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CHAPTER 9
Criminal justice follow-up inspection

Background

SWIA (formerly SWSI) began a national programme of inspections of criminal justice social work services in September 2003, concluding this in April 2007. A final report, published in October 2007, summarised the main findings of the programme.

We first inspected the quality of criminal justice social work services in Aberdeen in May 2006 as part of an inspection of services in the Northern criminal justice partnership (Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Highland and Moray). We concluded that overall service standards across the partnership were weakened by Aberdeen which performed less well than its partners in most aspects of practice.

We found that for a period of over two years some probation cases had received only a minimal service, culminating in over 270 such cases. These included high-risk offenders who were required only to report in to a duty service. Decisions on whether or not to allocate cases were not based on systematic risk assessment. Sheriffs in the city commented that they had lost confidence in the service.

In September 2005, before we began our inspection, the authority had introduced measures to try to address this situation. This had included providing a subsidy from council funds to employ an extra four social workers on a temporary basis. The service had also received funding from the Scottish Executive as part of the 'Clean Stream' project ²¹ to employ an additional two social workers to prepare reports for summary courts. Local Sheriffs also agreed to the early termination of 100 probation orders. The measures had partially alleviated some of the pressing concerns but, at the time of the inspection there remained a significant number of unallocated Section 229 cases (probation with a condition of unpaid work).

We were not convinced that the service had addressed all its underlying problems and considered that it was vulnerable to a repetition of the previous crisis. We therefore recommended that Aberdeen City Council needed to establish and maintain proper oversight of the performance of its criminal justice social work services.

In response to our inspection recommendations the partnership produced an action plan and, as requested, Aberdeen submitted a separate recovery plan (a 'response plan'). The authority established an Improvement Board to oversee implementation of the plan. The proposed membership of the Board was:

• the authority's chief social work officer;
• the head of service (neighbourhood area north);
• the chief officer of the Northern Community Justice Authority ( CJA); and
• the criminal justice team manager.

From April 2007 the newly formed Community Justice Authority (the former Northern partnership authorities plus Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles) also took responsibility for monitoring progress on action plans produced by all its authorities following inspection of their services.

Because of our particular concerns about the performance of Aberdeen we decided to carry out a further inspection of its criminal justice social work services in December 2007 as part of the performance inspection of all social work services delivered by the authority. A summary of our findings follows.

Summary

The service had increased the size of its workforce and almost all offenders had an allocated worker. Some aspects of the service had improved. This included the throughcare team who were producing good quality assessments and had improved their supervision of offenders. The previous inspection had found that the community service team was generally working well although we had identified some areas for improvement. The team had acted on these. There had also been some limited improvement in performance in relation to the overall quality of Social Enquiry Reports ( SERS) and focus on offending behaviour during supervision.

However, we found that there had been too little improvement and some deterioration in performance in other key areas of service delivery. This included the quality of assessments submitted to courts and the supervision of those on probation. There were many able and committed main grade practitioners but they were not receiving a consistent enough message about what they should be doing.

The service had not done enough and had not acted quickly enough to implement the response plan and to address the fundamental weaknesses we identified at our last inspection. It therefore remained vulnerable to falling into crisis once again.

Senior operational and strategic managers continued to exercise insufficient oversight and quality control of the service. There was significant room for improvement in the quality of partnership working between the council and the Community Justice Authority.

Criminal Justice social work services: Context

Criminal justice social work services remained a centralised city-wide service managed by an area head of service. The head of service (North) had held this responsibility for the previous five years but responsibility was about to pass to his counterpart in Central neighbourhood services.

Following the retirement of the former criminal justice team manager in 2006 a new team manager had taken up post. She managed:

• two probation/ SER teams managed by four senior social workers. Responsibilities also included court services, the supervised attendance order scheme and youth justice transition workers;
• a throughcare team, managed by a senior social worker;
• a prison team, managed by a senior social worker;
• a DTTO team, managed by a senior social worker. Responsibilities also included the arrest referral scheme, the prescribing service and the planned mandatory drug testing pilot;
• a community service team, managed by a team leader; and
• St Fittick's residential unit, managed by a unit manager.

