Integrated Offender Management

The development of Integrated Offender Management is taking place across the Thames Valley and some staff will be more knowledgeable and involved in it than others. This note therefore seeks to bring staff up to date following the last Team Briefing note (3) about this in March 2009 and I ask that this information is cascaded to staff working in your teams.

IOM is designed to expand the philosophy of successful multi-agency schemes such as PPO, MAPPA and MARAC, that is to say to increase the amount of information sharing amongst agencies and to fill gaps in service provisions (interventions) available to offenders in the community. The design of the process is to make sure that the best services are being offered to those who are most likely to reoffend in our communities and it is the responsibility in each location of Thames Valley Probation,TV Police and the Local Authority to reduce reoffending through each respective Community Safety Partnership (CSP), which will build on local partnership arrangements with voluntary agencies.

As we all live and work in diverse towns and cities across the Thames Valley the priorities for each IOM scheme can be slightly different from one another, but is important that we also strive to incorporate consistency across the trust so that all of our offenders have equality of opportunity for access to services.

The IOM approach will involve us working with -

• many people we already know and supervise, with better arrangements to share information and access services for offenders. The bulk of this group will be PPOs
  
• information and access services for offenders. The bulk of this group will be PPOs
  
• some people who are not in the above two groups, but are known to commit high levels of crime in our communities (for example those people who come off formal supervision without having broken free from the cycle of crime) (IOM - Others).
  

There will clearly be different approaches required to working with each of these groups, which depends on resources available as well as other factors. Staff working within IOM will also need skills in engaging offenders who have no statutory obligation to comply, but will all have a behaviour compact explaining their rights and responsibilities within the scheme.

IOM is being rolled out across each of the 16 CSP areas in Thames Valley and we have made an agreement with our partners that ICMS and OASys will be the primary systems for recording contact and progress made by those we work with. With our skills in Offender Management this is an important step. There will be developments made in the use of ICMS and OASys and specific guidance will be released to all staff working within IOM.

In some LDUs Substance Misuse Teams will simply become Integrated Offender Management Teams and in others there will be some separation of Substance Misuse and IOM responsibilities. Work is underway with prisons and courts to identify short term prisoners for IOM.