Guest Blog 104

Humiliation as a Policy!

It’s shocking to read that Ministers are planning to “name and shame” people completing community sentences. What utter nonsense from the Ministry of Justice, dressing it up as a way to “build confidence in community sentences.”

We’ve seen this before. Just as with Transforming Rehabilitation, the next step will be to shift control of Unpaid Work to Serco or a shoddy equivalent. Privatisation by stealth. Probation Officers may well have upon themselves forced a “legal power to take and publish the names and photographs” of those on Unpaid Work, but let’s be real: that duty will land in the hands of Serco “responsible officers” who will lap it up quicker than you can say “Chris Grayling”.

Serco will turn “name and shame” into part of the induction ritual. Refuse the photo, refuse the boots, refuse the high-vis vest, and the poor soul will be breached and dragged back to court.

And under Starmer’s Labour, do we really think Serco will stop there? Name and shame those electronically tagged, control of National ID cards and management of Trump’s border control ideas will likely be next.

Back in December 2013, the late Professor Paul Senior warned in his BJCJ TR special edition editorial, Probation: Peering Through the Uncertainty. They didn’t listen then and they won’t listen now. This time there’s no uncertainty at all. We know exactly how this ends: probation reduced to dust. Just look at the figures Prof Senior once brought together, many names we recognise if you’ve studied or worked in probation long enough; Steven Calder, Anthony Goodman, Jane Dominey, Wendy Fitzgibbon, Theo Gavrielides, Mike Guilfoyle, Carol Hedderman, Jamal Hylton, Fergus McNeill, Anne Robinson, Russell Webster, Kevin Wong. Where are their voices now? Where’s our champion?

As was written a few posts ago in the letter to Mr Jones, HM Chief Inspector of Probation: nobody speaks up for probation any more, not managers, not the unions, and certainly not the Chief Probation-Puppet. Martin Jones’s “I am very concerned” is a damp squib. And Napo’s Ian Lawrence claiming this “seems to only serve as a form of humiliation” misses the point entirely. Humiliation is exactly the government’s intention.

Anon (Probation Officer)

--oo00oo--

Postscript

Seeing as the author mentions Paul Senior's editorial from this TR special from way back, I thought it worthwhile quoting from his conclusion. Oh how we miss such wisdom:-

Concluding thoughts 

Reading through these contributions and also adding the passion and sheer exasperation which emerges from the Letters to Grayling it is tempting, if not impossible, not to conclude that the TR changes are simply wrong-headed and do not appreciate the complex web of reciprocity that probation functions within. It is often stated in debates that probation is little understood and there is little doubt in a sound-bite world probation is not a sound-bite organisation. But what these papers suggest is that this is as it should be. Probation deals with complex, difficult and intangible problems in a quietly authoritative, caring and committed way. Moreover even in the language of government it works. Probation on the Justice Ministry's own figures reduces re-offending and moreover offers service users real opportunities to reintegrate into society. Rather than throw this away in the rush to appeal to an ideological dogma hardly demonstrably successful in any other field of welfare reform surely now is the time to stop and think again. These contributions suggest that is self-evidently the case. We invite the government and the Ministers to take note.

Prof Paul Senior

13 Million

I've just noticed we've passed another milestone with 13 million visits recorded over the 15 year life of this blog. I guess there's no way of knowing how many of these visits have been by real people rather than 'bots' scraping the content on behalf of AI developers, but the 74,000 contributions from readers over the years are real enough for me and I thank them most warmly.

It would be an understatement to say the endeavour has been a significant part of my life over these years, bringing as it does much pleasure and pain, but every time I exclaim to my other half 'it's dying', it invariably kicks into life for some reason or other. But if I'm honest, even if the blog may not yet be of totally marginal relevance, the probation profession and ethos I feel so passionate about is finished here in England and Wales. 

The 'new' government has reneged on its promise of a thorough independent review and have signalled a continuation of punitive criminal justice policies rather than enlightened ones. My Labour MP has made it clear he has zero interest in discussing the topic, unlike every previous incumbent I've been represented by, both Tory, Liberal Democrat and Labour. The political landscape is becoming more toxic by the day and I find myself being drawn towards other endeavours that have social purpose.  

Probation continues to suffer from not having any high profile and authoritative champion and until such time the future looks extremely bleak. Nevertheless, I intend to carry on and will be in Eastbourne on Thursday October16th in order to meet colleagues both old and new over a beer or two. Hope to see some of you there. Cheers!

A Reminder

Once gain thanks must go to long-time reader and supporter 'Getafix for ferreting-out the following article from 2020 and published on an American academic website. It really is a very good summary of our recent history and demise:- 

Evidence versus politics in British probation

Highlights

• Twenty years ago, the Probation Service in England and Wales was widely regarded as world-leading.
• Since then it has been weakened by a series of politically driven and poorly evidenced changes.
• A badly flawed and ideologically driven privatisation programme implemented in 2015 has done serious damage.

The recent decision to end this failed programme is an opportunity to redesign better.
At the beginning of this century the Probation Service of England and Wales (these two countries have separate Governments but form a single jurisdiction for criminal justice purposes) was regarded as one of the strongest and most advanced in the world. Twenty years later it finds itself under-resourced, understaffed, organisationally fragmented and partly demoralised, with little idea how it will look or how it will be run a couple of years from now. This is largely due to a series of decisions taken by politicians which were (believe it or not) intended to improve the Service, but which were not adequately informed by evidence or by an understanding of practical realities. The story of how this happened is an object-lesson in how not to do criminal justice reform and is summarised here in the hope that it may act as a warning to other jurisdictions.

To understand what went wrong, and what might be done about it, we need to look a bit further back, and my starting point is the development of the Welfare State in Britain after the second World War. Probation services in Britain were well established by then, and like other welfare services, they had good prospects for further development. Max Grünhut, a German lawyer and criminologist who escaped from the Nazi regime and established the teaching of criminology at Oxford, wrote ‘Probation is the great contribution of Britain and the USA to the treatment of offenders. Its strength is due to a combination of two things, conditional suspension of punishment, and personal care and supervision by a court welfare officer. With the growing use of probation, social case work has been introduced into the administration of criminal justice … ’ (Grünhut, 1952, p. 168). A few years later Leon Radzinowicz, another refugee from Nazi domination of Europe who founded the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, wrote ‘If I were asked what was the most significant contribution made by this country [i.e. England] to the new penological theory and practice which struck root in the twentieth century … my answer would be probation’ (Radzinowicz, 1958). 

In addition to such expert endorsements, probation services were well respected and an integral part of both the developing social work profession and the criminal justice system. They were run by County-level committees which consisted mainly of magistrates, giving the main users of probation a stake in its success and a good understanding of how it worked. Chief Probation Officers played a significant role in social work's professional organisations, and expansion and development continued fairly smoothly until the 1970s. Even the proliferation of negative or discouraging research findings about the capacity of different sentences to reduce offending (for example, Martinson, 1974) did not significantly undermine probation in Britain, as it developed a new and useful mission as the provider of alternatives to custodial sentences. Governments were keen to encourage this for financial reasons. In this way the Service largely avoided the cuts in public services which were imposed by a Conservative government during the 1980s.

