Listen to Practitioners

Yesterday saw Andy Burnham make an historic speech. Beyond doubt he proved he cares and he has the wisdom and confidence not just to follow public opinion, but lead it for the public good. But he must apply the very same logic he so eloquently espoused at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool yesterday to the way society currently views crime and criminality. It never used to be a political football and has exactly the same roots in social inequality and poor life chances he so passionately cares about. 

We simply cannot keep spending ever greater sums downstream on locking more people up with no hope of rehabilitation. He must have the bottle to recognise this and that money spent wisely upstream on investing in people and returning the probation service to the task they once so skillfully undertook would fit perfectly with his vision. Listen to them Andy:- 

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Ask practitioners. We know what good probation looks like. That’s what makes me so bloody angry about the direction we’re travelling in. We haven’t forgotten how to do probation. Increasingly, we’re being prevented from doing it.

It’s the reduction in human contact that worries me most. It feels increasingly like a conveyor belt. Assess somebody, put them into the appropriate box, prescribe X number of appointments, move them through the stages, reduce contact, move them online and call it proportionate supervision.

Except these are people. People are complicated enough without adding trauma, abuse, addiction, poverty, neurodiversity, mental ill-health, damaged relationships, institutionalisation and all the other experiences so many of the people we supervise bring through the door with them. Two people who look remarkably similar on an assessment can need completely different things from us.

You cannot dictate that somebody needs X appointments because they fit into an A box or an F box and pretend that tells you how long it will take to build a relationship with them. One person might tell me everything in their first appointment. Somebody else might take six months before they trust me enough to tell me the thing I actually needed to know. That isn’t inefficiency. That is probation.

Give me a manageable caseload and I can actually know the people I supervise. If somebody who always attends suddenly doesn’t turn up, and I know they’ve been struggling recently, I can think that’s not like them. I can pick up the phone. I can speak to somebody who knows them. I can get in my car and do a home visit because my professional judgement tells me something might be wrong.

Under a conveyor-belt model, that same absence risks becoming something to process. Did not attend. Attempted contact. Warning. Rearrange. Next case.

Yet that person might have relapsed. Their mental health might have deteriorated. Their relationship might have broken down. They might have lost their accommodation or something else might be unravelling. Or there might be nothing seriously wrong at all. But I only know that their absence is unusual because I know what normal looks like for them.

That is what you cannot prescribe in a supervision package. It comes from knowing somebody well enough to recognise change and having enough space in your working day to do something about it. Give me an impossible caseload and I don’t suddenly lose those skills. I lose the time to use them.

And apparently the answer to that is everything except fewer cases. Justice Transcribe saves minutes. Online reporting removes appointments. Supervision packages reduce contact. Electronic monitoring provides surveillance. AI creates efficiencies. Dashboards measure performance. Another e-learning package tells us how to implement the latest version of probation.

I’m not against technology. Use it to get rid of pointless repetitive administration and give me more time with people and I’ll welcome it. But technology is a tool. A tag can tell you where somebody is; it cannot tell you why their life is falling apart. An online check-in can tell you somebody has ticked “fine”; it cannot necessarily tell you that they very obviously aren’t.

What makes me angry is that we seem to be designing probation backwards. Prisons are overcrowded, so more people must be managed in the community. Probation hasn’t enough capacity, so rather than genuinely addressing that, we redesign probation until the available workforce can absorb the numbers. Less contact. More automation. More remote supervision. More “efficiency”. Human contact itself becomes the resource to be rationed.

Of course not everybody needs intensive supervision and of course contact should be proportionate. But proportionate should mean responsive to the individual in front of me and capable of changing when their circumstances change. It should not mean fitting a human being into a centrally designed package because somebody has calculated how many practitioner hours the system can afford them.

We talk endlessly about individualised, trauma-informed, relational practice while simultaneously building a system which increasingly standardises how often practitioners are permitted to have the relationship. Those two things simply do not sit comfortably together.

And please don’t keep telling practitioners to exercise professional curiosity while systematically removing the time in which to exercise it. Professional curiosity is useless if I haven’t got the time to act on what makes me curious.

Stop asking how little probation we can give somebody and still call it supervision. Ask what this particular person needs to make it less likely that they come back through the system, then give practitioners enough time and professional freedom to respond.

Because if we keep stripping human contact out of probation to create capacity, eventually we may have a wonderfully efficient conveyor belt. I’m just not sure we’ll still have a Probation Service.

Anon

*****

This sums up the situation eloquently, and I applaud their contribution however, probation staff have been raising their objections to the direction of travel both in person and via this blog for several years, and the powers that be simply disregard us.

Do ‘they,’ not know our views? Do they not know that they have a crisis of confidence? Do they believe that they have a glorious vision of the future or that they know life at the sharp end better that frontline workers, or are they following a blueprint with an end point that has never been disclosed.

Dialogue, evidence, statistics, data and history are simply overlooked or disregarded either because of arrogance or a directive from above and we are playing a game without the privilege of holding a full deck of cards.

At the end of the day, bonuses will be paid, gongs awarded, promotions granted and the back slapping will continue. ‘They,’ have nothing to lose, they’re not listening and they don’t care what you say or do. It’s called abuse and they can do it because they have the power.

Anon

*****

I agree with this, and I think that’s what makes me angrier than anything else. We need to stop pretending the problem is that nobody has explained it clearly enough. How many more times do practitioners have to say it? How many different ways do we have to describe what is happening before we accept that lack of information isn’t the problem?

We’ve explained the workload. We’ve explained what relentless change does. We’ve explained why relationships matter. We’ve explained the danger of reducing human contact. We’ve explained what happens when professional judgement is squeezed between national processes, targets and performance demands. We’ve explained why people are exhausted, why experienced practitioners are leaving and why confidence in the direction of the service is disappearing.

And still we get another transformation. Another model. Another package. Another dashboard. Another e-learning module. Another “efficiency”. Another announcement telling us how much better probation is going to become.

So yes, I agree. At some point you have to consider the possibility that they already know what we think. And that is far more frightening than believing they simply haven’t listened properly.

Because if you know that the people delivering the service are deeply concerned about its direction and you carry on regardless, what exactly is “staff engagement” for? If practitioners are invited to meetings, surveys, consultations and events but the fundamental direction is immovable, stop calling it engagement. Tell us what has already been decided and spare everybody the pretence.

The power imbalance in that is what I find increasingly disturbing. The practitioner still carries the case. The practitioner still carries the risk. The practitioner will still have their decisions scrutinised when something goes catastrophically wrong. Yet how much genuine influence does that same practitioner have over the systems, workloads, contact models and processes within which those decisions have to be made?

And eventually people learn. They stop putting their hand up. They stop challenging in meetings. They stop answering honestly. They sit through the presentation, complete the training, tick the box and keep their head down. Not because they agree, but because they have concluded that speaking achieves nothing except potentially marking them out as “difficult”, “negative” or “resistant to change”.

For an organisation supposedly dependent upon professional curiosity and people being prepared to say something doesn’t feel right here, that should be absolutely terrifying.

I’m angry because I still care. I still believe probation can be better than this. But I’m increasingly tired of hearing that practitioners need to make their voices heard. Our voices have been heard. The question now is why so little appears to change when we use them. And perhaps that is the crisis of confidence we should really be talking about.

Anon

*****

Thursday 1 October 2026: one for the probation history books. Apart from the introduction, and eventual unwinding, of Transforming Rehabilitation, Thursday could be one of the most significant days the Probation Service has faced in recent times - again. The media attention around the Sentencing Act may have died down, but that does not change what is about to happen across prisons and probation. 

The new Progression Model comes into force with hundreds of prisoners estimated to be released on the first day, followed by implementation across 10 tranches between October 2026 and June 2027. These are modelled estimates rather than fixed numbers, so the scale of the challenge is clear. There is an enormous amount of work happening behind scenes and credit is due where it is due, but the level of guidance, communication, instructions and mandatory learning accompanying all this change does not make the situation better. We do not need to return to the past, but you’d think they’d have learnt from it. 

