Kim Thornden-Edwards and Chris Jennings.

Q63 The Chair: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee. Welcome to our witnesses today in our inquiry on community sentences. Kim Thornden-Edwards is chief probation officer for England and Wales at HM Prison and Probation Service. Chris Jennings is executive director for Wales at HMPPS.

We have apologies from Baroness Chakrabarti and Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia. Two of our members, Lord Filkin and Baroness Sanderson of Welton, are on screen.

I will start by asking about the role of a probation officer in the early part, or not so early part, of the 21st century. Which tagline does it align best with? We have had two. Is it “advise, assist and befriend”, which was the form that was used when the Probation Service was put on a statutory basis, or “assess, protect and change”, which is more current?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: It is a very interesting question. Probation has a very long history as a value-driven enterprise. As you referenced, when we first came into being as court missionaries, we were very much in an advocacy, helping and assisting capacity. We remained that way for quite a considerable time.

As with everything else, we have evolved as a service. I can remember as a probation officer in 1997 that the sex offender registration and sex offender multiagency panels came into being. That really started to change the shape of the way we worked. Not long after, the multiagency public protection arrangements came in that, again, put us on a very different footing in our public protection responsibilities.

I feel, because of the role we have on public protection, managing critical cases of concern, managing on a multiagency basis with our partners and managing terrorist cases, et cetera, that we are very much in the realms of assessing, protecting and changing. However, there is still a role for advising, assisting and befriending. If assess, protect and change is what we do, advising and assisting is how we help to engender change in the people we are supervising. It is that change that enables rehabilitation and contributes to public protection. Ultimately, we want to reduce the risk of reoffending and the creation of further victims.

It is not just about being fluffy in what we do. There is real evidence that the relationship that our probation practitioners have with people who are subject to probation supervision makes a difference in facilitating that change. We know from theories of change—desistance theory—that the power of the personal relationship, having somebody who is in your corner, who is championing you and who believes in you is very important to the creation of self-efficacy and the ability to believe in your agency to make change. Advising and assisting is very much the “how” of how we perform our function to enable people to make those changes.

The Chair: Perhaps it is befriend as well. The word “relationship” has come up in almost every session that we have had.

Chris Jennings: I think Kim put it very well. I am not sure that there is a huge amount to add. In addition to my responsibilities in Wales, I have the national brief for public protection. The word “befriend” on one level does not sound like completely the right approach to take when what we are really responsible for is keeping members of the public safe. Clearly, building really positive relationships with the people we supervise is key to keeping them on the right path. Building good relationships is absolutely key. I do not know if I would use the word “befriend” as being quite the right way to do it.

Q64 The Chair: There was a question that we asked the Ministry of Justice before. I do not know whether the answers came from you or not, but I would like to pursue it for the moment. Why—it is the why that is important—is there no longer a specific Director General for probation in the new organisational structure, One HMPPS? We know the history but not the why. Can either of you help us with that?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: We are looking to create a new structure to move into a new era of probation and prison delivery, and we term this “One HMPPS”. The purpose of it is to ensure that, on one level, we have the right size and shape of headquarters to properly enable and facilitate the front line. It is about making sure that we balance resources so that we have all the right resources and capacity at the front line, because front-line delivery is the priority for our service.

We are creating a new structure, as you quite rightly allude to. We now have two directors-general. Amy Rees is the Director General and Chief Executive of HMPPS and Phil Copple is the Director General for operations. They now have a role across the whole agency. One of the advantages of that is that Phil Copple, as the Director General for operations, will have oversight across the two elements of the system. One of the things we know about the system that we have—we know it from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation reports—is that we sometimes do not get the read-across and the join-up across prisons and probation that we should have in order to effectively manage those of our people who are subject to custodial sentences and then released on licence.

We are confident that having that overview of the system will start to move us forward to create greater alignment. That system is then replicated at area level. We are creating a structure where we have area executive directors, who will manage a geographical patch. On that geographical patch will be both prison and probation. There are a number of advantages to that, not least the one that I previously referenced about having an overview across the system and being able to ensure the requisite join-up and linkages to maximise our ability to effectively supervise, exchange information and manage risks across our prison and release population.

One of the concerns that has been raised about the structure, so it is useful to have the opportunity to address it today, relates to probation influence and probation voice, and whether the new structure actually dilutes that. As the chief probation officer, I have a significant role, and I am built in structurally to ensure that my influence and my voice is at all the tables at the highest levels of decision-making in HMPPS. I will also have system ownership for probation as well as being head of profession, and the Director General Chief Executive and the Director General of operations will represent both prisons and probation at our executive committee for the Ministry of Justice. We think that we have actually amplified the voice of probation in the new system because there are more senior leaders now who have responsibility for probation, and that that voice will be well and truly influential in the way we move forward.

The area executive director structure that I have just referenced, with a geographical patch, has been tried and tested in Wales for about seven years. This is not an entirely new structure. We have the living and breathing prototype with us today in Chris. He may very well have some insight and reflections.

The Chair: Are you confident, then, that you are not, as has been put to us, simply managing other people involved in delivering the service? Referring people on and filling in assessment forms was one way that it was put. With your experience, Chris, would you like to comment on that?

Chris Jennings: Of course. To build on Kim’s point, I have had responsibility in Wales over the last four years for both prisons and probation. We have the ability to have the end-to-end view of somebody’s post-court journey through the system. That is helpful, because people who go into custody inevitably end up under the supervision of the Probation Service. There are benefits in me being able to have that system-wide view. That will now be replicated across six regions in England. As Kim says, there will be six versions of me caring about the whole system.

I have found on occasion, when I go to meetings in the prison half of the organisation, that I have to say, “What about probation?” Sometimes, when I am in the probation half of the system I have to say, “What about prison?” There will be seven of us doing that, so the system will inevitably be more joined up and more coherent. That is my view.

The Chair: And suitable for low-level offenders, do you think? That is what we are particularly interested in.

Chris Jennings: The prison bit of that does not necessarily apply to that cohort, although sometimes those people may have been in prison previously. I have operational focus on all elements of the system, so I do not just care about the prison/probation join-up; I care about everyone who is in our system and about making sure that we provide the best possible service to them, including the lowest-level offenders and people on life sentences. It does not dilute my attention away from any particular cohort. I care equally about anyone who is in our system.

Q65 Lord Filkin: Thank you for coming. I want to ask about the Probation Service’s challenges and how you are responding to those. We have heard—I am sure it is true—that staffing levels are less than would be ideal and caseloads are high. There is nothing unusual about that in a public service at this point in time. Virtually every public service would say exactly the same. We are interested in your responses to that. You have spoken about some of the structural changes. Later on, we will talk about the technological issues, so maybe we do not need to go into that now. I am particularly interested in how you think you should be changing, or could be changing, the service, better to deal with low-level offenders, who are our focus.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: You absolutely reference the difficulties that are shared by a number of organisations at this point in time. It is absolutely right to say that at the point of unification we inherited a lot of staffing capacity gaps in the system. We then clearly had the recruitment challenges of the pandemic and then the recruitment challenges of the post-pandemic employment market.