1. Populist punitiveness versus ‘What Works’

The tide began to turn in 1993. A Conservative Minister, hoping to achieve popularity through a display of toughness, declared to his party's annual conference that ‘prison works’, signalling an end to ‘alternatives to custody’. The Probation Service, under considerable political attack, needed a new way to present its role, and in due course its leaders (particularly the Chief Inspector of Probation, Graham Smith) launched the ‘What Works’ initiative to develop the Service's effectiveness in reducing reoffending (Underdown, 1998). By this time the ‘nothing works’ consensus of the 1970s was being replaced by new research which showed that some ways of working could have a positive impact on offenders' behaviour. Probation leaders and researchers were strongly influenced particularly by Canadian studies of effective rehabilitation (for example Andrews et al., 1990) and by British psychologists who disseminated similar ideas (such as McGuire, 1995). Money from a new Government of a different political colour enabled the establishment of ‘Pathfinder’ projects to develop and evaluate new methods, with a particular (though not exclusive) emphasis on cognitive-behavioural group programmes, and for a while at the end of the last century and the beginning of this, England and Wales were seen as global leaders in a very ambitious and comprehensive ‘What Works’ exercise. Gerhard Ploeg, a leading figure in Scandinavian probation, told the Confederation of European Probation that ‘The Probation service in England and Wales has always been in the vanguard in these developments, and many other European countries are watching it like a hawk, ready to accept that which seems to be working and to criticise that which isn't’ (Ploeg, 2003, p. 8).

Unfortunately the results of the ‘Pathfinders’ were not as good as probation's leaders hoped (Raynor, 2004). Over-rapid and top-down centralised implementation did not give probation staff time to understand and adapt: many of the new methods eventually became established, but this took at least twice as long as the three-year period allowed for the Pathfinders to prove themselves. In addition, political changes were reinforcing central Government control over probation, so that probation policy became more politicized and local influence and control, particularly by the Courts, was diminished. A new Criminal Justice Act in 1991 had redefined probation as a punishment in its own right (no longer Grünhut's ‘conditional suspension of punishment’) and in 2001 the Service became the National Probation Service, run from London. This also meant it was very visible to London-based politicians, and vulnerable to politicians of both major parties who wanted to be seen as ‘tough on crime’. In 2004 the Probation Service was merged with the larger and wealthier Prison Service to form the National Offender Management Service, which in theory might have led to better integration of offender management across the criminal justice system but in practice meant that the central administration of probation was dominated by officials who understood the needs and practices of prisons better than they understood probation.

2. Evidence versus delusion

Practice in the meantime had become dominated by risk assessment and risk management, with some officers having to spend more time on their computers than with the people they were supervising, and with a new official focus on enforcement as a priority. The evidence-base of practice remained primarily psychological, and there was less time to address social circumstances and social needs or to link people into the other services from which they could benefit. Probation officer training had been disconnected from social work training. However, the biggest changes were yet to come, as a new Conservative-led Government looked for opportunities to reduce social spending and to marketize public services by moving them into the private for-profit sector. A new Government Minister, Justice Secretary Christopher Grayling, was a particular enthusiast for privatisation and saw this as a way forward for probation. There was, in fact, no evidence to suggest that this was a good way to run community corrections in Britain, or that this might be profitable for the private companies jostling for a slice of the criminal justice pie. The Minister was encouraged to pilot the proposed arrangements but stated that there was no need to do so. This egregious example of evidence refusal was motivated by blind faith in markets and a right-wing Conservative tradition of scepticism about State-funded public services, and in 2014 seventy per cent of the Probation Service's work was handed to private companies, some with little criminal justice experience (Raynor, 2020).

After implementation in 2015, it quite quickly became clear that the private companies (known as Community Rehabilitation Companies) were in difficulty, and a series of inspections by the independent Inspectorate of Probation consistently showed them to be performing considerably worse than that part of the Service which had remained public. The companies had exaggerated what they could offer, and only a high degree of magical thinking by politicians could explain their confidence that the new arrangements would work. Before long the companies were trying to maintain profitability by making about a third of their staff redundant, leading to over-large caseloads handled by often inexperienced people. In short, although some innovations were interesting, overall the private companies damaged the services they claimed to be able to improve, leaving them in ‘a worse position than they were in before the Ministry embarked on its reforms’ (Public Accounts Committee, 2019.  Eventually, after four years of bad results, politicians had to recognise their mistake. The decision has now been taken, by a new Justice Secretary, to terminate the contracts of the private companies and to re-unify probation as a public service. This is already happening in Wales, and England is following.

It is, of course, encouraging to see a bad policy decision reversed by considering the evidence; this does not always happen. However, the new Probation Service faces a considerable task of reconstruction and recovery, and discussions are still continuing about exactly how it should be organised and managed. Many commentators favour a greater degree of local involvement in governance with the restoration of some judicial input, not just central control by civil servants in London. In addition, practitioners and their managers need to be able to focus on the development and use of evidence-based skills, informed by what we already know about how to promote rehabilitation and desistance from offending. The coronavirus pandemic has shown that Government spending on public services is necessary and unavoidable, and there is less political clamour to shrink the State and hand over services to private enterprise. However, the post-Covid world will be short of money, and criminal justice will have to compete with other strongly justified demands for public expenditure. Perhaps the most important lesson learned from the rise and fall of British probation is that there is no magic bullet to bring about a step-change in the effectiveness of probation services: development needs to be gradual and incremental, and informed at every step by evidence and evaluation rather than ideology.

Peter Raynor

Dear Mr Jones,

We’ve all read your cry for help on behalf of probation. And yes, it must be heard. But I can’t help wondering, who exactly are you talking to? Because frontline probation officers don’t need reminding how bad things are, and the public doesn’t really know what we do. We live it every day, as do those in prison and on probation needing our support. What we don’t hear from you is where the buck actually stops.

And perhaps you find that hard to say, where that buck stops, since the top table of HMPPS and the Ministry of Justice changes hands quicker than a brown envelope in the back room of a casino, or a foil packet in a back alley.

Here’s the reality for probation: when you conclude there are “failings in public protection,” we get the blame. When you warn of “further serious failings without urgent reform,” we get the blame. When you say staff “don’t understand enough about risk,” we get the blame.

You cannot in one breath acknowledge the government’s repeated press release that probation is under immense pressure, “with hard-working staff burdened with high workloads,” and in the next follow the same approach implying those same officers should have done more. That contradiction and the consequences lands squarely on us, along with the endless actions, tick-boxes, briefings, and unpaid overtime that follow.

Your own reports already spell it out: probation is broken. Years of privatisation, de-privatisation, restructuring, pay freezes, devalued training, and haemorrhaging expertise have left the probation service in pieces. The role of the probation officer itself has been twisted to serve prisons and political headlines. At times, we play second fiddle to the police, social services, and charities. Some days, probation staff aren’t even sure what probation is meant to be anymore.

And yet, strangely, your reports still praise probation leadership. How is that possible when every probation region is rated “inadequate” or “requires improvement”? Leadership cannot be doing well if the service is collapsing on their watch. Name me one probation leader who has spoken out honestly about any of this, just one.

Meanwhile, on the frontline, caseloads of 40–80 people (many seen weekly) have become standard. We deal with bulk prison releases with no notice. Policy shifts without consultation. SFO reviews and HMIP inspections breathing down our necks. Professional registration and standards piling more weight on our backs. All of it with fewer staff, less time, insulting meagre pay “increases,” and not a single voice championing us.

We are tired. We’ve had the same conversations in staff rooms, with unions, on this blog, at the Probation Institute, with the Prison Reform Trust, even with your own inspectors, about probation pay, conditions, pressures, identity, recruitment, retention, discrimination, probation’s subservience to prisons, and the relentless scrutiny. A colleague in Preston was almost murdered, and still nothing changes.

