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.
0 Comments
Students of Civil service arcania will be familiar with the procedure for an Accounting Officer's request for ministerial directions. Briefly the Permanent Secretary who heads a Department has a personal, statutory responsibility to Parliament for use of public money, independent of that of ministers, requiring that he be satisfied that it meets the four tests of regularity, propriety, value for money, and feasibility. If ministers require civil servants to act in a way that does not meet those tests, the Accounting Office must write to the minister seeking a formal Direction to proceed, and his letter and the minister’s reply must be published, and the National Audit Office and Treasury must be notified. Responsibility for the decision then rests with the minister giving the direction.
Considering how daft, ill-considered, ineffective and wasteful so much Government spending is, the procedure is surprisingly seldom used – some stats collected by the Institute for Government are here . The National Audit Office has commented that officials lack confidence in challenging ministerial decisions, not least because it might damage their career projects. (Information from Martin Stanley’s excellent website www.civilservant.org.uk.) Such an exchange had just been published between Sir Richard Heaton, Permanent Secretary of the MoJ and David Gauke (here and here). Gauke wanted to pay the debts of subcontractors to Working Links, whose 3 Community Rehabilitation Companies went into administration, due to loss making contracts. Heaton noted that there was no legal obligation to make good losses by subs, and rightly questioned whether using public money in this way would pass the tests of propriety and value for money. After all, if the subs had a beef it was with Working Links as main contractor. Heaton concluded that such payments would create a ‘moral hazard ‘ – i.e. a situation in which a company takes on a risky business, but knows it will in fact always be bailed out – of which there are innumerable examples in outsourcing including as indeed had previously happened the CRCs themselves. Gauke’s response is interesting. He said the subs had asked MoJ to stump up in view of “the unique circumstances of this first-generation probation outsourcing, the comfort given by my predecessors about how the Government would steward this market, their status as ‘Permitted Subcontractors’ in our contract structure, and the extent to which these organisations were delivering frontline statutory services on behalf of Government.” He added that a partly privatised service could be hard to maintain if subs bore their own losses. So he made the Direction, again quoting ‘unique circumstances’ that meant Government has a ‘moral duty of care’ to the subs. What was, then, ‘unique’ in these circumstances? After all, Government contracts all the time, passes risks to contractors all the time (that is a main purpose of outsourcing), contractors do the same to their subs all the time, those subs deliver ‘frontline statutory services on behalf of Government’ all the time, and contractors go belly up quite often. Moreover, there is no shortage of other contractors waiting to take over business. The idea that if contractors or their subs get into difficulties, Government has aa ‘moral duty of are’ always to cover their losses would of course make a total mockery of outsourcing, which would instantly become pointless and a huge waste of funds. Was the ‘unique’ consideration that created a 'moral duty' to meet subs' losses that the then Minister who implemented probation privatisation, Grayling, acted recklessly and by so doing, mislead the subs, or made perhaps understandings and promises which he should not have done (‘comfort given by my predecessors’)? Considering Grayling’s record of dubious spending decisions and dodgy contracts, those possibilities must be considered. We don’t know. The only body able to probe this is the National Audit Office. It should do so. Research by Katherine Auty and Alison Liebling, just published (behind paywall – how can that be right, with research done with public money? – but message me if interested) confirms that unsafe prisons don’t reduce reoffending. It takes measures for the quality of prison life (generated through anonymised surveys of prisoners’ and staff) developed years ago by Alison, and relates them to variations in reconvictions rates for those prisons, by excluding other variables. As a result, we can now say definitively, what common sense surely told us previously, that a safe, stable, decent prison is likely to reduce reoffending and a violent and chaotic one is not. It is the measures of safety and security that are most strongly associated with reduced reoffending, especially ‘prisoner adaption’ (the prisoners perceived need to trade or make alliances within the prison, presumably relating to drugs and so on): “for every one-unit increase in the prisons mean score for prisoner adaptation there would be a 10.67 decrease in rates of proven reoffending”. An astonishingly high figure, larger I recall than most offender programmes (of course, they are linked: if a prisoner feels safe, he/she will benefit more from such programmes). Other strong correlations were with measures of prisoner safety, policing and security, and drugs and exploitation. The message for MoJ is that if prisons remain violent, chaotic places full of drugs, as is the case in many now, you won’t reduce reoffending. Indeed, I wonder if one could use this work to estimate how many more hundreds of thousands of crimes have been caused Grayling’s cuts? If anyone can manage this in a statistically convincing way, I am happy to raise funds to put up posters around his constituency! Fig 1: an intelligent Grayling Impressive journalism by the FT has uncovered the scandal of Berwyn Prison, costing £220m (say, a thousand homes unbuilt) - but still half empty two years after opening, because of multiple cock ups. It has the dubious claim of being the first prison actually designed to be overcrowded, thus ignoring all the lessons of the Mubarek Inquiry (a teenager horribly murdered by a racist with whom he was forced to share a cell), just to undercut the private sector and so avoid open competition. It is more violent, yet more costly, than other such prisons.