I think it would be fair to say that we have done brilliantly well in addressing those recruitment challenges. Over the last three years we have recruited just over 4,000 new trainee probation officers, which is an exponential rate of recruitment. Previously, we would usually recruit around 600 probation officers per year to keep the system ticking over. In the first year of our drive to increase capacity in the organisation we recruited 1,000. We then went on in the two subsequent years to do 1,500 each year. That has been hugely significant.

You may know that probation officer training takes somewhere between 15 and 21 months, so there is a lag in the system before trainee probation officers actually qualify and become competent and confident in role. Because of the recruitment decisions that we made some time ago, we are now seeing those people land in our organisation. I think we have had almost 1,000 newly qualified officers in the service this year. That is starting to make a real difference locally in teams. As you can imagine, it reduces the workload for existing members of staff. It starts to give staff a bit of a breather in the cases that they are carrying. That is in the probation officer role.

There are other roles in the organisation that are critical to the management of our offender groups. We have Probation Service officers who manage the lower and low-medium risk offenders. They are very important to us. As you quite rightly say, they manage many of the cases that you will be interested in hearing about today. They are a group of staff who are incredibly important to us. We had capacity gaps there and we have been looking to fill those gaps.

Recruitment for Probation Service officers was not moving at the rate and pace that we wanted it to. We brought in specialist recruitment provision from the Ministry of Justice who looked at the whole of the system for our recruitment, from the marketing to the assessments, and the contact that we have with candidates during the whole process. They turned it around and we now have an excellent pipeline of Probation Service officers coming into the organisation. In fact, in many of our regions in the north we have now reached our target staffing levels for Probation Service officers, which is really excellent and will start to make a difference to local teams of people.

There is a very similar story for case administrators. Again, they are hugely important in the administrative work that comes with supervising offenders. We have also increased recruitment there, through the use of Ministry of Justice specialist resourcing teams, and we are really making headway in filling vacancies. We are not there yet, although we are close. For probation officers, we have more trainees in the system than we will need so we have bought ourselves some real capacity with our approach.

We are also seeing our retention rates improve. For a while we were flatlining on our numbers of staff in post because the attrition rate was at a level where we would be bringing people in, but we would be losing a significant proportion of them through the back door. We have now really turned a corner on that. Our retention rates have improved, and they are improving all the time. We now have a net gain in staff, month on month, for every region across the country and some significant challenges are starting to abate. We still have staffing difficulties in some of our regions, so we have a different picture, a north/south divide, if you like. We are able to recruit at a faster rate, and we have more numbers, in the north. In the south, particularly London, there is a slower growth trajectory.

In terms of the management of our people, we now have a wonderful injection of new staff who are fresh, bright and enthusiastic, but they are new. We now have a workforce with less experienced people in post than we have usually had, so the balance is different. We are working very hard to ensure that our training and development activity meets the needs of all our new staff, as well as ensuring that we look after our more experienced staff who sometimes feel the weight of bringing their colleagues on locally in teams.

We have a retention strategy to ensure that we direct activity at our new people, to make sure that we are looking after them and providing them with the right opportunities to progress, develop and embed. We also have activities that directly support our more experienced staff and help them to feel that they are not burdened by all the new staff, but they have a significant role in bringing them on, which many of them embrace.

In terms of workload management, we are now able to distribute our cases across new staff coming into the organisation. We actively manage our caseloads. We have a workload measurement tool that enables us to do that with some basis in science. Our senior probation officers locally on the ground look to ensure distribution of cases in line with ability and capacity. If anything in that space becomes more difficult, you would expect our senior probation officers to work with individuals in their teams, and they do, to make sure that things feel reasonable and that they are enabled to do a decent job.

Q66 Lord Filkin: Thank you very much. First, well done in the recruitment and retention progress. You are fortunate to have the budget headroom. Many services do not have that at present. You have spoken about training and performance management. Is it essentially the same service with more bodies, or are you looking to find ways of improving performance and productivity by reshaping the Service? For example, in the NHS or teaching over the last decade or so, very many parts have re-engineered their services in a variety of ways. What are you doing as significant innovations in the way the service is delivered that would raise efficacy or performance?

Chris Jennings: We are absolutely changing the way we provide and deliver our service, not just increasing the numbers. As part of the reform programme that we led to bring about the unification of the Service a couple of years ago, we developed a whole new target operating model. Apologies for the jargon, but essentially it is a list of things about how we do our business and wanting to do them differently.

For example, Wales—the region I was responsible for—unified earlier in relation to sentence management than the rest of the Service. We went early. That has enabled us to develop and implement our new approach to resettlement, wanting to work further up stream with people in prison. I appreciate that this is not the cohort that you are particularly focusing on, but it is to give you an idea of the innovation that we are trying to bring in.

We have now started working eight and a half months before somebody is released from prison, with people doing a refreshed risk assessment to make sure that we really understand their needs so that on release we can try to meet those needs. That is a new part of our operating model. We were not working that early up the system with people before we implemented the target operating model. There are lots of other things we are doing as well, but that gives you a sense of the fact that we are not just standing still and increasing numbers. We are trying to change the way we do things to get better outcomes.

Q67 Lord Filkin: My final question is this. We have heard about frustration in magistrates’ courts, with the inability at times to have what they would see as more effective disposals for repeat offenders and the inability to address some of the fundamental causes, whether it be drug-taking or mental health problems. What can you say about what the Probation Service is seeking to do so that there are better disposals available for magistrates’ courts?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: A really important part of what we are doing in that space is a real relaunch and refresh of our Community Sentence Treatment Requirements. You may know that we have three Community Sentence Treatment Requirements: the Drug Rehabilitation Requirement (DRR), the Mental Health Treatment Requirement (MHTR), and the Alcohol Treatment Requirement (ATR). All those interventions are co-worked between probation and specialist treatment providers. They have been around for some time, but they seem to have fallen out of regular volume use. I think some part of that was because it was becoming difficult to get the treatment elements properly in place.

We have put some dedicated focus on to ensuring that we start to move forward on those requirements. As you say, we see them as critical. Many of our people on probation have needs in those areas. We have a high proportion of alcohol and substance misuse. We also have a lot of mental health issues that we are dealing with, both in the community and of course in prison. We have renewed emphasis on those sentences. We are certainly discussing them and providing relevant information to sentencers to keep them high profile.

We have a new national partnership agreement on health and social care, which we signed up to in February this year. There is some significant investment there from the Department of Health and Social Care of £533 million, which creates over 54,000 new substance misuse treatment places, which is significant in terms of the sentences that we will be able to effectively deliver. It also funds some dedicated criminal justice-focused staff, who will work across police custody, courts, probation and prison to improve those treatment pathways. We also have—potentially a game-changer for probation—NHS England rolling out primary care mental health treatment requirements for offenders who are at a lower level of mental health needs.

Practitioners in probation often talk about people on their caseload who have not met the threshold for drawing down mental health specialist services because the threshold has been high. We now have specialist provision for those with lower-level needs. We know that our mental health treatment requirements are already popular, and we really think that this will make a significant difference to bringing in specialist wraparound support for offenders with significant needs around alcohol, mental health and drug substance misuse.

