The government's disastrous privatisation of probation played with lives
Analysis: The government is having to clean up its own mistakes after ignoring warnings about the Transforming Rehabilitation scheme, writes Lizzie Dearden
It is hard to think of a government programme more disastrous than Transforming Rehabilitation – a botched privatisation scheme that has seen criminals commit rape and murder while supposedly under supervision.
A damning report released today said “skyrocketing” numbers of offenders were being sent back to prison for violating licence conditions.
The privatised companies charged with supervising them from 2014 onwards were meant to save the government millions, but it is now expected to pay an extra £467m of taxpayers’ money to repair the damage.
The National Audit Office (NAO) said the Ministry of Justice had “set itself up to fail” by rushing through the reforms, with its then head – the ever-competent Chris Grayling – having ignored warnings over the consequences.
It found that the drastic overhaul was not properly tested, creating a dangerous experiment that played not just with public money, but with people’s lives.
The government argues that public safety has actually improved because new rules mean more people are being monitored after being released from prison than before.
But that will be little comfort to the relatives of those killed by 225 convicted criminals charged with committing murder while supposedly under supervision by Community Rehabilitation Companies.
Once again, the trail leads back to austerity and the government’s attempts to contract itself out of responsibility for the criminal justice system.
Securing parliamentary backing for increased public funding for rehabilitation is a hard task for any government.
Aside from the inevitable screaming headlines about “perks” for criminals and “soft-touch” justice, many people simply do not see offenders as their problem. But as the NAO findings confirm, they are everyone’s problem.
However hard to stomach it may be to pay millions on improving prison conditions, providing better work and education opportunities, or helping inmates obtain housing and benefits on release, the consequences of not doing so are worse.
Offenders who are not rehabilitated reoffend. Criminals who see no alternative to crime carry on committing it. People rejected by society harm it.
Justice secretary David Gauke has deviated from his predecessors by expressing these truths, and moved to scrap probation contracts early and rewrite their terms.
But for many campaigners who have watched the service disintegrate for years, the proposals are merely a sticking plaster on a gaping wound.