The Probation Chiefs Association and Probation Association last week published their response to Justice Minister Chris Grayling’s consultation paper, Transforming Rehabilitation.

The report welcomes areas of proposed reform – particularly the desire to provide services for those sentenced to less than 12 months, and the proposal for a professional body or institute. In other areas, however, there are concerns.

The report’s view of the consultation paper is that it proposes restructuring probation along the following lines:

There would be a “very slimmed down public probation service which would deal with risk assessment, court advice, advice to the Parole Board, allocation of community sentences, sentence enforcement and supervision and management of high risk of harm offenders”.

There would also be up to 16 Payment by Results (PbR) contracts with private or third sector providers, and these would supervise and rehabilitate medium and low risk offenders, with a ‘significant’ PbR component, says the report.

After summarising Transforming Rehabilitation, the reply by probation chiefs highlights many areas of concern should these proposals be implemented.

The authors fear that splitting offender management up like this would increase the complexity of information exchange, damaging the continuity of offender supervision, and so increase the risk of public protection failures.

Also, the report says, the national commissioning remit of the proposal would likely dislocate probation from local partnerships that have delivered impressive results, such as Integrated Offender Management.

There are also fears that the PbR approach is not sufficiently tested. Experience in other parts of government points to the complexity and difficulty of achieving success with this model.

The report also adds that there are significant infrastructure issues to overcome, and that the pace of reform is too fast, if all this is to be implemented by 2015.

At Alliantist, we also think there needs to be a focus on the ecosystem as a whole, and a rethinking of traditional supply chain management, for the successful implementation of Transforming Rehabilitation.

We think there needs to be a more inclusive engagement beyond the traditional subcontractor and lead provider model – a more collaborative and social model of working needs to come about to get the best outcomes.

The selection of lead providers needs to include criteria to foster more complete behaviours and competences that will enhance the probation ecosystem as a whole. And the same ethos of selection needs to be created for the sub-contractors that lead providers will employ.

Potential lead providers also need to be assessed on how they intend to integrate into the existing local ecosystem to work with the PCC, and other statutory agencies, such as police, prisons, health and local authorities. Potential providers and subcontractors also need to incentivised/rewarded for a contribution to learning, articles, research and best practice.

Whatever model of probation is eventually implemented, new ways of working need to be at the heart of the ecosystem that will be created.

If a collaborative environment is created where the needs of localism are met, and all agencies are fully plugged in to the ecosystem with a commitment to collaboration (where possible) then there is a great opportunity to continue the great progress that has already been made.