The Chair: We have spent quite a lot of time already on not very many of the questions that we have for you. Can we write to you to drill down a little more into the figures for recruitment, attrition and differences in regions, and any figures you have about offenders giving consent to the treatment programmes, because I know that is required? Thank you.

Q68 Lord Sandhurst: I am concerned not about what happened in the past but about looking forward. The past is relevant, because since June 2021 there have been 28 inspections, and of those only one was good and 27 required improvement or were inadequate. One of the inadequate ones in the 27 received a mark of nought. That is the past. We will park that.

What will be the pattern of future inspections and follow-up? What programme do you have to ensure that the inadequate ones come up? When will they next be inspected?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: We have three lines of assurance in the Probation Service. The first is the individual assurance that takes place on individual cases. That is conducted by the casework practitioner, their manager and the quality development officers we have locally. That is the first point of assurance over cases. The second line of assurance is internal. We have an operational assurance team who perform annual inspections across all our cases. The last one that we had recently reported. That built on the baseline of the first operational assurance audit in 2022. The external assurance is provided by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation. So we have a number of layers of assurance.

HM Inspectorate of Probation is due to change the inspection regime. It has been operating a regime of conducting probation delivery unit inspections that is one unit. We have 108 across the service as a whole. It will take a region and do a percentage of probation delivery units in that region. Those are the inspections that you have seen. The inspectorate is now changing its methodology and will be doing a regional inspection. The inspection schedule will probably be about one every three years, because it will be aiming to do all the regions nationally.

Lord Sandhurst: With the 13 inadequate ones and the one of the 27 that got nought, how long will it be before someone goes back in to see if they are climbing up?

Chris Jennings: It should be at least once every three years that the inspector will be back, but he has decided to change his methodology slightly. There will also be a new inspector.

Lord Sandhurst: You understand the concern that three years is a long time. If you remain at the nought out of 27 level, or just go up to two or three out of 27, that will not be something that we all have confidence in.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: You are absolutely right. Let me assure you that we may not have the external assurance because the chief inspector will decide on their own regime, but we have internal assurance. For every one of those inspections that landed as inadequate we have an urgent strategic response that I chair. We bring together all interested parties in the management of the probation delivery unit, and we look at the root causes of the performance issues. We identify the performance measures that will take place to address those deficits. We also identify what kind of support will be needed.

We have follow-up review sessions. The case that you referenced with zero scores was in London. I routinely revisit the London performance to look at the changes and improvements that have been made. I assure the panel that we have seen some significant improvements in London since that day. We will also have an annual assurance audit. It will be done by our own teams internally, but they are independent from us in operational delivery. They will address the gap that we have from HMIP coming in, to make sure that we have an annual sentence management audit on all our probation delivery units and regions to make sure that we do not have an assurance gap.

Lord Sandhurst: I will not pursue it further because I know time is tight, but it is a matter of real concern that people should be put on report.

Chris Jennings: I agree. That is a point I want to add, if I may. Senior operational leaders need to be held to account for making sure that their regions are improving. The first two of the inspections that you just referenced were in Wales. We are deeply disappointed with the result. I am looking forward to the inspector coming back so that we can share the progress that we have made with him.

Q69 Lord Beith: The reunited Probation Service inherited a multiplicity of IT systems. The mix of those systems has been severely criticised over the years by the National Audit Office. Is it different now and, if so, in what respect? How many systems are employed in the casework side of your work?

Chris Jennings: I do not know the answer to how many systems there are exactly. We will have to follow that up with detail from colleagues. Vast improvements have been made to the provision of IT to our staff.

Shortly after unification we provided every member of staff with a new laptop and mobile phone, a modern set of kit with which they can do their job. We are still definitely hamstrung by some of the legacy systems. For example, we need to improve OASys, which is the risk management tool used by probation practitioners. A business case has been written and is moving through governance at the moment to get that replaced and updated. It is out of date, and probation practitioners regularly feed back that it takes too long and is not efficient. It does not enable them to spend their time supervising offenders, which is what they want to do, because they are stuck with that old system. A lot of progress has been made. People I meet when I go around the offices feel that the IT has improved, but we definitely have more to do. There is a programme of work under way to address the legacy issues.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: It is absolutely right that our long-term ambition is certainly to replace all our systems. That is the long-term goal. The National Audit Office did a report in 2016 that certainly criticised the IT systems that we have, for all the reasons that Chris outlined. There was lots of double keying and lots of systems that did not talk to each other. It was very frustrating for practitioners who actually want to spend time with their people on probation, doing face-to-face engagement and spending less time sat behind their computer.

We have changed a number of things since 2016 that directly address some of those points. In addition to the points that Chris raised, we now have full control. We used to have IT through a supplier, but now we have control. We have certainly looked to create much more automation of our services, which reduces the time that people have to spend. We now have better navigation in our systems and we have better integration. It is not perfect, but there has certainly been a significant improvement since 2016 when the NAO was very critical.

Lord Beith: Have you considered a new comprehensive casework system, or is that in the too-difficult box?

Chris Jennings: I do not think it is in the too-difficult box. We need to replace the systems we have when they are old and do not do what we need our front-line staff to do. nDelius is another system that is a key part of our IT infrastructure that we are modernising and making sure it is more fit for purpose.

Lord Beith: It appears to be named after a Bradford-born composer.

Chris Jennings: It may well have been, yes.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: I have heard it called worse.

Chris Jennings: There are other exciting innovations that we are trying. I was on a visit to an office in Wales recently where, as part of the reform programme, the practitioners there were piloting—it is only a pilot at this stage—an app that they can use to contact an offender with. They can upload documents and communicate securely with an offender. They can do video calls to contact an offender. We are always trying to look for new ideas that will help front-line staff to deliver a better service, and make it easier for people on probation who must, on occasion, find it frustrating to engage with some of our services that are not always necessarily fit for the 21st century.

Lord Beith: Is there a problem for your delivery partners of access to the information they need to administer the supervisory systems that they are running?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: We have mostly worked through a lot of those issues. You are absolutely right that sometimes we did not have the availability to transfer information in a safe way to some of our delivery partners. We have made real changes in those systems. I think we have unblocked most of the problems now.

Lord Beith: To be clear about what that is about, it involves risk-level patterns of behaviour and known dangers with a particular individual.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: Yes.

Chris Jennings: For example, again in Wales, if there is what we call a reportable incident and the police attend an incident, we get notified about that in the Probation Service. We know that the police were called out to an address and what happened. We can get much better information than we might have done previously, but there are still definitely areas where sharing information across the system is complicated. Last year, for example, before we would recommend to a court an electronic monitoring disposal—the fitting of a tag and a curfew—we mandated that we must have domestic abuse and safeguarding information in front of the court before it was asked to make that sort of decision.

Getting information on child safeguarding is not straightforward. Each local authority does it differently and has its own system. There is no one place you can go to draw off a system a nice piece of data that will enable us to move forward. There are still things we are working really hard at, where we interact with other systems and it is not straightforward, but they are beyond our control to resolve.

Lord Beith: You can flag up a need to refer to another system.

