There was a time, almost three years ago, when the Tories came close to doing some radical thinking on the role of the third sector – even if they were, and are, far happier passing the time talking about what the sector should be called (social sector? non-profit? civil society?) as opposed to liberating it to deliver more effectively. Of course any charity worth giving money to is far too concerned with delivering change to even know that such debate even exists. There’s nothing more yawn-inducing to serious activists than David Cameron’s oft-repeated line, “I hate the term third sector because in my book you are often the first sector”; it’s focus-group flattery at its worst.

But every now and then they have hit upon a good idea. Take this one from their green paper on the third sector: charities delivering public services by contract should be allowed, even encouraged, to make a surplus. Surplus is charity-speak for profit. This would indeed be an innovation, as charities by law must reinvest any surplus in either delivering services or developing innovations that will help them achieve their charitable endeavor. It’s a win/win for the taxpayer, who can rest assured that profit as a reward for success won’t be whisked off to appease distant shareholders but instead be invested in social innovation.

As a prelude to more recent and larger announcements, this one quickly began to be picked apart though. Not in the principle, but in the Tories’ willingness to deliver it. I was in an audience when someone pointed out to Nick Hurd, the shadow charities minister, that they did not have to wait until taking power to deliver this pledge as the majority of money into the sector comes via local authorities, and the Tories controlled more than 60 per cent of them. They could deliver this policy the next day! But to my knowledge not a single local authority has encouraged third sector providers to price a surplus into their bids to run services.

Indeed, the only evidence emerging from Tories in power is that they are using the third sector as the first whipping boy in a relentless and neanderthal approach to making savings. Take Westminster city council, which in the last few days lopped £500,000 off the funding to the voluntary sector and followed this with a right-hook in the form of expelling charity representatives from their seat at the top table – the consolation prize of a powerless advisory role within the council without voting rights is nothing more than an insult to the very people closest to vulnerable people and communities in times of great hardship and crisis.

Similar practices emanating from the London Mayor’s office are well documented.

To be clear, no one sensible is saying that the third sector should be ring-fenced carte blanche from any spending cuts. Indeed, if engaged properly they are capable of delivering more services at a lower cost using radical and highly innovative practices, often employing partnership models and volunteerism in ways that statutory services can only dream of. This makes the short-termism of the Tories in power all the more galling, as it simply will not benefit anyone – service user or taxpayer alike – beyond the end of this financial year.

Just as worrying, the Tories are increasingly divorcing the different factions of their Party according to policy approaches. Take Iain Duncan Smith, who thinks that small charities are the answer to everything, coupled with a bigotry towards those who are either large (what he calls the Tesco-isation of the sector) or take contracts (which can often be similar in terms to grants but have the potential, if well negotiated, to offer long-term financial security and protect against raids and cuts by a hungry funder). Then on the other extreme you have Francis Maude and Stephen Dorrell who believe that large charities can solve nationwide problems and standardise quality of provision across geographic and regional boundaries.

This close to an election, a credible party would have bridged this divide, banged heads together, brought the policy thinkers together to plot a unified narrative. But instead the Tories have allowed the different wings to diverge, and I believe they will institutionalise this divide should they win the election.

Word is that IDS will get his much coveted department for social justice, whose job will be to moralise on the benefits of marriage on the one hand and extoll the virtues of communities solving their own problems through voluntary action (and in his book that means free of regulation and financial support from government) on the other. And then Francis Maude at the Cabinet office grappling with the challenges of public service reform and doing his best to harness the power of charities large and small whilst providing demonstrable evidence of outcomes to deliver to the public when tough questions are asked. Perhaps this fracture will see social enterprise dispatched back to the department for business, innovation and skills. This would in my mind institutionalise the conflicts within Tory thinking rather than bring them together to offer the third sector clarity and certainty.

Some of that is speculation – how can we know what the Tories will do in power when even they haven’t figured it out – but based upon the salami-slicing of Westminster, it seems that the days when charities can expect to profit from solving society’s (and government’s) most intractable problems would be delayed, not expedited, by a Tory victory in May.

