Rehabilitating Probation IfG Event
The Rehabilitating Probation Research Project partnered with the Institute for Government to explore 'What Lessons can government learn from the insourcing of probation services?'. The expert panel assembled to discuss the insights to be generated from the creation - and impact - of the Probation Service in 2021 comprised of Harry Annison from the team; Martin Jones CBE, the Chief Inspector of Probation; Helen Berresford, Director of External Engagement at Nacro; and Sam Freedman, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government. You can watch a recording of the session here.
The panel discussion explored a series of themes to help understand how processes of outsourcing and then, more recently, insourcing has impacted on the character of the organisation of probation services and the capacity of the service to meet the demands being placed upon it. The importance of organisational stability in building practitioner confidence and in enhancing the ability of probation staff to sustain meaningful relationships with those they manage was a constant thread that ran through the session, and the capacity to draw on research from the project to add more context helped enrich the commentary. Important too was the need to place the work of the probation service within the context of a connected network of partners working within a shared organisational field to address the underpinning issues that those most frequently (re)entering the criminal justice system present with. The panel explored the important role that strengthening local level leadership of probation services – through seeking to eradicate excessive bureaucracy; facilitating the (co)commissioning of services; and greater immersion in more narrowly constructed partnership arrangements – would help probation services deliver more impactful interventions and develop an even greater level of understanding of offending behaviour.
The panel were unanimous, in ways that are consistent with the findings generated through the Rehabilitating Probation Project in our interviews with policy-makers, leaders, and practitioners in probation, in recognising just how traumatic the recent period for the service has been and of how significantly the challenges of recruiting and retaining staff continue to be in efforts to stabilise the service. All too could see how the need to push for national-level change programmes should avoid casting all operational practices as necessarily good or bad, and that time needs to be taken to explore practice working, listen to practitioners and partners, and draw out lessons from efforts to innovate service delivery. There are, as the panel identified, important lessons about how to manage processes of insourcing that other sectors can learn from probation and a decade of structural reform within the sector. But, as the discussion captured, there are as many lessons to draw from the deep and legacy impacts of the partial outsourcing of probation services under the Transforming Rehabilitation Reform programme in 2014 for those within and beyond probation services.