In February 2007 the service received council approval to make seven temporary posts into permanent appointments. In the period since then it had either appointed existing locum staff to permanent posts or replaced them with new staff. The council had also approved the appointment of an additional 2.5 community service officers and a risk management co-ordinator (we describe the role of these staff later in the report).

The service funded these additional appointments through a 15% uplift in its allocation from Government to fund criminal justice social work services and through a £288,000 subsidy from the council budget.

Methodology of inspection

Our inspection focused on the quality of assessments, compliance with National Standards and the nature of the work carried out with offenders. We read advance information, looked at samples of files and reports, observed practice, interviewed offenders, practitioners and managers and key stakeholders. We used the same four-point scale to assess the quality of work that we had used throughout the national criminal justice inspection programme:

• 'poor' was unacceptable;
• 'adequate' reached a minimum standard but with substantial room for improvement;
• 'good' reflected a wholly acceptable standard; and
• 'very good' reflected a very high standard.

We read:

• 51 Social Enquiry Reports;
• 15 Home Background Reports;
• 17 probation cases;
• 14 S229 cases; and
• 15 parole and non-parole cases.

We also provided the criminal justice social work service with a self-evaluation questionnaire similar to that used by the wider social work services in the city to evaluate performance.

Inspection findings

Assessment

When we first inspected services in Aberdeen just one in ten social enquiry reports ( SERs) sampled reached a wholly acceptable standard. During our follow-up inspection we found that around a third of reports had now reached this standard. The city nevertheless remained amongst the poorest performing authorities we had inspected during our national programme.

Areas of weakness remained report writers' analyses of offending and risk of re-offending. Too often practitioners reported only an offender's accounts of his current and past offending and made little attempt to interrogate this further.

During our last inspection managers stated that they had introduced the concept of 'standard' and 'enhanced' SERs, intending that the former would be provided for low risk offenders. Managers told us that the distinction was in the amount of preparation going into the report. This seems a common sense way to deal with the volume of reports that criminal justice social work services face. However, in the sample of 51 reports that we read we were unable to identify any differences in the quality of reports. We would have expected to find that SERs on high risk offenders were of an 'enhanced' quality, reflecting the additional time spent in interviewing the offender and in liaising with other services.

In its action plan the city had set out an intention to deliver training to staff on assessment, including offence analysis and risk assessment, by January 2007. This had yet to take place. In its first response plan submitted as part of advance information the service indicated a new target date of September 2007. An updated version submitted in November 2007 had shifted this to December 2007. In December the team manager told us that there were plans for senior social workers to hold workshops on report writing with their teams but that there were no fixed timescales.

The authority's action plan had also set out an intention to supplement the Northern Partnership's quality assurance cycle (a sample of 10 reports twice per year) with routine in-house quality assurance measures. This included senior social workers assuring a minimum of 5% SERs and home background reports ( HBRs) in 2007 and a minimum of 10% in 2008. This had not happened in respect of SERs.

The action plan also stated that the service would, by January 2007, establish pairings or groupings of workers to quality assure each others' SERs before submission. This was not happening.

Criminal justice managers had arranged for administrative staff to attach a checklist to all SER requests to encourage workers to examine their own reports prior to submission. However, there were no mechanisms that ensured that this happened and no systems to aggregate the checklists and analyse strengths and weaknesses or training needs.

The throughcare team senior social worker had quality assured all HBRs produced by the team in the first six months of 2007 and had provided feedback to staff on areas for improvement. We found a marked improvement in the quality of HBRs. A third of the 2006 sample was of a wholly acceptable standard. This had increased to around seven in ten of those read during our follow-up visit.