Chris Jennings: Yes, and we do that. In those examples we have good contacts with the local authorities, where we can ring them and ask them to provide the information. In some instances they might be able to provide us with access to their system remotely through a laptop and a data-sharing agreement and all the things we need to put in place, but I do not want to give the impression that it is perfect, because there are still definitely complexities in our system.

The Chair: This committee had an inquiry into the use of advanced technologies in the justice system. We were concerned about the ethics of what was being used and the potential for discrimination, for instance. I do not want to spend too long on this, but the tools you have mentioned—OASys and RSR—are both used for assessment. Are you satisfied that the sorts of concerns that I have just mentioned are being met and that, for instance, there is no built-in discrimination?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: Yes. We are as confident as we can be that neither of the risk assessment tools that you have alluded to creates issues of discrimination or disproportionality. There is an element whereby any system that we have, such as OASys, has human beings putting in information as well. We need to ensure that the system is built in a responsive way, but we also need to ensure that the people operating those systems and putting information into them are really clear about protected characteristics and levels of bias, et cetera, and that they are culturally competent so that they can navigate the systems in the best way.

The Chair: Do you have a panel, for instance, that considers these things? We were impressed by one of the police forces that we talked to where there is a dedicated, independent panel for each individual or each supervisor.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: We have a dedicated panel. The people who form the panel are academics, experts and research specialists. We bring to the panel issues of concern or areas of development. We look to create an environment where we are effectively probed and challenged by real experts in the field, to get under the skin of what we are doing and the way we are doing it. We take that very seriously. We have changed things that we were doing or taking forward on the back of the feedback and the challenge that we have received in that panel.

Q70 Lord Blunkett: First, I thank both our witnesses for the operation within enormous constraints of trying to find a way forward for prisoners on IPP. That is appreciated by me. What it has thrown up is the way in which the system captures those working in it, rather than enabling them to make logical decisions. I am rolling two questions together because we have touched on the obstacles to delivering community sentences.

We have begun to talk about the partnership arrangements. You talked about the National Health Service and three pathways that are available, although I do not see from the form that we have been sent that when either written or oral recommendations are being made there is a space for, “Would you recommend a treatment pathway”? Might that be built into the system? Secondly, are we learning anything from those who are being supervised on licence? This is a diversion, but you will see why.

On IPP, when people come out and are on licence, a breach leads to them being put back in prison on the same sentence, but the breach does not appear to say—what is effectively supervision in the community—“We will put you into a treatment pathway instead of you going back into prison”. There are two questions: partnership with the third sector, private sector and others; and the obstacles to doing the job. Is there any way in which we could allow people just to use a bit of common sense?

Chris Jennings: In relation to the structure of the form and whether it leads probation practitioners to make the appropriate recommendations and treatment requirements, I am happy to come back to you with further information about whether we can update the form to make that clearer. I am not a probation practitioner myself.

Lord Blunkett: The form arose from the 2003 Act, for which, as you know, I carry a responsibility.

Chris Jennings: We are definitely happy to have a look at whether there are things we can do to make that clearer. One of the things, as Kim mentioned earlier in relation to the three treatment pathways, is increasing their availability and working with health partners in both England and Wales to make sure that they are a real, tangible alternative that will be meaningful. There is a bit about making sure that the report going to court makes it clear, but we have to make them meaningful as well. There is a lot of work going on in that area.

One thing we failed to mention is that we are running three intensive supervision pilots in different courts across England. There is not one in Wales yet, although I live in hope. They are to test out with the Courts and Tribunals Service and the judiciary a problem-solving, court approach to these kinds of treatment requirements and working more closely with them. We will learn a lot from those pilots, which are getting under way soon.

On your talking to different groups of people point, we have put in a huge effort post Covid. We have had to reinvigorate that element of our system. Talking to people on probation is something that we had stopped doing a bit during probation with actual service users and people who actually experience what it is like to be in our service. A huge effort has been put in across England and Wales to set up regular engagement forums with people we are supervising, to hear their perspective on our system and what we could do to improve it. We have those in Wales, and I know that in England, for which I do not have responsibility, that kind of effort has been made.

An important element of our system is actually stopping to listen to people, and that also applies, as we have discussed in a separate forum, to the IPP cohort. Stopping and talking to that cohort of prisoners about what more we can do to help them is really important, but it equally applies to people on community sentences and making sure that we are listening to their voice.

Lord Blunkett: Could you say a bit more about partnership arrangements with other partners in the community, which seem to come and go like the tide coming in and going out?

Chris Jennings: We have myriad third sector and partnership arrangements in place. We commission many third sector partners to come in and deliver community sentence orders for us through our CRS—I think that is the abbreviation—community rehabilitation services. That is our framework, basically, for bringing in people to help us. We cannot deliver everything we need ourselves. We work with hundreds of third sector partners across England and Wales to come in and do particular work on specialist areas, such as neurodiversity. We do not always have the in-house skill set to help people with neurodiverse needs to manage that part of their life, so we employ experts from the third sector and others to come in and help us to address those needs. That is just one area where we are working with local partners, but we have hundreds of arrangements.

Lord Blunkett: How do you look at it from a Probation Service angle?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: To build on what Chris said, we have over 200 suppliers from the private or voluntary and community sector on our dynamic framework. We have 133 contracts with such suppliers to deliver local services. We also have the ROIF—the Regional Outcomes and Innovation Fund—a pot of money that we make available to regional probation directors for them to use on local commissioning. Sometimes there will be niche local services, and money can be used to co-commission or co-produce. That is really important in local areas.

I can give you a couple of examples of the innovative partnership approaches that we have got from that—to bring it to life, hopefully. In the south-west a service has been co-commissioned with Bristol City Council that provides two reducing reoffending coaches and specialist access to community activities for young people. One such young person—a female offender—received a subsidised bicycle, which enabled her to get around the town and build her confidence in that respect. She was able to do swimming lessons, et cetera. In London, the ROIF has been used to commission two pan-London specialist services to marginalised people from priority cohorts, principally around Gypsy, Roma and Traveller engagement, and ex-armed service engagement. I could go on. A lot of ROIF money has been used to commission specialist services for neurodiversity in our caseload. They are really important partnerships that we actively seek.

We also, of course, have statutory partnerships that our regional leaders will be around tables with, making local decisions. Those are partners in the local authority, the local police and the local NHS, et cetera. All our probation leaders are networked well into those local partnerships. There may be different structures in place in different parts of the country. It might be a reducing reoffending board. It may be a board that sits under a mayor, where they have one, but our people around those tables are collaborating with other partners in the landscape.

Lord Blunkett: That is very encouraging. It is a lot better than the apocryphal stories of people having to steal a bike to get to their supervisor’s meeting.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: They do not have to steal it now; we give them one.

Q71 The Chair: You were trying to find an abbreviation, Chris. Is it CSTR—Community Sentence Treatment Requirements? I wanted to ask about that. I gather that in 2017-18 a protocol between HMPPS, the NHS and partners was piloted to increase the use of treatment requirements. It was evaluated in 2019. I wondered what had happened to that, because it seems to have been pretty successful.

