Unbalanced management

However, as a witness in the long running Serious Fraud Office investigations, I was obliged to remain silent while court cases were pursued against G4S and Serco employees.

Poor management of the electronic monitoring (EM) contract resulted in a vast waste of taxpayer’s money, caused in part by overcharging and massive costs associated with both the internal and criminal investigations, but also due to two hugely expensive failed procurement exercises.

Added to this, there were decades of failed opportunity to take advantage of the full potential of the EM service, a huge (and possibly permanent) rift between the UK Government and two of its largest suppliers, and now significant doubt over the future of the Serious Fraud Office.

Understanding the cultural and political forces that existed in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) during my tenure is essential to understanding the decision-making processes that have led to these issues. The UK Government must learn from the MoJ’s experience and use this knowledge to reduce the risk of similar problems occurring in other government functions.

When I joined the MoJ in 2010 I was confronted with a highly chaotic EM document set, following several years of under-resourced management of the contract. This had resulted in the erosion of its integrity and poor attention being paid to ensuring value for money.

For example, the contract document did not accurately reflect the operation of a service worth hundreds of millions of pounds per annum – even the original signed contract was absent. It took considerable effort to update the documentation to reflect reality.

Despite this, the contract was delivering from an operational perspective, thanks to G4S and Serco EM’s significant understanding of the mechanics of EM management. Both companies understood the legal risks and technological limitations related to the EM service rather better than senior staff at the MoJ appeared to.

However, there were downsides to allowing G4S and Serco EM to become the service experts and passing all risk to them. First, the service management became remote and ‘someone else’s business’. Second, the MoJ became too dependent on the suppliers and lost its ability to set the agenda. Third, it became harder to negotiate service changes and determine what was good value.

I still struggle to believe that I was the first person to write an internal report on the profitability of both the G4S and Serco EM contracts, calculating them to be grossly over profitable for both companies. This was a relatively simple exercise, and I was surprised that no action was taken after I presented my findings to senior management.

Had they done something it may not have taken until 2012 to uncover the mismatch between what G4S and Serco EM were charging and what was actually being done. This mismatch was ‘discovered’ during the 2012 attempt at procurement, when the MoJ published activity figures that did not match those provided by G4S and Serco

Perhaps the MoJ was suffering from the embarrassment often felt by those who realise they have been sold a poor deal. Perhaps senior staff believed the best way to deal with this was to try and forget about the whole thing and start again. This certainly might explain the negative reactions to suggestions for improvement: for example, the rejection of a digital solution for the management of starting/ending electronic monitoring.

This requires some background.

When instructed by a court to carry out the electronic monitoring process, suppliers were obliged to continue until the instruction was rescinded. The order to begin monitoring was made via a paper/fax-based process which had been in place for decades. The mechanism by which suppliers could be told to stop monitoring activity was limited, inefficient and often initiated by MoJ or probation staff.

In a very significant number of cases the suppliers continued to monitor offenders for whom they had not received instructions to cease, even when the monitoring had obviously become irrelevant, such as after an offender had been re-arrested, returned to prison or, in some cases, died. 

The suggestions made about developing a digital solution to resolve this situation were rejected as being too expensive or not relevant for the EM service that was due to be retendered. The focus was on replacement rather than correcting errors in the existing arrangement.

This was all part of the cultural norm at the MoJ, where working long hours and being subservient to senior staff gave you the best chance of gaining promotion. Junior staff were not to be involved in decision making; nor were we supposed to find solutions to problems that were felt to be intractable by more senior staff. If we had been listened to then the catastrophic outcomes that followed could perhaps have been avoided.