GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

Community Rehabilitation Companies and the creation of the National

Probation Service.

Since then, a series of parliamentary reports and highly critical assessments

by HMI Probation have laid bare this most disastrous policy, which has failed in

a number of areas including: support for prisoners re-entering the community,

the monitoring of domestic violence perpetrators, and the introduction of

operating models and substandard supervision regimes which expert

practitioners have assessed as representing a direct threat to public safety.

Despite this catalogue of failure, and £250 million in further bailouts by the

taxpayer, the 21 CRC contracts are being terminated early. Nevertheless, the

Government has announced its intention to remarketise the service into 10 new

contract package areas by 2020 and will be inviting current CRC owners to

tender for new delivery contracts.

This BGCM instructs the Executive Committee to do all that it can to support

the campaign of total opposition to this plan by the probation unions, who are

also committed to seeing the return of the service into public ownership.

She said: Conference, brothers, sisters and guests, you might expect us to

have withdrawn this motion, because on Thursday the Government announced

that part of the work currently undertaken by private companies in probation will

be returned to the public sector, but, and I have written that in capitals and

underlined it twice, this is not the end of our struggle. We still have a long way

to go. Although there has been widespread recognition that Failing Grayling’s

outsourcing of the probation service was disastrous, the proposal announced

on Thursday was not NAPO’s desired outcome. It retains a split in provision

between the public and the private sector and all of the difficulties that this

presents. It also presents difficulties in terms of the access for charities, third

sector and other small and specialist providers into the probation system.

Our members working in probation are dedicated professionals who have

clung on, despite the challenges they have faced over the last five years and

let’s not forget what those challenges really are – being forced to deliver unsafe

operating models which gave them unacceptably high workloads and the

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