Founded 1980
Chair:        
Secretary: 
Treasurer: 

Graham Smith
Jan Thompson
Graham Mumby-Croft


Issue No. 80 Spring 2019

Paul Laxton
NEW HMPPS CHIEF EXECUTIVE APPOINTED

By the time this edition of the newsletter hits your doormat the new CEO of Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service will just be getting to grips with her new job. Dr Jo Farrar becomes the first female Head of the Service with a start date of the 1st of April. Let us hope that does not prove inauspicious. Dr Farrar is moving from being Director General for Local Government and Public Services at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Her C.V. begins with the Parole Unit of the Prison Service in 1987 so her career has come full circle via the Home Office, the Cabinet Office, MHCLG as mentioned
above, as well as two Chief Executive roles in local government. The first of those at Bridgend Borough
Council is tinged with controversy. In 2012 a job evaluation exercise (JES) was held which saw a large number of council staff roles downgraded, but her own and other senior posts were exempt from the process. The Trade Unions were not amused and made much of her £170,310 pay package. Given that JES is a more than a decade-long running sore between the PGA and the employer, I would guess that the
NEC will be on high alert.

The weighting of the Duty Governor role will be just one of many issues sitting in her in-tray. On the face of it, given the huge problems that the Service faces, it is small potatoes, until you remember that getting the trust of, and boosting the morale of senior managers on the front line is hugely important. Staff at all levels will also be watching closely how successful she is at resisting micro-management from ministers, whether she is prepared to take an axe to the bindweed of bureaucracy, and whether she will break with tradition and stop wasting money on expensive and useless management consultants. More than anything Dr Farrar will be judged on whether or not the anarchy in our prisons can be curbed, and whether decency can once again be truthfully described as one of our core values. The battle to restore staffing levels is one Dr Farrar will have to embrace and win.

Shortly before the end of her time at Bath and North East Somerset Council ended, Dr Farrar gave a
lecture at Bath University entitled "Transforming Public Services in a Time of Austerity." It's easy to find on the internet, but little is applicable to HMPPS. After four successive in-house appointments, Dr Farrar is
the first outsider since the ill-fated Derek Lewis to take the job. In fairness, Mr Lewis was far more of an
outsider coming in from the private sector, and in some ways, Dr Farrar's appointment harks back to the days when the operational head was a generalist senior civil servant. No doubt she will be mindful of the fate of Mr Lewis and her immediate predecessor Michael Spurr, both of whom were ousted so that the Secretary of State was not.

We wish Dr Farrar luck... and no-one should be in any doubt that she will need it.

PAUL LAXTON, Editor