Note: assault and self harm rates show % change on 2013 base, on rt hand scale.

Richard Burgon,  Shadow Justice Minister, had a field day with his debate on prisons and probation on 14 May, here.  His advocacy of a return to monopoly services had both wind and tide with it, what with the disaster of botched probation privatisation plain for all to see, and a timely bit of analysis showing the levels of violence are higher in private than in public prisons.

But what really made his day was that David Gauke had nothing to say in defence of the private sector, other than bland platitudes about innovation and some favourable inspection reports. Granted it was difficult to use the argument that, thanks to Grayling's cuts, the public sector is as fucked up as the private sector (the public sector 'flagship' of Berwyn springs to mind).  Difficult, too, to run the argument that the private sector is ony more violent because (even) more overcrowded.

But it is astonishing that he made no use of the Cambridge  research that has shown the private sector stronger on 'respect' though weaker on 'control' (shorthand for a much more nuanced report), or improving dramatically at Birmingham in the first years after G4S took over; and that he failed also to point out what a scandal the public sector  was when last a monopoly. It is also beyond belief that the civil servants appeared not to have noticed previously that private prisons have a higher level of violence, or to have any response to those figures, which they themselves had just put together.

As I pointed out in my book, one of the most astonishing, and unpardonable, things about privatisation has been Governments (Labour and Tory) complete lack of interest either in evaluating the results, or making the case publicly. The privatisers seem to think it unnecessary to make their case, even though polls showed as far back as 2011 that the public did not support privately run prisons. They now reap the reward.

There is a kind of institutional studidity in Government nowadays, on this and many other matters. The MoJ sees to have dispensed with its research unit altogether. That made Gauke's attempt to contrast the Governments' supposedly evidence based approach with Labour's ideological bent doubly painful - because on this occasion, Labour had the evidence, the Government had none. It is not Labour that will kill off outsourcing, one of the biggest policy experiments in UK history: it has already been killed off by the ignorance and incompetence of Tory Ministers.

Not that Labour emerge with any credit. Burgon, like Khan before him, has never shown any real interest in justice, beyond a weapon to beat Government with on cuts and privatisation. In particular, Labour have been way behind all other parties in committing to sentencing reform. Everything Labour has to say about the importance of rehabilitation has been said dozens of times before, by every single Minister right back to Michael Howard.  Labour, too, are bereft of any real ideas (1), other than restoring the monopoly power of their union friends, the Prison Officers' Association .  And there is very good evidence as to where that leads.

(1) Has there been any significant new idea in the past quarter century - since Labour introduced 'what works' evidence-based interventions in 1997 (but sadly not evidence-based sentencing, on which Government continues down the decades to do what it knows does not work).

Grayling with mouth wide open, foot sure to follow.

Gauke's announcement today of renationalisation of the probation service was the right decision and will be welcomed by everyone (except 'Reform', the PR people for outsourcers, I notice). Indeed, it was inevitable, the Balkanised structure Grayling set up had to be replaced by a unifed service, and that could only be publicy run.

Many questions remain about the new structure, not least cost.

Much has been made of the figure put out by the National Audit Office of £500m, but that was the cost in excess of what the Grayling reforms should have cost Similarly the Public Accounts Committee). But the Grayling structure could never have worked, that is now clear.

The important figure is the cost of the new  nationalised service compared to what it would have cost,  had Grayling been strangled at birth, and the old public system continued. That, together with set up and transitional costs (which may run into many tens of millions),  would give us the true 'cost of Grayling'. We won't know that figure for some time, not least because MoJ is now consulting on the new structure. The calculation is complex, for example Grayling extended probation supervision to short term prisoners, so extra workload, but then total court ordered supervision of offenders has fallen - and Gauke wants to do away with short terms sentences altogether.

What is certain is that the new arrangements will cost a shedload of money more than MoJ has available, since their spending plans were based on Grayling's reforms working, and part of that was to get cost out of the old public sector structure. The discussions with HMT must have been interesting, as MoJ was struggling with a £1bn overspend even before this volte face.

If one adds to this the cost of Grayling's bizarre contracts for ferry services with companies who don't in point of fact run ferries, which were then cancelled at huge expense, the successful claim by Eurotunnel, the forthcoming claim by rival ferry companies, the legal actions by Arriva and Stagecoach relating to Grayling's handling of rail franchise contratcs,  to name only the ones we know about, Grayling seems to be one of the most expensive idiots in politics (a closely fought field). It looks like the all up costs of Grayling to the British state could be as much as £500,000 for each  day in office.

(I refer only to financial costs. There are then the human costs - staff made redundant, staff public and private sector alike over-worked, offenders not properly supervised, left homeless, self harming and being assaulted in prisons as a result of those cuts....)

What this saga reveals is that the system of accountability on which Parliament relies isn't fit for purpose. Because if you keep moving quickly enough from one Department to another, it's your hapless successors who have to clear up the mess you dumped on them, and answer for it.

The Public Accounts Committee should innovate - they are always demanding that the public setcor innovate, now's their chance to do so. Hold an inquiry into the consequences for public spending of Christopher Stephen Grayling.

 In 2013 the Government announced that it had just discovered that G4S and SERCO has been billing excessively for their contracts for electronic monitoring of offenders.  The companies were made to pay back some £200m.  It has been established that amongst other things, the companies were billing for work they had not done.