Instead, we get the same political theatre: Gauke’s fag-packet sentencing notes. Timpson’s novelty rehabilitation speeches. Endless reviews that lead nowhere. Another Justice Secretary talking tough on punishment, tagging, and “public safety.”

The reality? Frontline probation will see none of the £700m “promised,” nor the benefit of the thousands of recruits that never arrive. And as every probation officer knows and will have told your inspectors from Northumberland to Newquay, what people actually need is housing, addiction support, access to healthcare and jobs. Tagging, political soundbites, sabre-rattling, and Ai solve none of that.

Working in probation today feels like a mix of an abusive relationship, Stockholm Syndrome, and a forgotten cold-war system. We’re told to do more with less. To patch up the failures of the entire Criminal Justice System. To JFDI and shoulder the problems and risks when things go wrong. All while our pay stagnates, our professional status collapses, our role evaporates, and literally nobody wants to hear our opinions when we probably hold the best solutions.

So yes, Mr Jones, probation needs urgent reform. But if you are truly crying for help, then cry about this, not at us, but for us. Probation officers deserve a voice unfiltered by inspections, politicians, or “leadership” spin. We know the realities, we carry the risks, and we’re the ones left to pick up the pieces when policy fails. If there is to be a cry for help, let it come from the people trying against all odds to do the job.

Anon (Probation Officer)

White or Blue?

As much as I'm glad occasional bits of Probation are deemed good, the fact of the matter is that certain parts of the service are, when compared to case management, a cushy number. Until front line case management is properly resourced, and dare I say it paid a premium, then officers will continue to leave the service either to less stressful roles in APs, VLOs Prisons, other units, even to be SPOs etc and inspections, will continue to see us demotivated, overworked and struggling to do the basics at times.

******
Pay won't improve the quality of the work. Interest, dedication, understanding, mutual obligations. Respect comes from the role not a pay rate and as we no longer provide the sort of interest level and guidance we once did, the job has no professional standing. It is a bain of my career seeing us tagging, signposting, yet neutered from real difference making practice. I no longer care. The pay is just what pays the mortgage.

******
I disagree, better pay does help inprove quality, mainly by improving recruitment, retention, and morale — but it won’t solve quality issues on its own. The biggest gains come when higher pay is combined with better resourcing, manageable caseloads, and strong leadership.

******
Of course, better pay means recruitment, retention, and morale. With more staff, more motivated staff, better quality of staff, better quality of work. Tired of this “it’s not just a job, we don’t do it for the money” RUBBISH. It IS just a job and we wouldn’t do it for free.

******
Very true more money would be nice but the job these days and our fallen position in the justice system won't warrant a pay hike it's regarded as a low value role. Monitoring till an order runs its course, simple anyone does do it nowadays. The task is how we fight back to our status and what help we need to get there. By delivering a reduction in criminal behaviour attributable to qualitative interventions which require engagement and resetting offender activity crime free. We will never do that or demonstrate it. Get used to what we have become.

******
Double the pay. Double the number of staff. Half the caseloads. All that achieves is twice the number of staff being paid twice as much for half the work and still doing the same old shite that attracts the same old inadequate inspection assessments. It's just a job? How can being charged with public protection and claiming the right to take someone's liberty away ever be described as "just a job?" The thing too with "just a job" means you're selling your labour, not your skillset. If it's "Just a job" then get used to a set hourly rate with lower and lower pay increases whilst the national minimum wage raises at a faster rate until probation itself becomes a national minimum wage job. Actually I asked a question a week or two ago, "do people see probation as white collar or blue collar employment?'. If probation work is "just a job", a simple exchange of labour for renumeration, why would probation workers expect to be paid more then the national minimum wage? Just a thought!

******

If I had my caseload cut to 25 then I could actually do the work I wanted to with them and develop a proper relationship with my cases instead of sometimes seeing them as an impediment. I usually find most of your comments informative but this one is pretty poor. Plus we're already doing twice the work for half the pay if as the MOJ research states, another 10000 officers are needed on current caseloads.

******

I saw that question posed and it had a reflective impact. I wanted to say white but know what it has become. It's still white but I know it's really blue. It still upsets me to have answered this conundrum. It is just a job now after and sadly [above] may have it right because it how I feel. I want a better job more than money, so it is not about pay for me. Yes more than 10 years in pquip and wondering what was the point.

*****

Quite a debate to be had on the issues raised here. In the first instance, we, the supposed professionals didn’t make the job what it’s become. That is down to the glorious leaders who, as I said last week, haven’t identified where we are being led to, how long it will take, what we will experience on the way, and how we will know when we arrive. I’m sure they have an agenda, they just haven’t shared it yet. Secondly, if it is, ‘just a job,’ perhaps we should be campaigning to forego salary status and be paid by the hour. I think that once they are forced to quantify the amount of free labour they currently extract, they might be keen to come back with an offer of decent remuneration. As things stand, the leaders are asking themselves and you, ‘why should we pay for something we are currently getting for nothing.’ Unfortunately, until our own people decide whether it’s, ‘just a job,’ or a prized and valued vocation, we will get nowhere. Whoever said you can’t have it all ways had obviously never studied the probation workforce.

******
It is quite a debate although an interesting point on the risk of pay decline. It is about vocation as well but the alarm should be ringing in our ears. I like the idea of stopping the extra for free so how do we get our lacklustre union to formulate this proposal a blended approach.

A Good News Story

First Approved Premises report published

Published: 17 September 2025

The launch of our Approved Premises (APs) inspection programme comes at a pivotal point for the Probation Service. The number of places available in APs has been under pressure in recent years, and this is pressure is likely to increase following the introduction of Probation Reset, SDS40 early release scheme and the implementation of the Sentencing Review.

The national network APs is one of the least visible and least well-known corners of the criminal justice system, yet they provide essential support for people leaving prison who are assessed as a risk of serious harm. These individuals require an increased level of monitoring in the community and APs help them to rehabilitate and resettle while ensuring the public are protected during those early months back in the community.

Within our inspections of probation delivery units and regions within the Probation Service, we routinely find public protection to be an area of weakness, with insufficient work being done to keep victims and the public safe from harm. The role APs play in public protection cannot be underestimated and it is crucial that we gain some oversight into this extremely important aspect of probation work. AP staff and managers also deserve to know what they are doing well, and we believe there should be a mechanism for learning from best practice from the AP network.

Currently, APs face no accountability to the public through inspection processes to see how far they are achieving their aims. We believe people deserve to know how well the Probation Service is working to protect communities through the national network of APs.

I am delighted to announce the Southview Approved Premises, the first service inspected in the programme, has been rated ‘Outstanding’. While in our inspections of probation delivery units we routinely find concerning public protection work, at Southview our inspection team found no areas for improvement relating to public protection. Inspectors spoke enthusiastically about the leadership and staff working on the premises and I again want to congratulate them on the invaluable work they do to keep communities safe and reintegrate prison leavers back into the community.

Read the full report of Southview Approved Premises here.

Foreword

Approved premises (APs), formally known as probation hostels, play a key role in managing the risks posed by people released from prison who are deemed too complex or high risk to live independently. Until now, APs have not been subject to any form of independent scrutiny, despite the vital role they play in keeping communities safe and providing effective rehabilitation.

I am therefore delighted to announce that Southview AP – the first in our new AP inspection programme – has been rated as ‘Outstanding’.