The debate about crime in the run up to the election is heating up. First we had a row about disputed violent crime statistics; now the Conservatives have claimed that the Government is secretly planning to cut police officer numbers, despite pledges to protect frontline policing.

The Tory claim is based on a report by the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA), which says that financial savings could be made – and performance improved – by replacing some police officers with civilian staff to carry out various functions that do not require the skills or authority of a warranted constable.

So, who is right? First, some context: spending on the police service increased by 19 per cent in real terms between 1997/98 and 2008/09. Most of this money was spent on increasing the number of police officers: police numbers increased by 11 per cent or by 16,326 officers between 1997 and 2009, meaning that there are more police now than at any time in our history. So, in historic terms, the police are exceptionally well resourced– and at a time when crime has fallen to its lowest level since 1981.

We now face a fiscal squeeze, and all parties have said that the police service will need to find savings. The prime minister has pledged to protect “frontline policing”, but has carefully not committed the Government to protect total officer numbers overall. There is a crucial difference between those two things.

The Government’s position is entirely sensible and was one I proposed in a recent ippr report. We can protect frontline officer numbers – those out on the beat, working in neighbourhood policing teams or in frontline response teams – while also employing fewer police officers overall. This is because there are many functions that officers currently carry out at comparatively high cost that could easily be done more efficiently by civilian staff.

Evidence from recent modernisation pilots shows that greater use of civilians can raise performance: a CID team in Surrey achieved an 8 per cent lower running cost following a reconfiguration making greater use of civilian staff. Use of civilians to help with investigations led to an increase in the detection rate of one Surrey basic command unit of a third.

There is no need for the fiscal squeeze to hit frontline officer numbers – we can both protect neighbourhood policing and make significant savings – but to do that we need to engage in significant reform of the way the police service works, including the constable/civilian mix, cutting out layers of middle management and reforming costly and archaic force structures. The sooner we get away from being fixated with the overall number of officers the better.

Labour’s attack on Conservative crime policies yesterday with the launch of its video “A Long Hard Look” was merely the latest instalment in a long and ugly tradition of political posturing over criminal justice policy by the main political parties – especially during election time.

A report published today by the National Audit Office (NAO) underlines the true economic and social costs of this unfortunate political legacy, which since 1995 has contributed to an unprecedented 66 per cent rise in the prison population in England and Wales, despite the massive cost of custody and its poor record in reducing rates of reoffending.

The report, which examined the costs to the taxpayer of the use of short-term sentences, found that 60 per cent of short-sentenced prisoners commit another crime within a year of getting out, costing the country between £7 billion and £10 billion a year.

Around 60,000 prisoners are jailed for less than twelve months each year costing taxpayers £300 million. Mostly convicted of theft and minor violent crimes, they make up nearly one in ten prisoners in England and Wales.

According to the NAO, more could be done to rehabilitate prisoners serving short sentences and reduce their risk of reoffending. The report found the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) – responsible for managing such prisoners – has little information on the quality, cost or effectiveness of its rehabilitation activities.

The findings of the report might lead you to conclude that there are far better ways of cutting crime and reducing reoffending than prison. Among the main findings of the report are:

• Prisoners on short-term sentences are being left idle in their cells for much of the day;

• Overcrowding means that despite having an average of 16 convictions each, little is done to tackle their reoffending;

• Activities for prisoners are “inadequate” and prison bosses know little about how well the schemes they do run work;

• Many inmates arrive, and leave prison homeless, unemployed and addicted to drugs or alcohol; and

• Most spend as few as 45 days inside, and are released automatically at the halfway point of their sentence. In that time they are not given “appropriate assistance” to help them turn around their lives.

The evidence is clear that community penalties involving treatment for addicts, mental healthcare and sorting out housing and employment all work better than a short prison sentence. Many prisoners on short sentences will have committed an offence that is in some way drug or alcohol related, with shoplifting, burglary, vehicle crime and theft all crimes that are commonly linked to problems of addiction. Around 55 per cent of those received into custody are problematic drug users – and the majority of these have never had contact with drug treatment services.