No rational person thought they’d be reversing rehabilitating, revitalising or renewing probation into something better. It is possible, but not if the future of probation success is primarily framed around justice transcribe, AI, tagging and reducing the prison population, with little serious consideration of what probation actually is or what it could become. 

Probation has become the mechanism for implementing whatever happens elsewhere in the justice system, but without its own identity, professional voice and purpose. I do not even think there is real sympathy for probation staff being pulled from pillar to post through yet another major programme of change, while continuing to deliver a demanding public service, while poorly paid.. 

It’s totally ignored that within there is a legitimate sense of anger at those who have been complicit in allowing probation to become increasingly defined by the demands placed upon it rather than by what it can contribute. This force fed approach is simply that Thursday is where the policy document ends and operational reality begins, take it or leave it because once again the change machine is upon us and this time the Progression Model risks becoming another missed opportunity to properly understand, develop probation, rehabilitation and justice.

In a word, another omnishambles.

Anon

A Well-Argued Point

The upstream/downstream distinction gets right to the heart of what has happened to probation. Probation should surely be one of the most obvious examples of preventative public spending. The person has offended, yes, but the purpose of supervision cannot simply be to monitor whether they offend again and react when they do. The opportunity is to intervene in all those things that might make another offence more or less likely: housing, relationships, employment, substance use, mental health, debt, isolation, attitudes and simply having somebody consistent enough to notice when things are beginning to unravel.

That takes us straight back to the uncomfortable question of what we actually want probation to do. If we want prevention, then practitioners need time. Not merely enough time to complete an assessment, satisfy National Standards, make the required referrals, record the contact and demonstrate compliance. Time to know somebody well enough to recognise change. Time to make the phone call that might secure the accommodation. Time to speak to the treatment service rather than simply signpost to it. Time to have the conversation that goes somewhere unexpected rather than ending it because the next appointment is waiting.

The irony is that much of the current direction seems to be travelling the other way. Reduce contact. Automate administration. Introduce online reporting. Increase caseload capacity. Measure activity. Manage risk. Recall when things go wrong. Then spend an extraordinary amount of money dealing with the consequences downstream.

Perhaps the question we should ask of every new probation policy is ridiculously simple: does this make another offence less likely? Not: does it save ten minutes? Does it produce a better-looking record? Does it improve a dashboard? Does it allow another five cases to be allocated? Does it demonstrate that a process has been completed?

Does it actually make another offence less likely? Because if prevention really is an investment rather than an expense, probation should be absolutely central to that thinking. But probation cannot prevent much in isolation either. A practitioner cannot manufacture a home, a job, drug treatment, mental-health provision or a functioning support network. Cut those things upstream and eventually their absence arrives at probation, the police, the courts and the prison gate wearing a much larger price tag.

Maybe that is the fundamental mistake we keep making. We keep trying to make the downstream response cheaper and faster instead of asking what investment upstream might have prevented the person reaching us again at all. And perhaps “advise, assist and befriend” doesn’t sound quite so antiquated when viewed through that lens. It sounds remarkably like prevention.

Anon

*****
A well argued point but... absolutely no-one with the authority to implement change will pay any attention to the argument. Why? Because they're all invested in a completely different set of imperatives, i.e. control & restraint via optics & metrics that nets votes for the political classes & wealth for their chums - tags, prisons, hardware/software & a layer of management to oversee it. All paid for by the taxpayer who has already been fleeced to the tune of £1billion+ by unnecesary, ineffective &/or failed projects. And STILL the emperor has no clothes!
Anon

*****
I fear you may be right about nobody with the authority to change things listening, but that almost makes it more important to keep asking the questions.

What troubles me is that the things we can measure and purchase increasingly seem to determine what probation becomes. Tags can be counted. Contacts can be counted. Compliance can be counted. AI can produce measurable time savings. Software can generate dashboards. Restrictions can be monitored. New systems can be commissioned and somebody can announce the number of hours or pounds they are expected to save.

What is much harder to quantify is whether a probation officer knowing somebody properly prevented something happening six months later. There is no neat metric for the conversation that changed somebody’s thinking, the relationship that meant they disclosed something before it became a crisis, or the experienced practitioner who spotted that something wasn’t right.

Perhaps that is precisely why those things become vulnerable. What is easily measurable starts being mistaken for what is valuable.

I don’t expect one blog comment to change Whitehall. But I do think we should keep challenging the assumption that because something produces impressive metrics it represents progress. Otherwise we eventually end up with a beautifully measured, technologically efficient, highly controlled Probation Service that has forgotten what probation was actually supposed to achieve. And then, as you say, everyone will admire the Emperor’s new dashboard.

Anon

*****
V. F. Ridgway published a paper in 1956 criticizing the measurement mantra. Simon Caulkin, a columnist, neatly summarized Ridgway’s argument as:

“What gets measured gets managed — even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so”.

Indeed the paper’s title is “Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements”. 
Ridgway clearly was onto something in 1956. Not everything that matters can be measured. Not everything that we can measure matters.

• Ridgway observes that once a quantitative measure of performance is installed, people reorganise their behaviour around the measure rather than around the underlying purpose it was meant to track
• A single performance measure produces tunnel vision, with effort flowing to whatever is counted while everything uncounted is neglected
• Multiple measures reproduce the problem and add conflict between them, so that people optimise the easy or the rewarded number and trade off the rest.
• Composite measures, which try to solve this by rolling everything into a single weighted index, merely bury the arbitrary judgements about what matters inside a figure that then looks objective.
• The problem with measuring a construct like safety is not merely technical imprecision but the behavioural distortion that installing any metric sets off.

See also Goodhart's Law, Campbell's Law, and the Cobra Effect — what happens when measures become targets.

Goodhart's Law: Named after British economist Charles Goodhart. When a metric is used to reward performance or judge success, people change their behavior to optimize for that specific number rather than the real objective.

The Cobra Effect: A classic manifestation of perverse incentives. It gets its name from an anecdote during the British Raj in India, where the government offered a cash bounty for every dead cobra to reduce the snake population. Instead of lowering the population, enterprising citizens started breeding cobras to collect the reward. When the government cancelled the bounty, breeders set their snakes free, resulting in more cobras than before.

Campbell's Law states that the more a quantitative social indicator is used for high-stakes decision-making, the more subject it is to corruption pressures, and the more it will distort the social process it is meant to monitor.

Anon

Sources:
https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/what-gets-measured-gets-managed-its-wrong-and-drucker-never-said-it-fe95886d3df6

https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/ridgway-1956/

Upstream or Downstream?

I found myself paying careful attention to Andy Burnham this morning on the Laura Kuenssberg show as he spoke at length about the recent death of his father and his absolute determination to address the social care issue before he leaves office. Of course we all know this is going to be a monumental task, not least because it's likely to cost a fortune and he has little room for manoeuvre given the tax 'take' is already so high. But when pressed by Laura on this point he responded by saying "but it's preventative".

Wow, lets just think about that for one cotton pickin minute. Supposing he wasn't talking about social care at all, but instead the criminal justice system? Whilst expanding on his social care hypothesis ahead of his big speech on Tuesday, he convincingly made the case for the commonsense approach of spending money upstream rather than downstream as a "preventative" measure. Isn't that the ethos of encouraging healthy living as a way of preventing ill health? A good education system as a way of preventing illiteracy and poor life chances? A criminal justice system that encourages rehabilitation rather than increased prison population? A probation service that is part of a solution rather than part of the problem?

Well, by a stroke of good timing, a recent contributor pointed us in the direction of not one, but two recently published reports that expand on Andy Burnham's "preventative" hypothesis within the criminal justice system. Interestingly they don't seem to address either prison or probation directly, but do highlight the entirely predictable effects of scrapping upstream funding in the form of a functioning youth service, together with Sure Start. 

Lets hope Andy is a quick learner and appreciates his enthusiasm for the concept of upstream funding being "preventative" can be equally applied in other area's of social policy and in fact could be classed as an investment. I'm reminded that Prof Rob Canton is on record as saying quite recently that " Perhaps the best way to enforce, rehabilitate and protect the public is by advising, assisting and befriending."

