The power which is exercised by democratically elected Governments is meant to be power that they administer on behalf of the whole of society. This suggests that their role is meant to be facilitative not controlling or coercive. The state inevitably on occasions must take decisions that are not widely supported or popular. Examples of this are the placing of responsibility on local government for providing homes and space for Gypsies and Travellers in each community. More directly the State needs to determine where prisons are needed and providing these and deciding when to send young men to their possible death in war and in peacekeeping activities. There are other areas where the power and processes of the state act in a way that has more to do with administration and bureaucracy than to do with command and control. It would be easy to assume that this element of Government organisation would instinctively be more attuned to the needs and wishes of those involved, however sadly this is not always the case.

The example of running prisons leads to the need to ensure that the people leaving prisons are rehabilitated. The Governmental provision in this area is currently through the work of the probation service and as we know there is a great deal of change taking place in this area. However probation doesn’t work alone. One of the partners to probation are the  voluntary sector organisations which work to mentor men and women who have been incarcerated in Prison. By working with willing prisoners as they reach the end of their sentence, and then onto the early months of their release it is possible to significantly reduce the level of re-offending at a very low cost. Most of these schemes work with volunteers, not because they are cheap (volunteering services do cost money) but because the prisoners respect these mentors in a way they would not respect a paid member of staff. There is ample evidence of the efficacy of these organisations, I am personally proud of my association with one scheme that is currently operating in Sussex and Surrey and we have plans to extend our work into Kent should the opportunity arise.

It would be easy to assume that such schemes would be good news for the Ministry of Justice which has responsibility to reduce re-offending. However the MOJ has been troubled for several years because these schemes are relatively local in focus and therefore not well suited to engage with the state systems that are in place to administer them. They are also concerned that each scheme tends to work with relatively small cohorts of prisoners. Over a year ago when preparing myself for the election as a PCC, I attended a conference which was addressed by a member of the House Lords who spoke about a concept I had never heard before. He expressed mixed views about these mentoring schemes, but where he was supportive he was concerned that the schemes were not of sufficient scale to meet the needs of the State. The solution he and others were convinced about was to get these schemes to ‘Scale Up’. I challenged the speaker to consider that these charities and social enterprises depend for their success on their link to local communities to attract volunteers and to help their mentees to become embedded into social groups and networks. Asking these organisations to scale up risks losing the very essence of their success. It also creates an expectation that these larger organisations will be sustained by the state when as larger organisations, the next Justice Minister decides that he or she wants to do things differently.

The Government has now announced a funding scheme to assist in this scaling up. They have created a Rehabilitation Social Action Fund which will award grants to help charities in England ‘scale up’ and ‘engage with commissioners, funders and contractors’. It is a £3.5m fund to support volunteering and mentoring programmes that reduce reoffending. The department said in a statement that the Rehabilitation Social Action Fund would support charities to “scale up, build evidence of impact and develop sustainable business models” and that it would help charities “engage with future commissioners, funders and contractors”. As a Trustee of one of these schemes I am delighted that the Government is willing to invest funds in our expansion. Sadly this level of funding is very small when compared to the size of the challenge and having just withdrawn from a procurement round for some of these services due to the unrealistic expectations of the local probation trust when preparing their tender documents I am very aware of how funders can sometimes get things wrong. However my big concern is that this language of ‘scaling up’ is ill suited to the culture of the organisations involved in this service delivery. The Government is meant to be a facilitator and my challenge to them is for them to scale down their view of who they will work with and mechanisms they will support. When I visit the local Bluebell wood (Sussex is well known for these) I don’t see one huge scaled up Bluebell, I see a sea of Bluebells, each of which is the size of the Bluebells in my garden. Managing the wood is more complex than managing the few flowers in my garden, but that is the price one pays for being the custodian of the wood!