IT is pleasing to see the Government admit that asking private businesses to manage probation contracts on a shoestring has been a disaster.

A scathing report earlier this year revealed that private companies were failing to enforce the sentences handed down by courts, leaving convicts to commit more crime or simply disappear.

HM Inspectorate of Probation said firms commissioned in a 2014 overhaul of the service were “stretched beyond their capacity”.

They said the lack of proper engagement with convicts led to mistakes whereby people were sent back into overcrowded prisons.

Inspectors found that staff in community rehabilitation companies (CRCs) were not seeing the offenders they were supposed to supervise during community orders and suspended sentences often enough.

In one case, no plan was drawn up for a man given a suspended sentence for assault, and an appointment finally made after 10 weeks was cancelled because of staff sickness. The CRC eventually sent a letter to the man’s address, but he no longer lived there. He then committed another attack on his former partner.

In other incidents, failures by CRCs allowed people to drop out of contact and disappear, including a homeless heroin addict with a long history in the criminal justice system who went on to commit more offences.

Another report warned poor supervision by CRCs was putting the public at risk, with thousands of convicts monitored using phone calls rather than proper face-to-face meetings.

Announcing the scrapping of the scheme Justice Secretary David Gauke said the original plans, introduced by Chris Grayling ( the man currently making a complete pigs ear of Britain’s railway) had been “an ambitious and innovative reform in terms of transforming rehabilitation”

No, it was a cheap, corner cutting disaster which put the public, victims, and vulnerable offenders, at risk.