. Depending on what restrictions you have, what context, what sentence, everything else like that, that will determine the nature of your supervision as to how much interaction probation will have with you. But it is like having a little shadow and a little voice in your head constantly saying, should you be there, should you be doing this, or more to the point, just keeping yourself above water. In terms of the actual interviews themselves, quite frankly, I would love if they put it in a completely different building, because I never want to go into that building again in my entire life. It scares the life out of me, which puts me on the defensive before I've even started. And strangely enough, I now actually spend more time in that building, because I'm part of a service user project than I ever did when I was on the supervision. But nonetheless, it scares me. In that particular interview, the standard lines, how you do, how things are going, but in terms of good practice, a lot of perhaps subtle questions concerning management of your offence, everything else like that, and getting you to understand the implications of what you've done. If you are willing to engage with your supervisor, and that again is crucial in your relationship with your OM, if you are willing to engage, it will work. If you aren't, or you're sceptical of the whole process, forget it. And there will be conflict, and there will be an issue. And invariably, the offender will blame probation. Unless you are willing to engage, it's not probation's fault. Probation will only have an issue with you if you give them reason to have that issue. So it was very personal, and I think about what you were hinting at earlier. Thankfully, the individuals that were involved in my supervision were human. Because up until that point, I'm afraid the system is faceless, but it's extremely aggressive and horrible. And then you're on the other side of it. And probation has a role in re-establishing you as an individual within society. That's not to say it's good to fix your problems, it isn't. But it's there to facilitate and help you understand how you are going to fit back into that process. Now, without the humanity of it, this is not going to happen. And I think I can successfully say that the three individuals that were through my process, all of them, in terms of good practice, were human beings above all. Yes, they had a responsibility, but the key responsibility in the whole process was mine. Not them. Fine. If they felt need to question something, they would. But it's ultimately me that takes responsibility to that. And I think they reflected and recognised that I was going to be that kind of individual that would. Make a mistake, put your hand up, you pay for it. Understandable. It's about them recovering. And probation is very much a part of that. Can they actually fix things? They can facilitate towards it, but as I've said, it's not their responsibility to do that. In terms of how we move forward, probation has a key role in reducing the re-offending rates. And it's certainly on the shorter sentences we are not succeeding within that year. It is not working. Now, that may be a question of the individuals not willing to engage, or different practices or cuts. There are a number of key sort of things, but I think taking the political nature out of this now needs to be forefront and restoring the humanity and the social context that probation originally had, that's what it was there for, is key. I was very fortunate with the individuals that I had, but I'm also an individual that will take responsibility when required. So, thank you for listening to me, but I, on the whole, had a positive experience. So, hopefully, that will form the basis of good discussion rate. Thank you, Mark. So, now we're moving to a frontline practitioner perspective, which is going to come from OE, who very kindly has stepped in it, relatively short notice. I think he had at least 15 minutes to prepare a few thoughts. So, on you come on. Okay, yes. I was kind of dropped in it a bit at the last minute. I wasn't really expecting to be standing here talking to you today. I was expecting to be in the audience, and I was actually caught in the thunderstorm as well earlier on. So, I hope you'll forgive me if I appear somewhat disheveled and also end up gibbering innanly, which hopefully I won't. But I have, whilst I've been listening to what people have been saying, I have managed to put together a few thoughts. I'm a probation officer, have been a probation officer for almost 10 years. I'm currently running a Cambridge user involvement project across Cambridge, which Mark is a part of and a very valuable part of. And this is using peer researchers who are service users or recently have been service users and in the capacity of interviewers and they're interviewing other service users and we're gaining some very valuable data from that. This is an ongoing project that we hope will move on to further phases. Indeed, we hope that the Cambridge Institute of Criminology will be involved in future phases of that programme. But in thinking about that and in thinking about what people have been saying from a practitioner perspective, I was reflecting on the fact that through my experiences of being a practitioner and through my experiences of starting and hoping to run this user involvement project. I was reflecting on the fact that there has been quite some resistance from some practitioners in embracing some of the innovative approaches such as service user involvement. And I was reflecting on why this might be through my experiences. And as a practitioner myself, I was realising that this is based partly on the pressures of