52. Reconstructing Probation Services: A Candid Talk with Tania Bassett on Failures and Change - Part 2

What if the very system designed to rehabilitate and reintegrate people with convictions back into society was riddled with systemic failures? Step into the world of probation services with Tania Bassett, Press and Communications Liaison at NAPO. where she and our host Alex Bastion dissect the growing workload, dwindling funding, and the harsh realities compelling many probation officers to abandon ship. We examine the significant impact of political decisions, shedding light on how this vital resource has been depleted over the years. It's time to understand the role of businesses, schools, and other institutions in providing employment opportunities for prisoners and people with convictions. 

Dare to venture into the monitoring and oversight functions of MAPPA 3 -  people under supervision,  managed under the highest level of risk. Hear from Tania about the essential need for  coordinated multiple-agency approaches and consistent supervision in preventing reoffending. 

From staff shortages and high sickness rates to a lack of institutional memory within the Ministry of Justice, the challenges are real. 

Tania's unparalleled insight  helps us to unravel the ill-advised cost-efficiency of the National Probation Service and successive governments' missed opportunities. 

This episode of  the Rebel Justice podcast  demands action for meaningful, lasting change. 

Tune in for searing insight into the criminal justice, amplified by View Magazine, as we expose stories of injustice, gender inequality, and abusive systems.

Transcript

Episode 51EPISODE 51: TANIA BASSETT

Episode 51

Guest: Tania Bassett 

Interviewer: Alex Bastion 

Host: Host

Description

HOST: 

Welcome to the View Magazine's Rebel Justice podcast. This week, we will be hearing from Tania Bassett, a former probation practitioner and currently the Press and Communications Liaison at NaPo, the National Association of Probation Officers. 

The National Probation Service is a fundamental part of the criminal justice system, assisting courts and prisons from the conviction stage of a defendant's court case all the way through their supervision, unpaid work requirements in the community, support programs, rehabilitation, as well as parole assessments for those serving sentences 

Alex Bastion (interviewer)

01:19

Welcome to Rebel Justice. I'm Alex Bastion, and this is part two of a two-part series interviewing Tania Bassett from the National Association of Probation Officers. We've had a real insight into the challenges faced by such an integral institution that deals with the rehabilitation of offenders. 

Probation service has long provided an invaluable service to courts and prisons in order to assist the most vulnerable in our society. However, with very limited funding from the government, probation officers struggling to maintain their requirements, which have led many to leave for other careers. 

In terms of the community's impact and what businesses, places of worship, schools and other institutions can do, are you finding that there is still that engagement taking place, or is it becoming also more challenging to find places and businesses that will take on offenders and ex-offenders? 

Tania Bassett (guest)

02:17

It's a mixed bag really. I mean there are some organisations that have been doing amazing work to promote employing people with lived experience. So if we look at Timpsons the cobblers, for example, Timpsons has been building and building on their employees with lived experience over many years now and starting off within the custodial setting, so people on day release getting employment with them and then coming out of prison to be able to take up full-time employment within his business and providing that training. 

So that's just sort of one organisation that's making quite a big difference. I think there are still concerns around some organisations. I think that some people see a criminal conviction on somebody's record and immediately panic and don't know what to do, and I think that's one of the things that's lost in terms of probation being such a centrally government-run organisation in civil service now is that not being embedded in local communities. 

So historically, when you have probation trusts, you could work locally with employers to say, well, actually we've got a group of people that are currently on probation, are interested in doing some training, and you can set up and commission your own training programmes where employers come in and provide training in their expertise to people on probation so that they're able to then find gainful employment afterwards. 

And that being embedded in local communities is really important and we're missing that now. We don't have that in this current huge organisation that we're lost in the civil service. There's no scope really to do that on a local level anymore. 

Alex Bastion:

03:50

So if I were an employer and I was interested in engaging more with offenders or ex-offenders, I could just call my local probation office and say this is my business. This is the kind of need that I have here. Is there a way that we could work together on a limited or a more long term? 

Tania Bassett:

04:04

I think it is something that employers can do, but I think that's the problem is that what we have is regional probation directors for quite large regions. If you think of Wales as one region in itself, one region is actually a country. So the ability to engage at that local level and the powers that the regional probation directors have is limited as to whether or not they could commission that on a local basis. And that's the bit. We've lost that connection. If you look back to previously in historical probation had the same number of trusts as there were police forces, so you were much more embedded in a smaller region, a smaller area able to keep those connections up. Now it's much. The scale of size has increased and therefore you've lost that connection. Does that make sense? 

Alex:

04:53

Absolutely. You touched earlier on the number of probation officers that have left the service. Just tell us a bit more about that, as to why you think the main motivation has been for them to walk out of the door. 