The justice system's problems are not just about money

Higher spending, without attention to how resources are used, may not translate into better outcomes

The justice system is under visible strain. Crown Court backlogs stand at over 80,000 cases. A record 330,000 tribunal cases were open in early 2026. Since 2010, over 300 magistrates' court sites have closed and Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) reforms have significantly reduced the scope for legal aid, and the number of providers. Prisons are almost at full capacity, with high levels of violence. These are not abstract statistics: they represent real delays, unresolved disputes, and people left further away from services they may need.

When performance falls short, our first instinct is usually to look at the budget. And the budget does matter. Ministry of Justice day-to-day spending fell 33% in real terms between 2007-08 and 2016-17, compared with a 3% reduction across all departments. Spending per person remains around 17% below its 2002-03 level. Spending has recovered somewhat in recent years, though delivering on the scale of reform needed across backlogs, prison capacity and access to justice remains a significant challenge.

But new research from the IFS Transforming Justice programme finds that budget alone will not fix the system's problems. Across policing, courts, prisons and legal aid, how resources are used, where they are located, and what pressures arrive from outside the system are all important determinants of performance. This means that higher spending, without attention to how resources are used, may not translate into better outcomes.

Take the Crown Court backlog. Sitting days rose 32% between 2019 and 2024, yet case closures (disposals) increased by only 20%. Had pre-pandemic productivity been maintained, even when adjusting for changes in the complexity of caseloads, the backlog could almost have been cleared by the end of 2024, without additional resources. This shows that investing in more court time alone has done little to clear the backlog. Doing so requires every part of the system to be working effectively together: judges, barristers, court staff, prison transport and case preparation.

The same is true when we look at management more broadly. In the Metropolitan Police, the effectiveness of individual borough commanders accounts for around a quarter of the variation in policing productivity across London divisions. In prisons, independent inspections by HM Inspectorate of Prisons reduced violence by around 12 incidents per 1,000 prisoners per month over the 15 months following inspection, without any increase in staffing or expenditure. In other words, good leadership and management can deliver real improvements even when additional resources are not on the table.

Where services are located, and who can reach them, is another important dimension of how the justice system performs. Magistrates' court closures have more than doubled the average distance to the nearest court for many communities. Police station closures increased violent crime in surrounding areas by around 9%, a rise that the evidence suggests could have been avoided had different stations been selected for closure. And funding changes in legal aid have reshaped where private providers operate, leaving 12% of local authorities with no active civil legal aid provider. Behind these changes lies a pattern of uneven geographic impact that deserves closer attention.

A further dimension concerns pressures that originate entirely outside the justice system. Several pressures are driving tribunal backlogs: disability and social security cases make up the largest share, while SEND and asylum and immigration appeals have seen the sharpest recent increases. Youth club closures following cuts to youth services raised offending in their vicinity by around 14%. Evidence from Sure Start suggests that early years interventions can reduce more serious offending later in life. More broadly, decisions made in other parts of government, often years earlier, shape the demands placed on the justice system. The introduction of mandatory reconsideration by DWP shows this clearly: designed to resolve more disputes before they reached tribunals, it directly reshaped the flow of cases into the system.

Funding matters, and the cuts of the 2010s had a significant and lasting impact on the system. But it is not the full story. The evidence base being built as part of the IFS Transforming Justice programme suggests that better use of existing resources, more efficient allocation of services across geography, and a clearer understanding of how other departments affect justice outcomes could all make a material difference. The question is not only whether the justice system is adequately funded, but whether the resources it has are being used as well as they could be, and whether the pressures it faces are being understood and addressed at their source.

Magdalena Domínguez is a senior research economist at the IFS, working on its transforming justice project and the education and skills sector. Imran Rasul is professor of economics at University College London, co-director of the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and research co-director of the Entrepreneurship Research Group of the International Growth Centre. They are co-authors of a new report on the pressures and challenges facing the UK justice system

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Transforming justice : the interplay of social change and policy reforms

Resources and the justice system

Executive summary

The justice system in England and Wales is a significant area of public spending (£11.8 billion in day-to-day spending in 2025–26) and touches on almost every aspect of economic and social life. It has also seen many important changes and reforms in recent decades. Despite the scale of change and the central importance of justice in underpinning economic and social relations as well as trust in the state, economists have paid relatively little attention to these developments.

In this report, we bring together insights developed through the IFS Transforming Justice programme, established in 2024 and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, to respond to this relative lack of quantitative economic analysis. These insights emerge from a range of studies undertaken to date that examine different parts of the justice system. The programme is interested in all areas of the justice system, but the examples we draw on reflect the areas in which our analysis under the programme is most developed. We organise the evidence presented in this report around one connecting theme: the importance of understanding the role of resources for the functioning of the justice system, where resources refer not only to financial spending, but to a fuller set of inputs that shape the justice system’s capacity and performance, including infrastructure and management. The studies presented demonstrate why it matters to understand how resources are deployed within the justice system, whether the system is allocating and using resources efficiently, and how resources shape justice outcomes and outcomes outside the justice system itself. While the important role of resources forms the backdrop of much existing legal and social science research on justice systems, our studies show how economics research can advance understanding of how justice systems work and how they may work better.

Key insights

1. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ)’s day-to-day budget – £11.8 billion in day-to-day spending in 2025–26 – is a key input into the financial resources of the justice system. It saw large reductions in the early 2010s, followed by a partial recovery in recent years. Between 2007–08 and 2016–17, this budget was reduced by 33% in real terms, compared with a 3% reduction in total day-to-day departmental spending. MoJ spending began to recover from 2016–17, and by 2025–26 the day-to-day budget stood 2.4% below its 2002–03 level in real terms. Current plans imply real-terms growth in day-to-day justice funding of around 1.8% per year between 2025–26 and 2028–29, faster than the 1.2% per year average for overall departmental spending. Recent increases are expected to undo, in aggregate, the spending reductions of the early 2010s, but spending per person in 2025–26 remains 17% lower than its 2002–03 level.

2. Pressures on justice system resources are shaped by demand on the system. For example, the number of open cases in party-to-state tribunals reached a record 330,000 in early 2026, driven largely by rapid growth in the number of appeals. As a result, average waiting times have risen substantially: asylum and immigration appeals were taking 61 weeks to resolve in early 2026, compared with 23 weeks in 2013, while social security appeals (predominantly for disability benefit applications) were taking 35 weeks, compared with 18 weeks in 2013. These delays – in part a result of increasingly stretched resources – appear to reflect rising demand more than a recent deterioration in the productivity of tribunals.

3. Productivity, management and organisation can, however, have large effects on outcomes in the justice system, helping to determine how effectively justice institutions convert existing resources into results. We provide three examples. In the Crown Court, sitting days increased by 32% between 2019 and 2024, but case disposals rose by only 20%, which helps explain why backlogs continued to grow despite increased court capacity. In policing, differences in the characteristics and operational practices of Borough Commanders explain around one-quarter of the variation in crimes solved per officer across London police divisions. Finally, in prisons, independent inspections reduced violence by around 12 incidents per 1,000 prisoners per month in the 15 months following an inspection, without requiring an increase in staffing or expenditure. Instead, inspections appear to work by changing how existing resources and practices are managed.

4. The geographic allocation of justice resources can affect access to justice and outcomes. Since the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, volumes of civil legal aid cases have fallen by around 57%, and the number of providers has fallen from roughly 3,000 in 2010 to 1,400 by 2024, leaving 38 local authorities with no observed civil legal aid provider activity in 2023. In London, police station closures increased the average distance for households to the nearest station from around 1.3 kilometres to 3 kilometres and were associated with a 9% increase in violent crime in affected neighbourhoods. Court closures have similarly increased travel distances, with the average distance for households to their nearest magistrates’ court more than doubling, from 5.7 kilometres to 12.1 kilometres.

5. The justice system can be affected by decisions made about resource allocation outside the system. For example, following a 71% real-terms reduction in youth service spending between 2011 and 2019, around 40% of youth clubs closed, and young people in London who lost access to nearby clubs became 14% more likely to commit an offence. Evidence from Sure Start similarly suggests that early years interventions can reduce more serious offending later in life. These examples show that spending on services for children and families can generate substantial downstream effects on crime and reduce pressures on justice institutions, meaning the returns to such spending may be larger than conventional assessments imply.