practice, increasing caseloads, increasing levels of risk to manage, increasing pressures on us as practitioners and also the constant changes in the service from the split between CRC and NPS and onwards through the oncoming changes of which I know there will be many. And I think that these organisational processes which often appear politically motivated and based upon achieving favourable statistics rather than reflecting real positive change is a definite frustration for the frontline practitioner. And I think this can feed into some of the frustration and some of the cynicism around innovative approaches. But wishing to achieve this real positive change and also wanting to change some of these processes is definitely what motivated me personally to become closely involved in the user involvement project. But on the other side, nevertheless, I think with the changes in the service we're also presented with a tremendous opportunity I believe to shape the future of the service. And this would be for the practitioner as well as for the service user. I think that links quite closely with today's remit to more fully understand the experiences of those we as practitioners supervise and learn from this experience. We need to shape our own service to fit more closely I believe with the service user's experience. I hope today in some ways helps to further sow further seeds towards this end. I think Mark spoke quite eloquently earlier on about the positive change and wishing to achieve this positive change. And so I think all I can really say is that from practitioner perspective I think that days like today are very valuable in helping to take this forward. And I hope this links in closely with what I'm trying to contribute towards achieving within Cambridge R&PS today. I think that's pretty much all I can add from that. Last but not least, another lately commissioned volunteer. I was using the word loosely. So we'll have a few words from Ken reflecting on an extensive career in probation in different roles. I'm currently working in the CRC with responsibility across several areas. Do you want to come and use the microphone just to make sure everybody can hear? Thank you. I am also at risk of inane ramblings. It's not that you did that having set yourself up. You spoke very eloquently. I have been 21 years in probation and I do believe I am what Anne Waroll referred to as a probation lifer. I have been in probation for years. I intend to be in probation for as many years as it will have me. And I'm hugely passionate about the contribution that probation makes to rehabilitation and safe communities. I'm very interested in the kind of words that have been used today about being human and the power of relationships that have been reflecting on some of my experiences 21 years ago. When I started, I started as a probation service officer straight from university and working in a day centre that then ran 60 day orders. And some of my jobs were around running group work for groups of offenders, but I would also be driving a mini-boss with 12 of them in the back, taking them swimming, ice skating, shopping, whatever we needed to do. Health and safety would be a gust at that kind of behaviour now. I then qualified as a probation officer so I got a caseload then. That was very serious and very responsible. But I did find that I spent quite a lot of my time with a small patch and a very known group of people on my caseload. And when they didn't turn up, I'd bob down to the pub and go, oi. And then we moved from that and we moved to something really quite different. Our buildings, our little buildings in neighbourhoods became great big centres on industrial estates and we didn't move from them. And they came to us because they were naughty and we needed to make them move and we were professionals and we didn't. And we started to create a very different culture and we started to actually create a very different probation worker, I think. And I think we're sort of moving through that now and I'm really, really glad that we are. And I think those of us that have got any kinds of positions of responsibility or influence need to be trying to design and pushing our organisations and our services to something that is about being human and being brave enough to have meaningful relationships with our service users in pursuit of rehabilitation for all of our communities. What kind of what does it mean? Was that more human what we were doing then than what we're doing now and what does being really human look like and what are some of the challenges around that? The first thing I think that you have to do is that you have to start to break down some of those barriers between staff and service users. You have to try to get them closer together. And that's not an easy ask sometimes. You've got staff that are very scared of that, not all of them by any means. Some of them absolutely relish it, know exactly how to do it but others are a bit scared of it and service users, some of them are really quite suspicious of it. And particularly those that have been around for some time and think what's going on there? What's all this getting alongside me all about? I just want to come in and you tick your box and I can go. So it's about trying to find something that is different and bring some fresh life into it but it is also meaningful. And some of the ways that we do that I think and some of the things that signal change it's been mentioned about service user councils and I think that done properly these are a really good way forward. This is about recognising that actually as organisations and as professionals you don't have all of the answers and it is not just your right and responsibility