Chris Jennings: We know that those types of orders work. Our focus now is on trying to make more of them happen.

The Chair: Has it been rolled out right across the country?

Chris Jennings: Yes. In Wales, with the mental health treatment requirement, for example, which is one of the three that Kim mentioned earlier, we have been doing work over the last couple of years in Swansea in particular, having identified a particular need in Swansea to address a number of our offenders who have mental health conditions. That has been really positive. We have had high levels of compliance from people on those orders. We are now working at pace with additional money we have secured through the spending review to roll that out across Wales over the next year.

We are in a slightly different funding arrangement in Wales, as you appreciate. Health is devolved, so there are ongoing conversations about what goes on beyond the next year to work out a long-term funding arrangement. That is the thing, operationally, that is worrying me at the moment. I have a short-term funding solution for a long-term problem, so we need to keep the conversations going with both Governments to make sure that there is a sustainable funding source. I believe that, along with the alcohol treatment requirements and the substance misuse treatment requirements, these are a key element. Of course, many offenders need more than one of those three because they have more than one problem. I am a huge fan.

The Chair: But you are saying that it is still being rolled out.

Chris Jennings: Yes.

Q72 Baroness Henig: Can I introduce magistrates into the picture and raise the issue of confidence? Obviously, magistrates and the Probation Service should be working closely together. When I was a magistrate I remember that, because offenders kept coming back after short probation sentences, or longer ones, there was a much greater tendency to say, “Well, send them to prison, because at least when we send them to prison for a short sentence we know that they’re behind bars”.

I think there is an issue of confidence, and that magistrates need to be kept in the loop as to what is happening when offenders are on community orders. What steps are being taken now? It is 20 years since I was a magistrate, and I am absolutely certain that everything has improved enormously since then. What steps do you take to keep magistrates in the loop? I was wondering about progress reports and whether they should be reintroduced.

Chris Jennings: A couple of years ago, I led a piece of work with the magistracy and the district Bench, which ultimately was signed off by the senior presiding judge and internally with us to establish what we called our judicial engagement charter. It was a promise of what we would do to engage with the judiciary to make sure that they felt we were fulfilling our obligations and giving them the information they need. We set out a series of commitments as part of that charter, to make sure that at local, regional and national level we have proper engagement structures where we can listen to the concerns of magistrates and provide them with any information that they need to have confidence in our system.

We have a national meeting now where the national Magistrates’ Association, the Magistrates’ Leadership Executive, the district judges and the Crown Court judiciary are represented. Kim chairs that and I help out if Kim cannot make it. I think it is an effective forum. It has been running for a couple of years and at national level the structure is well established and we have good lines of communication, but what needs to happen is at Bench level, where we are talking to grass-roots magistrates about what is going on.

I can speak with greater knowledge about Wales. We have what we call a strategic sentencer forum, both in the north and south of Wales, where the Crown Court judges, the district Bench and the magistracy come together on a regular basis with both prison and probation colleagues and talk about all the things that they want to talk about. There is a shared agenda, where we can make sure that we provide feedback on breach proceedings, on timeliness of our work, on quality of PSRs and all the things that the Bench really cares about. I think the dialogue is open and effective.

Your specific last point on progress reports probably highlights a healthy tension that exists in our system between the court system, which rightly wants to run at the quickest possible pace it can to deliver justice for people, and its ability to do everything it might want to do. I think the idea of progress reports is a good one, and we obviously have that ability with the RARs and other elements of our system. Were we to bring it back in for a wider cohort of cases, there are resource implications for both the Courts Service and the Probation Service. I would not advocate that kind of review in all cases. Because of the resource implications, it is sensible to target it where we need it the most. I would not be in favour of a review in every case, but I know the benefit it can have for certain offenders to come back in front of the Bench and have a progress report, and for the Bench to see it.

There is more we can do in the background to give feedback to sentencers about good progress. I do not think it always needs to be in a courtroom in front of a Bench. I think we can do more through local arrangements to provide case studies and data that says, “Out of the 50 mental health treatment requirements you gave last year in Gwent, this is the progress, and this is the story of the individuals who have gone through it”, anonymously to make sure that we keep it appropriately discreet.

I think we would have the most benefit by making sure that the local engagement forums work effectively and that we continue to challenge ourselves on whether it is only DRRs or the other kinds of requirements that might require more formal intervention by the Bench. For a lot of offenders that is not the thing that will help them succeed. For some it is, but for others it is not necessary. I hope I have answered your question.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: There are a couple of things from me on that. I have sought assurance, certainly from all my regional probation directors who operate with those local arrangements, and I am very satisfied that they have some really connected, vibrant arrangements with their local sentencers, both in quarterly meetings where the higher level progress and performance is reported, and in newsletters and ad hoc events, inviting magistrates over, et cetera. Those things are really starting to happen now. They became slightly more difficult under Transforming Rehabilitation, but now as a unified service I think it has opened up again and there is fresh life being breathed into it.

On progress reviews, the three intensive supervision courts that we referred to earlier—previously known as problem-solving courts—will be going live later this month. Two are on substance misuse in Teesside and Liverpool, and one is on women in Birmingham. Their model has progress reviews built in, so there is a single dedicated judge who oversees the progress of the case with routine reviews. We will be conducting an evaluation of those courts, as you would expect. We will take the learning and look at whether it could, and should, be extrapolated further. There are resource issues that we would need to take into consideration, but we certainly need to understand what it is about them that works or does not so that we can make those considerations.

Another point is that we are very conscious that in usual circumstances the only time sentencers note progress of an order is usually when it is in breach. There is almost a skewed picture of what happens. I think there is the potential and room for us to look much more seriously at revocation on the grounds of good progress. It has to be very judiciously undertaken, but it certainly is a very positive way of ending a sentence of the court to note that somebody has complied, has learned, has progressed and has potentially flourished, and that the sentencers are able not only to note that themselves but to provide that ending for that particular individual. That is definitely something that we are thinking about much more strategically.

Baroness Henig: Thank you. That is very helpful.

The Chair: It is obviously good that this is all being developed, but we have heard from the magistrates that it is still not quite good enough. Presumably, you are working with magistrates to find new ways of communicating.

Chris Jennings: Absolutely. As I mentioned, there is national engagement, the ability for us to engage at national level, but I know that those conversations are going on at local level. I speak quite regularly to all the Bench chairs in Wales at their regular meeting, where they come together. I go with the regional probation director. That is also replicated in England in different ways, so there is plenty of opportunity for the conversations to take place.

We also conduct an annual survey of magistrates and judges that has questions about confidence in our system. We have the ability to track it at quite a big level because we get a good response rate to the survey. That is another thing I should have mentioned in answer to your earlier question.

Q73 Lord McInnes of Kilwinning: Following Baroness Henig’s question about progress reports and working back in the process, I want to ask about pre-sentence reports and standard pre-sentence reports. When we heard from the Magistrates’ Association, it felt that there was significant inconsistency across the country and a degradation in the number of pre-sentence reports because of timings. We understand why, with backlogs and everything else, that might happen, but clearly the magistrates felt that was not to the benefit of their responsibilities to sentence wisely. First, the Magistrates’ Association was looking for further guidelines, so do you think they need to be provided and should be provided? Secondly, moving forward, you have a pilot being carried out just now. I would be interested to hear how that pilot is going.

