Ian Dunt starts his lacerating analysis of Westminster with an extended case history. It concerns Chris Grayling at the time he became secretary of state for justice in 2012. Having inherited a probation service that was creaking at the seams, he decided to privatise the whole thing, turning over the delicate business of managing ex-offenders to a selection of security firms that had no experience of that kind of work. The big idea was that they would be incentivised with a “payment by results” system, calculated according to how many people fell back into crime.
What followed can best be described as a fiasco. The firms had no insight into the many causes of recidivism. Some clients simply got lost in the system because payment by results was not conducive to careful record-keeping across different agencies. It is perhaps consoling to know that several of the private companies that signed up for the promised unlimited profits ended up bankrupt. And Grayling? He went on to transport, where he acquired the moniker “Failing Grayling”. Ian Dunt, though, thinks this is unfair, since Grayling is actually “a completely standard example of the quality of the ministerial class in Britain”.
