Seeing off competition

The Probation Service, the sister service of HMPS, provides some interesting parallels. Remarkably, the service was barely exposed to competition for 20 years after the first privately run prison opened. In 2006, less than 3% of probation work was contracted out (HL Deb 21 May 2006, c443).

There were various reasons for this. Until 2007, government had no power to contract for probation services. Probation failures never attracted quite the same media interest, even though they threatened the public in a way prison failures did not – as with the murders of John Monkton and Naomi Bryant in 2005, and Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez in 2008. The probation officers’ union, Napo, though adept at protecting its members’ interests, did not exercise the malign influence of the POA. Probation spending was around a quarter of prison spending in 2002–03, and although resources rose – operational staff more than doubled over 1997–2006 (Oldfield and Grimshaw, 2010) – demand-led spending on probation never worried the Treasury in the way prison spending did. Commercially, it was not very attractive – more than half of probation areas were spending under £10 million a year in 2002–03 (HC Deb 27 June 2002, 1072 WA) – and with little scope for PFI. And the Probation Service was not exactly being left alone – being successively reshaped, first by the creation of the National Probation Service in 2001, the creation of NOMS in 2004, and transformation from probation areas into Trusts from 2007 on.

In 2006, government published a manifesto for competing probation – 10% of work to be contracted out within two years (Home Office, 2006b). In 2007, the Offender Management Act finally gave government power to compete probation work. But the Probation Service's monopoly was stoutly defended by the liberal establishment, and ministers were forced to back down. The only major competition was contracting out of unpaid work in London, to SERCO, in 2012.

Kenneth Clarke's proposals, 2012

That immunity was bound to crumble after 2010, with the fiscal crisis and the advent of a Conservative-led government committed to rolling back the State. Kenneth Clarke, back as Justice Secretary, published proposals, ‘Punishment and reform’, which envisaged Probation Trusts becoming commissioning agents, with a much greater role for private and third sector providers (MoJ, 2012a, 2012b).