Sir, Libby Purves makes a good point in her criticism of the proposed centralisation of probation services (Opinion, April 6). This change meets the perceived needs of the management structure at the expense of the effectiveness of the service. This is a phenomenon that has affected all branches of the public services including the NHS.

The bureaucratic system of management in public services has a fundamental flaw. With its several tiers, those managers passing good news up the line are judged to do a better job than those who present a more balanced view; they are the ones who are retained and promoted. Thus at every level in the hierarchy, bad news is filtered out and the good news is passed on. At the end of the process, those at the top of the hierarchy get a distorted and falsely favoured view of what goes on, and thus ministers make statements they believe to be true but which those on the ground know to be misleading. The whole process is a sycophantic pyramid.

The Health Service is a perfect example of this and has now taken a further step to isolate the management process from the clinicians who do the work. Clinical practitioners, doctors, nurses and therapists are a difficult workforce to manage because they wish to do their best and in the one-to-one relationship with their patients they resist limitations on their use of resources. Historically, the clinicians in these professions have turned their backs on management roles, and those professionals, especially nurses, who have switched to management sometimes for reasons of higher pay, are not clinicians.

The need to control the professions has become paramount among managers and instead of changing management to suit the needs of the professions — and their patients — the professions are being changed to suit the needs of management. Management then becomes an end in itself and sees the solution to its problems as the appointment of more managers and the exclusion of troublesome professionals from the process. Organisational improvements are achieved but at a cost.

Continuity of care by probation officers or in the one-to-one relationship between clinician and patient is becoming a thing of the past, and locally available advice based upon a knowledge of the individual is being replaced by inaccessible centralised resources and by such organisations as NHS Direct which can fail catastrophically to recognise dire problems amid the multiple complaints they hear on the phone.

These are the problem issues that are being filtered out by the management process in state bureaucracies, and this now requires urgent attention.

John Spivey, FRCS

Penrith, Cumbria

Sir, The insight that Libby Purves offers into our criminal justice system is symptomatic of a wider disconnect between the public sector and the public it purports to serve. In straitened times when a reduction in public spending is inevitable, it is those parts of the public sector that are not serving the public that will be most under threat of cuts and reorganisation. One prime candidate must be the National Offender Management Service (Noms), which has consumed £18 billion of the public purse since its inception in 2004, while presiding over stubbornly high reoffending rates of 67 per cent and a rapidly growing prison population. Frontline services, prison and probation officers and a multitude of highly effective voluntary sector interventions have been sacrificed on the altar of expensive headquarters, centralised bureaucracy, consultants and failed IT systems.

Noms should be abolished in favour of community prison rehabilitation trusts that could provide joined-up and holistic criminal justice services more responsive to local needs.

Simon Edwards

Combe Down, Somerset

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