The service needed to take other steps to improve the quality of work. One of these was to address imbalances in staff workloads. Historically the service had operated an 'open' allocation system with practitioners volunteering to take SERs. If the report resulted in probation they were expected to take responsibility for supervision. First line managers in the SER/probation teams were not exercising oversight and control of workloads. Managers commented that there were tentative plans to move to a system of direct allocation. We think they need to do so now.

The service had also begun to look at how to make better use of the skills of the qualified social workers based in the court by transferring some of their responsibilties to unqualified workers and to administrative staff. It is important that the service brings this work to a rapid conclusion.

Supervision

Criminal justice managers reported that they had reduced the number of unallocated cases incrementally and that, as of November 2007, the service had no unallocated cases. This was not quite accurate as around 20 offenders who attended a 'supervision and monitoring service' (a reporting-in service that ran weekly) did not have a named social worker recorded on the CareJust system. Managers reported that these were all offenders who had received a service and who practitioners had subsequently assessed as low risk. There seemed no good reason why the workers who operated the supervision and monitoring service could not be the named workers for these offenders.

The service had sufficient capacity and there was no longer pressure on managers to prioritise cases for allocation.

Despite increased staffing we found that important weaknesses in practice persisted or were more marked than they had been at the time of our initial inspection. While some skilled staff were working hard to deal with some very challenging offenders there were systemic problems in the way the service operated. Steps to deal with these had taken too long to implement.

National Standards require authors of SERs, when considering the feasibility of probation, to develop an initial action plan with offenders setting out what will be done during the course of the order. Supervising officers should then confirm and if necessary make the action plan more specific during the first three months of the order during which time s/he should carry out at least one formal review of progress towards meeting the targets in the action plan. There had been a deterioration in the authority's performance in meeting these standards.

While between eight and nine in ten cases we sampled in 2006 clearly outlined an initial action plan only seven in ten of those sampled during the follow-up inspection did so. There was an expectation in Aberdeen that a supervising officer would make the initial plan more specific after further assessment carried out during an 'induction programme' (undertaken with an offender in the first three months of the order) and that a senior social worker would review this at the three-month review. However, we found that the service had reviewed less than half of these plans (having carried out reviews in almost six in ten cases in the 2006 sample). Managers recognised this deterioration. In an effort to address this they had recently transferred responsibility for chairing initial reviews from a dedicated senior social worker to all the senior social workers in the probation and throughcare teams, in their capacity as line managers.

Managers commented that there were also plans to review the induction programme to ensure that it moved beyond forming a more detailed assessment of an offender's risks and needs, to beginning a programme of work to address these.

We thought that there was a pressing need to improve the focus of work with offenders. In 2006 we judged that there was a good match between the content of supervision and the risk of re-offending and of harm in only two in ten cases in our sample. In our follow-up inspection we found that performance had deteriorated and that only one in ten cases now achieved a good standard of practice.

The service had managed to achieve an improvement in the way it managed offenders' compliance with their orders although still fell below a reasonable standard. From a position in 2006 when it managed compliance well in only two in ten cases we sampled it now did so in between four and five in ten cases.

We identified a culture among some first line managers and staff in the probation teams of accepting non-compliance because of offenders' drug misuse. A number of staff were content to accept offenders calling into the office at a time of their own choosing. We also found a tolerance of offenders attending appointments heavily under the influence of drugs. It appeared that there was no consensus about what was acceptable. Senior managers said there was a policy that offenders who were intoxicated should not be seen. We suggest that they remind staff of this policy.

A number of first line managers and staff that we spoke to believed that the primary focus of their work should be on dealing with offenders' drug misuse and were not convinced of the need also to address attitudes and patterns of decision-making that influenced offenders' behaviour. This approach extended to providing offenders with an unusually high degree of financial assistance to buy food. This had amounted to £6,000 'Section 12' funding during 2006-07 and although this had reduced to £2,000 in the eight-month period from April-November 2007 this remained a substantial figure.

Where workers maintained a balance between dealing with factors associated with offending and with offending behaviour itself they did so well. We saw evidence of this in some case files and observed some well-focused sessions.