Many of these would be much better dealt with in the community where the roots of their offending behaviour can be tackled through tailored programmes of treatment and support. Studies show that offenders who receive residential drug treatment are 45 per  cent less likely to reoffend after release than comparable offenders receiving prison sentences.

The benefits of noncustodial, community-based approaches is underlined by the recent report on Justice Reinvestment by the justice select committee. Borrowing from an approach successfully piloted by a number of states in the US it makes the case for diverting money away from the traditional institutions of criminal justice into programmes and agencies based in the community aimed at tackling the roots of offending behaviour.

As we head into the election all parties’ time would be much better spent paying attention to the overwhelming evidence for what works in criminal justice policy, instead of whipping up public fear with expensive and ill-judged videos.

There is now a fairly substantial body of evidence showing the ill effects of income inequality on society, but not yet much consensus on what to do about it, particularly given the public’s seemingly contradictory attitude towards the issue; that was the message coming out from last night’s Smith Institute and One Society event, held in the same room as many of the meetings of John Smith’s Commission on Social Justice 18 years ago.

The evidence is certainly strong. Two of the main players in this field – Kate Pickett, academic and author of the Spirit Level, and John Hills, author of the recent government-commissioned “Anatomy of Income Inequality” report – were there.

Pickett described the main point of The Spirit Level: that in rich countries, income inequality is the root cause of a whole host of health and social problems, from obesity to crime, and the UK is one of the worst. In more equal countries, the benefits of equality aren’t just felt by those lower down, they accrue right across society. (For all the evidence in painstaking detail, see the Equality Trust website).

John Hills pointed out some of the starker facts, that a tenth of social housing tenants on their retirement have assets (including everything they own) worth less than £3,000, compared with the £900,000 a professional is likely to end up with, for example.

So what does one do about it?

Hills gave some reassurance to those who hope the answer lies in government, claiming that the fall in inequality between 1999 and 2004 can be attributed to a large extent to government policy - particularly tax credits, improving public services, and the minimum wage.

Sadly he felt the conditions which made that possible – economic growth and increased spending on public services (fuelled by reduced spending on defence and debt interest payments) – no longer hold true. With an ageing population, a struggling economy, and considerable environmental limits to growth, redistribution “by stealth” isn’t looking too promising.

A particular cause for concern is the way that benefit and tax credits are linked to price, rather than earnings, meaning that if (or when) the economy returns to growth, those at the bottom are very likely to be left further behind.

Frances O’Grady, TUC deputy general secretary and the third speaker, had several suggestions for specific policies: a high pay commission, employee voices on remuneration committees, a permanent tax on bonuses, a 50 per cent tax on incomes over £100,000, and the recent Robin Hood tax on financial transactions.

O’Grady pointed out the importance of decent wages and decent work – in the 1970s wages accounted for 65 per cent of GDP; now that figure is only 53 per cent. She also talked about the need for a new industrial policy, making rewarding and fulfilling work the goal of public policy, and ensuring that companies able to pay a living wage do so.

While Hills argued for the role of the state in redistribution, and O’Grady focussed on how the state relates to employers, Pickett looked briefly at public attitudes – a crucial factor in determining how we tackle inequality as a society.

On the one hand, four fifths of the public support a reduction of pay at the very top; on the other, support for redistribution is declining. The general public displays a nuanced, some would say contradictory, approach to inequality. This week’s Vanity Fair headline, for example, reads:

“It’s still all about Greed and Money”

Crucial to people’s beliefs about inequality are their beliefs about where they stand relative to everyone else, so one suggestion was to start putting people right on that front.

If you earn more than £200,000 a year you are certainly not an average earner, as one participant in Polly Toynbee’s Unjust Rewards book claimed. Most people claim to be somewhere near the middle of the income scale irrespective of their actual income; in reality median income is about £24,000 a year.

