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.
ReplyDeleteWhy can’t sentence management roles be given a pay uplift as that is where the shortfall is? Exactly. If they can pay probation staff in the NSD a band up and spend all that money filling unnecessary department, on R&R and glossy recruiting campaigns, that £700 million about to be spent on IT and EMS, then they can do the same for sentence management and pay the actual FRONTLINE probation staff an equivalent as pay rises or retention bonuses.
DeleteHear 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.
ReplyDeleteIndeed I fear your only saying what is most likely.
DeleteLammy on race he speaks unwisely addressing a black meeting he lead a shameful pledge to call for financial reparations. Absolutely bonkers .
ReplyDeleteThe first blog is encouraging . Sadly the upper controllers are all moving through . The 15 or so regional directors have acos who all have little or no knowledge of very much. Saying the unions are incompetent is true and wrong for us. We need a professional union why are stuck with unions like this.
Would be interesting to see the reaction if this was sent anonymously to the all-staff probation email address....
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely agree. Figures like Bob Turney and Bill McWilliams once championed the practitioner’s voice, actively shaping probation’s identity and advocating for a rehabilitative approach over punitive measures. Their efforts were instrumental in promoting a probation model rooted in support, reintegration, and human dignity. That activity has all disappeared, similar with these recent ideas about shaping identity and emphasising rehabilitation over punishment.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.probation-institute.org/news/shaping-probations-identity
Similar stories
ReplyDeleteA Life of Justice, Joy and Uncompromising Principle
https://napomagazine.org.uk/jil-cove-a-life-of-justice-joy-and-uncompromising-principle/
A View from the Frontline
https://napomagazine.org.uk/the-concept-of-professionalism-in-probation-a-view-from-the-frontline/
This tribute to Jil Cove has been written by Helen Schofield, a long-time colleague, fellow activist and friend.
DeleteHelen reflects on Jil’s extraordinary life: from her early days as a nurse, to her influential role in the probation service and trade union movement, to her political fire in the heart of Spitalfields. Jil’s story is one of courage, compassion and conviction and the legacy she leaves behind is one that continues to inspire.
Jil Cove died on 9th July after a struggle with COPD. Jil was clever, funny, beautiful, brave and exceptionally politically astute.
I met Jil the day I joined the probation service – twenty something, following my Home Office training at Bedford College. We shared the top floor of the office in Grays Inn Road, also with Roj Holmes – in a split office in which initially Roj had the clock and I had the phone! We had a trojan senior probation officer but most of us recall that Jil was the real power. She influenced my career in many ways but most of all by persuading me that I should not only join the probation trade union Napo immediately but quickly take a local official role…..and the rest as they say…..is our shared history as Jil became a much loved chair of the trade union and I followed.
This article published in Spitalfields Life in 2011 recalls Jil in her own words:
“I trained as a nurse in Brighton and then applied to do midwifery at the Royal London Hospital. My mum came with me for the interview and there were drunks lying on the pavement all along Whitechapel, and she said, “You can’t come here!” but that was why I was attracted to it. I was working here in 1957, when the Windrush came over, and I worked alongside the first influx of black nurses.
After a couple of years, I was advised to give up nursing because I had a slipped disc, so I decided to try to become a probation officer and I got to know a psychiatric social worker at the Toynbee Hall in Commercial St where they had an outpost of Grendon Underwood prison – for inmates with personality disorders. At that time, the building where I live now was for ex-prisoners coming in and going off into the world, and she had a flat there but she needed a back-up to keep an eye on things, and I’ve been here ever since.”
Jil’s influence extended beyond the probation service into the local Labour Party in Spitalfields, where she left no one in any doubt about her views. It’s an interesting reflection that Jil very well understood the cultural differences between local politicians and the significantly increasing Bengali politicians. Jil had no qualms throughout the eighties and nineties in explaining about democracy, safety and justice to many local politicians. Jil organised against the redevelopment of Spitalfields Market but was eventually gracious about the commercial arena that replaced the old market.
In the early nineties, Jil persuaded me to leave my two young boys with their dad for a weekend in Derbyshire for the International Women’s Weekend in the company of an amazing group of women who have also been hugely influenced by Jil and in turn influenced her….sometimes sober, always noisy! This lovely group continues to meet to celebrate International Women’s Weekend and we are all feeling her loss deeply.
It is no secret that Jil despaired of the 21st century version of the Probation Service which she had loved for so long. She would tell fascinating stories about her lads in Camden Town where we worked. Jil practised “radical non intervention” – as often as possible – proving the importance of believing in people whilst they grow and change! She was proud to have only taken three individuals back to court in her long career as a probation officer but she was ever watchful and firm. If the Probation Service of the future can retain a fraction of Jil’s compassion and commitment it will survive and fulfil her ambitions.
We will celebrate Jil’s life at a giant picnic later this Summer – just as she did for her beloved friend George.
Helen Schofield
Jil Cove: A Life of Justice, Joy and Uncompromising Principle
DeleteJil Cove, who died on 9th July, leaves behind a legacy of fierce compassion, political clarity and deep commitment to the probation service, her union, and her community. A former chair of Napo and lifelong activist, Jil’s sharp wit, courage and belief in people left a mark on all who knew her. We remember her not only for what she stood for, but how she lived—joyfully, defiantly, and with love.
By Napo HQ
A bit more from the Spitalfield's Life article:-
Delete"In all the twenty-five years I worked in probation, I only took three people back to court for non-co-operation. You saw them for half an hour a week and you were supposed to influence them. My policy was radical non-intervention – I didn’t interfere with them and they didn’t interfere with me, but I was always there if they needed help. I think one of the things that me and my friends who worked together in the service for all those years valued was that we were left alone, but we had a small budget to do things – even as simple as getting a cat speyed.
One poor man, he was convinced the neighbours were sending sinister rays through the walls and ceiling, so we bought baking foil and helped him line the flat with it and it worked, it calmed him down. I remember one family in particular, the dad was a forger, the boys committed offences and the daughters would get pregnant, but somehow the mother held it all together – the kids were immaculately turned out and I always wondered how she did it. Another of the guys I worked with had done a lot of really nasty offences, a real tough nut. He was doing his A levels in prison and I visited him, and he said he’d just read the Diary of Anne Frank and it made him cry. It was November, and I said I wouldn’t retire until he got parole, and he got out next June. He’d never been to the theatre before so I took him to see Julius Caesar – you saw how you could change someone’s life and that’s what made it worthwhile. It was a nice job and I wouldn’t have left, but there was change towards a more punitive approach. In those days you could actually do social work. At my leaving party at The Water Poet, I got so drunk I was drinking pints of vodka and gin, and then they took me home and I drank half a bottle of rum."
About the sentence review, shambles is an understatement.
ReplyDelete“The Bill also introduces a presumption that prison sentences of a year or less will be replaced with tougher sentences in the community that better punish offenders and stop them reoffending.”
“Publishing the names and photos of those subject to an unpaid work requirement will demonstrate to the public that justice is being delivered and increase the visibility and transparency of community payback.”