A continental reflection on payment by result

I must confess I am extremely puzzled by the current probation privatisation programme.

I sense that there is a lot of ideology behind all this: the public sector seems to be deemed a priori as being:

–          Unable to innovate;

–          Unable to be efficient;

–          Not cost effective;

–          Not supervising offenders with a less than 12 months sentence.

We know that England and Wales’ probation services are considered in the rest of the world as being leaders on the first three accounts. On the fourth, I may be wrong but I seem to remember that the culprits are legislators themselves who decided these offenders should not be supervised in the first place.

From the continent, it all therefore seems like a rather irrational move.

And yet… some of the arguments raised by probation privatisation proponents are worth listening to (I am not saying the solution they are giving to them are the right ones):

–          Innovation is important;

–          Being close to what goes on locally is important;

–          Involving communities is essential;

–          Launching and enforcing policies and programmes with a top/down approach is probably a very bad idea.

If payment by result/privatisation was launched in France (and again not saying that this would be the correct approach to its own specific problems) this whole series of arguments would definitely be valid:

–          State probation is not innovative at all and its inclusion in the prison services makes things worse. Any innovation comes from the top and goes right down to the bottom. Local initiative does exist but is very strongly constrained and limited;

–          Local needs are thus only a small part of the parcel and do not count for much (in fact in this Napoleonic system centralism is often deemed highly desirable and local differences and initiatives are viewed suspiciously);

–          Communities do take part in CJ and probation (via ‘associations’, i.e. the third sector) but are treated as employees or subcontractors, far too often doing what they are told without enough leeway and too rarely as equal partners. Again this does not facilitate innovation – even though there are fascinating programmes going on – and is probably very bad in terms of taxpayers’ money since real collaboration is rare;

–          Incidentally we have no idea whether the public sector is efficient, nor whether the third sector fares better, worse or whether it depends (it probably does depend on a lot of factors). Nobody seems to care about costs.

A good start to try and sort one’s ideas out is to

– listen to the following VIDEOS (on the Probation Association website)

– go to the wonderful website by Russell WEBSTER

– and Fergus McNeill’s thoughtsFergus McNeill’s on TR, evidence values and ideology

I personally could not care less whether the public, the third or the private sector does the job so long as the job is done, is done well, is evidence-based, cost-efficient, innovative and collaborative – I would also add holistic, relation-based and problem-solving. I am tempted to believe that a collaboration of all sectors, partners and agencies would be the most effective – non ideological – way of doing things.