6. How we measure the benefits of justice interventions can substantially affect assessments of value for money. We illustrate this with an example using the fact that conventional estimates of the social costs of crime primarily focus on victims. However, evidence presented in this report suggests that crime also imposes high costs on witnesses. Accounting for these wider effects increases estimated social costs of individual crimes by around 25% on average and by around 28% for violent crime. Over time, victimisation rates fell by 25% between 2003–04 and 2014–15, yet once the costs borne by witnesses are included, the aggregate social costs of crime are estimated to have remained largely unchanged. These findings suggest that the returns to policies that prevent crime – from being witnesses to reducing victimisation – may be substantially larger than conventional measures imply.

7. Together, these findings point to a broader conclusion. Budget levels alone do not capture all the constraints facing the justice system. How resources are used and how different parts of the system interact matter as much as how much is spent, and decisions about resource allocation made outside the justice system can shape its outcomes too.

HMPPS and Duty of Care?

"His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) has a legal and operational duty of care to protect the health, safety and wellbeing of its staff."

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Well, the timing of the WMT switch-off becomes even more extraordinary today. HMPPS removes the tool which gives practitioners a visible measure of their workload. Today HMIP publishes national findings from all 12 regions saying workforce instability and staff shortages are directly affecting the quality and consistency of risk management and contributing to heightened risks to public protection.

And buried in the findings is perhaps the most important sentence of all: performance frameworks have prioritised “compliance with process ahead of the quality of practice.”

Read that again.

At the same time we’re talking about OFPS, reduced supervision, online reporting, Justice Transcribe, “released capacity” and all the other ways of making an overwhelmed service somehow accommodate more work, the independent inspectorate is telling us that staffing instability is already affecting public protection and that process compliance has been prioritised over practice quality.

And what happens [today?] WMT disappears.

Napo now says it “absolutely opposes” the decision and is actually advising members to capture their final WMT data before the system is switched off. Their concern is exactly the one practitioners have been raising: once there is no nationally defined measure of acceptable workload, how does an individual practitioner demonstrate objectively that what they are being asked to carry is too much?

Perhaps nobody deliberately timed these things to coincide. We don’t need a conspiracy theory because the facts are uncomfortable enough.

The independent inspector says workforce shortages are compromising public protection. The union says workloads are excessive. More demand is coming. And the employer’s response includes removing the instrument which visibly shows when workload exceeds capacity.

If WMT was flawed, improve it. If the timings were wrong, update them. If it didn’t cover enough roles, extend it. But don’t remove the thermometer while telling everyone the patient is overheating.

Anon

*****

Workload Measurement Tool (WMT) Shut Down – Napo’s Position

HMPPS have confirmed their decision to shut down the Workload Measurement Tool (WMT) at 4pm on Friday 25 September 2026.

HMPPS determination to continue with this deeply flawed and dangerous step reconfirms our assertion that they are not taking adequate steps to measure, manage and address workloads in the Probation Service.

This email contains guidance that we are asking every member who currently has access to the WMT to take. Prior to and during our ballot on industrial action we will continue to meet with HMPPS representatives to press them on what members need to see on workloads. That should not be understood by anyone as a lack of commitment on our part to conduct this ballot and then, if voted for by enough members, to take industrial action. We are disappointed that our continued engagement with the employer appears to be mischaracterised in some of their communications, to be clear there are no agreement with this decision from Napo and we are deeply concerned about what this will mean for our members.

Napo’s Position
Napo absolutely oppose this dangerous move by the employer. Our long-standing position over years has been to improve the WMT to properly reflect the excessive workloads we are dealing with in ‘Sentence Management’ and extend this tool to as many other Probation roles as possible, e.g. Prisons, Victim Liaison and Courts.

Since Napo won an extension to the employer’s plans - Employer listens to Napo - WMT extended until September! - NAPO Magazine – we’ve continued to represent members and push our position in numerous meetings with HMPPS representatives, based on the crucial demands we’re making linked to our upcoming ballot on industrial action - Napo pressing for change - 7 key issues.

Despite this HMPPS remain fixed on their decision, which we absolutely oppose. Napo’s view is that there has been ample time to properly review and extend the WMT, using the most up to date activity timings.

This change sees the employer, two years into a Labour Government, abdicate responsibility at the level of senior ‘leadership’ for defining what they believe is an acceptable level of workload for thousands of its employees. Many members have already concluded that, given its abject failure to deal with excessive workloads to this point, HMPPS have simply decided it’s easier to deny access to one of the strongest pieces of evidence employees have to show they’re being overworked.

Crucial questions remain about HMPPS’s plans, such as how reasonable adjustments can be properly applied going forward for staff in ‘sentence management’ when the employer has decided not to indicate what an acceptable level of work is for roles in this area. It’s also important that members know that while the employer has announced the introduction of a Log & View Reductions (LVR) tool from next week this has not been consulted on with the trade unions, who have also not been provided with an Equality Impact Assessment.

Next Steps
Our advice to members and Branches is to attempt to capture the relevant final WMT data as it relates to you as close to 4pm this Friday so you can refer to it over the coming weeks.

If you are going to capture this data it must only be done on a device (laptop or mobile phone) owned by MoJ/HMPPS. Under no circumstances should anyone use their personal mobile, or any other method, to do this.

If you don’t use the camera on your work phone you can take a screenshot on your laptop (that can be saved in your Pictures folder) - How to Take Screenshots on Windows 11 | Microsoft Windows

For individual members:
Go into the Workload Measurement Tool application.

Click through the National, Region and PDU views until you are seeing the list of names of people in your Team.

Click on your name; this should bring you to the Overview tab.

Capturing only the relevant data (Grade, Team, Capacity, Cases, Contracted Hours and Reduction) take a photo on your work phone or a screenshot on your laptop.

Click on the Capacity tab (next to Overview); this will should show a line graph representing WMT percentages for capacity and reduction for the previous 12 months.

Capturing only the graph take a photo on your work phone or a screenshot on your laptop.

For Branches:
Follow the process detailed above to capture the same Overview and Capacity data for the Region and each PDU your Branch represents (not data for individuals).

All the evidence that we have to this point indicates HMPPS do not intend to change course on this or a wide range of issues related to their failures to address the systemic problem of excessive workloads that is harming so many of us. That means we need to take collective action to protect our interests as workers.

Never Mind the Quality!

I wondered whether the claim that Justice Transcribe is “improving the quality and consistency of case records” was somebody’s interpretation of what MoJ had said. It isn’t. That’s the Justice AI Unit’s own wording. And I have a real problem with the word “quality”. What exactly are we measuring?

If quality means a record is grammatically better, neatly structured, comprehensive-looking and contains the appropriate headings, then yes, Justice Transcribe probably produces “better” records. But that’s quality of documentation. It tells us absolutely nothing about the quality of the probation work that took place. That’s precisely what worries me.

Scratch beneath the beautifully constructed record, get through the “non-structured intervention”, “pro-social manner”, strengths, needs, actions and whatever else has been generated, and what actually happened in the room?

It might have been an excellent 45-minute piece of work involving challenge, reflection, professional curiosity and meaningful discussion. Or it might have been a fairly meaningless ten-minute check-in, a bit of signposting and “anything changed since I last saw you?” Yet Justice Transcribe potentially makes both look remarkably impressive on the page.

That isn’t necessarily because the AI has recorded anything untrue. The problem is that structure and polished language can give relatively mundane interactions a significance and depth they didn’t possess.

There is actually pilot evidence behind the “quality” claim. HMIP reports that 96% of practitioners in one pilot said the quality of records improved. Fine. But again: quality of the record isn’t quality of the intervention.

