Introduction

Improving the quality and effectiveness of one-to-one work with offenders in order to reduce reoffending has become a stated aim of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). A strategy to achieve this, as the Probation Circular 10/2006 (NPS, 2006) states, is through offender engagement via effective consultation and involvement of offenders in developing services: ‘Involving offenders and ex-offenders in shaping the services which affect them is likely to lead to greater responsiveness to offenders’ needs and learning styles. This is an important factor in improving retention and completion rates.’

For many Probation Trusts, this was their first awareness that they were not consulting with offenders as ‘customers’ of the services being offered (see eg Sawbridge, 2010), but it was also the first indication that they should even be doing so. Up until this point, the orientation of statutory services under New Labour was to work from a victim-centred philosophy with the Probation Service having been reconceptualised as an enforcement agency. As Pycroft (2006, p 36) stated, the idea of the offender as a service user was a ‘totally alien concept’. ‘Service user’ was a term reserved for the victim and other key statutory and community agency stakeholders working with Probation. Those convicted of a criminal offence were to be referred to as the ‘offender’, a deliberate terminology replacing other less stigmatising labels when Probation was uncoupled from social work practice in 1998. The new lexicon of statutory agency language went hand in hand with the introduction of the ‘what works’ paradigm as the theoretical building block of choice for statutory interventions; a positivist approach that emphasised individual responsibility and distanced itself from social welfare explanations of crime, such as social exclusion.

Although rather slow to ‘get off the ground’, the notion of incorporating a service user perspective appeared to gain credence at about the same speed as the what works interventions increasingly seemed unlikely to fulfil their early promise. Desistance explanations for offending behaviour, which had fallen out of favour with the rise of the what works paradigm, also began to re-emerge in the literature (see eg McNeill, 2006; McNeill and Maruna, 2008; Robinson and McNeill, 2008; Brayford et al, 2010; McNeill and Weaver, 2010).