Criminal justice managers had also made efforts to widen the options to deal with offending behaviour such as developing groupwork provision for some offenders. This included programmes for high-risk offenders (described below), a pilot programme for women offenders that four women completed, and a planned drug and alcohol group that did not commence as no offenders attended.

Paradoxically, given the high numbers of drug misusing offenders, we found that the service made too little use of other resources specifically for addictions. For example, many of those on probation were repeat offenders with substantial drug problems yet too few SERs considered the option of a drug treatment and testing order.

The criminal justice addictions service was also not well used. This partnership resource, managed by Aberdeenshire Council, had two addictions workers based in Aberdeen. In our last inspection report we highlighted the low number of referrals to this service and recommended that the partnership review this situation. During our follow-up we found that referrals remained low and that staff in the criminal justice social work service and in the addictions team continued to raise the same issues. Criminal justice staff said that the service focus of the addictions team did not always meet the needs of drug misusing offenders as it did not offer a prescribing service. Addictions team staff were concerned that there was no dialogue with criminal justice staff as to why they were reluctant to make referrals. The partnership (now the CJA) had established a monitoring group to review the operation of all shared services but this had met only twice. The CJA needs to move this forward more quickly and establish a constructive dialogue. The city too needs to be more proactive in ensuring that it receives value for money from these services.

There were also problems for drug misusing offenders who wanted to access a prescribing service. A multi-agency inspection of substance misusing services in Grampian ²² had found that young adults in Aberdeen with no dependants who were injecting drugs could wait up to two years for assessment. The criminal justice team had access to a dedicated, albeit limited, substance misuse prescribing service for offenders that could offer 24 places. The service was oversubscribed and had a long waiting list. Managers stated that they hoped that funding for a mandatory drug testing pilot ²³ in the city would increase capacity.

The throughcare team had begun to make plans to deal with issues of drug misuse and other problems in offenders' lives (such as homelessness) by more systematically using the spare capacity of the three staff employed to deliver a throughcare addiction service. ²⁴ These staff already provided ad hoc assistance to social workers supervising long term prisoners and probationers.

In its action plan following the 2006 inspection the service had set out how it intended to assure the quality of supervision. The principal approach was to be a system of routine file audits during case supervision (implemented from February 2007). Managers acknowledged that most of the senior social workers were not doing this. In the team manager's progress report the intention to introduce this practice was re-stated but no indication was offered as to when it would do so.

Criminal justice managers had issued a checklist to staff to self-audit their files. There was no evidence that quality control measures had been put in place to ensure practitioners carried out this exercise consistently, or that any emerging issues were analysed and acted upon. First line managers had taken a preliminary look at case files selected by SWIA for the follow-up inspection. Some acknowledged that they had been surprised to find issues that practitioners had not raised with them in supervision, such as extensive non-compliance by some offenders.

In its action plan the service had stated that by January 2007 it would be reinforcing the need to meet National Standards at team meetings and commissioning training on addressing offending. Managers acknowledged that there was an urgent need to 'get back to basics'. The team manager stated that this would now be happening as part of the planned workshops the senior social workers would be holding with their teams in 2008. We thought that this was too long a delay.

There were some examples of good practice. For example, the throughcare first line manager had developed an induction programme for new staff and held quizzes at team meetings to test out practitioners' knowledge of standards and legislation.

Work with sex offenders

In our initial inspection we found evidence of strong working relationships with the police for the assessment and management of sex offenders. In our follow-up we found that these had continued into the development of Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements ( MAPPA). The two partners had also continued to meet on a monthly basis to review all registered sex offenders to make sure that they monitored those that did not fall within the scope of MAPPA.

Although satisfied with their links with criminal justice social work staff the police were concerned about much weaker links with other social work sections, particularly child care and learning disability services. Other stakeholders echoed concerns that both these sections had been slow to recognise the part they had to play in managing the risk presented by sex offenders. Staff from these sections had only recently begun to attend multi-agency public protection meetings.