And the latest MoJ transparency publication is revealing in another way. We know 1.6 million meetings have been summarised and we’re given an illustrative estimate of 266,667 hours saved. But MoJ itself says that calculation doesn’t account for variation in meeting length, type, user practice or summary quality. So I’d quite like to see somebody properly evaluate what we’re now producing before “quality” becomes another accepted fact through repetition. I’d also like HMIP to look beneath the sparkle when they inspect it.

Don’t just audit whether the contact contains the right information. Don’t assume a beautifully structured entry demonstrates meaningful engagement. Somehow, and I accept this is incredibly difficult, go back to the actual practice underneath it. Because we’re potentially removing one of the few clues inspectors previously had. A poor record might once have indicated poor recording. 

An AI-generated excellent record can now potentially conceal pretty mediocre practice. And if that happens, we’ve created something rather dangerous: a system capable of making probation look better without probation actually becoming better. That’s not an improvement in quality. It’s an improvement in presentation.

Anon

*****
I work in Court completing PSRs, and it now takes far longer than it should to review contact logs and work out what's actually been going on. Justice Transcribe generates dense, jargon-heavy transcriptions padded with phrases like "crisis management" and "stabilisation" standing in for what wasn't actually done. It reads as though far more is happening than really is. Whatever happened to CRISSA and the principle of concise, clear logs? Now we get paragraphs of dense text that sound professional on first read, but strip away the language and the actual content is often minimal. There's also no record of body language or presentation …. details that can say more about someone's state than anything they tell you.

It's genuinely infuriating. And I understand this approach is coming for court reports next, meaning reports will start to sound identical: the same phrases, the same flat, robotic analysis. I cannot bare the thought.

Meanwhile, the new Probation Service's training says nothing about the quality of supervision within appointments … the actual craft of the job, which has been neglected for years. Building rapport and trust, asking the right questions, challenging behaviour appropriately, working in a trauma-informed way. Instead it's all about papering over cracks, ticking boxes, and doing just enough to get by.

Everything right now is about saving time and seeing people less. It's transactional, not relational. And in the process, the relationship with offenders is being stripped out entirely, leaving a culture of learned helplessness in its place.

Then there's the online reporting rollout. What about people who lose their phones every few days? Who don't have a smartphone or internet access? A significant proportion of the offending population struggles with reading, writing, and basic admin. Why would Mr X openly disclose on an online form that he's struggling with his mental health, had a domestic incident, lapsed into crack use, or is behind on rent — if he's barely met his PP, or only had a few brief check-ins before being moved to online reporting because he's deemed "stable"? So many of these individuals have real difficulties with attachment, trust and authority. Building enough rapport for someone to start opening up can take weeks, months, sometimes years. Body language and engagement tell you so much about how someone is really doing, and what's normal for them. None of that comes through online.

We're going backwards. So much for "assist, befriend, advise" …. it's become skim, tick, and signpost. What about the deep dive of truly understanding someone and their lived experiences.

Sixteen years in, and I want so badly for the soul of this service to be found again — because I still care. A lot. And I hate that I do, because it feels like HMPPS doesn't. Get rid of the civil service bureaucracy. Bring back the trusts, where there was local autonomy and room for creativity.

Anon

*****
I think you’ve absolutely hit the nail on the head. This is probably the best explanation I’ve read of why my unease about Justice Transcribe isn’t really about Justice Transcribe at all.

It may produce faster, neater, more consistent records, but none of that addresses the fundamental problems facing probation. It doesn’t reduce caseloads. It doesn’t create experienced practitioners. It doesn’t improve the quality of supervision. It doesn’t build relationships, professional curiosity or trust. It doesn’t give somebody the time to understand the person sitting opposite them. And, as you demonstrate from the other end of the process, it may actually make it harder to see what meaningful work has really taken place.

That’s the bit I think we’re missing when we celebrate hundreds of thousands of “hours saved”. Saved for what? If that time is genuinely returned to practitioners to spend thinking, investigating, building relationships and doing better work, fantastic. I’ll champion JT alongside anyone.

But everything else currently seems to be travelling in the opposite direction: fewer contacts, online reporting, supervision packages, early termination, enormous caseloads and increasing standardisation. In that context, JT starts looking less like technology creating space for better probation and more like technology helping an overstretched service process the same impossible volume more efficiently.

And your point about the records themselves is crucial. A concise contact which accurately tells the next practitioner what actually happened is surely more useful than three paragraphs of beautifully structured professional language which they have to decode to discover that very little happened at all.

Probation doesn’t have a writing problem. It has a capacity problem and, increasingly, a relationship problem. Justice Transcribe might solve the first ten minutes of administration. It won’t solve either of those.

Anon

*****
"..,now we get paragraphs of dense text that sound professional on first read, but strip away the language and the actual content is often minimal. There's also no record of body language or presentation …. details that can say more about someone's state than anything they tell you.

It's genuinely infuriating. And I understand this approach is coming for court reports next, meaning reports will start to sound identical: the same phrases, the same flat, robotic analysis. I cannot bare the thought.

Meanwhile, the new Probation Service's training says nothing about the quality of supervision within appointments … the actual craft of the job, which has been neglected for years. Building rapport and trust, asking the right questions, challenging behaviour appropriately, working in a trauma-informed way. Instead it's all about papering over cracks, ticking boxes, and doing just enough to get by.

Everything right now is about saving time and seeing people less. It's transactional, not relational. And in the process, the relationship with offenders is being stripped out entirely, leaving a culture of learned helplessness in its place."

This! This is the bit that resonates with me more than anything else in your comment. We’re becoming increasingly sophisticated at documenting probation while simultaneously hollowing out the actual practice of it.

Justice Transcribe can produce paragraphs of professional-sounding language, but strip that language away and what actually happened? What was explored? What was challenged? What changed? What did the practitioner notice? What did the person not say? How did they present? Was there hesitation, agitation, avoidance, a change in demeanour? Did something simply feel different because you’ve known this person for months and know what “normal” looks like for them?

None of that comes from better prose. It comes from time, attention, experience and a relationship. And this is where I think the direction of probation becomes genuinely worrying. At exactly the point we’re developing technology capable of making the written evidence of practice look increasingly impressive, we’re reducing the conditions in which good practice actually happens.

Less contact. Shorter contact. Online reporting. Enormous caseloads. Supervision packages. Signposting. Standardised processes. And apparently very little attention in all this new training to the actual craft of supervision.

How do you conduct a really good probation interview? How do you build enough trust to challenge somebody without losing them? How do you recognise avoidance rather than simply record an answer? How do you explore ambivalence? How do you sit with silence rather than fill it? How do you recognise when the person you’ve supervised for six months isn’t behaving like themselves today? Those aren’t soft extras around probation practice. That is probation practice.

And the point about court reports genuinely worries me too. A good PSR shouldn’t simply contain the correct information arranged under the correct headings. It should contain analysis. It should demonstrate that somebody has thought about this particular person, this particular offence, these particular circumstances and what an appropriate sentence might actually achieve.

If AI eventually makes every contact, assessment and report beautifully structured, grammatically perfect and professionally phrased, while the human interaction underneath becomes increasingly brief and transactional, we won’t have improved probation. We’ll simply have become much better at writing about a poorer version of it.

Anon

Justice Transcribe Special

"I never cease to be amazed at how intelligent, resourceful, educated and aware probation staff are. They demonstrate ability, curiosity, flexibility, problem solving and emotional maturity every day on this blog and yet the powers that be have nothing to say. No answers, no evidence, no willingness to engage, nothing. Silence is golden, but power is strength and authority overcomes all resistance. They intend to simply bulldozer through their vision of the future and the plebs can either trail along behind or be crushed by their juggernaut." Anon

*****

Justice Transcribe in Probation

AI-powered transcription and summarisation helping probation staff spend less time on admin and more time on meaningful engagement.

Justice Transcribe uses speech recognition to transcribe, summarise, and structure records from probation supervision sessions and case interactions. What began as a pilot across Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Wales is now being scaled, with over a thousand probation officers equipped to use the tool following an expansion announced by the Deputy Prime Minister.

Validated in real-world frontline settings, Justice Transcribe is reducing administrative burden, improving the quality and consistency of case records, and freeing up time for deeper engagement with people on probation.