to design and deliver all of your services to people who have no say in it. So I think that we are moving in that direction to actually acknowledge the contribution that our service users can and should be making to the services that we develop and the services that we design and deliver and we are moving in that direction. That has to be done in a proper spirit though because you can do all of those things tokenistically. You can do that. So there is something about what you bring to it that is about recognising that it has to be something meaningful and you have to take some risks. You have to let go of some power and control and I don't think that that's always easy and in all situations. We have to design models I think that are about recognising the strengths that service users have and bring and I don't think we've always been particularly good at that. Lots of the stuff that we deliver is very needs-based. It's deficit-based. It's about objectifying. It is about talking about offenders in terms of the bad things that they do and not the good things that they have and can contribute. So it is reducing and objectifying and I think we have to move to something that is very different. We have to design operating models, design assessment systems that actually do recognise strengths and talents and work with those and again that's different and it does raise lots of tensions about how do you get alongside somebody, how do you celebrate their strengths and talents and how do you manage their risk and are these things in conflict or can these things live happily together and I think that's a really interesting question the likes of which can be pursued and discussed in events like this. There is also something about bringing a academic community and the practitioner community closer together which I think is to the benefit of both. We are very interested in the CRCs and I think in probation in general in operationalising the systems. What does it actually look like when it's delivered? How do you know you're delivering it properly and how do you know when you're really achieving something when what you're waiting for is a two-year reconviction rate down the line? How do we really measure the distributions that we're making and the strides that service users are achieving? I will stop my inane ramblings but I would like to take the opportunity to fly a bit of a flag for probation people across both the CRCs and the NPS who have been through really quite a difficult time but actually underneath all the gumpf and underneath all of the politics and underneath all of the negativity there are still people on the ground who are working really, really hard trying to be human, trying to make a difference trying to turn lives around trying to get alongside service users it's not universal and that's the point that we have to get to but it absolutely is there and I think that's what we really have to capitalise on both in terms of our organisational responsibilities our designs of services our valuing both our staff and our service users as a real model to go forward with Thank you Thank you Heather As Heather said I'm Rob Canton I too am a member of the Steering Group and I have the honour of being able to say out loud some of the things that are going to be going through my head over and over again on the train home I'm not going to try to summarise that presumptuous and well beyond me in any event but here are some of the things that are going through my mind and I'd like to begin as I think is appropriate with the thought again of the work of Bill McWilliams often Bill began his studies with an historical approach and one of the things that he memorably did was to try to identify different phases in the time in which probation has undertaken its work and the framework that he suggested to us others have taken up as well and used to tell the history of probation but other scholars less careful than Bill I think have sometimes recounted this as a probation's history in terms of legislation in terms of policies but if you think about it policies are aspirations they're what people hope will happen but the lived experience and what actually did take place has been much less comprehensively explored and that approach to history risks suppressing other experiences including the voices of staff and service users Bill certainly gave voice to practitioners but there has historically been a neglect of the user experience and desistence scholarship has begun to change this it's begun to restore meaning and agency and purpose to people's lives it's made people it's encouraged us to think of people as ends in themselves an expression which I think Emmanuel Cant anticipated a few years ago Emmanuel Cant anticipated Fergus McNeill in using that expression criminology is often searched for the causes of crime but that is a very bad start isn't it I mean that's immediately risks objectifying people and it's the difference as Fergus and others have spoken about this afternoon between objects and subjects if you reduce people to carriers of risks and need factors that is a form of objectification and it's likely to induce cynicism disengagement, anger and despair and the commodification that a recent speaker mentioned and the moments that some other service user less politely referred to Faces too can exaggerate turning points but there's a great deal of continuity I think in probation's history and one of the strongest continuities is this idea of relationship the very first probation staff applied not only on their local contacts to put resources of probation as disposal but on the force of their own formidable personalities to develop a relationship but they saw as a