We found strong and inspiring leadership, stable staffing, and a passionate and motivated team operating in a safe and welcoming environment within which residents felt respected and supported. As a consequence, managers and staff at Southview AP were deploying effective public protection strategies and engaging its residents in a meaningful programme of rehabilitation.

Striking a balance between protecting the public and rehabilitating people on probation, by establishing a quality relationship, is complex, and in other probation inspection programmes, we often find deficits here. It is clear that the psychologically informed planned environment (PIPE) approach embedded at Southview AP is succeeding in getting this crucial balance right.

We have identified a small number of areas for improvement which would enhance delivery at Southview even further – some of which are the responsibility of national leaders to address. In particular, the slow response to outstanding repairs and required building alterations is causing significant frustrations for staff and residents and must be addressed so as not to detract from the outstanding work being undertaken.

The team at Southview should be extremely proud of what they are achieving. I wish them well for the future.

Martin Jones CBE
HM Chief Inspector of Probation

A Good Question

From yesterday:-

"I’m just going to cut across this conversation, and I do love how this blog is a conversation:Probation is a traumatised profession. The trauma is huge: organisational, personal. There can be little recovery while a death by a thousand cuts continues to be inflicted. To wit, A New Choreography, TR, HMPPS and now the (largely) disgraceful Sentencing Bill. Why the persistent mood on this blog is of searing anger, and nihilism.
It seems like everything and everyone is hell bent on erasing the identity, the contribution, the social role, the profession of Probation as it was founded.

I was struck by a comment by an inspector, it might have even been The Inspector of probation, on some seminar or other, that he was made suddenly aware of the real impact of TR on staff by the literally visceral reaction of individual probation staff when it was mentioned. Its so hard, so dam hard, to envisage a way out of this pain and social cost. Ranting at the dying of the light is no solution, or even healthy if momentarily cathartic. Regrouping might be a thing. 

Your previous blog post sparked some vitriolic comments about the Probation Institute. The next posted a statement by its President extolling just what we would want the conversation about Probation practice to be about. The PI response to the Sentencing Bill was absolutely on point. 

So if regrouping in the trenches requires a cup of tea and a reappraisal of where our best bets, and best comrades are, I’d suggest the PI is shaping up. Napo is our Union. Unison is there. Howard League is definitely onside. There are others. Look for the common purpose, not the deficiences or differences. Would anyone care to share other groups and organisations that are aligned?"

1) Frances Crook

Labour gets punitive again

I remember when Douglas Hurd tried to reduce the use of short prison sentences but his rhetoric was all about the promise to punish people more harshly and send serious offenders to prison for longer. This had the effect of increasing the use of prison, not reducing it. So it will be with the current regime who are talking about increasing punishment both in the community and in prisons. They boast about how many more prison cells they are building, about making community sentences more vicious and only releasing people from prison early if they are supine and compliant. It is a mess and it will end badly.

Justice ministers went a jolly to Texas to see carefully selected prisons where people can earn early release if they undertake work and are compliant. The problem with this is twofold: good behaviour in prison means being obedient and is not a good indicator of how people will face the challenges of the outside world, and, there are so few opportunities for people to do any meaningful activities in prisons that we cannot demand they engage if there is nothing to engage with.

Compliance in prisons just means spending time lying on your filthy bunk watching television and not complaining. Will good behaviour be judged if people make complaints about their treatment and conditions?

People with mental health challenges on entry to prison find their condition deteriorates due to the restrictive conditions. People who were otherwise healthy suffer new serious mental health problems in prisons; we only have to look at the catastrophic level of self-injury across the estate, particularly by women.

Prisons are awash with drugs. It is a more lucrative market than the community. It fosters bullying and gangs and addiction. If prisons were better places, drugs would not be so enticing.

But this is not my only concern about the proposals. Community sentences should be based on people making amends for the wrong they have done. This should be a positive experience to help people be citizens, not criminals. Yet the government proposes it will introduce more negative elements by restricting people’s civil rights and access to leisure. Whilst it is fair enough to take a driving licence from someone who is a dangerous driver or who contravenes driving rules, that is a clearly linked penalty, it is not appropriate to take away access to leisure activities in order to try to solve prison over-crowing.

I entirely support David Gauke’s recommendation that short prison sentences should be severely restricted, indeed I would go further and ban them altogether. There is plenty of research, from the ministry of justice itself, that short prison terms increase the likelihood of reoffending, compared to community sentences in like for like cases. We hear from the magistrates that they have imposed community sentences and still the person in front of them has committed another crime - yes - but the likelihood is reduced each time a community penalty is imposed whereas the likelihood of more crime is guaranteed with a prison sentence. But then, magistrates don’t read research and are profoundly ignorant of the evidence.

Labour has a lamentable history of exploding the use of prison for working class people, introducing increasingly punitive community sentences and restricting civil liberties. It looks like they are at it again.

Frances Crook was Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform for 30 years until October 2021.

Prior to taking up her role at the Howard League, she worked as a teacher, a campaigner for Amnesty International and in non-executive roles at both Greenwich University and NHS Barnet.

Frances has campaigned for the whole UK penal system to be subject to a radical overhaul. She has highlighted the structural inequalities and injustice of the existing system and argued that a smaller more ethical and compassionate prison system would save public money, transform lives and change incarceration for good. During her tenure at the Howard League, Frances oversaw work with the police to reduce child arrests by two thirds, and under her direction the number of staff and turnover of the charity grew twenty-fold. She was described by David Lammy MP as "the single most influential campaigner for prison reform of our times".

2) Revolving Doors

Costly failure finally addressed: Revolving Doors responds to the Sentencing Bill

After over 30 years of campaigning, the end of short sentences is a milestone – but this is just the first marker upon the long road to ending the revolving door.

With a staggering cost of over £1billion per year, and reoffending rates of 55%, it has long been clear that short sentences are no deterrent and do not rehabilitate. Rather, for our group they are the very mechanism that keeps the revolving door turning, facilitating a downward spiral of crisis and crime.

While we welcome the Sentencing Bill, we have strong concerns about the proposed use of suspended sentences as an alternative to short prison sentences, rather than community orders.

Too often, suspended sentences function less as an alternative to custody, and more as a delay before prison. Many people caught in cycles of crisis and crime breach their orders not out of wilful disobedience, but because of unmet health and social needs. Addressing these issues takes time, resources, and consistent support, yet services are often slow to respond and the stability people need is not in place.

For those in our group, help frequently arrives only after a breach has already occurred. Their lives are chaotic, and while they struggle, the responsibility for failed compliance does not rest solely on them – probation and wider systems are not providing the support required. Without that, a suspended sentence risks setting people up to fail rather than offering a genuine alternative to custody.

Instead of suspended sentences, the presumption must be in favour of community sentences if it is to succeed.

People in the revolving door need help to address the root causes of their offending in a consistent, supportive environment. They need wrap-around support in the community to divert them away from the cycle of crisis and crime.

The benefits of this are manifold: safer, stronger, happier, healthier people and communities. Money and lives saved.

As the Bill makes its way towards becoming law, and in the years ahead as we look to the future, Revolving Doors and our members will be here to make the case for what works: pre-arrest diversion, community sentences which address root causes, peer support to build empathy and understanding, and whole-system approaches to breaking the cycle of crisis and crime.

We are getting closer to ending the revolving door. Now, more than ever, it’s time for bold action.

