WORKING LINKS SPECIAL,

If further proof were needed of the total shambles that Transforming Rehabilitation has caused, than look no further than the news revealed over the last day that the Community Rehabilitation Companies owned by Working Links are about to put forward plans for swingeing cuts in the region of 40%.

This has rightly caused anger amongst members in the three CRC’s concerned covering Wales, Avon, Bristol  and Devon, Dorset, and Cornwall who having gone through the trauma of the TR assignment process now find themselves in a potential redundancy situation.

Urgent talks are being convened between the national probation unions, local reps, senior CRC management and their owners about the extent of the intended cuts and their impact on staff numbers, but it is not hard to see how disastrous these will be to people’s future employment prospects in areas already blighted by the austerity agenda.

As always Napo will issue more detailed news once it is available but during my visit to South Western Branch members in Exeter recently I made it clear that Napo stands ready to assist them in negotiations with management, local campaigns against cuts of this order that can only pose a serious risk to public safety and ultimately industrial action if members decide that this is what they want.

Heads should roll but it shouldn’t be our members

Whilst Working Links will no doubt join the ever increasing whinge queue and pray in aid the Weighted Annual Volumes (WAV) figures and the absence of reliable information that was available to them from the infamously dodgy MoJ Data Room (see my ‘Salting the Mine’ Blog from a while ago). Key question doing the rounds is that someone ought to be accountable for predicating a bid that several months on could see one third of the combined workforce over the three CRC’s disappear.

We were told by Ministers before TR that the workforce in the then proposed CRC’s would ‘evolve’. Try telling that to staff who have given their all whilst being treated like chattels in the shambolic and discredited procurement process, and people who, even if they secure the Early Voluntary Redundancy terms that of course we will be insisting upon so as to avoid compulsory redundancies, face little likelihood of similar employment.

Ministers will offer a sympathetic message or two and again praise the hard work of probation staff etc. etc. but the reality is that their platitudes will be seen by our members as not worth a fig.

More news on this development next week, along with the other stuff that I have had to park for now.