Since the prison opened, 338 ambulances have been sent there, the police have been called 135 times and the fire service 27 times, the FT’s FOIs show. Use of force, supposedly a last resort, is running at an exceptionally high level. “The partner of the prisoner seeking a transfer said she thought some young staff had “got a bit of power and it’s gone to their heads” says the FT. The healthcare unit is a disaster. The health team’s report described a “lack of compliance with infection prevention and control standards……and unsuitable design of facilities ”, which made treating patients “unsafe” and “required a complete rebuild of some areas”. Further, the FT reports that prisoners have been taken off prescription anti-depressants, anti-psychotics and painkillers without their consent, which some inmates say has driven them to self-medicate with illegal drugs. An independent report lambasts the design of the prison generally, including no proper ventilation in the house blocks and problematic noise levels. The workshops are another disaster. “They were not ready when the prison opened, and lacked basics like electrical work, fixtures and fittings. “The lack of work spaces has probably been the greatest challenge for everyone who lives and works at Berwyn,” the then Governor wrote in his anniversary message to staff a year after the prison opened. “The procurement process has not yet gone as we would have hoped or planned [and], consequently, there are too many men left on the communities during the day.” Today, two full years after the prison opened, the workshop buildings are still not ready. “There were just so many delays, it was ridiculous,” said Mark Gilbert of recycling company Emerald Trading, one of the original subcontractors, who became fed up of waiting and pulled out. Imagine how the Guardian, Labour, unions would be frothing over this if G4S ran it! Obviously, they would say, the private sector is incompetent, wasteful, even wicked! But it’s public sector - so they keep quiet. If there is one thing I utterly despise, it is keeping quiet about wrong-doing because done by ‘your’ side. The National Audit Office and Justice Committee ought to look into this. 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:
The Government has published its ‘Outsourcing playbook’, an effort to stop cocking up major contracts. ‘Playbook’ – isn’t that so, well, ‘hip’? (‘Outsourcing’ here is used much more widely than I would, to apply to any service that Government contracts for, including those that have never been done in house, and which it is utterly inconceivable that they should ever be done in house, such as construction of prisons, tempting though it is to envisage mandarins laying brick upon brick, like Ivan Denisovich.) It’s all good stuff, based discussion with contractors (Rupert Soames of SERCO has been bravely saying this sort of thing for some years) and on learning from what has gone wrong with so many major contracts in recent years: electronic tagging (3 times), Carillion, probation, Birmingham prison (and that’s just the MoJ). The text is supplemented by voluminous ‘toolkits’ (sometimes mere ‘tools’), templates, scorecards, guidance notes, Green and indeed Orange Books, Codes of Conduct. The document sets 11 key principles, which I will translate into English:
It’s is basic common sense. Indeed, some of it is quite banal. We need measures of performance – are we really stating that, as a new insight, fully a third of a century after Thatcher’s Financial Management Initiative made that its central theme? Risk allocation, payment mechanism and pricing are to be ‘subject to greater consideration’? Verging on bathos. ‘We screwed up a lot, but in future we will give everything greater consideration’. So there! Still, if actually followed, it would have prevented many previous disasters. It’s useful to test the document against that walking, talking procurement disaster, Chris Grayling. Principle 6 would have forced him to pilot probation outsourcing (as we did indeed pilot prison outsourcing, in the early ‘90s). Principle 4 would have forced him to justify his belief that companies with no experience of running probation services, indeed that were only formed to bid for these contracts, could nevertheless be assumed to do much better than the public sector (the reverse has since been proved by repeated audit and inspection). Principle 11 would have required him to explain how services would be maintained if the contracts proved impossible and/or contractors went bust (as has indeed happened). Principle 2 would have stopped dead successive attempts to procure tagging services using a technology which did not then exist and using a delivery structure that was a nonsense in techincal and oepraional terms. Might also have stopped him to contract for ferry services with a company that has not got, and never has had, any ferries. And so on. Why, then, am I less than optimistic that the future of outsourcing is rosier