Tania Bassett:

05:04

There seems to be two main drivers. So if we look at more experienced staff that are choosing to leave or take early retirement, for example, a lot of that is staff burnout. 

So you know, we've got members we have a workload management tool for case management only and we've got members that are on a 140, 150% of the workload management tool. So that means they're effectively doing seven days work in five days, week in, week out. So it's not sustainable. It's a huge level of stress with the work that you do. 

Your biggest fear as a probation officer or probation service officer is getting what's called a serious further offence on your case load. So that's somebody who's known to probation who goes on to commit a murder or a serious sexual offence. That then requires a high level of investigation and is incredibly stressful for practitioners going through that process. But if you're working at a level that you know is not manageable and is not sustainable and you know that you're missing things from the work that you're doing because you simply don't have time to get everything done, you're carrying that burden of ‘what if a serious further offence happens’? Because I know I'm not working at the quality I should be because I'm holding far too many cases to do that.

So that's the reason why we're seeing experienced staff leaving. 

But then if we look at the trainee, probation officers and newly qualified officers coming in in the last few years, we're seeing a massive retention problem there as well. So people are getting partway through the training and realising this isn't quite what they signed up to. They're overworked, they're in an environment where their experienced staff are really stressed and on burnout or they're being placed in an office for their training where there are no experienced staff. So they're leaving partway through the training. And then we have newly qualified officers who should have a protected case load for the first 12 months of qualifying so they can sort of start to to learn their trade a bit more. But we're seeing them leaving as well after a couple of years because they've got their training, which has been paid for by the taxpayer. They've got a qualification. They don't want to work in the working conditions they're being expected to if you've just qualified enough. 

We had one example of the day after qualification. A female member of staff was on 150 of the workload management tool literally overnight. She had a huge amount of cases allocated to her in London and was already talking at that point: “I can't manage this, I can't cope”, and I think that's a real problem in terms of the working conditions being so poor. It's really affecting the retention of new staff as well. 

So the government keeps talking about 1500 recruits every year and we're really boosting the staffing levels, but actually, if you look at retention, we are losing staff. Attrition is at the highest rate the probation has ever experienced. So we're currently at about 9% attrition rate. We've never historically gone over 3%, really. So we've got a real issue in terms of retaining staff going forward - you touched upon serious offences and I think in particular sexual offences. 

Alex Bastion:

08:06

Just let's focus a bit on supervision, and I suppose MAPPAis a good area and something to discuss, especially when it comes to sort of terrorism offences. 

Why don't you tell the listeners a little bit more about what is required in terms of certain certain offences and certain offenders and how much pressure is put on probation to continue that role of supervision post a sentence? 

Tania Bassett:

08:29

Multi-agency public protection panels are made up of a variety of largely public sector, some third sector, depending on where you are. So people working in probation, the police, housing, children's services - quite a wide array of organisations sit on MAPPA panels. To determine whether a client requires MAPPA intervention depends on their risk of harm as much as it does their offending type. 

So you may have somebody who, for example, has committed a sexual offence, but actually they have a relatively lower risk of harm in terms of the circumstances around that offence and they may have stable housing and not have any children involved, etc. So that person could be managed at what we would call MAPPA level One, which is the probation officer, dipping in and out of other agencies as and when they need to. MAPPA 2 is for slightly more complex cases where the risk of harm has increased, usually to medium or high risk of harm. So you will sit around with other agencies looking at potential issues around housing or if children's services are involved in that particular person's life. What involvement have we got child conference plans in place, etc. Do they require it? Are they required to sign the sex offender register? In which case, have the police got involved and have they also provided an offender manager to work with that person? 

And then the top level, which is MAPPA three, is when you're looking at the most critical few, as we call them. So they're going to be high or very high risk of harm. You're talking with heads of service, - so rather than practitioners from housing and children's services, you're talking to directors of housing associations and children's services to get that highest level input into managing that person's case, whether it's move on plan from a hostel, for example, or are we looking at taking those children into care. So that's the MAPPA side of things. 

10:26

A MAPPA can be called by any agency. 

10:29

It can be called by the police as much as it can probation, but it tends to be those on probation where a MAPPA is called if there's a particular concern about somebody. 

But in terms of managing other cases I mentioned about, if someone is required to sign the sex offender register, so probation works really closely with the police sex offender unit that person will be allocated a police officer as well as a probation officer. We'll do joint home visits, we'll do joint supervision meetings where we check that that person is adhering to both sides of their sentence and that's critical at the point that their sentence ends, because obviously the police side of things will continue potentially indefinitely, depending on how long they have to sign the register for but they will have police input post probation. 

