GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

privatise a significant proportion by selling off contract package areas to, quite

frankly, anybody who fancied having a go, because, let’s face it, anybody can

do it, can’t they? What resulted was a large proportion of the service was

actually taken on by companies such as Sodexo and Interserve, because they

know a lot about offending behaviour. We fought these changes. We even

went to court and we took it as far as we could, but to no avail. Has it improved

the service, because we are three years on now? What do you think? Does it

ever? As soon as you make anything about money, you are not going to get a

better level of service, are you?

Three years on the system is at breaking point and in terms of progress in

getting political attention on the horrendous Transforming Rehabilitation

landscape, this election has come at a really bad time for us and I am guessing

for everybody else in the room too. Meetings with ministers and the Justice

Select Committee and an interest about what has gone on and is still going on

in the probation world from media contacts, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan,

who was a former Shadow Secretary of State for Justice when these reforms

were pushed through, Police and Crime Commissioners has meant that Chris

Grayling apart (we can never erase that name from our minds, I am afraid) you

would be hard pressed to find anybody that thinks this was a good idea and

this includes staff, even the service users. The people we supervise, even they

do not like it, so it cannot be good, can it? Victims, other agencies and, of

course, the public.

Our motion talks about SFOs or serious further offences and I thought it was

briefly worth mentioning to you what is a serious further offence. A serious

further offence is an offence committed by somebody who is already on licence

or probation supervision, but it has got to fall into a certain category. That

category is covered by something called MAPPA, which is Multi-Agency Public

Protection Arrangements, so we have got offences such as sexual offending,

arson, extreme violence, things like that. It is not a bit of shoplifting or

something like that, it is serious stuff, and we have actually seen a real rise in

serious further offences and particularly from the people who are in these

contract package areas who are the low risk offenders. There is lots of that

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