3) NACRO

Narco responds to Sentencing Bill announcement

Nacro responds to the introduction of the Sentencing Bill today (02.09.2025). The Bill, in response to recommendations made by former Justice Secretary David Gauke in his Independent Sentencing Review, introduces the following reforms, amongst others:

• An expansion of tagging.
• End of automatic release for people who behaved badly in prison.
• People released after a third of their sentence under a “earned progression model”.

Campbell Robb, Chief Executive at Nacro, the social justice charity, said:

“This is a key moment for the future of the criminal justice system and those affected by it. The initial focus on tagging is an interesting start to a much bigger debate about how the Sentencing Bill could and should transform our justice system to put rehabilitation and reducing reoffending at the heart. We need to ensure that any changes on this scale are thoroughly examined to ensure they positively impact victims, those working in the system, and help people move away from crime.

“Tagging can play an important role in supervision and safeguarding. However, it is vital that electronic monitoring doesn’t replace the one-to-one human support that can make all the difference to someone’s life chances. Therefore, investment in tagging and probation must go hand in hand with increased investment for the community services to ensure that people get the vital help to turn their lives around. It is also important that tagging does not overly restrict people’s ability to integrate back into society, for example ensuring that people are able to work or spend time caring for family, as we know these are key elements to reduce reoffending.”

4) Centre for Crime and Justice Studies

Smart, self-critical and less patronising

Is it time for a rethink on the way criminal justice reformers do criminal justice reform?

Government plans to shake-up sentencing, due out next month, are expected to include a further toughening of community sentences and a Texas-style “earned progression model” for prisoners. A number of reformers, rightly in my view, worry that the shake-up could make the prisons and wider criminal justice crisis worse, not better.

We explored the pros, and the many cons, of recent Texas prisons policy in July, in a special event with US sentencing and prisons expert Michele Deitch.

Beyond the specifics of the earned progression model, and the wisdom of following the lead of high-incarceration jurisdictions like Texas, I do wonder whether our current approach to discussing, and advocating for, prison and wider criminal justice reform, is working.

One of the problems, I think, is that reformers have tended to approach the public and politicians like visiting missionaries: intent on converting them to their way of thinking. “If we could just share these facts with you”, the message seems to be, “then you’ll understand why you are wrong, and why we are right”.

I parody somewhat of course, but only somewhat. For all sorts of reasons, a missionary approach is probably not going to be very successful, if it ever was.

As we enter what is looking like a period of heightened populist demands for tough policies and tough action – linked in part to claims and concerns about immigration – it would be as well for criminal justice reformers to reflect on their current approaches.

In particular, reform organisations should get better at reflecting on why it might be that so many members of the public appear open to what reformers might consider to be punitive or counter-productive policies, and why so many politicians champion them.

They should be spending more time thinking afresh about what policies are needed in response to the coming challenge, and less time worrying about how they might better communicate long-standing policy commitments that, to be frank, do not have traction with the public or politicians.

Listening empathetically, being on receive, as well as broadcast, is crucial. Smart and bold, yes. But also self-critical and less patronising with those who disagree.

It would also be helpful if ministers got over themselves somewhat, and accepted that a vibrant, independent criminal justice reform sector, confident about telling them things they do not want to hear, is a strength and a resource to draw on.

In a parliamentary democracy such as the UK, it is easy for power to become deaf to critical challenge, treating it as an irritation or sign of disloyalty. This is why it is important that the voice of the reform sector is confident and bold, but also self-critical and open to fresh thinking.

5) Howard League

How will the sentencing review recommendations be turned into operational reality?

Now that David Gauke’s sentencing review has delivered its recommendations, we expect legislation to be introduced any day. This legislation will start to fill in what is currently an incomplete picture, as we wait to understand precisely how the government will interpret the review’s recommendations and go about turning them into operational reality.

In hindsight, the sentencing review was a game of two halves. The first half led to a report published in February on the history and trends in sentencing. This was an excellent piece of work that identified the current use of custody as profligate and unsustainable. The review diagnosed penal populism as the driver behind this and recognised, as the Howard League has been campaigning on for some time, that sentence inflation must be addressed if our ballooning prison population is to be checked.

The review’s second half, however, is considerably less ambitious in scope. That’s partly because certain matters, most obviously the sentencing law around murder, were excluded from the review’s remit. This made tackling sentence inflation especially difficult. But other issues around longer sentencing, such as the escalation of maximum sentences and the use of mandatory minimum sentences, were put aside by the review in its final report. The euphemism used is that the review “did not have enough time” to look at these issues. It’s hard not to conclude, however, that these issues were shelved because they were viewed as too politically challenging.

At the heart of the review’s recommendations are five proposals that are estimated to save between 9,000 and 10,000 prison places. These are: 

• Curbing the use of short custodial sentences. 
• Extending the use of suspended sentence orders. 
• Introducing an ‘earned progression’ model for those on standard determinate sentences (SDS). 
• Introducing a similar model for those on extended determinate sentences (EDS). 
• Simplifying the recall system for those on SDS.

The government has already rejected the recommendation for people on EDS. If all the other proposals go through and save the prison places they are intended to save, we would expect this only to buy the government perhaps two more years before it starts to run out of prison places again.

What’s worrying about this prospect is that the government will be closer to the next general election by that point. It will have faced two more years of the attrition of being in power. In that scenario, how likely is it that there will be an appetite for making bolder policy choices?

There is also some concern about how an ‘earned progression’ model will work when the prison system is so overcrowded and unable to deliver positive regimes in a consistent manner. Staying out of trouble is already difficult in the current system – for example, new Ministry of Justice (MoJ) research shows that prisoners in overcrowded cells are 19% more likely to be involved in an assault.

The operational challenge of implementing an earned progression model has implications for many people in prison, but we are particularly concerned about young adults. There is a very real danger that young men in this age group will be set up to fail. It is worth spelling out why, with an example of how a poorly implemented model of earned release could backfire on the government.

We know that young adults continue to develop physically and psychologically until their mid-twenties and that maturity affects judgement, decision-making skills, and impulse control. Moreover, young adults reside in some of the most violent and unsafe prisons in the estate. Safety in custody statistics show that young men aged 18-20 have the highest rates of involvement in assaults (including as victims).

If additional days of imprisonment are used as a mechanism to keep people in prison who are viewed as not having ‘earned’ their release, then it is notable that two prisons holding young adults (Isis and Brinsford) saw the highest use of additional days in 2024. We are currently conducting data analysis that suggests more than a third of additional days handed out in 2024 were given to people aged 24 and under. It is hard not to conclude that young adults might be disproportionately impacted by the proposals around earned release.

The legislation we expect to see published soon will start to answer some of these questions we have coming out of the sentencing review. As it is debated in Parliament, there will be further opportunities to scrutinise the detail of what is being proposed. In the meantime, what we do know is that the government is ploughing ahead with a prison building programme. In the recent spending review, the MoJ was allocated £7billion of capital expenditure to create 14,000 new prison places.

While the department’s day-to-day budget also received an annual average increase of 1.8%, it is worth noting that those 14,000 new prison places represent an expansion of the prison estate by about 15%. The sentencing review alone can’t fix this colossal mismatch in the department’s sums. In other words, the MoJ is struggling to provide lasting solutions to the problems it faces today, while storing up even greater problems for the future.

6) Prison Reform Trust

PRT comment: Publication of the Sentencing Bill

Commenting,  Pia Sinha, chief executive of the Prison Reform Trust said:

“With the prison population just days from a new all-time high and capacity running critically low, the government has had little choice but to introduce a series of emergency measures over the past year. England and Wales already has one of the highest imprisonment rates in western Europe, and today’s bill offers an opportunity to begin restoring our justice system to a more proportionate, sustainable, and effective footing.