Pickett claimed we need a social movement to demand change, so that in ten years time it is as socially unacceptable to be greedy as it is to be racist or homophobic. But it’s less clear how we get there. Hills pointed out that as the rungs on the ladder of social mobility get further apart and harder to climb, those at the top are even more desperate that they and their children don’t fall down – a cycle that can be hard to break.

Demanding that employers make public their entire payscale – from the highest to the lowest – was one suggestion for starting to throw a light on these inequalities.

So in the end we were left with the conclusion that, yet again, the evidence all points to the ill inequality causes society but the key question now is how it can be tackled – through influencing public attitudes, through government policy on redistribution, through business policy on renumeration, a combination of them all, or something else entirely?

Nobody I have ever met likes the idea of someone living in absolute poverty. The trauma of not having enough to eat or a place to sleep is sufficient for all of us to agree that everyone in Britain should have these things. In other words, the abolition of want is a near-universal principle held among Britons. Regardless of its form, the welfare state is going to be around for a lot longer.

But are there any consequences to us wanting to keep people out of poverty? It would be remarkable if this were not to have even some bad effects, would it not? The answer, of course, is the ‘poverty trap’. Whenever a government decides that it wants to give a person money while they are unemployed or not earning enough, it gives them a reason to think twice about trying to earn that money themselves. This is a problem that all governments face, but how bad is this problem in Britain’s benefit system?

Pretty bad, actually. In a Policy Exchange’s latest report out today we show how, when even the most straightforward costs of work are taken into account, the financial boost that benefit claimants get for working is tiny. For example, if you compare the income of a normal Jobseeker’s Allowance claimant over 25 (£122.42, a figure which includes other benefits, like help with council tax and housing) to what they would get after 40 hours work on the minimum wage, the overall gain is only £51. That works out at a paltry £1.28 per hour.

This occurs because as someone tries to leave benefits they start to lose the money they are getting from the government. The Jobseeker’s Allowance claimant loses £1 of the benefit for every £1 earned. This means that the abolition of poverty, plus the need to make sure the state does not end-up paying money to everyone and anyone, leads to a perverse outcome: the poorest people in Britain face the highest tax rates. Think about it: as they earn more, they lose benefits and start to pay tax, so their effective tax rate must be high. For the Jobseeker’s Allowance claimant the tax on deciding to work, say, 20 hours per week is 111%.

The answer to this, as our report argues, is to let people on all benefits keep more of their earnings as they work. By tightening the tax credits regime and other benefit spending we can save £6.5 billion on the overall welfare bill.  We can then put some of this money back into the system to allow anyone on welfare to take home £92.80 before their benefits start being squeezed.

Unemployment is only likely to get worse over the next year or so. It is vital that we make sure everyone on benefits can see a good financial reason to keep looking for the jobs available.

While Gordon Brown yesterday accused the opposition of “ramping up” public fear of crime, a new report launched by the new economics foundation (nef) demonstrates the true costs of the political arms race over criminal justice policy engaged in by both main political parties over the past two decades.

The report, “Punishing Costs“, found that locking up children and young people for non-violent offences is costing the taxpayer millions, while doing little to reduce the amount of crime.

England and Wales imprisons more children than almost any other country in western Europe, with roughly 2,500 children in prison at any one time.

The case against child imprisonment in all but the most serious cases is lengthy and well-evidenced. Imprisonment is the least effective of all the sentencing options available to the court, with three-quarters of children reconvicted within a year of release – for the youngest children, this is closer to 80 per cent.

As the nef report highlights, child imprisonment is also expensive – very expensive – costing on average six times more than a place at Eton, and considerably more than community alternatives.

In addition, the experience of imprisonment can be corrosive for children. Self-harm rates are significantly higher inside than out. Retaining contact with friends and family is also difficult, as many children are held far from their homes with a fifth receiving no visits at all.

Imprisonment is extremely disruptive to schooling, with many school-age children leaving prison finding it extremely difficult to access mainstream education, despite all the evidence suggesting that being in full time education is one of the best ways to help children to stop offending.

