CRB Mishaps: Implications for the voluntary sector

 What would you do if you were falsely labelled as a violent criminal? The Criminal Justice system is a large, labyrinthine construct, notoriously difficult to navigate by the professionals that work within it, let alone an ordinary citizen wanting to volunteer time to a charity going through a CRB disclosure process.

Back in April, The Daily Telegraph ran an investigation which highlighted that as many as 20,000 people have been wrongly given a criminal record and forced to suffer the implications unnecessarily through systemic inaccuracies.

 That’s 20, 000 potential volunteers, teachers, nurses, medical students, social workers or anyone considering a career working with the public, sensitive information or cash.

  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/9054972/Thousands-wrongly-labelled-as-criminals.html

Let’s focus on what this means for the voluntary sector. CRB disclosure is meant to act as a ‘safeguard’; implemented, rightly or wrongly, by Whitehall. Below, a CRB spokesperson provides as an outline of the primary aim and outcomes of disclosure:

"The CRB's first priority is to protect children and vulnerable adults by helping employers recruit people into positions of trust. In the past four years, CRB checks have prevented 130,000 unsuitable people from working with vulnerable groups”.  (The Daily Telegraph, 2^nd February 2012).

Sure, the CRB disclosure does this. But what happens when the process goes horribly wrong? The issue here is consistency. 

Firstly, 20,000 people have had to spend time, energy and resources clearing their names. Secondly, Social Enterprises like Kazuri are deprived of potential volunteers; who are instead busy navigating a confusing arm of the criminal justice system. Big busted flush for Dave's Big society.

Furthermore, what happens if the CRB disclosure check gets outsourced in whole or part to large corporation driven by profits as part of a PPP deal? Next we'll be outsourcing the police, oh wait...

Proposals to cut HB for under 25s - joint Charities response

Shelter has signed a joint letter to the Prime Minister today, in response to Conservative Party proposals to cut housing benefit for under 25s.

The letter, which was published in The Times newspaper [paywallhttp://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/l ... 457264.ece ] calls for David Cameron to re-consider his proposals earlier this week, or risk having a ‘disastrous impact on thousands of young adults.’

Campbell Robb, Shelter’s Chief Executive, joins nine other charities signing the letter, including Barnardo’s, Crisis and The Children’s Society.

Read the full letter below.

Sir,

The Prime Minister’s proposals to cut benefits for under-25s will have a disastrous impact on thousands of young adults, especially at a time of record youth unemployment.

Tens of thousands of young people simply don’t have stable family and friends to go back to if they lose their job or fall ill. Young mums and dads, people whose parents have downsized or those who have experienced family breakdown will be particularly affected.

You don’t root out any excesses in the system by abolishing an entire safety net for young people. They too pay into the state safety net when they are working in the belief that it will be there for them when they need it. Evidence shows that when young adults claim support, many will need it for less than six months before they get back on their feet and into work.

We welcome open debate about the challenge of giving young people a fair start and making work pay. But with these ill-conceived proposals, the Prime Minister has gone too far.

Yours,

Anne Marie Carrie, Chief Executive, Barnardo’s
Seyi Obakin, Chief Executive, Centrepoint
Matthew Reed, Chief Executive, The Children's Society
Leslie Morphy OBE, Chief Executive, Crisis
Jane Slowey, Chief Executive, The Foyer Federation
Fiona Weir, Chief Executive, Gingerbread
Matt Harrison, Interim Chief Executive, Homeless Link
Campbell Robb, Chief Executive, Shelter
Jean Templeton, Chief Executive, St Basils
Ian Green, Chief Executive, YMCA England

Open Letter to Grant Shapps, Housing Minister

Ms Farah Damji
Kazuri Properties Ltd
1a Waterlow Road | London | N19 5NJ

The Right Honorable Grant Shapps, MP
Minister for Housing
DGLC

26 March 2012                                                                   URGENT via e mail and Fax

Dear Mr Shapps

I write in dismay about the additional funding being given to charities such as Crisis and Shelter next month,  to “help end homelessness” in the private rented sector.  This is referred hereto on the Crisis PRS website

The Crisis PRS Access Development Programme funds new community based services that help single homeless people find and sustain good quality accommodation in the private rented sector (PRS). It builds on Crisis’ history and expertise in PRS solutions to homelessness and represents an investment of over £10m of DCLG funding over a three year period.