We heard earlier about resource, which seems to be improving a lot. Will that increase in resource, especially in different roles in the Probation Service, help the administration with standard pre-sentence reports, or do you suspect that the continual decline of numbers will keep going and other means will have to be found?

Chris Jennings: In reverse order, I think the increased resource will absolutely help with this. Undoubtedly, some of the delays on our side in being able to provide timely reports are due to the overall resource pressure that particular regions and places are under. We should definitely see an improvement in our ability to do that in a timely fashion.

We have already provided a lot of guidance and advice to probation officers on what a good-quality pre-sentence report looks like. To a certain extent, it is quite hard to imagine that there will not be some inconsistencies, on the basis that they are individual reports about individual people. There will be a level of inconsistency that is appropriate, given that we are tailoring the report to an individual person, but we should expect good quality everywhere, of course. We have done a lot to try to address that issue. I am not saying that we could not do more. The resources will help. Learning from the pilot that you referred to, which is getting under way in the south central region, will also help. There is definitely more to do.

I referred earlier to the fact that there will always be a bit of tension between a Bench or a judge being prepared to wait for in-depth reports when we might think it would be a good idea if they waited for them, and their eagerness to get on and progress the case to give speedy justice to victims and witnesses. Of course we understand why they want to do that, but sometimes our preference might be to have a little more time to be able to do the work properly. We know that if we can spend a bit more time up front, everything that follows thereafter might be better and we have a better chance of reducing reoffending if we can get the right order. That sometimes takes a bit of time.

Q74 Lord McInnes of Kilwinning: Going back to Lord Blunkett’s question, how do you think the community sentence requirement of support for offenders are affected by the pre-sentence report? Obviously, a lot of the new community sentence requirements are being phased in and being encouraged. Hopefully, they will move on through partnership. Do you think there is a lack of them coming through at the moment because of the lack of numbers of pre-sentence reports?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: There are a couple of things. First, we absolutely acknowledge that there have been some difficulties with pre-sentence reports and advice to courts, which is why we commenced a pilot in 15 magistrates’ courts just over two years ago. We now have the outcome from that.

I think there is confusion in the system. We have fast delivery reports, on-the-day reports, short format reports and standard reports. Our aim is to cut through all of that and create something that is clean, simple and gives the best possible advice. We think, and studies will back this up, that it is better to have a full pre-sentence report. By that, I do not mean 17 pages that nobody will read, but that we have included all the right information that you need in order to be able to give a sentence that meets the needs and manages the risks of the individual in question, and has the best possible chance of being completed because it meets the needs and manages the risks.

We have moved from the pilot into the pathfinder. We learned a lot from the pilot about what we wanted to do and we are now testing that in the pathfinder. There is a completely new assessment template. We have developed that with sentencers, and it is currently with the Sentencing Council for it to give final feedback and potentially sign-up. We are confident that when we roll that out it will meet the needs in providing the best possible advice. It is not right for everybody to have a standard or full pre-sentence report, but there will be a verification template. We will only have two things: a verification template and a full standard pre-sentence report. It will be very clear who has what.

One of the things that Chris alluded to, and that we need to be very careful about, is that we do not slow down justice. We are confident that by building in the pre-sentence report preparation at an earlier point—bringing it up stream—we will not contribute to delays in the system. This is what we are testing out in the pathfinder. We are very confident, but we will await the learning from that. Our plan is then to roll it out nationally.

In the meantime, because sentencers need to be confident in what they are getting, we are looking to define more clearly the roles for probation staff, in both delivery of reports and their presence in court. We have a whole new learning and development package that has been rolled out to all court staff, and a mandatory gatekeeping process has been brought in to ensure that we have a quality product going into the courts. There are some things that we are doing right now and some really good things that we are testing to bring out in the future.

Lord Blunkett: Are you confident that the training you are offering allows those judgments to be made, including things like the maturity of the offender?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: Yes. I have no reason to believe that it will not. We will clearly see that as we see the training become embedded in practice. Sometimes there is a disconnect between training taking place and the changes that are required to the delivery of the role. We will certainly be checking them out. So far, the feedback that we have on the training from people who have gone through it has been very positive. That is one level of confidence for us. We need to see change and improvement in the way they practise. We will monitor, evaluate and manage that as we go.

Lord McInnes of Kilwinning: We have seen the short sentence report templates. Are there other things that you could send from the pilots and from the work that you are currently doing with sentencers that we could look at? I think that would help to inform the inquiry.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: Of course.

The Chair: Thank you. The form of the pre-sentence report is really interesting. I must say that I did wonder whether going for a short oral report or a long written one, in fact the same work has got to be done, so you either do it for the court or you do it after sentence.

Q75 Lord Sandhurst: Many of your contracts with delivery partners will expire in the early part of next year. I want to ask you about the process of renewal and I would like you to address five things. You might want to make a note, or you may have them there.

First, what do you see as the key milestones in the next nine months or so? Secondly, what is your overall budget? Thirdly, who is leading on this? Is it top down or regional? Fourthly, what is the role of the regional directors? It would be helpful to know the extent to which your priorities, as you see them, have evolved in the light of knowledge and experience in the last three years. Some regions have been successful in some aspects. Is that being disseminated to others?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: Thank you for a very detailed question. We currently have 113 live commissioned rehabilitative service contracts. They are all pathway provisions, which we know are linked to offending, on employment training, education, personal well-being, women’s services, et cetera. The total value of the CRS contracts is £348 million, with the permitted extensions, or £242 million without those extensions.

Many of the contracts are due to expire in March 2024. There is an option for us to extend for up to one year, and we are currently developing our plans for recommissioning. We have not finalised our plans around that yet. That means that the exact timeline and milestones are yet to be confirmed, but following standard procurement processes we would conduct a needs assessment in the first instance to ensure that the contracts that we have actually meet the needs of our people on probation. Then, of course, we would learn from the contracts that we currently operate.

It is fair to say that the contracts are first-generation contracts. We are new to this contracting landscape in the Probation Service at this point. They were brought online at pace at unification. We managed to get 110 contracts live at unification, which was a considerable achievement. They are first generation, so we will be looking to learn the lessons from that. We will also be conducting significant market engagement. We will then draw up the business case before we launch a competition for services.

You asked about the role and influence of the regions. Currently, these contracts are national contracts. They are built to address needs that we know are pretty standardised across our probation services. There is nothing particularly niche in them. We would look for our regional probation directors to use their regional innovation fund—the ROIF I referred to earlier—to do that kind of work. However, they can have some flex within the contract. They may decide to use more of one and less of another, so they have some control over the volumes, based on their particular needs.

It is probably worth saying that one of the things that we are discussing and considering as part of the One HMPPS model I referred to earlier, which has a stated commitment to looking to devolve more autonomy and authority to the regions, is how we square the circle between local or regional autonomy and national contracting. Those are some of the active discussions and debates that we are currently having.