*****

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/justice-transcribe/justice-transcribe-data-7-october-2025-to-14-september-2026

"The statistics are derived from internal product analytics collected for service monitoring and improvement purposes. Data was extracted on 14th September 2026. Coverage period: 7th October 2025 to 14th September 2026.

Between 7 October 2025 and 14 September 2026, over 1,600,000 meetings were summarised using Justice Transcribe... Justice Transcribe may save around 10 minutes per meeting... Applying this assumption to 1.6 million meetings gives an indicative total of approximately 266,667 hours."

The artificial brain inside my machine says:

Justice Transcribe Overview

• Purpose: An in-house AI tool developed to automatically record, transcribe, and structure case notes from probation supervision sessions.
• Rollout: Piloted in late 2025 and scaled nationally by March 2026, equipping over a thousand probation officers.
• Impact: Surpassed 1 million uses by mid-2026, saving staff upwards of 160,000 hours and cutting administrative note-taking time by roughly 50%.
• Efficiency: Estimated to save an average of about 10 minutes per qualifying supervision meeting."

Miraculous! By 14.9.2026 the jt wunderkind has saved the work of 138 full-time equivalent staff.

"the exact multi-million pound development and contract costs remain a classified internal operational budget"

So we'll never know how much of the oft quoted £700million has been spaffed up the wall on this system... I'd suggest it will be considerably more than the £5million or so allegedly 'saved' in those assumed 260,000+ hours.

The govt has acknowledged that "The UK Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) are investing up to £10 million to roll out AI-powered tools and digitize manual systems to prevent accidental prisoner releases and improve operational efficiency." But that's just the cost of "rolling it out". They also say "A broader investment of £20 million for 2026/27 targets the digitisation of paper-based prison processes".

Here's the cobbler's 2025 announcement:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-action-plan-for-justice/ai-action-plan-for-justice

In 2021 over £100million was poured down the drain:

https://www.civilserviceworld.com/news/article/prison-and-probation-service-spent-almost-100m-on-case-management-system-only-to-scrap-it

"The case-management system was part of HMPPS’ Electronic Monitoring Programme, which sought to overhaul the electronic tagging system used to monitor curfews and conditions of court or prison orders."

And here's a 2025 article about govt AI spending:

https://www.thinkdigitalpartners.com/news/2025/09/04/uk-public-sectors-3-45-billion-ai-spend-but-its-still-only-a-fraction-of-all-it-contracts/

"UK public sector’s £3.45 billion AI spend – but it’s still only a fraction of all IT contracts"

*****
Most of the assertions you make are inaccurate and misleading. Justice Transcribe was a tool developed in-house and adapted by MoJ at what would be no appreciable cost to HMPPS. Its rollout is slow and steady with minimal disruption or fuss as far as I can tell. No waste etc. Other AI projects build upon ongoing modernisation projects so again something we might welcome. Use is careful responsible and proportionate. This type of scaremongering helps no one. There is a small friendly team in charge of this in HMPPS that you can probably contact if you need accurate details. Ive seen them present at various events. They seemed quite sensible to me and sensitive to the needs of practitioners.

*****

Since we seem to have attracted one of the team I point out. Yes, Justice Transcribe saves a lot of hours, but if the aim is simply to do less rather than improve probation practice, create more time in the room with clients, and bring a better probation system then all the IT development in the world isn’t going to make a difference. If pay, training, conditions remain low then what’s the point.

It’s only a matter of time before the current static response of “Justice transcribe was developed with an £8m initial investment” is put under scrutiny.

The key question to be put to MoJ is:

Please provide the original approved business case, investment case or equivalent financial assessment for Justice Transcribe, including the estimated development cost, implementation cost, annual operating/maintenance cost and total forecast cost over the life of the product.

Then separately:

Please provide actual expenditure incurred to date, including internal staff costs, external contractors/consultants, software and cloud services, AI/model/API usage, infrastructure, security/assurance, testing, implementation, training, maintenance and support.

And critically:

If expenditure relating to Justice Transcribe is recorded within the Justice AI Unit, wider digital/AI programme, or another cost centre and cannot be separately identified, please provide the expenditure for that programme/cost centre and explain how Justice Transcribe’s costs are accounted for within it.

We all know what happened the last time they “developed” IT.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8339084.stm

*****

Seems like the basis of an FOI. Go for it and report back the response.

*****

"Justice Transcribe was a tool developed in-house and adapted by MoJ at what would be no appreciable cost to HMPPS."

So why do enquiries lead to statements such as "the exact multi-million pound development and contract costs remain a classified internal operational budget"? MoJ/NOMS/HMPPS have no track record of success whatsoever:

See also:

https://modulardata.co.uk/insights/ai-in-probation-and-the-future-of-public-service-reform/

"Against the backdrop of budget constraints, rising demand and system strain, the Chancellor’s announcement of a new £3.25bn transformation fund marked a significant moment in the direction of reform. The first tranche of this fund includes investment in AI tools for the probation service—an area under growing pressure as the justice system teeters near gridlock."

That doesn't sound like homemade AI; more like the sticking plaster ego-driven heath-robinson nightmare that is oasys, or the massive wastes of public funds with c-nomis etc etc etc.

• 2004-2007: C-NOMIS was officially abandoned as a single, combined database concept in 2007 after its projected lifetime costs more than tripled from £234 million to £690 million... it was eventually scaled back into a revised NOMIS programme costing £513 million

• 2012-2021: HM Prison and Probation Service spent £98.2m on a new case-management system, only to scrap it before it was finished, the Ministry of Justice's annual report and accounts have revealed... It would have cost £30m to finish the project, on top of the £98.2m already spent, the MoJ said...

• and then there was the shameful vainglorious tr experiment which fleeced the public purse; maybe you heard about it?

Financial Breakdown of the Failure

• Additional Taxpayer Cost £467 million ; extra money spent by the MoJ to stabilize and prematurely end the contracts.
• Early Termination Fees - At least £171 million;
• the direct cost to taxpayers for scrapping the private contracts early.
• Fines Waived / Adjusted - £110 million; shortfalls owed by private Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) to the MoJ for missing targets, which the government effectively allowed them to retain to prevent complete collapse.
• Through the Gate Services - £46million; extra stabilization funding injected to help support offenders leaving custody.

Total Contract Value Paid - Up to £2.3 billion; the final amount the MoJ paid to these companies under the failed framework.

*****

Justice Transcribe is estimated to save probation approximately 450,000 hours a year.
That seems an awful lot of hours, but with a quarter of a million people currently on probation, that figure equates too just under 2hours extra available per person per annum. That dosent seem so much. What niggles me, is that it dosent really matter how much time can be made available to the probation officer for each client if it can't be used to advance progress.

From May.

https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/do-we-want-high-tech-future-probation-service

*****

“Doing less” can be either a genuine improvement or a serious mistake. If technology removes administration and gives practitioners more time with clients, that could be transformational. If it simply allows them to carry another 30 cases, it hasn’t improved probation practice; it has increased the productivity of an overstretched system.

A better model would mean fewer cases, time focused where it is needed most, and technology used to support, not replace the probation officer. Success should be measured by the quality of supervision and where the client is at in a few years time, not simply its completion or compliance.

Probation cannot do this without accessible housing, employment, finance, health and community services, without it what can supervision realistically achieve? Perhaps then recall wont become the answer to every obstacle, and probation can become a system of credible supervision and support, rather than simply enforcement. For those that don’t need the supervision, then make it voluntary from the outset.

*****
In a nutshell, in a nutshell!

"Probation cannot do this without accessible housing, employment, finance, health and community services, without it what can supervision realistically achieve? Perhaps then recall wont become the answer to every obstacle, and probation can become a system of credible supervision and support, rather than simply enforcement. For those that don’t need the supervision, then make it voluntary from the outset."

And just on recall here's something to ponder on. Why is it that so few people breach their licence conditions on ROTL, when they have to return to custody anyway, whilst licence breaches on probation is astronomical?