precondition of supporting change by advising, assisting and befriending two people meet together one is wanting to change but often isn't sure that they can often loses heart can't see possibilities begins to revert to ways of life that are more familiar the other is wanting to support and encourage change and to bear witness to resistance if the service user is in charge of that process then as Kim has said the best beginning is an appreciation of their strengths and their ambitions involvement now of service users can evoke the suspicions that Kim spoke about and I think if I were a service user I might well be saying well why this, why me, why now what difference is it going to make anyway he said something profoundly important when he said if you are willing to engage if you are willing to trust it will work and otherwise it won't and that's advice to staff as well as to service users staff and service users must give of themselves and without this the relationship will always be incomplete for staff this involves giving up some power but the power that you give up is possibly a power that would otherwise turn into a form of oppression so those are some of the things that will be around in my head when I go home this evening but I now turn to the pleasant task which I'm delighted to have assigned to me of thanking a number of people before I do that those of you who attended this event regularly will know that what I'm now doing has always been done much better than I do it by Professor Mike Nellis and Mike is indisposed he's not well at the moment so you would like to associate yourselves with the good wishes that we would all like to centre Mike on his speedy recovery I want to thank first of all the speakers and all of them in their different ways I think have been absolutely extraordinary so without Fergus Fergus has steered the show he's given us of his wisdom and his experience he's managed to orchestrate the entire performance Mark spoke with great eloquence and courage and passion it's not at all easy to do it's not at all easy to do and then OE and Kim were absolutely put on the spot they didn't know as they have already said they didn't know when they set out this morning that they were going to be asked to do any such thing and OE at least like me arrived here in Cambridge being absolutely saturated which is never good for the confidence and I think that your contribution in making this event a much better event than it could possibly have been without you is something that we should all warmly appreciate Jane can I ask you please to come and pass a token of thanks to all our speakers while perhaps I can invite the audience to express appreciation in the usual way because there are other splendid people that I now need to go on to thank besides and the next people to thank are the staff of the institute and also the law department that we're in at the moment a lot of people put in a lot of work behind the scenes here but there's one person who I will embarrass and make to blush especially and this is Joanne Garner many of you will have had contact with Joanne in getting in touch with her to say that you're attending I didn't know today, until today that this is the last time that Joanne will be involved in this way the William Steering Group was appalled to hear that Joanne is leaving and I think that the staff of the institute will be similarly in a state of shock over many years Joanne's efficiency, good humour, hard work has been an enormous factor in making the Williams Lecture Series the success that it has been and continues to be so this time Brenda I wonder if you'd be kind enough to do the honours and to pass on a token of our esteem and thanks and good wishes to Joanne Garner a few very final remarks some of you are going to be attending the meal that's taking place in an Indian restaurant in Cambridge this evening and the advice is please make your own way there I think that everybody knows how to get there and if they don't Brenda and others will be happy to advise you I need to thank Dan and Steve who are responsible for the audio and the recording that's taken place we wanted to capture the occasion and a recording has been taking place but there will need to be some discussion about how and whether indeed that's going to be disseminated but we're on the case with that and we would like to share the experience of the afternoon I'd like to thank also the caterers for providing us with an excellent lunch and maybe if we're lucky an excellent tea and then finally just to say this is the 20th lecture in this series which is a wonderful achievement when the series started I don't think anybody had the ambition I wasn't a member of the group then but I don't think anyone thought that it would continue for quite as long as it has and being quite as successful as it has Brenda has set out some reprints of past lectures and their various memorabilia outside where we had our lunch it's the intention of the steering committee to continue this series for as long as it continues to be successful and to be well received but for long term sustainability we do need to think about funding as you'll appreciate and we are trying to be creative but among the ways in which this could be done is a collection of money and as in past years you will on the way out find a couple of people with huge empty buckets which you are encouraged to fill if you haven't anything with you but want to send a donation later then anyone on the committee will advise you how to do that so thanks again to the speakers above all the organisers too and to all of you for coming and for your participation in and contribution to an extremely interesting debate thank you