There is no  independent monitoring or evaluation of outcomes or sustainability in what Crisis  and Shelter are doing.     I know of cases in which dozens of tenancies have not been maintained because support was not there for tenants being placed through the scheme, and in others when quite manageable performance targets were reduced by 75% because charities who had been given this funding could not access  private landlords, whom they have to engage in order to get people into properties.  Once a person has been offered a property through the private rented sector they are removed from the Local Authority’s Housing List and are no longer able to access it, therefore  if they cannot maintain the tenancy, they are homeless again  without recourse to the Local Authority or indeed the charity funded by these hare-brained schemes. One I know , Vision Housing   claims to house ex offenders and has been granted  fifty thousand pounds. The owner then insists the tenant also gets a crisis loan from the DWP to pay a “referral fee,” thereby poverty pimping off the most needy and destitute. I am an ex offender, I have gone through the ridiculous process of trying to access suitable housing  and that this is not acceptable, you cannot seek to profit through other people’s desperation, it’s worse than loan sharking or doorstep payday loans which at least are  in the process of being regulated.

I attach a schedule of Kazuri’s outcomes  up to November 2011 so you can see the model works. Not one woman has been sent back to prison, bee convicted of a new offence  or gone back to a violent relationship and we are now expanding the provision to assist Local Authorities move men and women  off the Housing Lists and also out of prison and from Accident and Emergency wards into sustained housing. 

 This has been good for Kazuri, when charities who have been funded through the Crisis grants  have not been able to access landlords  even through letting agencies, they have approached us and paid referral fees because ours is not a leaky charity bucket model which breeds disempowerment ,  we are a social enterprise, with a triple bottom line, human, social and financial return on investment.  Our tenancy agreements actually state the tenant must partake in employment, education and/ or  training, do a minimum of 5 hours of volunteer work  in a recognized project for the benefit of the community to help restore the broken social bond and work with a mentor. We undertake monthly tenancy checks and support our tenants  to become self sufficient, contributing members of society. This is not the model to which charities who have been rinsing Supporting People budgets for years work. They are being paid through Supporting People budgets to keep people on benefits  disempowered and  dependent on Local Housing Allowance. Rather like characters from a Dickens novel, they are paid to retain  a substrata of society  to  stay within the culture of entitlement which is no longer affordable to our society . Sadly in this case, truth is stranger than fiction.

Crisis and Shelter fund charities who cannot compete in the highly competitive private rented sector and whilst there are undoubtedly pockets of good practice, they are not given any outcomes which they have to attain, by Central Government. This is free money, literally for nothing except to manage their own top heavy bureaucratic structures. This  is far removed from this Government’s move away from  non-performance and moving towards rewarding success rather than stagnation  through  the payments by results models. I am greatly concerned at the lengths to which Crisis and Shelter attempt  to demonize and indeed criminalize all landlords with their recent Rogue Landlords campaign and by the flyer attached herewith , which I picked up in my local Sainsbury’s  supermarket. 

The sector has long called for regulation and good landlords, which are the vast majority do not condone or participate in the illegal activities of a few rogue landlords who are common criminals, benefitting from the poorest and most vulnerable in society . Indeed one of the most respected landlord’s organizations has just started a petition asking the Government to bring in mandatory licensing of lettings agencies. This should  be supported and applauded. I ask where the funding is coming from for the film that Shelter has commissioned  and whether this has been sanctioned by Government. Surely it is in everyone’s interest to work with the landlords who are the gateway to the private rented sector, not disgust and alienate them completely.  Why then would they  encourage name-calling and  hostility towards those people who must engage in the process of providing shelter.  When private landlords see  campaigns based on bullying, they cease to offer their properties up to the private rented sector. Let’s face it, who hasn’t been burnt by private rented sector “incentives” run by Local Authorities? Tower Hamlets and Brighton councils are now planning to run their own social lettings agencies.  With the amount of bad feeling and arrears  they generate and the rush to remove risk and responsibility to the private  sector, these schemes are doomed to fail and I will be there lighting the funeral pyre when they implode and Heads of Housing are asked why they didn’t act in cooperation with landlords  rather than trying to change the sector to fit public sector preconceptions, backwards momentum and rigidity. 