*****
Because the probation officer is not included in the equation. We know this, and many have called to change, renew, rehabilitate what probation is to something it could be. The irony is they think those at the top are listening, and Justice Transcribe is progress. But when low- to medium-risk cases check in with a robot probation officer, when 18–25-year-olds transfer to youth justice services, and probation becomes a UK Corrections Agency focused on high-risk cases, restrictions of liberty and recalls — while the current wave of PQiPs, POs and SPOs are conditioned for that model — we’ll all sit there saying: we didn’t see it coming.

*****

I use Justice Transcribe and genuinely see the benefits, but I think there’s a much more difficult issue here than how many hours it saves. Quality of the generated case note does not necessarily equal quality of the interaction it records. That’s incredibly difficult to measure.

Justice Transcribe can turn a fairly ordinary ten-minute check-in into a beautifully structured record that reads as though a substantial piece of probation work has taken place. That’s not necessarily because anything in it is false; it’s because summarisation inevitably interprets, organises and gives prominence to things that may have occupied seconds in the actual conversation.

There’s also a potential accountability problem here. What happens if there’s subsequently an SFO and that polished record is examined months later? If the generated note suggests something was meaningfully explored when in reality it was mentioned briefly, who owns that record? Presumably the practitioner does, because they approved it. We therefore need to be very careful that saving ten minutes doesn’t inadvertently create a documentary version of an appointment that is stronger than the appointment itself.

Before Justice Transcribe, writing the record also created a natural period of reflection. You thought about what had just happened, what concerned you, what didn’t quite add up and what you needed to do next. Some of that time wasn’t “administration” at all. It was professional thinking. If AI removes the writing, we need to make sure it doesn’t remove the thinking with it.

Which brings me back to workload. Technology can remove unnecessary administration and I’m all for that. But I don’t believe technology can manufacture the thing probation is desperately short of: time. Time to know somebody, time to think about them, time to follow something up, time to speak to another agency, time to notice change and time to build the sort of relationship in which somebody might actually tell you what is happening in their life.

Ultimately, fewer cases per practitioner is what creates that space. If every ten minutes Justice Transcribe saves is subsequently converted into additional workload, we’ve gained efficiency without gaining quality.

The difficulty, of course, is the staffing crisis. You cannot simply reduce caseloads when there aren’t enough experienced people to carry the work. But that doesn’t make the underlying equation disappear.

If we want better probation work, somebody somewhere has to create the time in which better probation work can actually happen. AI can help protect that time. It cannot substitute for it.

*****
You have it in a nutshell with “Before Justice Transcribe, writing the record also created a natural period of reflection. You thought about what had just happened, what concerned you, what didn’t quite add up and what you needed to do next. Some of that time wasn’t “administration” at all. It was professional thinking. If AI removes the writing, we need to make sure it doesn’t remove the thinking with it.” It’s the nuance that is so vitally important that only the practitioner is aware of. The practitioner knows and understands the client and will pick up on those fine, subtle differences in meaning, tone and feeling which is often realised after the session during the period of reflection. It’s about not what is said, but how it is said which machines just cannot pick up on. Cue in body language here as well. AI and machines cannot recognise this.

*****
You do not appreciate it replicates the work and is a reliable assesment tool. It's consistent It's cheap and it doesn't argue . See what's coming.

*****
Oh I appreciate exactly what you’re getting at. That’s actually what concerns me more than Justice Transcribe itself.

I like Justice Transcribe as an administrative tool. I use it and can genuinely see the benefit. I become considerably less comfortable when “it saves me time writing my record” quietly becomes “it can interpret the interaction”, then “it can identify what matters”, then “it can support assessment”, and eventually “why does the practitioner need to make all of these decisions at all?”

Consistency sounds attractive until we remember that human beings aren’t consistent. Neither is risk, motivation, trauma, relationships or desistance. Sometimes the most important thing a probation officer brings to an assessment is precisely the bit that doesn’t fit neatly into the model.

And yes, “it doesn’t argue” may be the most important part of your comment. A machine won’t say, “I know what the framework says, but something doesn’t feel right here.” It won’t push back because it knows this person. It won’t tell an SPO that the proposed plan makes no sense. And it certainly won’t tell HMPPS that its latest model is wrong.

So yes, I see what’s coming. And I think plenty of practitioners see it too. The question is whether those with the power to change direction can see it, or whether they are simply too pleased to have found another plaster to stick over a haemorrhaging Probation Service.

Justice Transcribe may save time. AI may eventually save considerably more. Some of it may genuinely make our working lives easier and I welcome that. But none of it changes the fundamental problem if every hour saved is simply swallowed by impossible caseloads, insufficient staffing and ever greater demands.

People are already on their knees. No amount of AI can change that. Technology might make an overstretched service more efficient, but it cannot give practitioners the time to build quality relationships if every efficiency is immediately converted into capacity to carry more work.

AI might help stop some of the bleeding. It isn’t going to cure the wound.

*****
So on the one hand we have the "official" definition that justice transcribe is there to "transcribe, summarise and structure case records" contrasted with the reality that it "can turn a fairly ordinary ten-minute check-in into a beautifully structured record that reads as though a substantial piece of probation work has taken place."

Is this not disingenuous and dishonest? If justice transcribe is there to analyse and make things "look good" then poor probation practice, where it exists and for whatever the reasons that casuse this, gets turned into something it isn't. Surely this opens the floodgates to" deliver a fairly meaningless 10 minute check in is ok provided this is made to sound more than it actually was?"

*****
Justice Transcribe looks great from a writing point of view but it’s terrible if your job involves reading previous contacts which mine does. It’s added bloody hours of reading unnecessary shite to my day. I really don’t need every entry to start with an explanation that ‘the PP used a pro social manner throughout the interview’. Contacts are repetitive, overlong and rarely tell you what actually happened. The first SFO with Justice Transcribe is going to be interesting indeed.

*****
This is so worrying and depressing at the same time! I can see it now: in the not so distant future HMIP will pick this up with recommendations for "practitioners to complete e learning on using justice transcribe" when from the very start we identified this problem!

*****
Just got home tonight to a job offer which I will be accepting. Notice will go in tomorrow, apologies to some my colleagues picking up my caseload, to the others you made your bed siding with the junior managers expecting them to maintain your lower caseload, no child protection, no pd, no marac, no neurodiversity, drugs or sex offenders, no seeds with trainee SPOs who are scared of their own shadows and spend half the time at home and sending constant puerile emails with checklists and name and shame, What a fantastic learning curve you will be on!

Attention the Other Place!

Today is the day that the House of Lords are due to debate the Probation Service. Wouldn't it be great if one or two of them might get to read the following distilled from contributions made yesterday:-

The probation service’s crisis stems from chronic policy churn, de-professionalisation, and leadership failures, leaving the profession vulnerable both to political whim and internal inertia. Grounding this critique in official watchdog findings, structural reforms, and workforce data transforms it into a compelling, evidence-backed argument:

• Disastrous Political Reorganization: The ideological push behind the 2014 Transforming Rehabilitation agenda split the service into the National Probation Service and 21 private Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). By 2019, HM Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP) condemned the model as "irretrievably flawed," citing dangerous systemic risks and commercial failures that forced the government to renationalize delivery in 2021 at an estimated public cost of nearly £500 million.

• Dilution of Training & Identity: The transition from university-accredited social work qualifications (such as the DipPS) to accelerated vocational frameworks—notably the Professional Qualification in Probation (PQiP)—shortened foundational pedagogy to plug staffing gaps. While reducing upfront training costs, this shift dismantled probation’s identity as an autonomous, values-driven profession, absorbing practitioners into a standardised HMPPS civil service bureaucracy dominated by prison-centric metrics.

• Workforce Exhaustion and Brain Drain: HMIP annual reports repeatedly highlight unmanageable workloads, with some officers holding caseloads exceeding 130–150% of capacity. Experienced practitioners are exiting at record rates, leaving probation dominated by inexperienced staff without the institutional memory required to challenge Whitehall directives or advocate for genuine rehabilitation.