Notwithstanding the positive efforts the criminal justice social work service had made to deal with sex offenders there was more that they could do. For example, we found evidence in only one of the four sex offender cases that we read that practitioners had made the required number of visits to the offender's home to check on his living situation. Given the size of our sample our results need to be treated with caution but at the very least they underline the need for closer scrutiny of cases by line managers.

Encouragingly our small sample showed a good match between the content of supervision and the risk of re-offending and of harm in all four cases.

There were disparities between the teams in their approach to co-working sex offender cases. In one team (throughcare) this was the norm while in the probation teams this was not. Some staff and stakeholders we spoke to were not clear about the basis for this difference and commented that some practitioners were anxious about dealing with a sex offender on his/her own. The service needs to have a consistent and rational approach that takes account of the particular issues that can arise when working with sex offenders.

The service continued to have access to the partnership's joint sex offender project ( JSOP), although we were concerned to find that the problems we had found when we last visited still persisted. Like the shared addiction service it too continued to receive less referrals than we would have expected. Managers were at a loss to explain why this was the case. This matter needed closer attention from both the CJA and the city.

Violent offenders

Following our last inspection we recommended that Aberdeen and other partnership authorities did more to address the offending behaviour of serious violent offenders. The city had made some inroads here. Two practitioners had received training to run the COVAID (control of violence for angry impulsive drinkers) programme. One of these practitioners was working through this weekly programme with around five offenders. Another practitioner was also working alongside SACRO to deliver a group for perpetrators of domestic violence.

There were signs of improvement in the day to day management of such cases. For example, in the sample of 11 serious violent offenders cases we looked at in 2006 five failed to maintain an acceptable level of contact. This had reduced to only two of the 13 we examined in the follow-up. Although there was still room to do better, the service had also achieved a 'good' or 'very good' match between the content of supervision and the level of risk in over half of these cases.

The service had also begun reviewing the role of its residential unit alongside the national review of supported accommodation resources that was underway. The unit offered 14 places, most of which were normally occupied by offenders from Aberdeen. It had only achieved full occupancy in the 18 month period prior to the inspection, having operated for many years at 60-70% capacity. Managers acknowledged that it had struggled to recover from the poor reputation it had developed in its early years. The resource was an expensive one and managers said that they aimed to get better value for money from it by using it for higher risk offenders. This is a rational move though one that the service will have to manage carefully if it intends to maintain the unit as a mixed-gender facility.

Community service

For our follow-up inspection we looked at community service ( CS) through examination of case files of those sentenced to S.229 orders. We did not re-examine all aspects of community service closely as our initial inspection had found that much of this was working well. For example, we found:

• evident attention to health and safety;
• written assessments of the risk an offender might pose in a placement;
• regular supervision of task supervisors;
• good workshop provision; and
• efforts to support and develop personal placements.

When we first inspected the service there were around 60 CS cases that had no allocated CS officer due to staff vacancies. This had not prevented offenders beginning unpaid work as other CS officers placed them in a work squad or personal placement. Problems arose, however, if an offender failed to comply. Managers acknowledged that the service would not have dealt with this as thoroughly as they would have done if the offender had had an allocated officer.

When we visited the authority again managers reported that there were no longer any unallocated CS orders and that all offenders began work within the required 21 days. Managers also reported that the community service scheme had completed all action points from the plan drawn up following the inspection. We thought that they had done so with energy and enthusiasm. For example, the scheme had developed an interesting initiative to improve offenders' attendance and work performance by issuing fresh fruit at the beginning of each work shift. Early feedback on this low-cost initiative (funded through 'Section 27') was promising.

The criminal justice service had taken steps to deal with the problem of delays in dealing with non-compliance in S.229 cases. However, we thought that the approach it had adopted was questionable.

