Justice Committee publishes Government Response to its report on Transforming Rehabilitation: Follow-up

In July this year, the Committee published a follow up to its major report last year, voicing its ongoing deep concern about the failure of Transforming Rehabilitation reforms. The Committee welcomed the planned move to a new delivery model for probation - though it was well overdue - and made recommendations to enable the new system to deliver better outcomes for offenders, victims, professionals and the public.

Commenting on the Government’s response to the Committee’s report, published today, Chair of the Committee Bob Neill MP said: 

“Years of underfunding and the botched Transforming Rehabilitation reforms have left the probation system in a mess. The Government recognises the risk in moving to yet another delivery model, yet this response provides precious little information on how this risk will be managed. 

This response says almost nothing about how the probation service is expected to cope, through this transition, with the extra demand and pressure that will inevitably flow from recent announcements about tougher sentences and more police officers. We are just told that the Government is “considering the potential impact of changes to sentencing practice on probation services”.

It is particularly disappointing that the Government has not provided proposals on the intensive rehabilitative approaches which should be put in place as an alternative to ineffective short custodial sentences. We want to see these as soon as possible.

It gives us no confidence to discover that the Government has quietly disbanded its trumpeted Cabinet Office-chaired Reducing Reoffending Board. This was meant to support cross government work to tackle some of the main causes of reoffending, but the Government has not been able to tell us a single outcome the Board has achieved. 

We found that there was a national shortage of probation professionals. We are glad to see that the MOJ has finally agreed to develop a comprehensive workforce strategy for probation, something which we recommended in June 2018. We look forward to scrutinising this urgently.”