Finally, we routinely imprison our most vulnerable children, children who have learning disabilities and difficulties, mental health problems, children who have experienced abuse and neglect, many of whom would be better dealt with in the community.

Out of Trouble is a five-year Prison Reform Trust campaign, supported by The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, working to reduce child and youth imprisonment in the UK.

Whilst much of our work focuses on unnecessary imprisonment, we also champion alternatives to custody which have the potential to offer young people, and the communities they come from, a better deal. This is where restorative justice, a way of resolving conflict and repairing harm by bringing the offender and the victim together through closely managed ‘conferences’ or meetings, comes in.

The case for restorative justice, or restorative approaches as it is also known, has been building on the ground for some time now, with many schools and residential children’s homes around the country using restorative practices to great effect as an alternative to traditional forms of punishment and conflict resolution.

As yet, however, this momentum has not been matched within the formal youth justice system. Despite this, policymakers in England and Wales need not look far for evidence that restorative justice can work, as, since 2003, Northern Ireland’s youth justice system has placed restorative ‘youth conferencing’ at its heart.

Introduced as part of an overhaul of the youth justice system, the youth conference order is available both pre-court, as a diversionary order where the young person admits the offence at charge, and post-conviction, as a court-ordered conference. Conferences are organised and facilitated by trained specialists, and involve offenders giving an account of the offence, before victims and others involved, including community representatives, are offered the opportunity to ask questions and explain the impact on them.

Victim participation rates, a key measure of truly restorative encounters, are high at two-thirds of all conferences, and almost 90 per cent of victims express satisfaction with the outcome. The number of children being sentenced to custody has declined, with the youth conference order accounting for almost a quarter of all sentences.

And crucially, reoffending rates are lower than for other community sentences, and significantly lower than custody, with just under 38 per cent of young people reoffending within one year, compared to 71 per cent of those released from prison. Contrary to some of its critics, restorative justice isn’t a soft option, requiring offenders to come face to face with their victims, and hear, often for the first time, exactly how their actions have caused harm.

In addition, it has real potential to act as a robust alternative to custody, with violence against the person offences accounting for a quarter of all conference referrals in Northern Ireland. Perhaps most importantly, it gives both offenders and victims the opportunity to input into an action plan for making amends which the offender must stick to. Plans can include written apologies, specified activities, unpaid work, a curfew or compensation.

How could the lessons of Northern Ireland be replicated more widely? One way advocated in the nef report would be to devolve budgets for prison places to local authorities. At the moment, prison places are paid for by central government.

Transferring the costs to local governments – together with more power over how they can arrange youth justice services locally – would remove the perverse incentive to give up on young people in trouble and allow them to end up in custody. The councils would be allowed to keep some of the savings created from reducing custody, which could be reinvested in the reduction of crime.

The report finds that local authorities could reduce the use of imprisonment by 13 per cent without need for controversial legislative change or a large increase in public spending. The policies considered include better co-operation between local agencies and courts, and using interventions of restorative justice that allow offenders to repair the damage they have caused in the community.

These changes could result in more than £60 million of savings in England, and more than £2 million for some local authority areas. With the impending general election, and the attendant, inevitable focus on youth crime, it must only be a matter of time before policymakers wake up to restorative justice’s potential to radically reduce the escalating social and economic costs of child imprisonment.

In the latest round of violence, blamed by the Police Service of Northern Ireland on dissident Republicans:

• On Saturday a hoax device was used to lure police officers into an area of Craigavon in County Armagh where they faced sustained attacks from flagstones and other missiles, in what police said was an attempt to injure or kill a police officer. Three police vehicles were damaged, and officers fired three baton rounds in self defence;
• A mortar bomb was fired at a police barracks in the Brownlow area of Craigavon, although it missed its intended target; and
• Police faced sustained attacks from petrol bombs in Dunmurry on the outskirts of Belfast.

The events come on top of the Real IRA admitting responsibility for the murder of suspected MI5 informer Ciaran Doherty near Derry.

