Response to Professor Dan Finn: The ‘Rehabilitation Revolution’ and Payment by results

1. Response to Professor Dan Finn: The ‘Rehabilitation Revolution’ and Payment by results Dennis Gough Director of Community Justice Institute of Criminal Justice Studies University of Portsmouth

2. Penality and welfare • “Why have researchers of criminal justice on the one hand and welfare policy on the other, paid no attention to each other’s work.” (Wacquant, 2013, in Squires and Lea (ed) Criminality and Advanced Marginality, p.250) • “From now on, diversity is the default in our public services. What does that mean? It means that instead of having to justify why it makes sense to introduce competition, as we are now doing with schools and in the NHS, the state will have to justify why it makes sense to run a monopoly.” David Cameron, Prime Minister (2011)

3. Transforming rehabilitation • Statutory rehabilitation extended to all 50,000 of the most prolific group – offenders sentenced to less than 12 months in custody; • a fundamental change to the way we organise the prison estate, in order to put in place an unprecedented nationwide ‘through the prison gate’ resettlement service, meaning most offenders are given continuous support by one provider from custody into the community; • PAID FOR BY; • opening up the market to a diverse range of new rehabilitation providers, so that we get the best out of the public, voluntary and private sectors, at the local as well as national level; • new payment incentives for market providers to focus relentlessly on reforming offenders, giving providers flexibility to do what works and freedom from bureaucracy, but only paying them in full for real reductions in reoffending;

4. The future market in rehabilitation • The MoJ intends to compete 21 contracts for the provision of services for low- to medium-risk offenders across England and Wales. • The total value of the contracts to be let is likely to be between £5bn and £20bn over the next ten years • CRCs will be paid for managing the cases allocated to them, and a proportion of their payment will be at risk and dependent on their performance in reducing reoffending. • Where requirements have been placed on CRCs under contract in relation to the delivery of services, these will be monitored through NOMS account management; this will include penalties for services not delivered to time or to quality.

6. Innovation • CRCs will be responsible for delivering the sentence of the court for each offender allocated to them to manage, and in doing so seek to rehabilitate offenders and reduce reoffending. The system will give CRCs the combination of “grip” or control over offenders and flexibility to deliver appropriate rehabilitative services. CRC owners and CRCs will have the freedom to design the services which they believe will be most effective in reducing reoffending. They will be able to compel offenders to engage in activity which falls within the sentence of the court, and some types of sentence will give them considerable scope to require offenders to engage in rehabilitative activity. They could also choose to offer additional rehabilitative support to offenders on a voluntary basis, in pursuance of a reduction of reoffending and a payment under payment by results. • “CRCs will have maximum flexibility to determine how the “rehabilitation activity requirement” will be delivered. NOMS will not specify what providers must do towards rehabilitation, save for ensuring that the service meets basic minimum standards, including the need to be legal, safe and decent

7. Governance and inspection • Broadening the remit of HMIP • There will continue to be an independent Inspectorate of Probation with the same statutory remit as now. The Inspectorate will inspect the system as a whole, covering both the NPS and CRCs, though minimising bureaucratic burdens, and to liaise with HMI Prisons in relation to pre-release provision. • Light touch regulation about ‘black box’ rehabilitation interventions (including risk assessment), staff competence and abilities,

8. PAYMENT MECHANISM SUMMARY – KEY DESIGN FEATURES • Fee For Service • Annual price paid in twelve equal payments made monthly in arrears • Providers will bid against a predicted baseline volume range, weighted for sentence type & length • At the end of each contract year, the payment is reconciled to the actual volumes recorded, with a retrospective payment or clawback applied if actual volume is shown to have been outside the predicted range • Deductions made for failure to deliver the orders of the court to specified time and quality

9. Payment by results • Therefore there will be two measures for re-offending used to calculate the PbR payment. These include: • 1. Binary metric = measures the percentage of offenders that are convicted of an offence within a 12 month period. • 2. Frequency metric = measures the rate of offences committed by offenders within a cohort within a 12 month period.

10. PbR Issues • 1) It is difficult to measure re-offending outcomes in binary terms making it difficult to specify what ‘quality’ consists of and how performance should be monitored. • 2) Re-offending outcomes cannot be controlled by one provider alone, but depend on the performance of a range of other services such as health (for drug and alcohol treatment) and local authorities (for stable housing). This makes it especially difficult to attribute outcomes and therefore measure the value add of different providers, which increases the risk that contracted providers will be paid too much (and potentially for outcomes generated by other services) or, alternatively, too little (due to the poor quality of related services) ie everyone or no one gets paid! • 3) Where multiple providers contribute to achieving an outcome, it is also generally harder to ensure that their activities are effectively co-ordinated across organisational silos, particularly if these organisations have different ownership (i.e. public and private sector) or misaligned incentives. • 4) In built ‘gaming of system’ as offenders deemed to be ‘high risk’ can be passed on to the state by the CRCs. Could mean that those who have multiple criminogenic needs, or are non-compliant are moved to state who will purchase interventions from CRCs and be accountable.

11. Key questions for the future • In what way will private and voluntary ‘entrepreneurs of punishment’ (Feeley,M (2002) change the nature and extent of punishment in the community? • Will the specific nature and characteristics of the ‘voluntary sector’ remain or be reconfigured in the image of the state or of business? • Will payment by results lead to innovation, efficiencies and improved local outcomes or fragmented, one size fits all approaches and economies of scale?

12. See Gough, D in See Gough, D in http://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/publications/critical-reflections-social-and-criminal-justice-first-year-coalition-government