 The voluntary sector cannot take on the risk or the responsibility as pointed out by Bernard Jenkin,    Chair of the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC)   recently when discussing the failure of the Government’s much touted Work Program. There  is no transparency in the process around which funds are decanted to  Crisis or to Shelter and no transparency either in the way these funds are given the charities who benefit or to the tenants they are supposedly placing in tenancies. 

Until the complete and audited evaluation of the current funding schemes in place and a report  is published concerning  what has actually been achieved in the way of sustained (longer than 6 months) tenancies and other outcomes, such as lessened benefits and journey travelled towards employment or education, I must ask that this next round of funding is suspended. There is no case to be made for simply passing money on to charities who do NOT help homeless people and who have never built a building or been a landlord.  Based on the Housing First model which Kazuri has successfully deployed, there is no point offering jewelry making classes, as do Crisis in their lovely building (located in a prime location and expensively staffed),  for people to get into work as they cannot work if they have nowhere to live. The voluntary sector cannot sustain the risk of the responsibility to engage the private rented sector in this manner. Shelter and Crisis are good at academia, policy and research, let them raise and generate funding for that, not pretend to be tinkering round actually putting people into long term homes, which is the heart of the problem.

Kazuri is in the process of compiling a response along with some of the largest landlord organizations and regulatory bodies, developers, builders, town planners , property lawyers and housing specialists  as well as institutional investors and high street banks   to Sir Adrian Montague’s call for consultation asking why the private and institutional investor will not engage in the private rented sector. I would urge you to wait till the evaluations of Sir Adrian’s findings  before funding anymore “charity”  private rented sector schemes. 

I hope to hear from you as a matter of urgency. I am considering having the funding  issue brought forward to the Public Accounts Committee and will seek Judicial Review about the process as to how the funding has been allocated. I trust this will not be necessary.

Kind regards

Farah Damji
Director of Development
Kazuri  Properties Ltd

Crisis in crisis

A challenge to Heather Munro of London Probation Trust: 
Why not engage responsibly with the private rented sector, not a bunch of policy wonks? How many of your people on license have Crisis helped into sustainable private rented sector tenancies which have lasted the duration of the term? Charities such as Crisis and Shelter have a place in effecting research and a framework for good policy and practise   but generally,  landlords will not engage directly and PRS schemes  they have  funded  have not evidenced sustained success.

How can you help empower ex offenders to manage sustainable tenancies? Ex offenders need to understand their rights and responsibilities as tenants and  tell their story to landlords in a way that empowers their  desistance, not be held back by entering into badly managed poor tenancies in which landlords are lied to, not explained EXACTLY what the ex offender's background is and in which the tenancy fails and you  perpetuate the cycle of homelessness. Tell you what, we'll send along two of our most powerful trainers and  tenant advocates for a free day of training to probation officers and those on licences in the community.

We wholeheartedly support Crisis and Shelter's work in lobbying for changes in policy and addressing the  need for research in this sector but they are not equipped to deal professionally  with the private sector, landlords have been burnt by too many Private Rented Schemes designed by charities who do not understand that the bottom line for every landlord has to be sustainability and to be able to pay his mortgage and related outgoings on a rented property. Too many tenancies have been missold by the  Social Lettings Agency model purveyed by Local Authorities. Till you start to engage with the private rented sector, you don't have a chance of helping people on probation achieving successful, supported tenancies with buy in from all the stakeholders engaged.  Let's talk, Ms Munro.