“The belief that ever-longer prison sentences are the key to tackling crime has brought us to this point: dangerously overcrowded prisons and a justice system close to breaking down. These conditions fail victims, who face unacceptable delays in seeking justice, and they fail those we want to stop from reoffending. We must abandon the long-standing fantasy that building more prisons will solve this crisis — history shows it will not.

“The Sentencing Bill rightly seeks to expand the use of effective alternatives to custody, while reserving prison for more serious offences. For too long, prisons have become the last stop for people in desperate need of support they never received. For these reforms to succeed, probation must be properly staffed and resourced to help people rebuild their lives and reduce reoffending.

“Some measures, however, require careful scrutiny. Earned release must not replicate existing inequalities, particularly for young adults and minority ethnic groups; electronic tagging should only be used where evidence shows it is effective; and executive sign-off of Sentencing Council guidelines risks undermining judicial independence. This bill alone will not solve the crisis, but with the right investment and political will, it could be the start of building a justice system that works better for victims, prisoners, and society alike.”

7) Unlock

MoJ’s AI Action Plan for Justice raises questions for people with criminal records

The Ministry of Justice has announced a new three-year strategy for introducing artificial intelligence across the justice system in England and Wales. The plan aims to improve efficiency and fairness throughout the justice system.

While we can see there is a clear need to tackle issues like prison overcrowding and the courts backlog, we believe it raises clear concerns for people living with criminal records.

A major concern for Unlock is the creation of joined-up digital systems linking court, prison and probation records. These so-called ‘digital offender IDs’ risk embedding a person’s past, making it even harder to move on from the long shadow of a criminal record. We are especially concerned about how data is retained and reused across departments to not only inform IDs, but to also provide information for research.
We can’t hard-code barriers into the system

“At Unlock, we already see how a criminal record follows people into every aspect of life,” said Paula Harriott, Unlock CEO.

“The rollout of AI tools must not hard-code barriers into the system; everyone deserves the chance to be seen as more than their past. We are particularly concerned about how a person’s record will be used throughout the criminal records system. For us, the idea that a child’s record might be saved and shared forever is of particular concern. Because of these concerns, we need guarantees with this action plan, that there is room for people to be allowed to reset and move on.”

Other AI tools planned include mobile phone data scanning in prisons and predictive models that assess how ‘risky’ someone is. These could be systems that could unfairly flag or label people based on outdated or biased data.

Unlock will push to ensure that any AI-driven decision-making remains transparent, challengeable and rooted in fairness and compassion. People who live under the long shadow of a criminal record should not be impacted further in the digital transformation of justice.

Guest Blog 103

A Service on the Brink

Let me explain the predicament. Nobody speaks with authority for probation, and nobody listens to or recognises those who genuinely try. That’s the root of why probation is in the state it’s in.

We now have a growing industry of HMPPS “units”, effective practice, professional registration, workforce planning, policy, AI, yet none of it makes a single visible or positive difference to the service, its staff, or the people under supervision.

Recent events only highlight the vacuum: Timpson flopped at the Bill McWilliams Annual Lecture (why was he even there?). Gauke’s much-heralded sentencing review, and the Justice Select Committee’s “rehabilitation review,” both fizzling into a shambles. Rees entrenched the “big brother” dominance of prisons over probation, before quietly leaving the stage. Mahmood then crushed the “prison and probation” baton beyond recognition, only to drop it for Lammy (whose status Starmer just gave away in the cabinet reshuffle), who will now have no choice but to spend months fumbling it across the tarmac under political glare.

• MoJ / HMPPS: Deaf to voices from the probation frontline. Practitioners least of all.
• Probation leaders: Meek, heads in the sand, silenced by the system, or detached from reality.
• Napo and unions: Incompetent. Enough said.
• Criminology Academics: Too often caught up in their own research cycles and popularist narratives, speaking to each other more than to the service.
• Think tanks, charities, community agencies: No different, each with an eye on the next funding stream or contract, not on sustainable solutions.
• Probation Institute: Speaks well, occasionally elevates practitioner voices, but those voices vanish without impact. Inside probation, almost nobody listens.

The way forward?

Reading the Rademaker report alongside recent HMIP findings is sobering. If probation cannot get a grip on racism, bullying, and harassment, and continues to be rated universally inadequate (while probation senior managers and leaders remain silent), then the service is staring into a very bleak future (with a crass and dangerous looking Reform leader grinning back with a pint in hand).

While deckchairs are endlessly shuffled at the top, around 10,000 vacancies remain unfilled. And yet, the overriding national priority, the one thing managers insist on is ensuring every practitioner completes mandatory training and professional registration by the end of the month.

That is the true picture: a service on the brink, obsessed with bureaucratic compliance while neglecting its workforce, its purpose, its identity, and its integrity. Ignorant to everything positive the Probation Institute or anyone else has to say.

Anon

'Punitive, stigmatising and discriminatory'

I notice the Probation Institute, quietly, politely but thoroughly, pours copious quantities of cold water over the Sentencing Bill proposals:- 

The Sentencing Bill - an opportunity missed?

On 11 July, the Minister for Prisons, Parole and Probaton, James Timpson, delivered the annual Bill McWilliams lecture, in association with the Institute for Criminology at the University of Cambridge, and the Probation Institute. The lecture series was inaugurated following Bill's death, with the aim of commemoratng his research and practce on the history, culture and values of probaton work, and to keep alive the values of the rehabilitative ideal.

Members of the Probaton Institute and a wide audience of probaton staff, former chiefs, researchers and the judiciary were pleased to hear Lord Timpson reiterate the centrality of the Probaton Service in his presentaton, and did not at all disagree with the emphasis he placed on reducing reoffending, and public protection. However, there was some consternation regarding his focus on the possible and extended uses of Electronic Monitoring and AI to enable probation practice, with an apparent vision of 'custody in the community.'

These concerns were justfied by the content and tone of the announcement of the provisions of the Sentencing Bill, made via a press release on 3 September. The Probaton Institute applauds the principle of diminishing the use of short prison sentences, which, as the press release rightly points out, have a poor record of reducing reoffending, notably in comparison with community-based sentences. But we would argue that the current status of community sentences, with the provision of additional requirements to address offending behaviour, would be more than adequate, and suitable, to enable people to reform, and to achieve their rehabilitaton. 

We are disturbed by the proposed new powers to restrict the freedoms of people convicted of criminal offences, for instance, via restrictons of attendance at, amongst other places, 'pubs, concerts and football matches’; and the proposal that the personal details of people undertaking Unpaid Work in their local communites - originally known as Community Service - will be promulgated publicly. These proposals are at odds with any notion of rehabilitaton and reintegraton for people with criminal records - historically, core principles of Probaton work. The publication of personal details, alongside the proposal to electronically tag anyone released from custody, appear to be measures designed to stigmatise and exclude those who have fallen foul of the law, not to enable their rehabilitation and reform.

