GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

So why is offender manager consistency so important? Research tells us that

the most important factor in someone turning away from offending is a positive

working relationship with a worker who believes in them and who they can

trust. Research also tells us that the most difficult time and the point at which

most fail is the point that they are released from prison into the community.

The OMiC model gives someone a minimum of two offender managers (and it

could be more if that person moves from one prison to another), one person

working in the prison transferring over to another offender manager working in

the community just before you are released from custody. This means that

there is a break in the crucial worker relationship just at the point someone is

preparing to leave prison. When you work with those who are hardest to

engage, this is disastrous. At the moment the model that we use has an

offender manager based in the community who holds what we call the golden

thread of the sentence, providing consistency and a plan and hope for

someone’s future right the way through.

OMiC is seeking to alleviate the significant workload issues faced by probation

staff by moving around 30% of the offender management work done in prisons

from probation staff to prison staff. I am sure our brothers and sisters from the

POA will agree that their members simply do not have any spare capacity to fill

the gaps in probation caused by Failing Grayling’s reforms five years ago which

resulted in an exodus of staff from probation and a training gap when no new

probation officers qualified for a couple of years. We see our brothers and

sisters in the POA struggling every day with their own staffing issues caused by

the quite wonderful decision to get rid of trained, skilled and experienced prison

staff only to have to re-employ them short months after. Yet again we see this

as the wrong solution to a real problem of lack of probation resources. NAPO

have campaigned to reduce workloads and properly resource probation for

many years. At a time when all efforts are being diverted to fix the mess left

by privatisation, there is little time and space left for addressing the other

issues we face. Let us be clear. The solution to the problem of lack of offender

manager input during the prison part of the sentence is to give more resource

to probation and allow staff a proper chance to deliver what we describe as end

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