By Richard Johnstone
4 May 2011
The government needs to give the NHS clear commissioning guidelines to ensure the continuance of a £60m substance misuse prison rehabilitation programme, a leading figure in the sector has said.
Funding for these services for offenders in England was moved from the Ministry of Justice to the Department of Health last month following an announcement in the October Comprehensive Spending Review.
The government has said that the changes would ‘realise the vision of a locally commissioned, recovery-focused, prison-based treatment system’.
But the chief executive of the Rehabilitation for Addicted Prisoners Trust, Mike Trace, told Public Finance that he feared services could be cut if primary care trusts made ‘bad decisions’ when tendering for new services later this year.
He said that despite the changes, the aim of the service was still to reduce re-offending, which remained an MoJ rather than a DoH target.
Although funding has been guaranteed for projects this year, new contracts will be awarded in April 2012. As the cash has not been ring-fenced, Trace said that without commissioning guidance from the government, there was a risk of ‘disinvestment’ by PCTs.
‘We need more clarity from central government on what needs to be delivered in this new era of localism. The MoJ needs to say what they should be doing with this funding [this year] and the DoH should be saying what needs to be done in the future,’ he said.
‘We are worried that the commissioning structure will not be in place by April 2012 and there will be decisions made [without it].’
Outlining the changes in a letter to the sector, Richard Bradshaw, director of offender health at the DoH, said: ‘A cross-government board has been established to ensure a smooth transition to local commissioning, and to prevent disinvestment and a negative impact on prisons and their current providers.’
The letter, which was also signed by the National Offender Management Service’s director of service development, Ian Porée, and the director of delivery at the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse, Rosanna O’Connor, stated that the agency would provide ‘dedicated, locally based support to every adult prison to assist in the management of the current contracts and to commission outcome-based treatment in line with the DoH’s forthcoming Building Recovery in Communities framework.’