The Probation Service is identified as integral to the implementation of these new measures. Yet it is difficult to envisage a scenario in which effective supervision can be carried out, given the current strains on probation staff. Issues regarding the retention of qualified staff have dogged probation for over a decade, arising initially from the semi-privatisation of the service, and, more recently, following reunification. This issue, of a sufficiency of suitably qualified and experienced staff, has been raised frequently by the Probation Inspectorate in its reviews into Serious Further Offences, indicating that the organisational change imposed on Probation over the last decade or so has had real, and harmful consequences. Recent research conducted by the Rehabilitatng Probation team based at Liverpool John Moores University suggests that a factor in this attrition is that the role to which practitioners are recruited does not reflect the actual nature of the work; that the motivation to work in probation is, as it has always been, to enable people to make positive changes, not to provide a community based carceral environment.

The Probation Service has more than a century of working with people with criminal convictions to enable them to reform, and to reintegrate into their communities. Probation practitioners recognise that a key aspect of their work is putting clear and firm boundaries in place, alongside creating supportive and motivational relationships with those under their supervision. Probation does not shy away from the control aspects of the work, but does place such controls in a context of care and concern. Research by the Prison Reform Trust with people subject to probation supervision portrays the onerousness of this status. One participant, released from custody, escribed himself as 'free but not free.' Regrettably, this Bill seems to present a picture of justice which is punitive, stigmatsing and discriminatory, and which may only serve to further diminish real opportunities for effective rehabilitation.

Any probation practitioner will be acutely aware that many of the people they are supervising have been victims of crime themselves, with consequences of trauma and diminution in opportunities to achieve, notably in education and work. These structural disadvantages seem likely to be further entrenched by the provisions of the Sentencing Bill. The Probation Institute regards this as a golden opportunity to forefront a rehabilitative narrative and agenda - in its current form, the Bill appears to be a missed opportunity.

Trustees of the Probation Institute. September 2025

I Despair

Listening to Radio 4 last night, I became aware of yet another story I'd missed, namely that concerning the Safer Living Foundation based in Nottingham:-

File on Four Sex Offenders: The Long Way Back

Alison Holt, BBC social affairs editor, has been given exceptional access to the clients of a Nottingham charity that works to reintegrate men who have been convicted of sexual offences. 

'John, Matt, Dan and Liam', not their real names, are determined to turn their lives around after prison sentences. We hear how they work towards this with the help of the staff and volunteers at the Safer Living Foundation, the only charity of its sort in the country. Always mindful of the victims of sexual crime, the principal aim is to prevent further offending and the creation of further harm.

There are hurdles to overcome - public abhorrence, plus grave difficulties with accommodation and work among them. The Foundation also runs Aurora, an online advice scheme for people who have not offended but who are worried about their sexual thoughts.

This would be a 'good news' story of course, were it not for the fact it's now closed! As we continue to hear news of yet more punitive policies towards offenders - tag everyone leaving prison -  why on earth can't we find the wherewithal to fund enlightened projects like this? It makes me despair at the utterly misguided direction of travel our politicians are taking us on. Those with long memories will no doubt recall the disgraceful decision to remove funding for Circles of Support and Accountability in 2018. 

This posted on Linkedin:-  

It’s with great sadness that after more than 11 years the Safer Living Foundation, an organisation that I helped co-found, has today closed. The SLF was an award-winning organisation that existed to reduce sexual offending and re-offending through preventative and rehabilitative initiatives. 

It’s been an incredibly difficult decision to make for all involved, especially because of its impact on our service-users. It’s difficult to put into words what the SLF means to those involved with it and it’s very hard to say goodbye. At the end of March our centre in Nottingham closed, but our last day was one of celebration, hope (tears), tea and reflection on all the things we have done together in over a decade in existence.

• First organisation (certainly in Europe) to run Prison Circles of Support and Accountability. 
• First community reintegration and rehabilitation centre for people with sexual convictions (world-wide) 
• First compassion-focused prevention intervention 
• Third Sector Charity of the year 2019, 
• We worked with well over 300 individuals with sexual convictions or individuals that were concerned they may offend during. 
• Robust evidence to show that our service-users developed and strengthened meaningful protective factors, reduced risk and we had a 5 year recidivism rate of <2%
• Over 6000 volunteer hours committed to projects 

We’ve worked with many great individuals, and have been supported by many funders and partner organisations, including Nottingham Trent University who have supported us since our first day, Notts PCC, Notts Police and Probation, Lloyds Bank Foundation, and University of Derby. We’ve had amazing staff and volunteers that have worked for us throughout the years, but a massive thanks to our centre manager Dave who was with us 9 years and he made the centre the success that it is/was. It’s been an absolute pleasure working with our men and working with the other trustees Lynn Saunders OBE Dr. Kerensa Hocken Kirsty Teague Claire Hampson Luke Vinter Professor (Hon). Dr. Geraldine AkermanLuke Vinter and Jordan Clayton all of whom are wonderful, compassionate and dedicated individuals. Our Chair of Trustees, Lynn, has been the moral compass of the SLF, and you have steered us through the beginning and the end. It’s been an honour to be part of the SLF with you all. 

There has been highs and lows, but what we achieved and built is something we all should be proud of and I’m grateful to have been a part of it. We gave it our all and we had an amazing run, but sadly all good things...

Nicholas Blagden

Prof. Criminological Psychology, Trustee/Co-Founder Safer Living Foundation, Member (accredited) National Register of Psychotherapists and Counsellors

--oo00oo--

Postscript

Thanks go to the reader for directing us to the following:-

A scheme helped prevent sex offenders committing more crimes - then it closed. Why?

It took me some time to find the front door of the Safer Living Foundation. There was no nameplate, and the building was one of many anonymous red-brick Victorian terraced houses in Nottingham. It was January 2025, and I was wrapped up against the cold as I walked up and down the street trying to find the right address.

There was a very good reason for this anonymity. The foundation works with people convicted and imprisoned for sexual offences after they have been released back into the community. The men may have been found guilty of anything from indecent exposure to viewing abusive images online to contact offences involving children.

And people who have committed sex crimes can be among the most reviled in society. At times they are the subject of vigilante action.

In May 2025, the government announced it was considering the roll-out of voluntary chemical castration for sex offenders and also looking at whether this could be made mandatory.

But while this sort of tough rhetoric grabs headlines, the Safer Living Foundation claims the work it does providing a safe space for people with sexual convictions to find support with reintegrating into society has had positive results.

And there is evidence to suggest they may be correct. Just 2% of the men who spent time at the foundation reoffended, according to its own figures. That compares to an average of 15.1% for those convicted of sexual crimes in England and Wales. The Foundation says it only takes people who say they are committed to change.

I was there to see for myself how the centre in Nottingham - the only project of its kind in the UK - operated. Over five months the BBC was given a unique insight into its work.

What none of us knew that cold winter morning was that these would prove to be its final months. In May 2025, the centre was forced to close. Persuading organisations to fund sex offender treatment had never been easy and in the tough financial climate, it had become impossible to secure the money they needed to keep going.

It's an outcome that casts light on the UK's attitude towards preventing those guilty of sex crimes from reoffending. It forces us to confront difficult questions, including whether spending public or charity money on attempting to rehabilitate sex offenders should be recognised as an effective way of preventing harm and in doing so protecting potential victims.

'I'll do whatever works'

When I eventually found the right door, it was opened by Dave Potter. He had run the service since it was set up 11 years ago.

Here, he told me, offenders meet people who have insight into their experience of having been convicted for sex crimes - both others who have been found guilty of these offences as well as counsellors - "because who else can you talk to?".

Inside, in a busy kitchen, lunch was being prepared. A handful of men of all ages, sitting and standing, quietly chatted about the day's news, football and food. In another room, a games club was taking place and elsewhere, counselling sessions were under way.

