Guidance

National Probation Service Sentencer update - North East Division

Published 26 March 2015

Applies to England and Wales

1. National Probation Service – working closely with Sentencers

Probation services have always valued close and effective working relationships with sentencers, and this has continued following the creation of the National Probation Service (NPS) last year.

The NPS and NOMS in Wales now work alongside the newly formed Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) to provide a full range of probation services. Throughout the changes that have taken place during the past year we have made every effort to ensure that the services you have required have remained of a high standard, and maintaining our positive relationships with sentencers is an important element of these efforts.

We also appreciate the importance of regular communication between sentencers, courts and probation services. That is why we have started to create news and updates on GOV.UK which we hope you will find both informative and useful.

The introduction of the Offender Rehabilitation Act in February has brought about considerable reform, including the introduction of supervision for the vast majority of offenders sentenced to under 12 months in prison. The numbers of offenders affected by the changes introduced by the ORA will increase during the coming months, including the use of the new Rehabilitation Activity Requirement (RAR).

The NPS is arranged into seven divisions, each led by experienced senior managers. We hope that you are already familiar with the senior NPS managers in your area; however an article from each divisional NPS lead is contained in this section. We’ve also included a selection of news articles from each division to give a flavour of some of the activity happening across the NPS.

We hope the information provided will prove interesting and useful, but we would appreciate your input to tell us what kind of information you’d like to receive from the NPS in future. A short survey has been set up to gather your views and we’ll use these to shape future communications with you.

Thank you

Colin Allars, Director, Probation

Sarah Payne, Director, National Offender Management Service in Wales

2. Working with the new Rehabilitation Activity Requirement (RAR)

The recently introduced Rehabilitation Activity Requirement (RAR) offers the opportunity for a greater range of work to address offending behaviour.

Sentencers will be aware that this new requirement is available for both Community and Suspended Sentence Orders and replaces much of what would have been previously undertaken using supervision and activity requirements. It is for the court to first decide whether a Community Order or Suspended Sentence Order with a RAR is an appropriate sentencing disposal and then to set the length of the sentence and the maximum number of activity days.

The RAR does not allow for a minimum number of days, only a maximum. The allocated Responsible Officer, (previously known as Offender Manager or Probation Officer), will then decide the content of the activity days, how they will be delivered, how frequently the offender attends.

In some instances, the content of the RAR activity may be decided pre sentence where there are bespoke interventions in place. Therefore while the court may be aware of the proposed content, it cannot set what specific rehabilitation activities should be delivered under the RAR.

Roz Hamilton, NOMS Deputy Director and Courts Lead for the National Probation Service, said:

“The National Probation Service continues to work closely with the Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) in each division as they begin their rehabilitation services in line with the requirements of the RAR.

“This close working relationship will ensure that the NPS and sentencers are kept informed of what interventions and activities are available and also the impact they are having.

“The NPS will continue to provide the pre-sentence reports in all cases where sentencers feel that a Community Order may be suitable, and this will identify the areas of concern which may be usefully addressed with a RAR.

“The RAR will offer a flexible framework within which the provider will be able to identify the areas of concern in a person’s life and create bespoke interventions to address these.

“At this early stage of implementation we are working with courts and CRCs to arrive at the most appropriate approach to the new requirement that will offer the best outcome for offenders and communities.

“We look forward to working with sentencers to arrive at a shared understanding of these new provisions.”

3. Update from the Deputy Director - North East Division

In the National Probation Service North East Division we have been maintaining our close links with sentencers both in magistrates and crown courts in all of our court areas.

As part of this, we have given updates on our progress since the formation of the NPS in June, we have shared information on probation performance and established our arrangements with the Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) on joint sentencer liaison.

I have been encouraged by the fact that sentencers continue to give us many positive comments about probation performance.

We will need to work ever more closely with sentencers over the next few months on the Offender Rehabilitation Act and the Rehabilitation Activity Requirement.

I know that creating good links with our partners in the criminal justice system is vital which is why we have established a joint working group of NPS staff and HMTCS.

We have identified a number of areas where we are looking to make improvements and get consistent arrangements, following on from forming the NPS from a number of previous Probation Trust areas.

The areas we are working on are:

• measures of Probation performance that are required by HMCTS and Sentencers.
• NPS receiving all relevant court results in the most efficient and timely way.
• transforming summary justice and NPS contribution to this through delivery of reports on the day, written fast delivery reports and pre-sentence reports.
• digital working and the Court wi-fi roll out.
• enforcement – a review of our different inherited arrangements in the NPS North East, our approach to Breach trials and Crown Court Rights of Audience for NPS staff.

If you have any questions about these areas, or any other thoughts about areas this working group should look at, please email darren.thompson@justice.gsi.gov.uk

Lynda Marginson, NPS Deputy Director, North East Division

4. Probation accessing Court Results

One of the issues the North East Division have been looking at since the National Probation Service was formed has been a consistent and efficient way to ensure we receive all court results involving a probation intervention.

In Humberside, the NPS has been working very closely with the HM Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) Delivery Manager to enable reports to run from Libra to ensure that any sentences being imposed by our local courts are not missed.

The HMCTS Delivery Manager has created a Probation Report in Libra specifically containing details of sentences/cases NPS need to know about.

The NPS lead for this work then selected the relevant Libra codes from the Libra User Guide and has selected the appropriate cases, which also takes into account sentences under the new Offender Rehabilitation Act (ORA).

These reports are now available to use and are now in operational practice. When HMCTS Staff have validated all sentences for a particular day (usually within 24 hours) they will sent notification to NPS mailboxes specific to the court location.

Our NPS Court Staff in each location can then pull the report from Libra.

This report can be used to cross reference with the information we already have (from covering court) to ensure that no cases have been missed.

This is a great example of the new partnership working we have been able to take forward now that NPS is also part of the MoJ.

We will be discussing this approach with other parts of the North East Division as we seek to find the best and most efficient process for all.

5. Give us your feedback

NOMS has always valued a good working relationship with Sentencers and we appreciate any feedback received about any of our communications.

Please could you take a few moments to answer the following questions which will help us to evaluate this publication and shape future versions.

Give us your feedback