in the light of this document? Mainly because we have been here before. This exact same spot. Instructions, guidance, bought in expertise, training, independent external checks at different stages, you name it. Take, for example, the Office of Government Commerce, established with much trumpeting in 2000, with its elaborate structures to ensure distinct roles and responsibilities for major projects, its detailed guidance notes, its hierarchy of independent expert Gateway Reviews. Or the Major Projects Authority, set up in 2011, to provide independent assurance at different stages of major projects. And yet the disasters have gone on. You see, it’s not that people didn’t know they were doing the wrong things, and not doing the right things. They did know. They just didn’t take necessary action. Examples from MoJ, where people knew what they should do, then didn’t do it:
The question Government ought to be asking is, why, when we keep doing the same things to ensure things are done right, do they keep going wrong? That’s tricky to answer. Part of the problem is how far you can idiot-proof projects when you have idiots like Grayling in charge. Arrogant, bullying ministers who think it weakness to listen to advice. (As we all know, bullies are fundamentally weak people: strong ministers, like Straw, listen courteously to advice because they didn’t feel their manhood threatened by conceding the possibility that they don’t know everything. And if they are wrong, they want to know that now, not later.) Who exactly is going to face down the sublime arrogance of a Grayling (and don’t suppose there isn’t a limitless supply of them on both sides of the House)? The centre of Government i.e. Cabinet Office and Treasury, simply isn’t strong enough, at official level, to say ‘no’ to such people? And at Ministerial level PM’s are more likely to listen to their loyal or at least essential political allies than to worried officials. Just look how May stands by Grayling now, even after the ferry contract fiasco, the railway fiasco, the probation fisaco... Another way into this is to ask is, what actually happens when projects go badly wrong? Well, usually the National Audit Office produce a report saying what went wrong (but never naming officials); the Public Accounts Committee have an enjoyable morning roasting the officials; a critical report is published: Government says ‘we are busy learning the lessons’; and those concerned sail on through their careers and into well paid retirement. And of course, if those responsible have moved jobs, or retired, when the auditors have finished their work years later, they aren’t even hauled before the Committee, they are never asked to explain themselves, as they have ‘moved on’. I am not a fan of management by scapegoating, having seen that practised close up by Michael Howard. We all make mistakes, and hopefully, learn from them, certainly I did, and anyone who says otherwise is a danger to himself and others. But surely there is something wrong, if in terms of pay, promotion, career trajectory and retirement, there is no difference in the career path of those who hashed things up badly and wasted public money, and of those who did the job well and achieved benefits for the public? Then there are problems of expertise, and culture. Is there, even now, enough procurement expertise in Government, and of the right calibre? Earlier this decade, inquiries into MoJ management of the tagging contracts, which involved officials paying out £200m over many years or work which was never done, noted that this occurred against the background of severe cuts in procurement staff, difficulties in recruiting and retaining such staff – in 2009, MoJ did not even have a central procurement department (1). Maybe it’s better now but somehow, with the cuts in administration spending in Departments, I doubt it. Then there is the Civil Service culture, which traditionally has found ‘policy’ more attractive and career-friendly than the ungentlemanly tasks of running things, or buying things. Thus, the risk is that the bought-in expert is always positioned slightly to one side, rather than inserted into the heart of the business, as they surely should be in a Department like MoJ, spending over half its entire budget on contracts (2). Looking to the future, there are four reasons why I don’t see a bright future for outsourcing, even if Corby never graces No.10. First, the boom is over. Around one third of Government expenditure is on outsourced service – a fantastic amount. Plainly, there can be only a marginal further increase in outsourcing volumes in future. (And all those contracts, however imperfect, are out there now. How does the new ‘Playbook’ help with that?) Second, related to that, Government has learned so little from this vast experiment. To give a couple of examples: DH told me that they have no research to point to, in house or external, that compares public and private healthcare providers. They simply