Deborah Orr: The probation service needs help - but is John Reid the man to provide it?

His government has been reforming the service every three years since it came to power

There's definitely one reason to be cheerful about the contents of John Reid's turn at reforming criminal justice, to be unveiled in all its glory in the Queen's Speech next week. He is likely to do away with at least some of the "sentencing guidelines" that were brought in by one of his predecessors at the Home Office, the Samuel Pepys of our time, David Blunkett. They have proved just as controversial as they were predicted to be when they came in three years ago.

At that time, soft judges were Labour's bête noire, and the former's protestations that the guidelines would limit their ability to sentence appropriately were seen as nothing less than a vindication in themselves. Labour was still very deep in the grip of its belief that systems were better than people, because while ministers couldn't stand at the elbow of every single professional telling them exactly what to do every day, they could somehow catalogue every eventuality in every given circumstance into a formulated system which centralised government control just as well as if they could clone themselves a million times.

Brief experience has shown, however, that sentencing by numbers is not so sensible after all. This was seen most graphically in the Craig Sweeney case, in which the judge was compelled to knock a third off an 18-year sentence as the defendant had pleaded guilty, take away the time spent on remand, then half the remainder under his obligation to set a first possible release date. So it was that a man caught red-handed abducting and sexually assaulting a three-year-old girl ended up being rewarded for admitting his obvious guilt with the promise that he would become eligible to walk free in a little over five years' time.

All of these guidelines are likely to be refined, changed or done away with altogether. But Blunkett's wacky sentencing guidelines still don't explain why it is that the probation service claims that half of offenders housed in bail hostels are paedophiles. Nor do they explain how a convicted paedophile and child killer came to be filmed in Bristol by Panorama, wandering unsupervised out of his bail hostel and befriending children and their mothers on a local estate.

They don't explain either how another paedophile, at another Bristol bail hostel, was filmed loitering with a camera at public lavatories, when this is known to be his modus operandi for assaulting children. Most seriously of all, they don't explain how another hostel resident was left to commit a murder when probation officers had been told by hostel staff that he was dangerous.

While the Home Office has grumbled about the BBC's failure to hand over tapes in advance of broadcast, Mr Reid has lost no time in linking the programme's findings to his belief that the probation service is in need of reform. This isn't surprising, actually, because his government has been reforming the probation service every three years since it came to power, and the allotted period of grace is up once again.

The beleaguered service was centralised in 2000, when it became the National Probation Service for England and Wales. It became subject to new bureaucratic structures in 2004, when it became answerable to NOMs, the National Offender Management Service. Charles Clarke was in the throes of another restructuring when he was removed to make way for Mr Reid earlier this year. One of his wheezes was to abolish the 42 probation boards altogether and replace them with a much smaller number of less local trusts.

The proposal seems to have dropped off the agenda for now, but the state of permanent revolution in the probation service over a number of years, always with the promise of more to come, has done nothing to help with its more pressing problems of low morale, understaffing and poor employee retention. All these changes have, of course, been accompanied by the usual plethora of bureaucratically monitored targets, most of which the service has achieved. (Even though this success is not reflected at all in recidivism rates, which are up.) When Mr Reid says that the service spends too much time filling in forms and too little time on the front line, he knows whereof he speaks.

One idea that has survived the Clarke era, and has also been on the cards for some years now, is "contestability". Mr Reid is determined to press on with the introduction of contestability, despite the hostility of many in the probation service, a large number of Labour backbenchers and, naturally, all those who believe the English language is a thing of beauty.

Contestability is simply an ugly and cumbersome way of discussing the contracting-out of services, and getting private or voluntary organisations more involved in "delivery". It's partly a measure of the touchy defensiveness that the probation services have adopted that makes the idea so unappealing to them. It's partly a result of the way in which the Government has presented its ideas, though. Contestability is discussed as a way of "driving up standards" in the probation service itself, rather than as a way of broadening the scope of the service, spreading its workload, and allowing it to concentrate more specifically on the most difficult of offenders.

A great number of specialist organisations can claim some success in designing rehabilitative programmes. Lots of private companies are good at tackling drug addiction, for example, while other groups have achieved some success in tackling the intractable difficulties of violent behaviour. Many have been specialising in working with former prisoners for years, informally rather than in partnership with the probation service. They have a great deal to offer, and it is madness to discount their expertise.

More often than not, though, these organisations struggle to raise the funds they need to keep their projects going. Even if their private work makes them a profit, they would often welcome a greater ability to take on referals from government-funded services. They would welcome a stronger and less suspicious relationship with the public services, and they would welcome just a little ring-fenced funding as well. Likewise, there are plenty of organisations that would be happy to provide good quality community service work, if they were given the support they needed in doing so.

Yet one shudders at the terms under which Mr Reid appears to be introducing contestability. Targets are still in evidence, with Mr Reid talking of a third of the probation service's budget - £800m - being spent on procuring outside service within the next 18 months. Presently it's a tiny amount. Surely in an organisation that is already stretched to its limits, this is too big a sum in too short a time. A perfectly reasonable idea, couched in terms that are too ideological and to be enacted with indecent haste, is the last thing the probation service needs.

d.orr@independent.co.uk