30 October 2013
Probation Service
6:39 pm
Andrew McDonald (Middlesbrough,
Labour)
During my brief time serving on the Justice Committee,
I have seen this Justice Secretary rolling out disaster after disaster
under his stewardship. The outsourcing of translation
cases resulted in whole cases being abandoned at huge cost to the Court Service
and putting at risk the liberty of individual citizens. The Ministry of Justice
was repeatedly warned that ALS—Applied Language Solutions—was incapable of
delivering a contract of that size, but those warnings were ignored. Although Her
Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service forbade front-line staff to talk to talk
to the Justice Committee, the Committee’s investigation resulted in a
declaration that the privatisation was not sustainable, even after the intervention
of ALS’s parent company, Capita. The electronic-tagging debacle has now
required the intervention of the Serious Fraud Office, yet G4S and Serco, which
won those contracts, have not been banned from entering bids to run probation
services.
6:43 pm
Jenny Chapman (Darlington,
Labour)
Serious concerns have been expressed, and not only in
the Chamber today, about the Ministry of Justice’s capacity to ably procure and
contract quality services. The language services procurement process was
described as “shambolic” by the Select Committee on Justice, and the Public
Accounts Committee reported that the Department was not an “intelligent
customer”. The Justice Committee also found that the Ministry’s naivety in
contracting was matched by its “indulgence towards underperformance” after the contracts
came into operation. In the past two years, we have had: Jajo the rabbit signed
up to be a court interpreter; charges for tagging dead inmates; and a new
contracted prison in which it is easier to get drugs than soap. When is the
Secretary of State going to recognise the need to hit the brakes, build skills
and capacity in his Department, and improve on past failures?
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