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
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
“a service on the brink, obsessed with bureaucratic compliance while neglecting its workforce” - never a truer word spoken. So many units - data analysts, performance teams compliance teams ,death under supervision teams , complaints teams , learning and development teams (that don’t actually provide any training ) … all of these corporate units that make no real or visible difference to the workforce on the ground. Sentence management will continue to flounder until something is done as why would you want to work on the shop floor when you can move into a non operational team for the same if not more money and a fraction of the stress and responsibility. The ballot failed and we all know the pay offer will be peanuts and yet they will still scratch their heads and create another team no doubt to look into why retention is so poor in sentence management. Why can’t sentence management roles be given a pay uplift as that is where the shortfall is ? No one does this job as a vocation anymore so rightly or wrongly, pay that reflects the work done on the shop floor is the only way to start attracting more people and keeping them.
ReplyDeleteHear hear! This is spot on. Probation isn’t short of ideas or reviews, it’s short of leadership, honesty, and the courage to put staff and service users first. Until that changes, we’ll keep sinking under the weight of our own bureaucracy.
ReplyDeleteProbation is already dead, what we’re watching now is just the corpse being shuffled around to keep up appearances. The frontline knows it, the public will pay for it, and those in charge don’t care. At least Rt Hon Lammy wont hide the racism problem.
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