A House of Lords peer has called for reforms to the rehabilitation program for offenders.
Lord Navnit Dholakia has spoken of the "disastrous" shortcomings of the offender management strategy for the rehabilitation of offenders and called for optimum usage of resources from both large and small organisations. Whilst he acknowledged the aims of the changes introduced to the offender act in 2014-15, Lord Dholakia said,
"The arrangements squeezed out most voluntary sector agencies as the tendering process, favoured large private sector companies that can take significant financial risks. There was a heavy emphasis on paying organisations according to the volume of work which they received.
“This process meant organisations had to incur expenditure without knowing whether they would receive enough work to reimburse them properly. This ruled out most voluntary organisations who could not take the financial risk of becoming involved in these arrangements".
Voluntary institutes have expertise in areas such as housing, employment, training, mentoring, addiction and mental health that are key to rehabilitating offenders and reducing reoffending. He further highlighted that larger voluntary organisations such as Nacro, help provide "outstanding services and have strong local links".
Citing the House of Commons Justice Committee, he stated,
"There is now less voluntary sector involvement in the provision of probation services than before the transforming rehabilitation arrangements began".
He further discussed a system which has split offender management between the National Probation Service for high-risk offenders and community rehabilitation companies for medium and low-risk offenders. Describing the split as "artificial", he said,
"Many offenders who start out as low-level petty offenders move on, over time, to become high-risk offenders".
Lord Dholakia noted that whilst the National Probation Service has "largely done a good job", the same is not true of the community rehabilitation companies". Depicting a grim picture with inadequate performance, staff shortages, and "frequent transfers of offenders from one officer to another in the course of their supervision", Lord Dholakia concluded that,
"There has been a sharp fall in the number of offenders taking part in accredited offending behaviour programmes. The importance of this issue cannot be overstated as it is something that has been shown to reduce reoffending—by 56% between 2009 and 2017".