Responding to the attacks, Sinn Fein MLA for Upper Bann John O’Dowd said:

“This attack was wrong and should not have been carried out.

“I would challenge those who claim to speak politically for these factions to tell the republican and nationalist community exactly how these sorts of activities, or indeed the recent murder in Derry advance the cause of a united Ireland one iota.”

DUP MP for Upper Bann, David Simpson said:

“It is certainly very reckless coming on the back of what’s happened in Keady (in south Armagh) and Newry.”

For the SDLP, one of its local MLAs, Dolores Kelly, commented:

“Republican dissidents seem to be upping their game and becoming more emboldened by recent events.”

The attacks on the police come after Alliance party leader, David Ford, agreed to put his name forward for the post of justice minister, and ahead of a vote in the assembly due on March 9th on transferring policing and justice powers.

Whilst the attacks serve as a reminder of the threat to the peace process posed by dissidents who refuse to disarm, such attacks could prove to strengthen the resolve of Northern Ireland’s political leaders. As the Irish Times’ Northern news editor Dan Keenan concludes:

“Relations between the DUP and Sinn Féin in the Stormont Executive have been openly difficult since devolution was restored in 2007. But the threat both parties face from the dissidents at this most politically sensitive time has emerged as a powerful incentive for them to make common cause.”

The panel was chaired by veteran BBC technology journalist Rory Cellan-Jones and featured Susan Pointer, Google’s director of public policy & government relations; Andrew Keen (via mobile phone), author of “Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is killing our culture”; Kevin Anderson, blogs editor of the Guardian; and Annabelle Sreberny, professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

In addition to the panel, there were questions from the audience and from outsiders participating in the debate via Twitter. The discussion started with a brief history of the web in terms of its libertarian ethos, but now finds itself in an arms race with government who seek to suppress it or control it to further their own ends.

Keen, who has been a critic of social media in the past, took a surprisingly conciliatory tone in his viewpoint, arguing that technology isn’t bad for freedom. He, like other panelists, pointed out how adept governments have been at adapting and co-opting technology.

Interestingly, despite the use of mobile technology during political protests around the world, Keen asserted that the internet had not brought change. Real change could only be brought about through culture within a society, which in turn could drive changes in political structures.

Anderson talked about the way that social media now plugs a gap that would otherwise go unfilled in journalism. Mobile pictures and video from Iran’s aborted green revolution were some of the first images that the west saw of the conflict. However, the constant debate and ease to which communities can be created means that online movements could be less effective as they fragment.

He also made the point that much of the online activity is of little-to-no use; something that he called slackitivism. The active role that governments were taking in the online space was underscored by Anderson quoting Major General Huang Yongyin, who said:

“The internet is a battlefield without gunpowder.”

Where political movements break out online, Anderson said that this depended on a set of circumstances that facilitated “viral serendipity”.

Sreberny discussed the topic with particular reference to Iran. Technology depends on the context and the culture where it is being used. In her view, the role of technology in political action has been a progression rather than a revolution.

Discussing three revolutions in Iranian history in 1905, 1979 and 2009 respectively, Sreberny talked about how the technology of politics had evolved. In 1905, the opposition had used printing presses to create pamphlets that were distributed at night.

The Islamic revolution of 1979 relied on cassette recordings of Ruhollah Khomeini together with photocopied political flyers. The conditions for the 2009 revolution were set within the eco-system of politically-minded blogs in Iran, together with mobile phones which were used to document the revolution through pictures and video.

The Iranian government had struck back by throttling the speed of internet connections and restricting access to many sites.

Sarah Pointer discussed the topic from the point of view of Google. Specifically on Google’s entry into China, Pointer said that the company had made a conscious decision to enter the market in order to ensure that Chinese audiences had access to information.

Whilst the company had complied with Chinese regulations on censorship, it had clearly indicated to its audience where results had been censored. She refused to be drawn further on whether the company would be withdrawing from the Chinese market following the accusations of hacking, nor the direction that company’s talks with the Chinese government would take.