Heather Munro, London Probation Trust

Lovely press release, time for action.

March 15 2012

'Homelessness' contributory factor to offending

Over a quarter of London offenders serving their sentence in the community have housing as a ‘criminogenic need’* - according to data from the UK’s largest probation trust.

London Probation Trust (LPT) has over 40,000** offenders on its books at any one time and is the largest service of its kind in Europe.

LPT Chief Executive Heather Munro said: "Homelessness is an issue probation officers will come across on a daily basis when dealing with the offenders under their supervision.

"Most people working in probation would probably say the lack of stable accommodation, a place to call ‘home’, is one of the biggest contributing factors when it comes to offending and reoffending. It’s well known that if you are sleeping rough or moving from place to place that you are more likely to end up reoffending.

"Our data shows that 27*** per cent of the offenders on our books have problems with their accommodation. Usually this will be just one of several issues we have to help offenders deal with as part of addressing their criminal behaviour. Offenders tend to have complex backgrounds with multiple concerns – lack of skills, lack of employment, low finances, problems with substance abuse etc; and they are often compounded by issues with housing."

Heather pinpoints the direct link between homelessness and offending as the most likely reason her staff voted Crisis as their 2012 Charity of the Year.

She said: "I’m very pleased to be supporting Crisis – and not at all surprised that it came out top in our staff poll.

"We’re already working with them in our approved premises, where they provide free employment and skills advice to offenders as well as help some of them to secure more permanent accommodation.

"Crisis is a great charity and we will be exploring ways for staff to donate their time as volunteers as well as raise funds for this worthwhile cause."

Last year LPT staff raised money for several charities, including the Cassandra Learning Centre; Setu Nepal and MacMillan Cancer Support.

ENDS

*There are several criminogenic needs which are identified in the Offender Assessment System (OASys) tool. The guidance states:

"There is clear evidence that lack of permanent decent accommodation is related to re-offending. Those of no fixed abode or who are living in hostels, especially hostels with other offenders, are more likely to offend. Those who have many changes of address are more likely to re-offend. Accommodation can also be seen as a proxy measure for social exclusion. Not having a postal address can have serious and widespread consequences. Living in a high crime area is an environmental factor that can affect the rate of re-offending. A sudden change of accommodation status can lead to a significant change in the likelihood of reconviction very quickly, so this section is one of the most ‘dynamic’ area is OASys. Carlisle (1996), when discussing the housing needs of ex-prisoners, reviewed research that clearly showed a link between unsuitable accommodation and the rate of reconviction. (OASys Manual, 2002)

**This figure includes offenders who are currently on licence in the community as well as those under LPT’s supervision in prison.

***This figure only applies to those offenders currently on licence or serving their sentence in the community and for whom an OASys assessment is available. The OASys data is from the assessments over the last 12 months.

The scandal of A4e, an insider's view

Our intern K spent some time at Her Majesty's leisure at HMP YOI Feltham.
Here's his view on the   contracts announced today for learning and skills for offenders in prison and in the community for scandal ridden company A4e.

A4e are a company who are meant to deliver a service which they are  contracted to do with tax payers' money. They should be, and are responsible and accountable to us, the general public, for  delivering the various services which are procured by Government and are trusted and funded with large amounts of tax payers' money to ensure they deliver their services efficiently,  in the very least.

