Developments since June 2014 – reflecting on institutional change as it happens

It is difficult to monitor institutional change as it happens. While the Coalition government set out its broad plans for ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ (TR) early in 2013, details on the process of implementation, the problems encountered and contingency plans were difficult to locate. The public debate on the privatisation of probation was relatively muted, although it was covered systematically in the mainstream media. A sample search of The Guardian and Observer for stories discussing ‘probation privatisation’ between 2010 and 2015 revealed 66 items, with most items run in 2013 (26) and 2014 (20). Similarly, The Independent ran 34 items between 2010 and 2015. A search on the BBC website revealed coverage of the most significant events following the national probation strikes and the milestones of the TR process, with 48 items run between 2010 and 2015: 27 in 2013 and 18 in 2014. Late in 2014, a number of media programmes picked up on the ‘probation crisis’ in Radio BBC5Live Investigates (BBC5Live, 2014), and in January 2015, the House of Commons debated the situation in the Probation Service, with particular reference to the speed of implementation of the significant structural changes (Hansard, 2015).

Opponents of TR actively used social media to discuss the impact of the changes on the service and to voice their concerns. The Facebook account ‘Keep Probation Public, not Private’ was started in January 2013 and had 3,272 followers as of 11 February 2015. ‘Jim Brown’s’ popular ‘On Probation Blog’, set up in 2010, meticulously documented the implementation of TR, under the title of ‘Omnishambles’, and included comments by a number of probation staff. In total, ‘Jim Brown’ wrote 83 Omnishambles blogs and made 484 blog entries in 2014 alone.

These comments provided an impression of probation in chaos after the splitting of the service on 1 June 2014, with: inadequate information technology (IT) systems; communication problems between the National Probation Service (NPS) and the Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs), as well as between different NPS offices; staffing problems in the CRCs; a decline in working conditions; and an ‘exodus’ of experienced staff. Of course, ‘evidence’ from social media needs to be regarded with considerable caution. Nevertheless, it provides some insight into the world of the NPS and CRCs that would otherwise remain largely hidden.