A number of members of the audience expressed concern that Google held so much information on consumers and were concerned about the company’s power. Pointer responded to these concerns by pointing out that the audience Google attracts is their lifeblood. If they betray the consumer’s trust, the audience will go elsewhere and the company will suffer financially.

There was a wider discussion amongst the audience about whether internet connectivity itself in time will become a human right as it has become so central to modern life, especially since some countries in Scandinavia had set a minimum legal standard of connectivity that its citizens should be provided.

Overall, there was no definitive answer to the question of whether technology is really good for human rights.

Following Friday’s remarks about youth offending, and despite earlier signs that the Conservative Party were keen to engage in a serious debate about criminal justice, recent pronouncements on prison policy are a setback to those of us who advocate prison reform.

On the back of their proposals to reintroduce prison ships and reduce levels of community sentencing, they announced plans last week to put post-prison services in the hands of the private and – to a lesser extent – voluntary sectors.

This is a dangerous, ill-judged and unwelcome move.

Post-prison resettlement and rehabilitation services are currently provided by the National Probation Service (NPS). The NPS has gone through several changes since 2004, the most recent of which effectively gives control of probation to HM Prison Service through the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) which manages both.

The coupling of probation with imprisonment was on the basis that an ‘offender manager’ could work with an offender throughout their sentence and post-release. In theory, it’s a great idea and similar to the benefits of having the same doctor, consultant or teacher over a specific period.

In practice, however, it hasn’t worked. Very few of the prisoners I am in contact with know who their offender manager is, let alone what they are supposed to do.

The shadow justice secretary, Dominic Grieve, wants to change the probation service’s remit to “public protection” – this mirrors my experience of how the perception of the NPS’s role has changed.

Rather than the rehabilitative, one-to-one, social work type probation officer of the past, many of those under the supervision of the NPS see the organisation’s role as a punitive one, part of the system that locked them up rather than something to engage with so that they can stay out of prison.

There are many fantastic non-public sector organisations who work closely with probation services in several parts of the country. Basic Caring Communities (BaCC) is a resettlement project being pioneered by my colleagues in pact, and is aimed at helping ex-prisoners settle back into the local community and has been very successfully piloted in London.

Similarly the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) have encouraged their members to employ ex-offenders and have produced guidelines and advice on how to do this. The involvement of the voluntary and private sectors in this regard is to be encouraged. There is no substitute, however, for a properly-funded, accountable and person-centred National Probation Service.

The amalgamation of the prison service and NPS in the NOMS hasn’t worked. They should be decoupled and a fully-supported, efficient and effective, regionally-organised probation service should be allowed to focus on working with offenders to prevent re-offending; leave imprisonment to the prison service, and “public protection” to the police.

“Over 650,000 crimes have been committed by juvenile offenders who had received a community sentence, referral order, or reparation order, in the previous twelve months, research by Conservatives has found.”

The clear implication being that locking more young offenders up would reduce the offending rate. Indeed, shadow justice secretary Dominic Grieve goes on to say:

“Ministers need to get a grip of the youth justice system and reduce reoffending rates, which remain stubbornly high.”

A sure sign that an election’s looming and the Tories are reverting to type, and a million miles from his sentiments of a few years ago, when he said:

“Prisons are places to which we want to avoid sending people whenever possible.”

In the same 2003 debate, he added:

“We share the Government’s desire to ensure that, as far as possible, sentences can be served in the community, rather than in prison.

“There are many good reasons for that and the Minister has touched on some of them, including the fact that the successful management of a convicted person within the community makes it less likely that he will reoffend.”

So what’s changed between then and now? Why were prisons “places to avoid sending people” seven years ago and not now, and why would a young offender on a community sentence be “less likely” to reoffend then than now?

If it was a round of applause in the right-wing press he was looking for, it seems the dogwhistle u-turn has done the trick, today’s Mail describing community sentences as “bird-brained justice” and the Telegraph calling them “soft penalties”.