• Internal Fragmentation and Nostalgia: The workforce remains divided between legacy practitioners clinging to a mythologized pre-1990s "advise, assist, and befriend" era - which itself lacked robust empirical evidence of reconviction reduction - and newer cohorts accustomed to tick-box risk management. This division has weakened professional bodies like Napo and allowed executive roles to be filled by generalist Whitehall managers rather than reform-minded probation leaders.

Ultimately, lamenting an imagined golden age changes nothing. Reclaiming professional credibility requires probation professionals to organize around clinical autonomy, evidence-based risk assessment, and active leadership rather than passive compliance with bureaucratic mandates.

*****

There is something rather telling about police leaders apparently calling for a Royal Commission because reforming one part of criminal justice in isolation doesn’t work. Quite! Perhaps somebody could send that message down Whitehall.

For years we have behaved as though prisons, probation, police, courts, housing, mental health, substance misuse services and social care are separate machines which can each be “transformed”, made more “efficient” and given their own performance measures without considering what happens to the others.

• Prisons run out of space? Release people earlier.
• Earlier release increases community supervision? Probation absorbs it.
• Probation hasn’t enough capacity? Reduce the amount of activity through OFPS.
• Need additional reassurance in the community? Add electronic monitoring, restrictions and more conditions.
• More people breach conditions or are recalled? Prisons absorb them again.

And round we go. Meanwhile each individual reform can be presented as perfectly rational because somebody has drawn the boundary around that bit of the system for which they’re responsible.

HMIP's description of probation is hardly nostalgic: too few staff, too little experience, too many cases, with systemic pressures contributing to reactive and compliance-focused practice. So perhaps the question isn’t whether probation was once a “noble career”, it's whether we still understand that probation performs a function which cannot be separated from the health of the rest of the criminal justice and social system.

You can't compensate indefinitely for inadequate prisons, inaccessible mental health provision, unstable housing, court backlogs and insufficient community services by making the probation officer more “efficient”. Eventually there is nothing left to optimise except the amount of time spent with the human being. And judging by what I’m currently learning about supervision packages, home visits, remote check-ins and “released capacity”, we appear to have reached that stage.

Perhaps a Royal Commission should start with one remarkably unfashionable question - what do we actually want probation to achieve, and what resources does achieving it require? Then you design the system around the answer, rather than deciding what resources are available and continually redesigning probation until it fits.

*****

I don't at all disagree with your points here, that's not my intention...but "there's nothing left to optimise except time spent with the human being" is not a position I accept...it's the position we've been forced fed to believe by OFPS training and I see no evidence shown about what other attempts were made to optimise other areas of practice. 

As others have noted elsewhere, the mountain of policy dictats and unreasonable expectations, the huge amount of time filling out a so called "assessment system" which is flawed and sucks out vast amount of resource to little benefit...the huge resource that goes into targets and monitoring meaningless data and compliance...all of this left untouched. I do think there's a case to argue that too many people are sentenced to probation and it's seen as the catch all service to respond to all crimes...lower level first or second time offenders shouldn't really be getting probation supervision without justified reasons as an exception.

OFPS and the sentencing reforms have done nothing to address any of this...all left intact...and it makes me so angry.

*****

[This] comment has made me reconsider something. Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question when we talk about probation capacity. OFPS seems largely to ask: given the practitioner capacity we have, how do we make the work fit inside it? Hence supervision packages, fewer routine contacts, targeted home visits, remote reporting, progression and early termination. But there is another perfectly legitimate question:

Why does so much existing practitioner capacity disappear into activity which isn’t direct probation work in the first place?

Before rationing contact with people, I’d like to see a serious audit of the bureaucracy surrounding them.

• How many practitioner hours nationally are spent completing and updating assessments?
• How many recording information which exists elsewhere?
• How many satisfying performance measures and data-quality requirements?
• How many reading policy changes, completing mandatory learning, feeding dashboards, correcting administrative errors and demonstrating that something has been done rather than actually doing it?

Put a monetary value on those hours. Then tell us which activities have demonstrable value for rehabilitation or public protection and which primarily satisfy the organisation’s need for assurance. Because if OFPS can calculate that changing supervision will “release” 25% practitioner capacity, presumably somebody can calculate how much capacity the organisation itself consumes.

And the commenter raises an even more awkward question: why is probation expected to supervise such an enormous range of people in the first place? Perhaps genuinely low-risk first or second-time offenders with no identified rehabilitative need don’t require a diluted version of probation. Perhaps they require a proportionate sentence which doesn’t involve ongoing probation supervision at all. That isn’t being soft on offending. It’s asking what probation is actually for.

There is something backwards about extending community supervision as the solution to prison overcrowding and then reducing the substance of supervision because probation cannot absorb the resulting numbers. Reduce unnecessary bureaucracy. Decide who actually requires probation intervention. Resource properly the supervision of those who do.

Only after doing those things would I be persuaded that the remaining efficiency has to come from reducing human contact. Otherwise “efficiency” risks meaning something much simpler - everything surrounding the practitioner remains intact; the practitioner simply gets less time to practise.

Once a Noble Career

We are trying to fix the unfixable here. Probation is an impossible job and people who have been here years are looking through rose tinted glasses. It's always been a tainted career, most people don't even know we exist. And the biggest question, why are more people committing crime, why are more people up in court? Nobody wants to dig deep into corrupt governments, cost of living, decline in mental health provisions. Rather we wallow in a world of blame game, poor training, poor managers, never any questions on the individuals who cause this initial harm. Very naive and limited thinking.

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No, I think the naive and limited thinking is with you and those like you. The organisation itself uses the blame game, we see that with SFO and performance approaches. It is no secret that there is poor training, even the universities providing PQIP training cannot criticise the Ministry. The problem of inexperienced and poor managers is widely documented by HMIP. Probation historically was a noble career, not a tainted career. And the focus was actually not on stopping people committing crime, but stopping THE SAME people committing crime. Speak to anyone in probation that understands this differentiation and they’ll tell you the impact of cost of living, decline in mental health provisions, problems with access to social provision, and whatever else.

So there are no rose tinted glasses, and that term is used by managers to dismiss the opinions of those with experience and length of service. It’s an excuse to ignore the past and the embrace the current state of affairs without question.

*****
“Most of the staff like the above now.” 

Perhaps some do. But I think there’s a more uncomfortable question: how would you know you’ve lost professional autonomy if you’ve never experienced it? f your entire probation career has taken place within OASys, performance measures, prescribed processes, centrally designed practice models, mandatory e-learning and increasingly structured supervision, that isn’t managerialism intruding into probation practice. To you, that is probation practice. And I don’t mean that as criticism of newer staff. Quite the opposite. People cannot miss a professional culture they were never given the opportunity to inherit. That’s why the loss of experienced practitioners matters beyond simple staffing numbers. When they leave, we don’t merely lose somebody capable of carrying a caseload. We lose memory of how the job can be done differently.

Perhaps the greatest success of managerialism isn’t persuading practitioners to accept less autonomy. It’s eventually producing generations of practitioners who don’t recognise autonomy as something they’re supposed to possess. That also makes all the current talk about “professionalisation” rather interesting.

You can create registers, standards, CPD requirements and eventually statutory regulation. But a profession isn’t simply a workforce whose members are individually regulated. A profession also possesses a body of knowledge, an ethical identity and some meaningful authority over its own practice. Otherwise we’re in danger of creating something rather peculiar:

professionally accountable individuals working in a profession that no longer controls its profession.

And perhaps that’s why the argument about probation’s purpose matters more than nostalgia for “advise, assist and befriend”. If we can’t collectively articulate what good probation is, beyond completing the required processes, managing the allocated contacts, satisfying the assessment framework and demonstrating compliance, then somebody at the centre will continue defining it for us. They have plenty of modules available to explain it afterwards.

*****

Probation celebrated its centenary in 2007 and at that time from memory every service was a gold standard…….then Chris Grayling, the split, the CRC's managing medium risk cases that were high risk but which they were not allowed to increase to high, every CPO offered three years protected salary to push the split, the reunification, the abandonment of critical thinking, the Mickey Mouse training (sorry Disney), the new breed of duplicitous CPOs kowtowing to ministers…….from gold standard to the brink of collapse in a generation………makes you think what will come next……