do not know; and it hasn’t occurred to them that they should know. Likewise, on prisons, there has been no substantive study by Government comparing public and private operators since 2000 (3). There is a vast amount of experience in Government, and local Government, about making, shaping, and managing the many utterly different types of outsourcing market – from the single customer/3 supplier model of prisons to social care, with hundreds of suppliers, hundreds of customers and millions of users. But what has Government learned from all that experience? Practically nothing. The Institute of Government, and NAO, have done some good work examining different sorts of outsourcing and different kinds of quasi-markets, but it never seems to have occurred to Government itself to reflect on such matters. It is incredible that there simply does not exist a body of evidence to tell us where and how outsourcing has brought benefits, and where it has not, in what sectors or environments it appears to work and where not, what sorts of market work and how are markets best reregulated, and so on. It is willed ignorance on a colossal scale, and surely the root reason is that the advocates of outsourcing fear that impartial assessment would show, in many cases, that it has not brought any public benefit at all, indeed has done real damage. The consequence of this willed ignorance is that the case for outsourcing is not made, and that the practice of outsourcing does not improve. Third, it is unclear how outsourcing can work well in an age of austerity. If there simply isn’t enough money to run services to an adequate standard, how can outsourcing help? In prisons, we showed in the 1990s and 2000s that private companies could run decent prisons at lower costs because the existing public service was so wasteful – we didn’t use staff efficiently, overpaid many of them, dint have the slightest grip on procurement, and so on. There is no reason to think that the problems of the NHS or schools are down to too many doctors and teachers, paid too much, not working hard enough. And there is unbelievably, almost no evidence that the private sector can run services better. In which case, what is the case for outsourcing? Fourth, the game is completely lost politically. Poll after poll (4) shows remarkably high levels of public opposition to many forms of outsourcing, and remarkably high levels of support for Labour’s promises to re-establish public sector monopolies. The argument that outsourcing can work better for the public than state monopoly has been lost. And that has been entirely an own goal. It has been lost because Government has simply asserted private sector good, public sector bad, without ever bothering to produce evidence. It has never explained to the public what benefits they are enjoying because of outsourcing. Yet at the same time the public see endless stories of corporate greed and incompetence, of Government botching contracts and contract management and then failing to do anything about it, of failing contractors bailed out by government. To me, as someone who believes that competition, properly targetted, intelligently and responsibly run, can in some cases do more for us than monopoly, this is sad. Because it means that we will then go around the track again. Labour state as a self-evident truth the surely equally daft mantra, public good, private bad. A generation who never knew British Rail at is worst, never waited for months for the Post Office to put a phone in, never knew the scandal of the publicly run prison service of the 1980s, or the horrendous NHS waiting lists of the early 1980s, will have to learn again that monopoly power tends to be high cost, tends to be self-serving, is often resistant to new ways of doing things, and is often in reality barely more accountable than G4S or SERCO. Which is where Mrs Thatcher came in. NOTES (1) Details in my book (2) ‘Government procurement: the scale and nature of contracting in the UK’. Institute of Government, December 2018 (3) The excellent comparative study of service quality by Alison Liebling and others was not conducted for Governmen. There have been no comparisons of cost since 2000 (4) Populus 2012, YouGov 2017. Actually the polls show the public to be much more discriminating than one might suppose. They think it OK for buses and airlines to be run privately but not trains, phone services but not mail, banks but not the Post Office. The appointment of Jo Farrar to replace Michael Spurr as Chief Executive of HM Prison and Probation Service ends a quarter of a century of professional leadership of the prison service i.e. by people who had been prison governors – Richard Tilt, Martin Narey, Phil Wheatley and lastly Michael Spurr. Prior to that there had been one total outsider – Derek Lewis, ex Granada and Ford – and before that, a succession of senior civil servants who had never worked in prisons and who in most cases had spent their working life in Whitehall.
It is a very tough job to fill, because it is at once one of the most testing hands-on management jobs where things can and do go wrong any time of day or night, and highly political, with Ministers directly personally accountable in a way they aren’t in the NHS, for example. So, you need someone who both knows prisons from deep personal experience as a manager, and who at the same time understands and can operate in the political and media world. Managing both down and up. We’ve been lucky to have had 4 chief executives who could do both. Why the change now? There were some first-rate candidates with both senior prison operational experience, and experience outside of prisons. The decision to choose a generalist civil servant from outside the service, for the first time in a quarter of a century, could have come from two quarters, or both. Rory Stewart seemed ill at ease with a strong operational leader from the start – the body language between the two at their first public appearance together was unmistakable. Happily, it soon transpired that Stewart himself miraculously understood all about prisons and knew how to run them and, indeed, meant to run them. Spurr ceased to be visible, became an unperson, and the difference in role between minister and chief executive seemed at times non-existent. So, a civil servant used to public invisibility would suit Stewart well. Then there is the historic tension between the Worshipful Guild of Permanent Secretaries and strong operational managers, which I saw up close in my time, and have heard much of since. Most Permanent Secretaries have never run a public service directly, I mean a service where you actually deal with face to face, serve directly, with them, the public – that appears true of Heaton, a career lawyer. They know of course that such management experience is a good thing, but up close they find it a bit challenging. There was often a tension with operational managers like Lewis and his successors, who clearly knew things that Permanent Secretaries didn’t, but for that very reason was a threat to their grip on the Minister. It was also an article of faith that mere operational oiks couldn’t possibly master the esoteric arts of advising Ministers, though when I was there, successive Ministers were just so glad to have someone around who actually knew what they were talking about and could get things done. There was also the perpetual fear that a chief executive might actually answer back. So, Heaton’s predecessors played with such devices as having a generalist civil servant ‘mark’ the chief executive and supply suitably ‘mandarin’ advice to Ministers in parallel to that from the chief executive, and in a busy and risky service you might imagine how helpful that was. More recently it was seriously proposed that a senior civil servant next to Heaton should be in charge of ‘policy’ and negotiate ‘contracts’ with Governors which the chief executive would be bound to ‘deliver’, thus ensuring Ministers got two lots of advice all the time, from ‘buyer’ and ‘operator’. Playing at shops. Quite how long it took to knock that lunacy on the head I do not know. So, the idea of ending professional leadership or at least subordinating it to a generalist civil servant with no prison management experience, who’s a reliable member of the club, so to speak, and who would interpose between operational managers and Ministers, must have been very attractive to Heaton. Does the change matter? It does, for two reasons. It matters to people working in prisons, especially Governors, whose job is a lonely and exposed one, that the person at the top, the one handing down policy and performance demands and budgets, even if they don’t agree with his decisions, at least knows what the job is like, understands the dynamics of their peculiar world and the risks being run, not because they have been told it, but because they once did the job themselves. And it matters in the other direction that the person telling Minsters that such-and-such a policy or budget runs unacceptable risks, or that there is a better way to do things, or the true priorities are otherwise, has credit with Ministers. I know from experience that that on occasions enabled the chief executive to prevent Ministers making serious errors of judgements, that would in the end have rebounded on them. Good Ministers, like Jack Straw, appreciated this – weak Ministers resented it. A generalist civil servant knows when to shut up and do as told, however risky or impossible the demand. It helped too that professional heads of the service had no further ambition – they had no need to please the Permanent Secretary, just because they hoped to be one themselves one day. So I think the change is a loss. On top of that HMPPS has lost control of much of its business – for financial, HR, procurement legal, estates, ITC and other services, which it used to run itself, it must now rely on the centre of MoJ, to which the resources previously managed directly by HMPPS when it was a real Agency have been withdrawn. I know how important it was when I was FD that I was an integral part of the business and not outside it. Given the chaotic state of MoJ finances and its numerous procurement disasters, the end of self-management is a huge blow, and means that the chief executive no longer has the information and control required to run these services. About Farrar I know very little. She has experience in local government at senior level, so she knows a fair bit about managing, albeit on a smaller scale. For the past 3 years she has been Director General for Local Government and Public Services in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The MoJ spin people say that in that job “she has helped local government to deal with significant increases in demand in a difficult financial climate.” That’s one way of putting it. The councillors I know put it rather differently! The cuts in local government have done enormous damage to vulnerable people. Here’s what the National Audit Office say:
None of this is Farrar’s fault, needless to say. Any more than the catastrophic cuts that have overtaken prisons is Spurr’s fault. Goes with the job nowadays. It’s just that the spin, pretending nothing bad is happening, we’re just finding ‘new ways of doing things’, is so sickeningly dishonest, and of course, no-one believes it. Reminds me very much of the history of Soviet Russia which I am reading. (1) Anyway, one wishes her well. She will be utterly captivated by these services, as most people are. But please, not too many gimmicky initiatives. We know what needs to be done to restore safe and decent prisons: more money, more staff, fewer prisoners, stable, professional management allowed to get on with their job and sure, held to account for it. I’ve already said my piece about Michael Spurr here. I guess he will be forced into early retirement. I wish him a long and happy retirement, a long way from prisons. And Ministers. (1) For an uptodate, informed and objective account - by the National Audit Office - of the ways in which decisions, and indecision, by Government are devastating local services and pushing local authorities into bankruptcy, see this. Some damned Tory Brexiter was saying the other day that it was high time we who oppose Brexit ‘come to terms’ with it, accept it as inevitable and ‘pull together’ for the country’s sake. Much as if I woke to found a majority in our household had decided to set fire to the curtains in our house, arguing that it would save on heating bills, I should accept their decision and smile benignly as they went about their senseless destruction. But I can’t bear to write more about that. Instead I shall give myself (and just possibly you) the pleasure of writing about two great films that are completely unavailable in this country, but which have recently come into my hands through rather roundabout routes.
One involves ‘coming to terms’, the other it’s opposite, for which there is no name. Now a certain person whose confidences I shall respect by calling him Felix, which happens to be the name of our son, says that if there is one thing he cannot abide, it’s film and novels about ‘coming to terms’. An odd aversion, since so many great films and novels are about just that – what else is ‘Gone with the wind’ or ‘It’s a wonderful life’ but ‘coming to terms’? But I think I know what he means, Felix, that is: a certain type of too-easy English resignation, acceptance of pointless failure, of life not properly lived: ‘Remains of the day’ or ‘Brief encounter’ type of thing. The first of these films is about ‘coming to terms’ but in a far more positive, even joyous, way. It is ‘A ball at the Anjo’s house’ directed by Kōzaburō Yoshimura in 1947, at the start of the golden age of Japanese cinema. A high-born family is facing their own total defeat, in the wake of Japan’s defeat in war: they have lost their status, their titles, their money, the ancestral home, in short, their world. The father lost the house by credulously trusting to one of Japan’s new rich, who exploited the family name, tricked them into signing over the house and now disposes of them ruthlessly as no longer useful to him. His son hides his desperate sympathy for his father beneath a brittle veneer of world-weary cynicism, and dismisses the servant girl he has seduced with promises of marriage. One daughter, conscious of her rank, dismisses their former driver who adores her and who through hard work has made himself enough to offer to save the family home. The other daughter, played by the incomparable Setsuko Hara, is desperate to save her despairing father, who sharply rebuffs her plans. (Hara specialised in such roles, notably in the films of Yasujirō Ozu, including ‘Tokyo story’ (1953), which ranks high on most lists of all-time great films. There was something of the father/daughter relationship between her and Ozu. On his death she never worked again and retired to a remote village where she died in 2015. Her roles, as the dutiful, self-sacrificing daughter, but happy in her self-sacrifice, don’t suit today’s feminists. But I know women like that, and they are not patsies or failures or weak, but amongst the best and strongest people I know. I don’t have a favourite actor, but I have a favourite actress: Setsuko Hara, who manages somehow to make every other actress seem a little…well, tawdry, somehow.) The Anjos decide to hold one last ball in their home, just as they used to do, before losing it forever. Much goes wrong: their past is falling apart in front of their eyes. Yet Hara saves the day, averting her father’s suicide, and in an extraordinarily prolonged scene, almost without dialogue, bringing him, and the whole family, back to life, to love life again, to look forward to their uncertain place in the new Japan. She does it by dancing the tango with him. Wonderful, wonderful Setsuko Hara. The second film, 'Sunday's children', is a sort of negative to that story: the erasure of a reconciliation, of kindness that was contained in the past. The script was by Ingmar Bergman and is about a Sunday in the household of his (thinly disguised) family household in rural Sweden in the 1900s, when Ingmar was 8 and his father a priest. The outwardly happy, boisterous household conceals a failing marriage and a harsh, sometimes physically brutal relationship between Bergman pere and Ingmar fils, extraordinarily played by Henrik Innros. In a flashforward, we briefly see both in 30 or 40 years’ time – the father is dying, the son visits him, they resume their lifetime’s quarrel bitterly, no coming to terms here. Yet in the present moment, that Sunday all those years ago, we see the two take a trip to a neighbouring parish, and on the way back taking refuge from a thunderstorm: and there is a time of simple happiness and love between them. I find that so moving: the idea of the moment of true happiness, forgotten later, inaccessible to the grown man, but always there, always real. It adds to the pleasure of this film that it was written by Ingmar Bergman but directed by his son Daniel. Ingmar was notoriously not a good father to his many children from different wives, but he seems to have had some sort of relationship with Daniel, who learned his craft from watching his dad. And it is beautifully filmed, the cinematography like but not like his dad's films. Daniel soon abandoned cinema and became a paramedic working in ambulances, where he reasoned he did more good than by making films. As even my friend John Ellis, capo di capi of media professors, might agree. (Not that there is anything criminal about John, though he would make an excellently calm and shrewd capo di capi, more Godfather than Soprano, should the opportunity ever arise.) I guess the reason I love these two films is that they show two eternal truths about us humans, which one becomes acutely aware of in old age: our need to tell us ourselves a story about our lives that tells us warts and all, it has a pattern and meaning, that yes, that bit ended and this bit started, but it all makes a kind of sense; and equally, that true meaning is as it were imprisoned on the moment, can only be known in that moment, cannot be overwritten by some larger meaning. Plus, of course, neither film has anything to do with Brexit. The new Prison and Probation Ombusdman, Sue McAllister, began work this week.
The eagle-eyed Rob Allen has spotted an anomaly in this appointment: the Justice Secretary makes the appointment on the recommendation of the the Commons Justice Committee, which examines candidates in public to give assurance of some independent scrutiny. The Committee did examine McAllister, on 17 July. But it did not send a recommendation to the Secretary of State or, if it did, preferred to do so in secret – which negates the value of public scrutiny. This may seem a bureaucratic nicety, but governance arrangements relating to appointments (and for that matter, dismissals) are there for a reason. The failure to follow them here is serious, implying a casual attitude by the Committee to its duties. This is particularly so, as there a couple of serious question marks about McAllister's suitability. First, she is hostile to the private sector, as a matter of ideology, as she to her credit candidly stated at the hearing: she thinks privately run prisons are plain wrong, and has condemned privatisation of probation. To my mind, this must cast doubt on the appointment. She will be arbitrating between prisoners/offenders and the private operating companies – which she thinks should not be in business at all. The Committee asked about this and were satisfied by her statement that despite her views, she would be at all time professional. Too easily satisfied, in my view. It is not, of course, a question about her integrity, but about the need for absolute impartiality to be demonstrated beyond doubt in such a role. I don't see how it can be, given her views. Second, there is a general issue about appointing former governors (or probation managers) to such a role. Prisoners/offenders want to be assured that the post holder is completely neutral between them and the management – that is the whole point of the Ombudsman. I don't think that requirement is fully met if the post holder has spent her entire career in prison management. It can be argued that that experience is useful background to the job. But it must also raise the question whether the post holder can really be expected to see the issues entirely independently. Sometimes you need an outsider to take the robust view that what seems sensible, right and proper to prison governor isn't, in fact sensible, right and proper, to the general public. It seems agreed that the Chief Inspector should not be an ex Governor: how is this post any different? I have, let me say, no reason at all to question McAllister's capacity and skills. And it is a miserable thing to sound such doubts just as she starts work. Indeed: that is exactly why such issues should have been properly considered during the appointment process. Now is too late. Neither the MoJ nor the Justice Committee have done an adequate job here. A really excellent article by Penelope Gibbs on the breakdown of the courts system. So many people blog about prisons and probation, almost none about the equally serious disaster unfolding in our criminal courts. The analysis is stronger for being rooted so much in peoples' direct experience, and the prescription is unusual in offering genuinely new, genuinely practical solutions, not just shed loads of more money. “Mags Ct today in chaos. 2 duty solicitors unable to cope because almost none of the 40+ defendants had own solicitors and all needed legal advice. There are consequences to reducing #legalaid scope and fees. Many cases adjourned to another day” @Halo_Lawyer
“Defendant appears at Mags Ct, but there’s no interpreter for him. Clerk says she won’t deal with him and will send him back to the Police Station. I query the lawfulness of this and am told this is what the regional court managers have said is to be done and it’s happened at other courts with no complaints. I point out that if they want to take that approach then I’ll expect to be quoted chapter + verse of legal basis for this – reply to that was, I’m the clerk, I don’t have to justify a decision” @neilsnds “Two London Criminal defence firms I used to work for are about two months from going under due to the large number of people being released under investigation and due to the LAA making it a war of attrition to get PPE [pages of prosecution evidence] paid on any large Crown Court cases” @escobills “The prison declined to bring the defendant to court because … they have spelled his name wrong on their paperwork. As we are asking for him by his actual name, it does not tally with their records. The fact that the Prison Number is the same is, it would seem, irrelevant” @ClonchFlud “Trial adjournment application this morning in the mags. Schedule of unused [evidence] only served 2 days ago. Need to serve a defence statement. Court clerk had to be ‘guided’ to the view that this is an entitlement. Concerning” @Peter_L_Jones “Another call today from Court to confirm tomorrow’s trial is off due to a lack of judicial/courtroom availability.3rd hearing in 2 months that I’ve had vacated the day before.Trying to explain that this is normal to clients & witnesses is never easy and it’ll only get worse” @SuffolkSolicita “The ceiling in Court 7 at York House, Feltham, immigration tribunal fell down yesterday. All cases for that day adjourned. Cases for today supposed to be in Court 7 “floated” and then “floated out” [cancelled] at 3pm” @englishchick “Currently prosecuting a trial with judge whose only concern is finishing so he can go on holiday next week. Outcome of every application contingent upon time it will take. We are now sitting at 09.30 every day He’s said he’ll discharge jury if we don’t finish on Friday” @F_E_Smith “One of the biggest lessons this year has been this: Enforced speed is the enemy of justice. Dealing in bulk and getting punters in and out quickly sounds great.. but I think the public would feel safer and more confident if we were given time to read and consider” @CriminalPupil These are just a few of the tweets I’ve seen in the last few days indicating that the courts system is coming apart at the seams. And if you search #thelawisbroken on twitter you will see hundreds more tales of lifts not working and cases adjourned. Last week I sat on a panel (organised by the South-Eastern Circuit of barristers) with Susan Acland-Hood, Chief Executive of the courts service. Around 30 lawyers chose to spend their evening giving their views on court reform, but inevitably the conversation dwelt on the kind of problems described above. I have seldom seen lawyers so frustrated and angry. Poor Susan was patient and courteous in responding, but I think even she was slightly shell-shocked by the palpable unhappiness. And by the scale of the problems – from court closures to administrative failure, from video links which don’t work to cancelled sittings. Unfortunately I don’t think digital court reform will take us to new sunny uplands of effective courts. And before any of the reforms kick in, there is chaos to be sorted out. The only “saving grace” is that the police are investigating and the CPS prosecuting fewer crimes. So the workload in the courts is reducing. But diminished police resources means some crimes are not investigated properly, and disclosure is bungled. The wise words of @criminalpupil that enforced speed is the enemy of justice I think provides part of the answer. There is no magic money tree for justice. There should be, but health, education and social care will always get priority when there is any money to spare. The only way of giving all court cases the time they deserve and getting enough money for the courts is to shrink the criminal justice system. Lets decriminalise lots of minor offences like possession of cannabis and non-payment of a TV licence. Lets divert a lot of low level cases away from court via out of court disposals, deferred prosecution and well facilitated restorative justice. Lets reduce the number of remand hearings by remanding fewer defendants. Lets have a moratorium on the creation of any new offences. If we shrunk the system, we might have some chance of paying lawyers a fair wage for their work, and of giving the cases in the courts the time they deserve – which would mean not delaying them because of a shortage of judges, nor rushing them through when they are actually heard. Pie in the sky you think, but actually we have a home-grown case study. In England and Wales, we have shrunk the youth justice system considerably. There are fewer prosecutions, fewer first time entrants and fewer getting any kind of formal criminal justice disposal than ten years ago, and the child custody population has shrunk by two-thirds. Despite the recent media coverage of serious youth violence, there is no evidence that the shrinking of the system has led to an increase in youth crime (the number of proven offences has fallen by 75% in ten years). Overall the shrinking of the youth justice system has led to fewer children being criminalised and to the remaining money going further. I would shrink the system even more through raising the age of criminal responsibility and raising the prosecution threshold, but I feel the shrinkage so far has been positive. And it has, for the most part. been tolerated by politicians and the public. So lets try shrinking the adult system so the money available might possibly be sufficient. |
I was formerly Finance Director of the Prison Service and then Director of the National Offender Management Service responsible for competition. I also worked in the NHS and an IT company. I later worked for two outsourcing companies.
Archives
January 2023
Categories
All
Click below to receive regular updates
|