The Government referrred them to the Serious Fraud Office. 6 years later, the SFO are still mulling over the case.  Granted, it is one of the most complex in the entire history of the SFO, featuring as it does no fewer than one victim, no fewer than 2 companies, no fewer than 2 contracts and no fewer than one jurisdiction.   Obviously, that must takes many years to unpick!

Meanwhile, here is an interesting graph. It is interesting because as a general rule, if volumes of work done under contract rise, in this case getting towards doubling, the unit cost - the cost per item - can be expected to fall. This is because fixed costs are spread over more items. This is a basic  rule of intelligent contracting.

But in this case, the unit cost actually increased as volumes increased. That would be bizarre whether or not the companies billed for work not done.  And suggests that there was something very wrong indeed with the contracts themselves.

Source: National Audit Office, 'The Ministry of Justice's electronic monitoring contracts', 2013

 In fact, the fall in assaults is much the same for the target prisons as for all prisons – and for self-harm, all prisons did better than the target prisons. So it seems that what did the job was not Rory Stewart’s personal focus on the 10 prisons, but the result of management action across the whole estate. Now, who was running prisons during that time….name slips my mind. Whoever it was, he did a good job. 

(Although another explanation – one too seldom considered, nowadays, when every tiny change is considered the fault of achievement of those in power – is just that all trends come to an end. It may be that drug consumption for example has reached its natural limits because prisoners simply couldn’t take any more drugs. Or because of the same arcane changes in society that created the problem in the first place.)

The second thing follows from the first. Experienced staff, and £10m, were diverted from other prisons to the 10 targets prisons, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Yet the rest of the prison service, deprived of those resources, actually did slightly better than the prisons to which resources were diverted. Raising the question of whether that diversion was more than a political ploy.

The third thing follows from the second. What, then, can have changed in late 2018 that might account for falling assault and self-harm, across the whole estate? Well, just possibly the same thing which, in the opinion of everyone except Ministers, created the problem in the first place - staffing levels. In 2018, staff numbers picked up again, as the Grayling cuts were partially reversed. In other words, maybe this isn’t so much the triumph of Rory Stewart, as further evidence that the appalling collapse of safety and decency in prisons since 2011 is the work of Tory Ministers.

The fourth thing follows from the third. It is, simply, this horrendous graph.

We're all aware of funding pressure on public services - prisons, probation, courts, legal aid, NHS, social care, schools, universities, roads, defence, you name it - none of them now able to offer acceptable services. The bill to restore something like what we used to think acceptable, maybe £100bn a year? Here, to make you really depressed, is the long term picture: the trend line shows the very slow but seemingly unstoppable decline of the rate of growth in the UK economy over 60 years. And that's before taking account of the post Brexit slow down, the ageing population, climate change....No, I dont know what to do about it either, except to say, the future has to be different. We don't know yet how different. 

The refusal to see this is one of the reasons I am not a enthusast for  Corbynism. The great Aneurin Bevan famously declared that "the language of priorities is the religion of socialism" (though the great Peter Simple pointed out that you can change the order of the nouns any way you like and it still sounds profound). Corbyn and Co, with their assumption that everything can be afforded if we just chuck out the Tories and switch the printing preses to over-drive, clearly do not know that language.

Earlier this month one of the most damning National Audit Office reports I have ever seen detailed the disastrous damage done to a previously reasonably well performing public probation service by a privatisation botched from the start, every which way, predicted by everyone to fail, and which has now utterly failed, with contracts ended early, wasting stupendous amounts of public money. But there is still more to this scandal:

1. In spite of MoJ re-jigging the contracts part way through to make it easier for probation companies to ‘achieve’ targets for reducing numbers reoffending, most still failed to do so, while the numbers of new offences per offender actually rose
2. MoJ nevertheless claims that CRCs ‘achieved’ a 2.5% fall in numbers reoffending. But did you know that MoJ fixed it so that you cannot compare this ‘success’ of CRCs with what the public sector NPS achieved - with much more difficult offenders? Very likely, given that inspections consistently show much higher compliances by NPS than by CRCs, the NPS has done much better. But MoJ have concealed this information from us.
3. In any case all this stuff about ‘achieving’ reductions in reoffending is a nonsense – rates for those receiving a disposal which does not involve the probation or prison services at all have fallen by much more – 2008-2016, caution down 18.7% to 14.9%, discharge from 36.5% to 29.6%, fine 31.7% to 25.7%. For that matter, rates for prisoners serving 4-10 years fell from 26% to 19.8 % over the same period - just as our prisons moved from stability into violent chaos. The idea that correctional services’ performance is reflected in such figures simply defies the real-world evidence. It is an ideologically-driven fantasy.
4. The probation changes were driven by the wish to extend post release supervision to those serving under 12 months, so as to cut high reoffending rates. But MoJ now says there is no point in sentences of 6 months or less – because of high reconviction rates! MoJ have thus themselves destroyed the policy  basis of their own privatisation.
5. Nevertheless, MoJ persist with this model of privatisation, despite the express comment of the NAO that this model is ill-conceived and cannot work.
6. The official who presided over probation policy, Justin Russell, is set to become Chief Inspector of Probation. In the new role, he will be expected to comment on the disastrous results of policy for which he had responsibility. This bizarre appointment makes a nonsense of a so-called independent inspectorate. Why not make the chief executive of G4S the next Chief Inspector of Prison?

Further evidence that the MOJ is simply unfit for purpose.