In some authorities CS officers issue formal warnings for non-attendance at the CS element of a S.229 order on behalf of the social worker supervising the probation order (who retains overall responsibility and who submits any breach reports). In others the social worker issues such warnings. Aberdeen had historically adopted the latter approach although some social workers in Aberdeen were not exercising this responsibility. This meant that while offenders on standard CS received warnings for non-attendance some of those subject to the more serious S229 disposal did not.

The service had therefore drawn up new procedures allowing CS staff to issue two CS warnings for absence, with a third resulting in a CS review and a report to the supervising social worker. Importantly, these did not have the status of formal warnings in respect of the whole S229 order and were described by one manager as serving only as a 'shot across the bows'. The procedure appeared to us to allow the continuation of multiple warnings and lack of clarity and rigour in the process.

Criminal justice managers had appointed an additional 2.5 CS officers to implement these new procedures by overseeing the unpaid work element of S.229 orders and issuing 'community service warnings'. This additional resource may not have been necessary had probation team managers ensured that social workers supervising S.229 orders had done so in line with national standards.

Management practice

Performance monitoring

Managers told us that the response plan the service had produced as a result of SWIA's previous inspection served as a 'baseline framework' for improvements and the basis for future service plans. The service reported progress on a monthly basis to senior corporate managers through CitiStat, one aspect of the council's performance reporting process (that measured progress on a traffic light system). One senior social work manager described this as a crude measure that provided estimates of progress at best.

The most recent versions of the response plan that we received indicated that most action points were 'green'. This gave the impression that the service had made significant progress in implementing the plan. In light of our findings we concluded that operational and strategic social work managers had been over-optimistic in their evaluation of progress since the last inspection. For example, the service had reported that the in-house quality assurance group was quality assuring 10% of SERs and HBRs, although this was not happening with SERs. Regardless of the 'crudity' of the measure, a reader would infer that the service was meeting targets when in fact it was not.

It seemed to us that social work managers had been giving a 'green light' to actions when the service had developed new procedures without checking whether first line managers and practitioners were implementing these systematically.

Although the city had established an Implementation Board to oversee implementation of the response plan it had not met regularly. There had only been one meeting since June and in the interim there appeared to have been little communication and no consultation about the plan with the CJA's representative on the Board.

The CJA Board also has a responsibility to monitor and evaluate the quality of the services provided within the partnership. We recommended in our previous report that the CJA developed a more pro-active approach to implementing the council's recovery plan. However, it was evident that there was still significant room for improvement in the quality of partnership working between the council and the CJA.

Management and Leadership

The Criminal Justice team manager inherited a service with significant difficulties. We were not convinced that she had received enough support to meet these serious challenges. Many staff and stakeholders we spoke to commented on the level of her workload and, in particular, the number of corporate commitments she had to meet.

The head of service responsible for the operational management of the criminal justice service met the team manager regularly. However, we queried whether he had taken a close enough look at the way the service was operating. He acknowledged the limitations of the Citistat system.

Reflecting the split in responsibilities between strategic and operational managers across all social work services, strategic responsibility for the criminal justice service lay with the city's chief social work officer ( CSWO). The CSWO chaired the authority's internal improvement board, attended CJA board meetings and meetings of the CJA Joint Officers Group. As the local authority link with the CJA the CSWO had a role in monitoring and evaluating the quality of services provided by the partnership, as well as services provided by the council. We did not feel that this governance and leadership role was well managed. It also appeared to us that the head of service and the CSWO were not effectively working together to address the problems the service faced.

The systems the city had established to oversee the service's response plan lacked rigour. They were based on unreliable management information that senior operational and strategic managers appeared to have accepted unquestioningly.

In the report of our inspection of the Northern Partnership in 2006 we discussed the serious difficulties the Aberdeen service faced and commented that;

'There is insufficient recognition of the extent of these difficulties at a senior management level within social work.' ²⁵

Our view is unchanged.