Often their partners and families wanted nothing more to do with them after their convictions, according to Dave.

Dave accepted that there would be those who wondered how he could bring himself to offer support to sex offenders. But he believed the bigger picture is what's important. "Everything we do underpins (the idea of) no more victims," he said. "I'll do whatever works to prevent further offending."

Certainly, the official statistics around sexual offending suggest that much more needs to be done to bring the numbers down. On average the police record more than 194,000 sexual offences each year in England and Wales. Of these, 40% are against children.

One child in every 10 experiences some form of sexual abuse before the age of 16 in England and Wales, according to "conservative estimates" by the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse. Many victims, both adults and children, will never feel able to speak about what has happened.

The harm caused by these offences cannot be underestimated, and that was acknowledged in most of the conversations I had at the centre with offenders, staff and volunteers alike. At the time I visited about 60 men were enrolled as service users, but over the last decade hundreds of men and two women have been supported by staff here.

'The life I knew has completely ended'

The service users I spoke to wanted to remain anonymous. They described feeling lonely and even suicidal, and said they realised what they had done was wrong. They said they recognised the impact it had on their victims. They also talked about how the centre had helped them.

"I was petrified about leaving prison with a stigma attached," said Matt (the names of all ex-offenders have been changed). As a result of his conviction, he had lost his family, his job and everything he knew before. "The life I knew has completely ended." Without the centre he would be struggling even more, he said.

Another man, Liam, described being assaulted after he was released from prison.

"One of my neighbours found out who I was and then one night decided to come round and attack me," he said. "Physical violence, swearing at me and basically, telling everybody around there what I was," he said. He had to move.

Finding work can be a major challenge for the men, too. Some 95% of the service users here were on the Sex Offenders Register and were required to tell potential employers this. In my conversations with them, the same words came up time and again – anxiety, low self-esteem, fear and, in particular, isolation.

While to some these risk factors could sound like an excuse for what they have done, the centre's approach is based on the idea that addressing these issues will make these men less likely to offend. And so it tries to help them rebuild their lives in a way that protects them and others.

"By treating people with decency, by looking at the whole person and not just the crime, by finding ways to manage their social isolation, their shame and their guilt, that reduces further offending down the line," Dave said.

He accepted that some might think that what the centre was doing was naïve. Before he did his job, he says, he might have agreed with the suggestion that sex offenders simply need to be punished. But now, he said, "I know what we do works. It is about understanding the harm that acting on those impulses causes. It is about understanding what they've put victims through."

Distractions from inappropriate thoughts

There is group therapy as well as weekly one-to-one counselling sessions. In one of the discussions with Dave, a man called John, who has been jailed twice for his offending, talked about how he now distracted himself if he began to have any fleeting, inappropriate sexual thoughts. He played football video games and generally kept busy.

He also described how difficult the last few months have been. A homeless man, who John had offered to help, moved into his flat and became increasingly manipulative and violent. Eventually, he threatened to tell others about John's conviction.

With support from the Foundation, John called the police and the man was removed.

"If an alcoholic has no help and support, its unlikely they'll give up booze," said Dave. He believes it can be the same with sex offenders, so the centre provided controlled support that helps them cope, even under stress.

There is support for this approach, too, among groups that work with victims.

"This project further underpins the fact that we can't make a dent in the alarming figures of a quarter of the population experiencing sexual violence by simply pledging to change things," says Lucy Duckworth, policy lead at The Survivors Trust. "We need action and funding and to have difficult conversations with those who commit this crime, to enable us to intervene earlier."

A failing in the system

The main place where sex offenders currently get treatment is in prison – but even there it is limited. In the year ending March 2024, there were about 87,000 people in prison in England and Wales. More than 18,000 (21%) had been convicted of sex offences. Some 1,115 prisoners did start accredited treatment in prison and 1,094 people completed those courses.

The length of time the courses take means they may not be an option for offenders in jail for a short period. Matt, who had earlier told me how worried he had been about leaving prison, took two 30-hour programmes while an inmate at HMP Whatton in Nottinghamshire, which is, according to the Howard League for Penal Reform, the largest prison for adult sex offenders in Europe. Matt said these were hugely useful to him.

"You ripped yourself right open," he said. "Laid everything on the table. Looked at how and why you got there, and how are you going to rebuild yourself? How are you going to make sure it doesn't happen again?"

But once inmates are released, accessing this kind of treatment becomes even more difficult, experts say. "That's a failing of where we're at in the system," says Nick Blagden, professor of criminological psychology at the University of Derby and a co-founder and trustee of the Safer Living Foundation.

An alternative solution is to reach people before they end up in the criminal justice system - before they harm someone. There are UK projects that do good work offering services in the community, says Prof Blagden. But given the scale of the problem, the level of support is nowhere near as "wide-ranging" as is needed, he adds. He contrasts this with Germany, where he says there is a "much more sensible" approach to funding prevention projects that provide therapy to adults who feel they might commit sexual offences.

In addition to the Nottingham centre, the foundation also ran a programme called Aurora, which provided highly confidential support, online and in person, for people with concerning sexual thoughts, before they did something that put them in contact with the criminal justice system. It had 300 people on a 12-month waiting list.

"If we had unlimited funds and resources, we would be working with hundreds of people a month," says Prof Blagden.

'We've helped a lot of lives'

Getting all this right could not be more important. The National Crime Agency estimated in 2024 that between 710,000 and 840,000 UK adults posed varying degrees of sexual risks to children.

The questions for society are: as well as making it easier for victims of abuse to be heard and believed, are we ready to challenge the behaviour, thoughts and actions of those who have offended and are at risk of offending much sooner? And are we prepared to spend money on doing so?

For its part, the Ministry of Justice says: "We are determined to halve violence against women and girls in a decade and tackling sexual offenders' criminality is a vital part of this plan."

Ministers also point to their plan for a national roll-out of "medication to manage problematic sexual arousal in sex offenders", often known as chemical castration, which is delivered through drugs alongside psychiatric work, and say they are considering whether to make it mandatory. The department also says it recently announced a record £700m increase in overall probation funding by 2028.

For decades, the mantras of many politicians have focused on being tough on crime. The use and length of prison sentences have increased as a result. However, the current overcrowding in prisons is forcing a rethink.

In May 2025, an independent review of sentencing was published. It concluded that while punishment is important, there "has been insufficient focus on reducing crime". It called for more community-based sentences and support and more use of the third sector charities and organisations.

The government has since accepted most of the recommendations across all crimes. The Safer Living Foundation, with the guardrails it provided to support sex offenders in the community, seemed to be tailor-made for this strategy. But the same month the review was published, the Foundation learned that its application for a lottery grant - which it needed to keep running - had been turned down.

'Fairly hand-to-mouth'

"It has been fairly hand-to-mouth over the years we've been operating," says Lynn Saunders, another of the co-founders of the Safer Living Foundations as well as a former governor at Whatton and now professor of applied criminology at Derby University. "There seems to be a big reluctance because of the nature of the work, people find it difficult to be associated with it."

In May, the centre closed, while the Aurora Project was paused. On the final day, staff, volunteers and some of the men they have supported, packed into the small kitchen to say goodbye.

"I've decided to celebrate the fact we existed at all," said Dave. "We've helped a lot of lives and prevented a lot of victims."

A few hours later, when that anonymous front door was shut and locked, it marked the end of the project. There is no replacement and no prospect of re-opening.

Alison Holt

Social Affairs Editor