However, it appears this is not the case. A4e cannot clearly be trusted  to deliver contracts  procured by  Government, they are paid to deliver a service which they are not providing efficiently, and it looks like most of the tax payer’s money is just getting pocketed by these fat cats such as Emma  Harrison, the Chief Executive who recently stepped down as Family Tsar and  who  helped herself to £11m in bonuses over the last two years. Whilst she enjoys herself on the loot, living lavish, customers on her company's programs are floundering and are feeling the lack of provision  and witnessing first hand that A4e actually doesn't provide a service which helps them find employment but just make matters worse for them. People are beginning to “feel let down by the service that is meant to help them”. For example, Ms Verwaerde, 25, from Leicester who said that, she was put up for an interview by A4e, as part of the Coalition's Work Programme. The job was in sales, offering £7,000 a year plus commission. But after A4e told her she had been offered the position, she says she was discouraged from asking for written confirmation of her hours and pay; she was told she could have her benefits sanctioned if she did not accept the position, and was then told by two A4e staff that she could "give it (the job) a go" without having to notify the Jobcentre. Ms Verwaerde, whose ambition is to work in the police service one day, said she feels she has been failed by the very service meant to help her. "It felt like I was being pushed into a corner."  If she did not notify the JobCentre, she would be committing a fraud and would have faced sanctions, such as having her Job Seekers' Allowance cut or worse, criminal charges.

This raises serious concerns about whether  A4e are  fit for purpose, to deliver services to prisoners , especially  to   prisoners who are already vulnerable and a target to police because they will be on supervision licenses. Is it safe to allow them to be managed and forced into committing criminal acts, unknowingly by the employees of a company riddled with systemic fraud which is paid to assist them.   As evidenced  in  the case with Ms Verwaerde A4e are relaying the responsibility onto their vulnerable clients.

What the Government are doing taking on board A4e when they knew   serious allegations of systematic fraud existed regarding the  company and there have been numerous whisteblowers come forward since the most recent spate of arrests three weeks ago? It’s just as bad as letting an armed robber work as a cashier  in your bank is there a clear risk factor there. A4e have no other interest than to make a huge profit and deliver the service however inefficient it may be,  however how can we have a company with such problems internally be given contracts to help with the ex-offender community who really need help. An ex offender in work is far less likely to reoffend and gets a strong footing on his desistance  journey.

As someone who’s been prison before I want the Government to give out contracts to companies that are reliable, accountable and genuinely want to help me to get employed and not make life harder for me by pretending they are helping when really they are not doing nothing actually and potentially jeopardising my freedom.

But with the latest round of prison education contracts  announced today , others fear that in reality a system already under strain is about to become even more stretched, as ever more unworkable demands are heaped on it and its staff. In its submission to the Making Prisons Work review, the University and College Union told ministers its members were struggling to maintain standards in an environment increasingly hostile to learning, blaming the competitive retendering system. 

Cost-cutting in the pursuit of profits, attacks on staff pay and conditions, instability and bad management practises, including bullying, have resulted from the process, UCU claimed.

Charities subcontracted by the big private providers to deliver the service have warned they face going bust under harsh contracts that only pay out if they get a client into work and keep them there for six months, and last week, analysis by the National Audit Office found that rather than the 40% of people the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) estimates will get jobs via the programme, the figure is likely to be closer to 26%. That, the NAO said, increases the risk that providers might seek to protect profits by favouring those they can get into steady work more swiftly. There are fears that adopting a similar system in prison education will bring the same problems, the distorting effect of targets merely replaced with a similarly problematic focus on outcomes. Alastair Clark, co-leader on offender learning at the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, talks of the "perverse incentive to go for the quick wins" offered by payment by results; 

 "The people you can easily get into a job, and who can sustain it, could probably have done it themselves," says  Maria McNicholl from St Giles Trust. "Who is then helping people like a lot of our core clients? They're just being left as usual; nobody's paying you to help the people who need it most."

Racism and Misogyny in the Criminal Justice System

Here are the virals from the event in September chaired by ex prisoner ex Minister Jonathan Aitken, Imran Khan, Eoin McLennan Murray and others featuring questions from women serving prison sentences. Women, the unheard voices in the Rehabilitation Revolution

Mental Health Friday by Farah Damji

Friday afternoon, I took a tour to easternmost (well almost)   Bow to the old Victorian Cemetary  to see one of our customers (they're tenants but they're so much more, tenant / landlord relationship has the connotations of modern day Rachmanism and I prefer the word customer or client to service user, blame our CEO Viv Ahmun,  for inducting me into this customer friendly language) fulfilling the volunteering requirement that we ask all of them to complete, as part of their residence in one of our properties. The minimum is five hours a week and we have racked up a few thousand hours, putting good will and hard graft back into the local communities where our customers live.

