Yesterdays breaking news that Chris Hyman, UK CEO of SERCO is to step down comes on the heels of the previous days announcement that Richard Morris is to leave G4S. Both men are leaving in response to  the corruption in the organisations which led to the UK taxpayer being charged for tagging people that in some cases were still in prison or had died. Whilst these departures have taken longer than might have been hoped, they are a positive move and one from which their political commissioners and others in the public eye should learn. As the news item reports there will be some reorganisation within SERCO, separating the divisions that deal with Government contracts so that they can be scrutinised more easily. Perhaps this is one of the most significant lessons of this appalling situation. If the private sector is to deliver public services, it cannot do so behind the usual screens of commercial confidentiality.

This change was reported on last nights BBC Radio 4 PM programme and included an interview with Tom Gash, Director of Research at the Institute for Government. The IFG is a charity funded by the Sainsbury family and governed by a cross party mix of MPs and Lords. IFG views are not government policy, nor are they party policy, but they are well informed by all of the thinking in Westminster. Tom was interviewed in a piece about the impact of the commercial corruption on plans to reform probation services which are already well underway. The intention from the Government is to retain a small  national probation service for very high risk ex-prisoners and for the remainder of the current probation work to be handled through a number of regional contracts. There are three types of organisation that are expected to bid for these contracts. The private sector of which G4S and SERCO are the most likely contenders, mutualised probation trusts, and the voluntary sector which I wrote about previously. Tom responded pragmatically suggesting that it would be difficult to remove SERCO from the list of contenders at this stage as the pool of available talent would become too small to offer an effective process. This is like suggesting that Lance Armstrong should be allowed to continue to race, in order to ensure that the Tour de France remains a viable event.

My own view is that the current reforms for probation are misjudged and out of scale to the market through which the Government wants to see them established. The size and scale of these regional groupings is larger than the current probation trusts which are operating with existing relationships and networks of voluntary sector agencies and social enterprises. The only organisations that will benefit from a small number of very large contracts is the MOJ and companies such as SERCO and G4S, the losers will include tax payers and the public at large. I fundamentally disagree with Tom Gash. SERCO and G4S have proven that they cannot be trusted with these sort of contracts. They will in any case be conflicted in trying to run prison services and probation conntracts within the same commercial operation. I believe that the UK is alone in attempting to operate a probation system with a profit motive. Unlike the privatisation of the prison service which has been trialled and tested in one or two places, the Government is now attempting to reform the whole of a national public service in one step. This means that if something goes badly wrong with the process, there will be no way back for the probation of ex-offenders. We are at the brink of a major change in our national approach to rehabilitating and monitoring people who have broken our laws and served their prison sentences. Many of these people are very vulnerable and need a great deal of support if they are to avoid remaining in what for many is a revolving door experience. I suspect if these people were not prisoners, but instead people with low educational attainment, high numbers of people with mental health conditions and people who have been abused and damaged by others around them, that all of our newspapers would be calling for a halt to this ‘reform’ and raising questions about the suitability of G4S and SERCO to provide these services. The truth is many of our ex-offenders do fit that description. It is time for people like Tom Gash to speak out for a stop to this process. Lets get Lance Armstrong off his bike and if that means that the race comes to an end, then we must pay that price!