Chris Jennings: One of your questions was specifically about who is in the lead. There is a director in HMPPS who is ultimately responsible for running this programme of reprocurement. It is his job to engage with all the key partners, including regional probation directors, as that process goes along.

The Chair: I understand that regional services have commissioned mentoring support and services for ethnic-minority service users, as well as for the neurodiversity that you mentioned. Will those be commissioned centrally going forward? Do you want to say anything about them?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: Some of those providers are very niche and local. It is a very interesting question. One of the things that we want to do is evaluate all those contracts, and we will do that, because there may very well be learning for us nationally. Whether we would be looking to create a national contract is probably down the line from where we are now, but we are certainly alive to the potential learning from some of the bespoke and smaller niche commissions locally and what that may tell us that we should think about nationally.

The Chair: Some of it needs to be mainstreamed, does it not?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: Absolutely.

The Chair: It should not be sidelined.

Chris Jennings: There is a local angle. In Wales, we are looking to work with our PCC partners to co-commission particular services for women and young people. In Greater Manchester, a huge amount of work has gone into co-commissioning with the combined authority, under the mayor. There is some helpful flexibility in our national approach for local innovation and for different local arrangements to be respected. In Wales and Greater Manchester, certainly, we are benefiting from that flexibility.

Q76 Baroness Prashar: Good morning. When we took evidence from the Chief Inspector of Probation, he praised the approach of youth offending services and recommended that the same approach be adopted when supervising young adults. I want to probe with you the practicalities of that. How practical would it be for that change to be implemented? What challenges, if any, do you anticipate with that approach?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: First and foremost, I commend our colleagues in the youth offending services for delivering some excellent work, but there are some critical differences between youth offending services and probation. One of those critical differences is in caseload. An average probation officer may have 35-plus cases. A Probation Service officer may have more than that. A youth offending officer may have more in the region of 10 to 12 cases. Scaling that differently would have some significant resource and affordability issues at the outset.

Another challenge with that approach is that youth offending services are very networked into services for young people. Adult services are usually with different providers and, of course, have different thresholds. You usually find that the threshold for an adult service is much higher. When it comes to practicalities, you would need to think about the safeguarding issues of seeing both children and adults in the same service, potentially in the same building.

There are significant problems with it. Any change in the design would clearly need legislation, so it would inevitably be a ministerial decision. We are currently taking some innovative approaches with that cohort of young people. It will be quite important to see how they fare and what that tells us about improving probation services to 18 to 24 year-olds, who are statistically overrepresented in our group of people on probation.

Chris Jennings: Can I come in on that point? That is the key thing for me. We would not necessarily want to say that what they do for youth offending services should look the same for adults, because I do not think that the needs are necessarily the same. Aside from the impossibility of getting to a caseload like that across our system, which would be unaffordable, it would undesirable. The cliff edge at 18, when you have one level of intensive support and then suddenly you do not, is the thing we have to worry about. In Newham in London, we are testing a different approach for the cohort of 18 to 25s to see whether there is a different way we want to work by having a lower caseload for probation officers supervising that group, recognising that they may have a higher intensity of need.

We have a similar debate going on in the prison side of our business. I will not go into that, because I know that it is not for today, but we have people coming out of the youth estate into the adult estate, and it is very different. What can we do to support those people and recognise that an 18 year-old is not very different one day on from when they were 17 and 364 days? We have to make sure that we get that transition really smooth.

I would not be in favour of trying to replicate those services, but there are things that we can learn. We must make the cliff edge not a cliff edge and make the transition as smooth as we can. There is definitely more for us to do with the cohort of people from 18 to 25.

Baroness Prashar: You mentioned that you are taking some innovative approaches. What is the essence of them? Are you monitoring them?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: Yes. We have a pilot approach in Newham in London. We call it the youth to adult hub or the transition to adulthood pilot. This is what it is doing, basically. As Chris said, there will be a dedicated group of people who manage that cohort of younger people on probation. They have had special training in trauma-informed approaches, in neurodiversity and in maturity. We can recognise that there are some significant differences purely around brain function among people who are at a certain age, so we have specialist trained staff who will work more intensively, with lower caseloads, in the hub.

It is already showing some promising outcomes, certainly in attendance and compliance. That is all going really well. This is a cohort of people who tend to struggle with compliance, so we are seeing some really good indicators that it is a successful service. It will be subject to a full evaluation. We will take the learning of that and work out how it can inform any broader approaches that we may want to take as a national service.

Baroness Prashar: Looking back to Lord Filkin’s question about the fact that you are recruiting new staff and whether you are training them differently, is this part of the training that you are undertaking on how you will deal with young adults?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: This particular training is not available in that format across the board. We have specially trained the group of people who are managing the specific cohort of offenders in the hub. As part of the evaluation we will be able to see whether we should be investing in that training for all, certainly for anybody who has young people in their caseload, so that we can guarantee a better service.

Chris Jennings: One of the challenges for our service is how a probation officer can be an expert in young people, female offenders, neurodiversity, drug issues and accommodation issues. Probation officers are superhuman, in my view. I did not train as one, but I have got to work with them over the last four years and what they do is incredible.

We constantly have to balance specialising teams with the generic offer to offenders, as we think about what is the right answer. We cannot specialise everything, as we would not be able to resource that, but we recognise that there are groups for which we need specialism. That is also where we need to work with other services, because we cannot do it all on our own. That is why we are so keen to work with other partners that have that expertise.

Q77 Baroness Meacher: Several members of the committee have raised the importance of community orders focusing on the underlying causes of criminality. It was wonderful to hear Chris say that your focus in Wales is on ensuring that more treatment orders happen. Have you looked at the programme in Ireland, where they have introduced integrated community service orders that enable the offender to attend a treatment programme or other rehabilitation programme that, hopefully, will address the underlying causes of criminality? I certainly would not suggest that you introduce exactly the same design of integrated community services order. Over in Ireland, they enable the offender very much to choose whether to go on such an order. One has to strike a balance. Compulsion is not necessarily the right way forward, but there should be some sort of incentive structure and quite a lot of encouragement to ensure that people attend those orders.

The idea of having integrated community service orders is tremendous. The committee is very interested in producing a report that strongly encourages probation to have community orders that really address the underlying causes of crime, so I would be very interested to know whether you have thought about the Irish model. Obviously, it would need quite a lot of adjustment.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: The honest answer is that we have not looked at the Ireland model. Clearly, we will now that it has been brought to our attention, just so that we can properly understand how it operates versus how we operate. There are some interesting elements in having a sort of pick-and-mix, as you say. For me, that speaks very much to the idea of individually tailoring our response to a person, to ensure that we are the most successful that we can be at engendering that particular change.

I think we still have the ability to do that. We can combine a rehabilitation activity requirement with unpaid work. We can choose what components you might look to address underneath the rehabilitation activity requirement. We have the range of Community Sentence Treatment Requirements, as you say. We do not have to do those in isolation. We can do them with other orders. We can create an individualised, tailored package for our offenders.