She is volunteering at the Providence Row  Housing Association  horticultural therapy project, Ecominds. Seen that amazing eco bar on the top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the South Bank Centre? That's the fruit of this talented lot's endeavours.

I didn't really know what to expect  but the walk through the peaceful but neglected cemetary allowed me some space away from the hustle and the bustle of my day-to-day. There, nestled away in a corner of the rambling plot with spectacular views of the Gherkin, Canary Wharf and the neighbouring crawling council estate, just over the ten foot high stone wall,  were a dozen or so people dressed in gardening gear and steel capped boots busily chopping down trees, planting wildflowers and moving logs of wood. On a portable gas stove there was a   vegetable curry  / spicy chilli bubbling over and some eager stirring  meant the scent rose up into the warm early spring air.  Here,  a real life diorama,  depicted the disparity which is Tower Hamlets Borough,  so much potential and so much wealth, yet such deprivation. Recent reports confirmed that 58% of Tower Hamlets young people lived below the poverty line, so on  10 pounds  or less a day, for an entire family, a world away from the glass cages and luxury penthouses along the river in Wapping.



Paul, one of the founders who was formerly homeless (picture below, third from right, standing)  started Ecotherapy Grounded, and looks like a weathered Jesus, skin worn and sundried with the healthy gleam of  hope in his sparkling blue eyes. Kelvin Barton (left), a former social worker joined Paul and together they run a project on Friday afternoons for people experiencing mental distress  who seek some company and to feel useful and the combination of camaraderie and physical labour  appears to have direct positive results. The project is now in its sixth year with some  volunteers attending consistently over a number of years and all had a good word to say about their experiences on the project, brimming over with a sense of pride and ownership.

I get lots of background noise from various agencies and my colleagues about insisting upon the volunteering aspect of the Kazuri model but this is what makes it different and (touch wood) successful. No other social lettings agency which  rehouses ex offenders, vulnerable women and people from supported housing embeds the community aspect in the offering. By being supported by and interconnected with the local community at the grassroots level, projects which work for the hardest to reach group are primed to succeed, they engage a sense of stakeholder-ship and stewardship at the micro level. This breaks away from the dependency  model  and stigma of social housing and empowers people to feel more confident, straight away.  

This part of the tenancy is made very clear before we offer any propective clients a tenancy and we help identify a local volunteering scheme, in which they are interested  and which doesn't feel like a burden. It looks great on their CV and doesn't affect their welfare benefits, as long as the unpaid work is declared.

Part of the process of desistance is a sense of belonging and being a contributing, participating member of society (a steady job and the love of a good woman), and we've watched our customers evolve and blossom as they reaffirm their social bond through this simple gesture of restorative justice. Volunteering work has lead to paid work and sustainable employment, through increased self confidence and self worth.

I was truly impressed by the team spirit, the real sense of equality and the obviously great sense of achievement which has manifested itself in the corner of that tumbledown graveyard. Trees are being cleared away so that butterflies and other insects will pollinate the area and the life cycle is restored by repairing broken links in the food chain. Many of the service users have been chronically homeless, have multiple needs and  can suffer from a dual diagnosis. Some have long histories of offending behaviour. Something about a good bit of hard graft and being around people who also want to move into an empowered, authentic self has more than ticked the statutory boxes of reducing depression and reoffending. I left feeling pleased that I had taken the time out to go and visit our customer on the project and we are actively looking at how we can refer more of our clients, particularly those in Tower Hamlets, into this patently effective way of boosting health, self esteem and well-being.

Rt Hon Mr Iain Duncan Smith, take note, this is not compulsory, it is volunteering into community projects in return for a clear, contractual benefit ( housing and supported tenancy). Dump the failing Work Fare  Program and try this instead!

For more information please contact Ecominds directly on kbarton@prha.net