Criminal justice staff

Most main grade staff were able and committed to delivering a good service. Questionnaire evidence indicated that they felt they made a positive contribution to protecting the public. However, evidence from our file reading, interviews with staff and with other stakeholders indicated that morale was low among some staff. Contributory factors that these staff highlighted included the lack of a consistent approach from managers, particularly in relation to the focus of work with offenders and the appropriate response to non-compliance. Some practitioners commented that they felt unsupported if they sought to institute breach proceedings. A number also expressed concerns about the lack of a transparent allocation system and about unequal workloads. Many commented that they had been disappointed by the pace of change since the previous inspection.

Some criminal justice managers were of the view that if they pursued performance improvement too vigorously there was a danger that this would overload main grade staff and adversely affect their morale. They justified the 'low key approach' to delivering on the action plan because of delays in filling additional posts and training demands arising from new national policy and legislative developments such as MAPPA, VISOR and risk assessment.

Many practitioners and managers we spoke to were cautiously optimistic about future service improvements following two 'awaydays' held around the time of our fieldwork. There had been a gap of several months since the last 'awaydays' held immediately after the last inspection. Many staff we spoke to said that there had been little sign of action following these events. The more recent sessions had led to the establishment of a number of working groups to take issues forward. It will be important for the service that it sustains this momentum.

The service had recently gained additional resources that may help it to do so. This included the new post of risk management co-ordinator. An experienced manager from outwith the service had been appointed to this post with a remit to take forward the implementation of the MAPPA arrangements, develop quality assurance and management information in relation to high risk offenders, provide learning and development on risk assessment, to review and improve policies and procedures and to develop strategies to better match resources to risk.

The local authority had also recently recruited a strategist whose remit included developing a set of policies, procedures and guidelines for the criminal justice social work service and developing inter-service, corporate and partnership protocols.

Criminal justice managers will need to ensure that the potential of these posts is maximised.

There were other immediate steps required to improve the quality of services. These included addressing the unacceptable condition and location of the waiting room. All service users, staff, managers and stakeholders that we met commented on the poor physical condition of the room and the aggressive and antisocial behaviour that had become routine within it. We observed the conditions here and agree that they presented an intimidating atmosphere that also conveyed a lack of respect towards the people who had to use the area. We were particularly concerned by its proximity to the waiting room for the generic social work duty service, for example observing young children wandering between the two waiting areas apparently unsupervised.

Staff and managers at different levels appeared to have a fatalistic attitude towards this issue and no-one accepted responsibility for addressing it.

Conclusion

The throughcare and community service teams were performing well and additional funding had allowed the service to reduce the number of unallocated probation cases.

However, we were not convinced that the significant issues we identified would be resolved simply by increased staffing. We remained of the view, formed after our last inspection, that such steps would only partially alleviate the service's problems and that there were many fundamental weaknesses that needed to be remedied. Our findings indicated that the authority had done too little to address these and there had been insufficient improvement and some deterioration in performance in key aspects of the service. The internal reporting of progress had been inaccurate and poorly scrutinised at a senior level. As long as this situation persists the service remains vulnerable to crisis once again.

The service's response plan remains relevant to an agenda for performance improvement but it is crucial that the authority begins to make more progress on the action points and does so more rapidly.

Aberdeen City Council, at the highest level, should ensure proper scrutiny of the performance of criminal justice social work services in the city. The CJA too will need to take a more assertive and pro-active role in overseeing the quality of the city's services. Both agencies must improve the quality of partnership working.

Recommendation 23
Aberdeen City Council should ensure that all of the objectives of the criminal justice social work SWIA response plan are delivered as a matter of urgency.

For criminal justice service managers this will include:

• the prioritisation of improvement in the quality of assessment, planning and delivery of probation supervision;
• more rigorous application of compliance and enforcement measures, in line with National Objectives and Standards, in relation to probation and Section 229 orders; and
• ensuring that agreed quality assurance measures are delivered and acted upon, including the provision of accurate management information to senior operational, strategic and corporate managers.

For senior operational, strategic and corporate managers this will include:

• ensuring more rigorous oversight and quality control of service performance; and
• establishing more effective partnership working with the Northern Community Justice Authority.

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