I think that speaks to the pre-sentence report. That is when you should be looking at what that looks like and creating the germ of a package at that point. The idea of being able to reduce the sentence by up to one-third is definitely very interesting, and we should probably consider that. Of course, people on unpaid work can use 30% of their unpaid work hours specifically on employment training and education. It is not quite the same thing, I grant you, but it is a dedicated focus.

I am sure that Chris will want to come in here. I think the intensive supervision courts are very much about tailoring to the individual. Forgive me for almost sliding back into the old language of problem-solving courts. You have a judge who maintains oversight and progress reports and has a range of incentives and sanctions that can be deployed creatively within a particular order. We have some things that are similar to that package, but we do not have them packaged up in quite that particular way.

Chris Jennings: Any significant changes would obviously require legislation, too, because we have a slightly different legislative framework from our colleagues in Ireland. Other than making the point that, if we wanted to change it, it would need to be done through that kind of route, I agree with Kim that we have quite a lot of the elements of it already and are able to make the most of those.

We could do more to use unpaid work for education and employment training. I appreciate that there is a punishment element to unpaid work as well. That is about people paying a punishment back to a community for a crime that they have committed. I am sure we must maintain that as an element of the sentencing framework, but we should be able to do something more useful with it as well so that at the same time as they are carrying out their punishment they are able to get a qualification in horticulture, if they are clearing the church courtyard or clearing out canals. It has to be a good idea for us to continue to try to make the most of those kinds of things. We have some elements of it that are similar and that enable us to do quite a lot to meet the needs.

Baroness Meacher: Our idea is that if community orders were of that ilk and were very much addressing the underlying causes of criminality, as well as punishment and so on, perhaps you really could replace short-term prison sentences for prolific acquisitive criminals, who tend to have addictions and so on. That is what we would like to try to get on to.

Chris Jennings: Getting to the root cause, and solving the root cause, is obviously the aim, is it not? It is difficult to do.

Q78 The Chair: As senior civil servants, you are expected to “proactively champion and lead change, seeking innovative new approaches, policies and systems that add value to the organisation”. That is a requirement for all senior civil servants, but let us focus on the Probation Service. You have talked quite a lot about innovation. Is there some single change related to community sentences that you are driving, either individually or in unison, in the Probation Service? It is a very big question.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: It is. Hopefully, this will not be a disappointing answer. I have been the chief probation officer since February. I came in with three specific priorities: improving our practice in relation to public protection—principally, risk assessment and risk management; improving our support for senior probation officers; and improving retention of staff.

I see my main role at the minute as being about the consolidation of our core services and core practice. What we know from our assurance from HMIP reports, which were referenced before, is that there are some basics that we need to get right. That is my principal focus. Some of the ways we might do that might be quite innovative, but, for me, in driving change through the organisation, I am driving improvement in an organisation that still feels quite young and quite new, and has a high proportion of relatively inexperienced staff. I am trying to ensure that we maintain a focus on getting good, competent, confident and skilled staff who know how to do the basics and do them well.

At this point in time, we see that we are performing better in things like our engagement and desistance, which are really important parts of engendering change in our people on probation, but we are not getting some of our public protection right in the checks that we make, in understanding what we do with the information that we get in information exchanges, and in having enough professional curiosity to be a bit terrier-like about getting information. Those are the things that we are not seeing consistently in the way we would want. That is a real priority focus for me. I am driving change in practice improvement.

I am driving that through our senior probation officers because they are the people at the coalface, managing teams of front-line probation practitioners and performing case management oversight. We are looking to have some new and innovative ways of properly supporting and developing that group: different training, different development programmes and different mechanisms to put them in touch with colleagues across the whole of the country. There is innovation within that, but I am standing very firmly in the space that we have had a lot of change in the Probation Service and I want us to have the time to embed, to consolidate and to move forward with real practice expertise and improvement.

The Chair: I think this is the first time that public protection has been mentioned this morning. Thinking back to the questions about IT and information, are you getting information about what happens to offenders and whether they are reoffending once they have left your care, if I can put it that way?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: No. Chris leads for public protection, but I do not think that we do after they have left us, unless they come up for a new offence. Then the files will come back out, if you like, but we do not routinely hear. We have our reoffending outcomes.

Chris Jennings: At the lowest level, that is right. At more serious levels, we have all sorts of ongoing arrangements, but when people are no longer under the supervision of the Probation Service we do not hear about them unless they come back into contact with the law.

The Chair: That enables you to make assessments as to the success, though.

Chris Jennings: Yes. One of the key statistics we look at is to measure reducing reoffending.

In answer to your previous question, there are probably two things I would add as pertaining to community sentences in particular. The Community Sentence Treatment Requirements are the area where I want to see most progress. If we cannot address people’s mental health and drug and alcohol issues, we will not be able to get them to keep on the right path and move their life to a more positive stage. Solving those root-cause issues is the key focus as pertains to community sentences.

Finally, in my role as a senior civil servant trying to drive change and innovation, in addition to my day job I am the well-being champion for HMPPS. Making sure that we have appropriate support in place for our front-line staff in both prisons and probation to look after their well-being is another really big focus for me.

Lord Sandhurst: Earlier, I asked you about following up in your own organisation. If somebody finishes their sentence with you and reoffends in the same area, you will hear about that. If they move from London to Birmingham, to take a reasonably stark example, and offend there, is that something you will hear about?

Chris Jennings: Yes. The system is joined up enough.

Lord Sandhurst: It is joined up. Do you see? That is what we do not know.

Chris Jennings: I would not like to say that, on occasion, someone might not fall between the gaps because they have changed their name. Sometimes it is hard to track offenders, but in general terms we would know and would be able to access all the relevant information pertaining to that individual.

Kim Thornden-Edwards: We have a national IT system.

Lord Sandhurst: Is name change becoming an issue nowadays? One seems to read about it.

Chris Jennings: It can be an issue. Again, I can provide more information later to avoid the risk of not remembering it correctly now. For serious offenders, certainly there are rules about them having to notify us and the police of name changes. I am not sure whether that applies to everybody, but we can provide more information.

Lord Sandhurst: They may be under an obligation to do so, but if they do not—

Chris Jennings: They are committing a criminal offence.

Lord Sandhurst: They may be, but that creates problems, does it not?

Chris Jennings: Yes, it can.

Lord Sandhurst: With the DBS and everything else.

Chris Jennings: It can create problems, for sure.

The Chair: Is there anything further that you would like to throw into the mix?

Kim Thornden-Edwards: There is one thing that I would like to throw into the mix that I think is significant. Just under three-quarters of our people on probation successfully complete their community sentence. That is a really positive statistic, because we are working with some very challenging and challenged individuals. We have referenced the substance misuse issues, the mental health issues and the general chaos that some of our people live in. To manage to complete successfully at 75% is a significant achievement.

I feel very pleased about that statistic. It does not mean that we are not trying to get up to 80%, 85% and onwards, but it is a mark of the success of the services that we deliver. There is always more that we can do, but we take some comfort from the fact that we have decent successful completion rates.

The Chair: Thank you. Chris?

Chris Jennings: There is nothing further from me, Chair. Thank you.

The Chair: That is an upbeat note on which to end. Thank you both very much.