Toby Eccles, development director at Social Finance, has warned MPs that the government’s rehabilitation reforms have an “inherent incumbency bias”, and that the process is happening too quickly to allow charities to take part.

Eccles was speaking to the Justice Select Committee which is examining the government’s Transforming Rehabilitation programme.

The government plans to contract probation services out of the public sector as part of its Transforming Rehabilitation programme. The scheme will see contracts split across 20 regions for England and one for Wales with responsibility for supervising and rehabilitating 225,000 low and medium-risk offenders each year.

Some 700 organisations, including 399 voluntary sector organisations, are competing to take part in the scheme, which is due to start next April.

However, speaking to the Justice Select Committee about the reforms, Eccles warned that they were big issues with charities’ access to finance, access to data and the structure of the model.

Lack of diversity

“There is a danger that we will move from one monotone solution to another monotone solution,” he said, “and not a diverse sector with a good mix of private companies, social sector organisations and mutuals.

“There are some attempts to create smaller schemes. But it still feels like the model favours those who have had lots of procurement with the Ministry of Justice before. There is an element of inherent incumbency bias in the model.”

Eccles continued that there was a lot of uncertainty and financial constraints with the model: “It is still uncertain whether one can bid or not,” he said. “And to bid you have to demonstrate you have half a year's worth of money available. But you can’t raise this if you don’t know what you are doing. So you have to have this money already available, so you are creating another constraint in the market.”

Eccles' concerns are especially pertinent considering that Secretary of State for Justice Chris Grayling told the Justice Select Committee earlier this year that the rehabilitation reforms would be a major opportunity for the social investment sector. He held up the social impact bond scheme in Peterborough as a good model for private and voluntary sector partnership in prisoner rehabilitation.

But Eccles - one of the architects of social impact bonds - told the Committee that the timetable for the rehabilitation reforms do not allow for access to finance on time. “Social investment is still emerging,” he said. “And it’s taking longer than expected to work, though we are pushing it along.”

Elaborating on this, Alisa Helbitz, director of research and communications at Social Finance, told civilsociety.co.uk that the government’s proposals for payment by results in Transforming Rehabilitation were very different from the Peterborough model.

“Peterborough was set up to address  a gap in provision for short-sentenced offenders. The government's Transforming Rehabilitation programme is primarily about restructuring present probation services, on which Peterborough offers little of relevance.”

Grayling also told Committee MPs earlier this year that the Justice Department was also doing intense work on data to provide a databank which can be used by charities to understand their impact.

Rehabilitation data provided only to primes

But speaking to the Justice Select Committee this month, Eccles warned that there was a “paucity” of data available on rehabilitation.

He said that currently the sets of information about reoffending which the Ministry of Justice provided to bidders was only made available to prime-contractor bidders, so those bidding for subcontracts had to rely on the primes for access to information.

Eccles said this meant smaller organisations had no negotiating position. Talking to civilsociety.co.uk afterwards, he said it was all very well for Grayling to say that charities needed more “commercial savvy,” when they didn’t have the information needed to negotiate properly.

During the Committee meeting, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour MP for Islington North, pressed Eccles on the issue of transparency and data.

Eccles warned of a stark lack of transparency, and cited the highly unpopular Work Programme, as having “no transparency at all”.

He said there needed to be more openness on data, and this had to be mandated for everyone. “You don’t want to be on the only transparent provider on the block,” he said.

Balancing transparency with commercial sensitivities

However, while he supported more transparency with data, he also said this had to be balanced with the commercial sensitivities of organisations, and the risk of the press exploiting data for a headline.

He suggested that the publishing of data could have a time delay. “If data was published month by month it risks becoming part of the news story and discouraging anyone from doing something innovative.”

He continued: “If we publish outcome data as it becomes available it would be very difficult. Data takes a while, it is complex and fiddly. And in the first year I’d be very surprised if someone made a difference. I also fear it could increase the rate of data fraud if organisations had to publish it monthly.”

He suggested that there could be a delay in releasing data for two or three years into a contract. He also said that if after three years data showed that reoffending was not going down, the contract could be terminated. “Things like that would make things really interesting,” he said.

Speaking at the same session, Oli Henman from NCVO voiced concern about a lack of clarity on the subcontracting elements of the Transforming Rehabilitation programme, and the speed of it: “We are quite alarmed at the pace at which we are moving. Our members are expected to mobilise over the next few months.”

Henman also suggested that grant funding or upfront funding should be made available for smaller providers taking part in specialist services in the scheme.