There are many public service activities where it is inappropriate for private contractors to be involved. The contractors in some activities can be continually at risk of succumbing to the moral hazard of being in a situation where greater profit can accrue if standards are lowered – and contrariwise.
A Criminal-Justice system depends on support from an effective Probation Service.
In 2013 the UK Ministry of Justice (MoJ) reviewed all 35 of the then publicly owned trusts which administered the country’s Probation Service. All were found to have been assessed as “Good” or “Excellent”.
However the then Minister of Justice, Conservative Chris Grayling, decided in 2014 that he would privatise 70% of the service, keeping just 30% still within the MoJ to handle “serious cases”.
After at least two false starts, the contracts for so-called “Community Rehabilitation Companies” (CMCs) were let starting in February 2015.
The contracts did not require disclosure of staff numbers and almost immediately the CMCs started cutting thousands of staff – mostly the more experienced and higher paid. The remaining staff were then incentivised with cash based targets.
Despite this, shortly afterwards several CMCs went into receivership following apparent financial failure.
Soon work was not being done – less than 50% of required domestic abuse enquiries and only 45% of safeguarding enquiries with children’s services were carried out.
The staff were inexperienced. lacking in adequate training and overworked.
As a result in 2021 an appalling incident occurred when a pre-sentence report was written for an offender without police evidence – that the man was a violent criminal – being included. As a result the sentence was suspended and the man was allowed to live with his pregnant girlfriend. In September of the same year he murdered her and three children.
The officer monitoring the suspended sentence had been recruited only 6 months earlier and, like the author of the inadequate report concerned, had insufficient experience and training for managing such a high risk offender.
The Minister responsible for the probation service, Rory Stewart, responding to public pressure and adverse reports acknowledged in 2019 that the privatised arrangements had failed. In 2020 it was decided that the contracts would be terminated early.
The Probation Service in returned to MoJ in June 2021, but too late to prevent the disaster of September 2021.