So it's important that that handover is done really well and that we share intelligence about you know, police have done a home visit without probation and they're concerned about something they find at the house, for example. So we may then do an unannounced joint visit to see what's going on in the home environment. That may be a risk or may be a factor to offending behavior. 

Alex Bastion:

11:37

And I suppose the way I'm thinking about it is we don't want that revolving door of a probation officer is coming in and out, because the process that you are providing is from beginning to end, doesn't it? 

11:49

It goes through a number of years, certainly a number of months, and having the same person from beginning to end, providing that input, having had that face to face interaction with that client, is going to be… I mean, you're not gonna get a better way of figuring somebody out, having an insight into an individual than you are, by having that continuation from beginning to end, are you? 

Tania Bassett:

12:14

No, absolutely, and there's some more research published this week, actually, I can't remember... It's come from a number of academics and there's an interesting blog on Russell Webster's website. Russell does quite a lot of blogs about recent research etc. 

But this looks specifically at the quality of probation supervision and resistance, or reducing reoffending. Probation has historically always been an evidence based service, so what does the evidence tell us about what works in terms of reducing reoffending? 

And a critical part of resistance has always been the building up of professional relationships between probation practitioner and the client has been a fundamental factor in reducing reoffending. The recent research that's been published has repeated  back to me to reinforce the need for that. The importance of those relationships going forward and consistency is vital to build that relationship up. 

13:12

If you have a continuous revolving door of probation officers or probation practitioners, that becomes really problematic, not only for the practitioner, who's constantly trying to get on top of new cases they don't know anything about in relatively short space of time, but also for the client, who is constantly having to repeat why they ended up where they have and not getting any further down that that route of their journey because they're just having a new officer every six months. And the first question is going to be “I know you said this before, but tell me why you're here.” That's all they're doing for the duration of their sentence. They're not going on to: ‘What are the underlying factors that causes the offending behavior?’, ‘What can we do to help them address those factors, those criminogenic needs, to reduce their reoffending, going forward or to develop victim empathy?’ 

I mean, it's always happened occasionally in probation… 

14:07

Going back when I was still in practice, I moved from a different office and I picked up a case load that was very high in terms of numbers and that case load had had - I think I was their third probation officer in three months, and it was probably one of the most chaotic case loads I ever managed. 

There was a lot of reoffending, there was a lot of recalling back to custody because there hadn't been that level of consistency and building up of a professional relationship. At the moment, that is now happening more often than it ever has before, that constant turnover of staff, partly because of people leaving, partly because we have incredibly high sickness rates at the moment as a result of staff burn out. We also have, because of staff shortages, some cases that just never get allocated a permanent practitioner, so they're being seen by somebody different every single week, never mind, you know, every few months. 

15:02

So it's really damaging and it damages the effectiveness of probation and that concerns me that that will then be used as the stick to beat us with when people look at the performance figures and the reducing reoffending figures and they say operation doesn't work in its current form. 

So this is the ideal opportunity to bring in yet another organizational change or reform and that's concerning. The Ministry of Justice can have a very short memory when it comes to what's effective and what isn't effective and what those underlying causes of failures can be. So I would say at the moment we have a systemic failure in probation because of the challenges we faced over the last 10 years, but also the current organizational change, and I think there is a reluctance for that to be acknowledged by the Ministry of Justice In terms of why we are where we are when is the next sort of spending review or what are you working towards? 

Alex Bastion:

16:02

is there a date when you're hoping there's going to be something more positive or, sadly, something negative? Thank you. 

Tania Bassett:

16:09

There is potentially a spending review with the autumn statement. In terms of going forward, am I optimistic? No, I'm not. I'll be honest I think that I've been quite impressed with some of the current Justice Secretary's decisions on policy. I think Alex Chalk, he's got some good ideas that could make positive steps forward, but I don't believe he's got the political backing to make fundamental changes. 

I think there's a bit of tweaking around the edges. There's a bit of policy, the civil service drawn at policy around organisational change, but I don't think Alex Chalk has either potentially the political will to go strong himself or he hasn't got the political backing to make any real fundamental changes - such as, for example, to take probation out of the civil service. I don't think there's the political will for that. Those are the things that, in order to happen, we're going to need a real focus on the spending review. 

Alex Bastion:

17:09

No, no, I can understand that. Just to move on to something positive as we close, I know probation often work with other organisations. I know there are a lot of programmes that are given out - alcohol rehabilitation programmes, drugs you mentioned certain things in terms of curfews, home detention, tags and things like that. Are there any schemes coming up that the public can be excited about? Some good ideas. 

Tania Bassett:

17:34

In terms of outside agencies, there will be variation geographically. In terms of drug and alcohol services, they're commissioned much more on a local basis. In terms of third sector, organisations tend to be based in a particular area. It might be the Herefordshire alcohol service that only works in that county. That would be very locally commissioned for that probation service. We've still got an element of that local connection, I think, in terms of what probation is providing itself. 

18:05

Excitingly, we are looking at working with the employer at the moment at developing a new accredited programme for those on probation supervision. At the moment the probation service provides a general offending behaviour programme which tries to meet needs of problem solving and general causes of offending. We also do building better relationships, which is focusing on domestic violence, and we also do Horizon, which works with those that commit sexual offences. 

There is a new programme being designed that will create one programme. I was really nervous when I first started going into talks around this that I thought they were going to try and do a one size fits all approach to accredited programmes. What they're actually doing is a general offending behaviour programme and then we'll add on certain elements so there will be separate modules for those that have committed domestic violence, for example, and separate modules for those that commit sexual offending. So it isn't quite a one size fits all, but I think it's exciting because it sees probation actually looking at the current research and reviewing their own programmes and how effective they are and how we can improve what we deliver. 

19:15

Now we know different things about resistance and what's effective. 

19:19

The downside of that is that it will be the same programme that's delivered in prisons and the motivation for this seems to be because prisons deliver lots of programmes and they're finding it a bit confusing. 

19:28

So it's yet again kind of being swallowed up by the prison service to a certain extent. But I think going forward NAPO has campaigned to improve probation. NAPO came into existence in 1926, I think the year after the Offenders act which created the probation service, so we've been around the block a while now to know what we think probation is based on, what works and how it's effective. We campaigned strongly to get probation out of the private sector, which we successfully did, and we're now in the public sector. 

So I would say watch this space. NAPO will continue to campaign to get probation out of the civil service, released from prison, as we call it, embedded in our local communities and really focusing on going back to basics, so that we can actually focus on those pre-sentence reports, reducing re-offending but also making sure we protect the public at the same time. 

Alex Bastion:

20:29

No, that's brilliant. Well, look, let's end on a real high note. Just tell me a sort of feel good story from your previous experience, maybe one individual that you came across and not such a good time in their lives and then suddenly, a few years later, you've heard of an impact or bumped into them somewhere. Can you share a story with us? 

Tania Bassett:

20:48

Yes. So I supervised a young white male who had come from a not deprived background, a relatively comfortable background, but who completely lost focus and gone off the rails and messed up his GCSEs and been out of work since school, had got into drinking too much and ending up in fights on a Saturday night in the town centre, and got into quite a serious violent altercation and was sentenced to a probation order which included unpaid work and supervision. 

He was really unmotivated to do anything. I was trying to get him into - what we then used - learn direct for our employment and education side of things, but he was reluctant to do that. Unfortunately, he then was involved in an accident. He got hit by a lorry at the side of a road with a wing mirror and had a very serious head injury that took a long time for him to recover from, but when he was able to, fairly early on in his recovery journey, he decided to engage in our education services, partly to help him with his cognitive thinking, but also to give him something to do. 

He wasn't in a good place to resist engagement with probation. He went on to win an award for the best learner of the year that year and successfully completed his probation period and had an employment to go to. 

22:16

I then bumped into him after I'd left the service, probably about five years ago, and he came up to me and said you probably don't remember me - I did. I did remember him. He told me that he was working full time. He'd gone on to get further qualifications and wanted to thank me for getting him on the straight and narrow, as I think he put it. And I actually bumped into him again just a few weeks ago and he came up to me and gave me an update on how he's doing. His work's going really well, he's on a career path rather than just having a job, and just again wanted to say thank you. And he said probation turned my life around and I don't know I'd probably be in prison by now if I hadn't had that input when I had it and the support that I had to really straighten myself out. 

Alex Bastion:

23:01

Wow, I guess, those sorts of stories are what keeps you going in your role and keeps you fighting the good fight. Thank you so much, Tania. That's very insightful and enlightening and, I think, a lot for us to ponder in terms of what's going on. I'm sure I speak for the public to say we're so grateful for everything that you do and your contribution to society. 

Right, that wraps up. Thanks very much. 

Host:

23:24

This concludes our podcast for today. Thank you, Tania, for the insightful conversation on the National Probation Service and our criminal justice system and for leaving us with plenty to reflect on, including how the government is not utilizing what could be a benefit to taxpayers, like having offenders on probation instead of in prison. 

Rebel Justice podcast is produced by the View Magazine, which is the only platform by and for women in the justice system where, by amplifying their stories, we shine a light on injustice, gender inequality and abusive systems. Check out our quarterly magazine to stay on top of all that is relevant and important in the justice system and find out how you can activate your rights and citizenship to create a meaningful, lasting change. You can subscribe to the View at TheViewMagorguk and follow us on our social media. We are Rebel Justice on X, formerly Twitter, and the View Magazine on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook.