Romeo Special

From Daily Mail:-
Andy Burnham's top mandarin is facing questions over her own role in the prison overcrowding crisis that is leading to thousands of criminals being released early.

Dame Antonia Romeo, now Cabinet Secretary, was in charge of the Ministry of Justice for four years as problems mounted with the plan to build more cells. She was accused by MPs of presiding over a 'ticking timebomb' as her department knew that existing jails were rapidly running out of space yet the construction of new sites was delayed.

On her watch the MoJ built just 6,518 new places were built out of a promised 20,000, and the target will only be reached five years late according to the National Audit Office. When grilled by the Public Accounts Committee last year, Dame Antonia admitted there had been a 'degree of slippage in the delivery' but blamed unexpected developments including planning hold-ups.

She was also challenged over the MoJ's decision to sign a 10-year lease on HMP Dartmoor despite knowing the site had high levels of radon gas, meaning that hundreds of much-needed cells cannot be used.

Former prison governor John Podmore told the Daily Mail: 'She dug a big hole and Andy Burnham jumped right into it. 'While she was at the Ministry of Justice she watched it all go wrong. I didn't see any intervention that she did. 'The overcrowding crisis has been around for a long time but they haven't taken any responsibility.'

He said the department could have created more room by stopping so many suspects being held in jail on remand ahead of long-delayed trials, or by reducing the large number of released prisoners being recalled to jail for minor licence breaches.

Instead, the Prime Minister is now having to consider more radical proposals to free up space - in order to prevent the killers of PC Andrew Harper being included in the looming early release scheme - such as putting men in women's jails.

Another ex governor, Prof Ian Acheson, pointed out that Dame Antonia was previously responsible for the disastrous £4billion part-privatisation of the probation service, which later had to be reversed. He said: 'The connected upper class of the Senior Civil Service giving the PM advice on this political crisis bear some of the blame for the mess the criminal justice system is in.

'Romeo now sits at the side of the Prime Minister and represents continuity of the administrative class who have presided over chaos with no answers apart from 'No, Prime Minister'.

'The Ministry of Justice in a tight field is one of the worst departments in Whitehall. When the dust settles on this latest debacle, Andy Burnham would do well to consider a wholesale clear out of officials who have served him so poorly.'

But a Government source insisted: 'It is totally ridiculous to claim that anyone is responsible for the prisons crisis Labour inherited other than the Tory ministers who ignored repeated warnings from officials and refused to take action.'

Insiders said that key decisions that led to the overcrowding crisis, including increasing prison sentences as well as failing to provide enough funding, were taken by Tory-era ministers rather than officials.

A Government spokesman added: 'As Permanent Secretary at the MoJ, Antonia led the programme for new prison places, which included opening three new prisons with over 4,500 new prison places and plans to deliver 14,000 by 2031.

'She and her team consistently worked to prevent the prison system reaching maximum capacity, including during the summer riots in 2024 where she led the response of the Criminal Justice System to bring offenders swiftly to justice.'

*******
A significant Twitter thread:-

I've absolutely avoided the tittle tattle around Romeo's previous conduct mainly because of my own experience of being a pushy outsider in CS. I've focused on aspects of her performance which have been effectively memory holed. 'Transforming Rehabilitation' is exhibit A.

Romeo while DG at the MoJ was Senior Responsible Officer for this part privatisation of the probation service which was a total disaster from start to finish. Government ideological vandalism certainly but implemented by her.

She assured parliament the doomed transformation programme “is going to work and isn’t taking on any unnecessary risk” It was a total fuck up from start to finish when Probation was returned to public sector after wastage of £467 million underestimated costs and bail outs.

The probation union said the process was a “shambles” with “zero communication”, increased paperwork, fragmented risk management, deskilling and demoralisation of staff, and poorer outcomes for offenders being supervised. In other words it put the community at greater risk.

£9 million alone was spent on consultancy trying to gild this turd while probation officers had their pay frozen. The National Audit Office demolished the programme finding 'systemic failings' in design and implementation, aspects she was fully responsible for as SRO.

So it's for this reason and this alone I have serious reservations about the spin that says she's equal to the task of 'rewiring government.' It doesn't matter that she's a women and ambitious (oh no!) or all the fluff around her media profile. What matters is *delivery*.

But airbrushing serious failures won't cut it either. The systemic rot in the senior lanyard class in public service is a 'mediocracy' - people promoted up to and well beyond their level of competence. Not sure she's the best exemplar of how to tackle that. We shall see.

Ian Acheson

*******
"The systemic rot in the senior lanyard class in public service is a 'mediocracy'"

After all of the failures & waste of public money la romeo has been responsible for, someone with media clout has finally said it out loud.

John Podmore also alluded to it last week on R4 (referred to on this blog previously), but without going as far as Ian (possible bbc editing? possibly being cautious?). But la romeo has been at the heart of the destruction of justice for a long time, at least 8 years' at the helm in varying roles:

2011-13, Director General, Transformation.
2013 -15, Director General, Criminal Justice
2021-25, Ministry of Justice as permanent secretary

Dame Antonia Romeo (Jan 2021 – Mar 2025)
Sir Richard Heaton KCB (Aug 2015 – Aug 2020)
Ursula Brennan (July 2012 – July 2015) – Retired
Sir Suma Chakrabarti (May 2007 – 2012)

There's also this motley crew from noms/hmpps who aided & abetted the catastrophe:

Martin Narey (2004 to 2005)
Helen Edwards (2005 to 2008)
Phil Wheatley as Director-General (2008 to 2010)
Michael Spurr (2010 to 2019)
Jo Farrar (2019 to 2022)
Amy Rees (2022 to 2025)
Phil Copple as interim (2025)
James McEwen (2025 to present)

And any assortment of shadowy senior civil servants who shun the limelight but happily impose stupid, uninformed policies upon the minions.

******
There is an interesting contrast between the discussion about Antonia Romeo and the SFO discussion above. When accountability reaches senior organisational level, suddenly context matters enormously: political decisions, funding constraints, planning delays, competing pressures and decisions made elsewhere in the system.

And actually, context should matter. Complex systems fail for complex reasons. But surely the same principle has to apply when examining the actions of an individual PP.

If a practitioner was carrying an excessive workload, covering sickness, working within an organisational supervision model, unable to access accommodation or treatment, dealing with poor information sharing and making decisions within the time and resources available, those aren’t excuses to be stripped away before examining their practice. They are part of the evidence.

Perhaps genuine organisational learning starts when we become as interested in the context surrounding frontline decisions as we apparently are in the context surrounding decisions made at the top.

******
When there's glory to be grasped, Alpha Romeo is more than happy to be in the spotlight.

“To get large transformation programmes working, you’ve got to have really good assurance in place so that you know you’re not believing your own hype”

“My job as senior responsible officer is to make sure we deliver the benefits of the programme. We need to really understand what’s going on – and there are no prizes for not listening.”

Most offenders, she points out, have “a very complex and intractable set of problems that need to be looked at holistically.”

As the new system is established, these will be identified using what Romeo calls an “actuarial tool”: a piece of software that “looks at all the indicators and does something rather complicated and determines what level of risk someone is.” ... Romeo emphasises that the final decision will be made by NPS professionals – as will decisions over whether to recategorise offenders once the system is up and running.

There is clearly a political timetable behind the pace at which the MoJ is moving... Romeo acknowledges that the ministry hasn’t trialled its final proposals anywhere. “You have to turn on the statute once nationally,” she says.

“The Cabinet Office has a very clear process for awarding contracts.”

"I personally listen very carefully to what people tell me; and I go out all the time and talk to trusts, and to local authorities, and to police and crime commissioners.”

******
Powerful friends are useful, especially when you share a longstanding agenda.

"The Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team broke into a safe and destroyed the department’s copy of a historic bullying investigation into the new head of the civil service. In 2022 Darren Tierney, the then director-general of the government standards watchdog, asked maintenance staff to force open the vault. Reports surfaced that the department's copy of the Romeo file was disposed of following the vault breach... He later said he had wanted access to a confidential report about Dame Antonia Romeo. The Cabinet Office stated that the manual opening of the broken safe was routine due to a mechanical failure" - The Times/Telegraph & others

* Darren Tierney previously worked under Antonia Romeo when she headed the Department for International Trade (DIT) before later becoming the Director-General for Propriety and Ethics in the Cabinet Office

It seems there's a strong link between Romeo & the Cabinet Office...

"In July 2022, Francis Maude launched an independent review of UK civil service governance and accountability... Antonia Romeo—acting then as the Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Justice—officially sponsored and supported the review alongside Maude.. Romeo later advanced to become Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, putting her at the head of the department where Maude previously drove major structural reforms as Minister for the Cabinet Office" civil service world & others.

"News of the government’s intention to reform the civil service began to emerge in 2020. At the time, the agenda was being pushed by then-Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser of PM Boris Johnson. Maude will chair the latest review, with the support of Ministry of Justice permanent secretary Antonia Romeo"

2010: Romeo transferred to the Cabinet Office as the Executive Director in the new Efficiency and Reform Group under Francis Maude.

But not everyone's in thrall to alpha romeo:

"Antonia did not arrive in the senior civil service by the usual route of decades in a single department. She arrived through the coordination layer, the place where the various arms of the British state meet and agree their stories.

[romeo's] is not the career of a specialist. It is the career of a fixer. Intelligence liaison, efficiency reform, transformation, implementation, delivery. Every job title is a verb dressed up as a noun, and none of them leaves a paper trail you can scrutinise in a newspaper.

There was a reason for the trajectory, and his name was Jeremy Heywood, later Lord Heywood of Whitehall, who was Cabinet Secretary from 2012 until his death in 2018... Heywood was Romeo's mentor. He personally asked her to stay in the civil service when she was considering leaving, and sent her to New York. He smoothed her path to DIT, reportedly striking a "trade-off" with Theresa May, according to the Mail on Sunday's 2020 reporting, to secure her appointment despite the New York investigation.

Past performance is the best predictor of future performance. On past performance, Antonia Romeo is precisely what a failing administrative state produces, elevates, and protects. Not despite the record. Because of it.

She will also, we are told, rewrite the Civil Service Code, which is a bit like asking the fox to redraft the henhouse security policy."

*****
Reading that old interview alongside this discussion is quite sobering. Forget personalities for a moment because the more important issue is institutional memory. We have been here before.

A major transformation programme. Pressure to release capacity. Increasing reliance on actuarial tools. Assurances that professional judgement will remain with practitioners. A nationally implemented model accompanied by confidence from the centre that the risks are understood and appropriately managed.

TR subsequently failed, at enormous financial and human cost. So surely one of the most important questions for OFPS is: what has HMPPS actually learned from that experience? Because the line from that 2014 interview that really stands out now is: “You’ve got to have really good assurance in place so that you know you’re not believing your own hype.”

Quite.

If OFPS is deliberately attempting to release 25% of practitioner capacity through new tiering and supervision arrangements, where is the independent assurance that the model can safely do that? What happens if the assumptions underpinning the actuarial tools prove wrong? How will unintended consequences be identified once implemented? And crucially, who owns that risk?

That’s why this connects directly with SFO accountability. It cannot be acceptable for the organisation to design the model, determine the available resource and set the parameters of supervision, but for the individual practitioner to inherit the consequences if those assumptions subsequently prove wrong.

TR should have taught HMPPS that organisational optimism is not evidence. The question is whether anyone retained the lesson.

Guest Blog 110

When the System Sets the Risk, Who Carries the Blame?

Excellent piece, particularly the acknowledgement that sometimes the difference between becoming the subject of an SFO review and never experiencing one is not necessarily professional competence, but luck.

Risk assessment is not clairvoyance. Practitioners make judgements using the information, resources and time available to them at that moment. Yet after an SFO almost every action of the individual PP [Probation Practitioner] can be reconstructed: what was recorded, what wasn’t, whether an assessment was updated, whether information was acted upon and whether recall should have been considered.

The question is whether the organisation is examined with anything approaching the same forensic intensity.

And that question becomes even more important with everything now being introduced through OFPS, [Our Future Probation Service].

HMPPS is attempting to release around 25% of practitioner capacity. A new tiering model will determine how supervision is targeted, with seven tiers and maximum rather than minimum contacts. Practitioners will have to review all of their cases as the new arrangements are implemented, including ensuring the relevant risk indicators are captured. At the same time there are changes to supervision packages, increasing reliance on actuarial tools, the removal of practitioner access to the WMT and the additional pressures coming from sentencing reform and electronic monitoring.

These aren’t simply administrative changes. They are organisational decisions about risk.

If HMPPS determines through OFPS that a particular category of case should receive less practitioner resource, and a PP manages that person within the supervision framework HMPPS has designed, what happens if that person subsequently commits an SFO?

Will the review ask whether the model itself allocated sufficient professional time to that case? Will it examine whether the tier was appropriate, whether the supervision package was sufficient, what workload the PP was carrying and what other work they had been instructed to deprioritise?

Or will we once again work backwards through the individual practitioner’s records looking for something they might have done differently?

There is a particularly uncomfortable contradiction here. HMPPS is redesigning probation specifically because it accepts there isn’t sufficient capacity to continue doing everything currently expected of practitioners. Yet practitioner access to the WMT is disappearing just as these changes arrive.

Potentially, therefore, the individual PP becomes more retrospectively measurable while the organisational constraints around their practice become less objectively measurable.

That is exactly how defensive practice is created.

And perhaps this is the real test of whether SFO reviews are genuinely about learning. If HMPPS wants practitioners to embrace a new model that deliberately targets finite professional resource according to assessed need and risk, then HMPPS must be prepared to own the consequences of that model too.

Accountability cannot stop at the practitioner when the parameters within which that practitioner was working were designed much further up the organisation.

Anon

Guest Blog 109

When Fear Leads, Probation Fails

SFOs and the culture of blame in Probation

HM Inspector of Probation, last month published a Research & Analysis Bulletin looking at how the Probation Service can learn and improve practice following Serious Further Offences (SFOs).

I read this with interest: in my time I spent as a Probation Officer I had my fair share of sleepless nights worrying someone I supervised would do something terrible. I would hear news reports about a crime and run through, in my head, whether anyone on my caseload could have been in the location it happened in, and when I would get news, someone had been arrested my heart would beat faster and I would feel panicked as I waited to hear what for.

As my career developed so did my greatest fear– fairly or unfairly – that, should the worse happen, I would be ‘hung out to dry’, and left unsupported to take the sole blame. I feared I would be shamed for negligence and incompetence that led to the harm of another person – making me as bad, if not worse, than the person who actually committed the SFO. I became frightened that one day I would wake to my name and personal details appearing in the national press – and my professional reputation forever tainted, with no right to reply or opportunity to give an explanation.

Of course, SFO reviews are intended to promote learning. But as the HMIP Report shows, staff experience the reviews as failing to reflect the complex realities of frontline probation work, and actually being about allocating blame to individual practitioners, to divert attention from the organisational and systemic factors that contribute to SFOs.

I was fortunate, no one I supervised ever caused me to be the subject of an SFO Review. Not because I was especially skilled – but because I was lucky. I saw some truly amazing Officers subject to brutal SFO Reviews and, frankly some poor Officers never subject to one. Because that’s the nature of working with people – sometimes things happen that you cannot predict. Other times you might have strong suspicions – but nothing you can evidence, or you try to get resources to help someone – and they simply are not there – or not there in time.

Of course, there are times when Probation Officers practice is poor. But – for a long time now Probation staff have worked in a very poorly performing service. Consistently, the Inspectorate reports detail a service in failure. Staff are constantly holding more cases than they should be, they are covering cases for absent colleagues, they are having to act as proxy housing officers, chasing referrals in an increasingly disjointed system.

Despite being exposed to seeing and hearing some of the worst parts of human behaviour – both in terms of the crimes the people they supervise have committed and the, often, trauma filled background those same people come from, probation staff rarely receive any clinical supervision or genuine assistance to process this.

Probation staff are encouraged to ‘build their resilience’ but little is done, to help them do that. The systemic problems in the Service, are something staff are expected to deal with and rise above – and if you can’t – well you must be to blame.

Of course, the result of a staff body living with this kind of pressure and fear is a culture of defensive practice. Every decision is seen through the lens of ‘what if the worst happens?’ Even when nothing in the person’s history suggests the worse will happen. The recall rate – now at record levels, is, in my opinion, testament to this.

The irony is, people enter the Probation Service wanting to deliver relational, rehabilitative practice. Inspectorate reports demonstrate staff worried to admit any deficits in their practice, and staff worried to commit fully to relational practice, for fear of the consequences and, as such, a learning culture is simply not possible, and Probation fails to be the service of rehabilitation it could be. It’s hardly a surprise retention is such an issue in the service.

But blame doesn’t keep people safe. Learning, ultimately does. And until probation chooses learning as the central part of its culture, rather than fear, it will never be the rehabilitative service our communities deserve.

Kelly Grehan - In Justice Blog
@kellygrehaninjusticeblog

After 20 years working for the Probation Service in London, and 3 years working for MPs with justice briefs in Parliament, I now work for a justice charity. So fed up of the false discourse about justice I have decided to start blogging about it.

After HMIP published their (excellent) bulletin on serious further offences by people on probation, I felt compelled to write about the experience of staff being on the end of these reviews.

Without Probation None of This Can Happen

“Promises of extra investment are starting to sound like snake oil... Napo is urging government to listen to probation professionals... HMPPS has previously been issued with seven key demands, with deadlines for implementation"

Probation's been spoon-fed snake oil for decades. Local, regional & national management have been collectively holding the noses of probation staff & pouring it down their throats. No matter how its been disguised & delivered - Choreographed, Trusted, Transformed or Reset - it still tastes like shit.

Difficulty is that the unions (plural) have no authority, no gracvitas, no meaningful presence... just wobbly words of if's, but's, maybe's, wild claims & empty promises. They do a lot of "urging", so much so its a wonder they haven't had a prolapse. They do a lot of "demanding", but from a position of subservience & learned helplessness.

The "indicative" ballot is, as [has been pointed out] above, not exactly overwhelming when 9% of however many of the 6,135 members (no AR21 for 2025 yet, so this remains the 2024 membership figure) do not vote for it.

IF *all* members voted (I doubt they did) that's over 550 union members who, in this current climate of ever-worsening shitstorm, did NOT vote for "potential industrial action over workloads". If the current & impending situation isn't enough to make you fear the worst, what will it take?

Severally & individually you're in a position of extreme jeopardy, with the current dangerous levels of workload about to be ramped up beyond what is imaginable. The govt & hmpps haven't a fucking clue what they're doing & as an ex-prison governonr said on R4 yesterday, the PM is getting shit advice from a pack of inexperienced blowhards & his cabinet sec - ***who used to be the DG of HMPPS***. What he didn't go on to say was she was responsible for so much of the catastrophe that's been brewing for the last decade at least.

The whole Sentencing Act is about to be re-written - again - and it aint going to be pretty. Its already been rebranded as The New Progression Model ... one where the loudest cries of "foul" result in failure to release because hmpps will find some means of keeping the chosen ones in gaol for a few more weeks or months.

Meanwhile those moderate rightwingers wanting to 'reform' the country are having a ball, with ex-prison governor flakey frake signalling the return of the death penalty wouldn't go amiss. And 9% of however many voted (will we ever know?) think there's nothing to fret about?

Anon

*****

Whatever anyone thinks of Napo, 90.76% of those voting in an indicative ballot supporting potential industrial action should be impossible for HMPPS to dismiss as a few disgruntled staff.

I agree that Napo should publish the turnout and actual voting figures because transparency matters. But perhaps the bigger question is what happens next.

Probation has an unusual amount of public attention at the moment. Channel 4 is actively asking frontline staff to describe what is happening. Early release is dominating the news. Government is relying on “tougher community supervision” to reassure the public, while simultaneously expecting an already overstretched service to deliver it.

If ever there were a moment for probation staff to stop being the invisible part of the criminal justice system, surely this is it.

And this cannot be allowed to become simply an argument about wanting more pay or doing less work. Workloads, retention, experience, training, professional autonomy and yes, pay, all ultimately lead back to the same thing: public protection.

The government cannot tell the public that probation will provide the safety net for its sentencing and early-release policies while ignoring warnings from the people expected to provide that safety net.

The really interesting question now is whether Napo is prepared to use the leverage its members currently have, or whether we get another round of strongly worded statements, meetings, “urging” HMPPS to act and then watch the moment pass.

Because “without probation none of this can happen” is only a powerful statement if probation is finally prepared to act like it believes it.

Anon

Media Interest

Three questions for probation staff from C4 News:

• How concerned are you about the early release plans starting in October?
• What are you worried about and why?
• What do people need to know about what's happening inside the Probation Service and its ability to manage risks to the public? 

Responses please to: 

wyjaw@protonmail.com 

Sally.Chesworth@itn.co.uk 

All replies will only be used by C4 anonymously and the content will be voiced up by actors. We welcome replies from anyone working in Probation, across England & Wales

Guest Blog 108

I can't help but wonder if our current Criminal Justice System has reached a point where it's now beyond repair, and a whole new system needs to be created across the board? Apart from the chaos of the early release scheme, I read this week that prison wings are being closed under the guise of renovation to hide staff shortages and high levels of sick days being taken.

I read too that the MoJ may have to close down more prison space because of dangerous levels of radon that is affecting several of our victorian prisons as the building materials used are starting to decay through age.

I also read that whilst the MoJ are struggling to release prisoners early, they have at the same time decided to increase prison punishments, increasing the number of added days a prisoner can be awarded from 42 days to 84 days.

https://insidetime.org/information/mean-spirited-and-unjust-why-the-mojs-new-rules-risk-undermining-rehabilitation/

It seems that every policy that is introduced has an alternative policy that works against it. Within my social group there is a retired probation officer (CQSW) who is very left wing in their views. There is also a retired prison officer (10 years a block screw) and extremely right wing in their views. There is also a couple of ex-cons (old lags now and also long retired) who's views stretch in betwwen. 

However, regardless of political opinion, everyone is on the same page with the CJS. It was never perfect, but it worked well. More importantly, it was respected. The police caught the offenders and brought them before the courts. The courts heard the case, weighed up all the circumstances and decided on the most appropriate punishment. If that happend to be imprisonment, then the convicted person would serve two thirds of the total sentence and be released without any post sentence supervision. For those sentenced to two years or longer the possibility of being granted parole after one third existed, and if granted release, came with the provision to engage with probation services. No consent, no parole.

The public respected this process. There was never any outcry that someone hadn't been given long enough, or someone was being released early on parole. There was never any media or victims making headlines demanding that someone serve the amount of time that they wanted to see them serve. The system was respected. The sword and the scales, and what ever decision the courts arrived at, or who ever the Parole Board released was just acceped as part of the overall process.

Probation was respected too. It worked to resettle and rehabitate those being released on parole, not by enforcement and control, but by support and encouragement.

The CJS needs to go back to somewhere near to what it was. Each agency needs the freedom to do it's own job and achieve its own specific purpose, what it was designed to do. The CJS needs to assert itself and not be driven by the court of public opinion because pandering to one group will always upset another group. It may not of been perfect, but there was a time when it all worked so well, and its really not all that long ago.

'Getafix

No Mention of Probation?

From a contributor:-

"It's far greater & more complex than untrained coppers making a bad call:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8jnrk4xlvdo
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c70g18vpwxvo

• Scotland Yard downgraded Levy's risk to women upon his release in 2024
• The Met took three years to investigate and charge Levy with the sexual assault of the prison officer
• British Transport Police's (BTP) investigation into Levy's sexual assaults meant he was not charged for more than six months, despite being filmed carrying out an attack
• The Met and BTP both gave Levy back a stolen travelcard which let him travel without paying and commit crimes, including the first murder
• The CPS has apologised for "shortcomings" in its attempts to have Levy remanded in custody.

I do sometimes feel a chill inside when I read tabloid-worthy, set-in-concrete statements from what I always thought was a non-judgemental profession:

"they down graded the high risker... a po would not have downgraded him."

Everything's a mess. The entirety of the justice system (police, courts, probation, prisons, victim work) has been severely maltreated for decades, eroded & corroded by financial & moral starvation, ridiculed by the political class, mismanaged by Whitehall & hung out to dry by the media. The culture & nature of justice has been distorted.

We now seem to have a model that, with the rapid expansion of social media, means victims & their advocates have direct access & influence over government policy. That might not be a bad thing in & of itself, of course, but it has meant that the new government has been doing embarassingly poor public cartwheels over the Sentencing Act.

Sadly the last twenty or so years have seen some of the most contentious & damaging changes imposed upon the justice system, with frontline staff in all departments having little to no say; indeed, saying "it's shit & won't work" but being ignored, only to be proved right some time later, time & time again.

Even more sadly, those who sat in remote offices in Whitehall doing the sums, drafting the spreadsheets & writing the glossy reports promoting pointless change have never & will never been held to account for their wilful vandalism to public services & the massive holes they made in public finances. £Billions have been wasted on any number of vanity projects.

But hold up a sign saying "Plastacine Action", sit in a road blocking weapons destined for a genocidal state or daub paint on a statue & you'll be remanded into custody for months on terrorism charges."

Anger Is Mounting

Just in from a contributor:-

I have read the comments on here and feel that unless the mood is represented to the government yet again probation will take the blame. Where are the unions when needed certainly not working in our interest and probably not working. Always chuckle when I see the Probation Officer/NAPO chair at the bottom of an email, the NAPO bit why? It doesn’t get you any further or any more recognition, actually it is the badge of a shirker! 

The unions should be challenging the government asking for more money for the hard working operational PO’s. Should be having a ballot, taking strike action and let all the NPS lackeys manage the cases. Hmmm the majority couldn’t do an RMP let alone interview an offender, that is why they are up the greasy pole! Yet again we are playing probation Hokey Cokey, you put the training on, take the training off, on, off, on, off, you do the Hokey Cokey and turn around here’s an SFO!

There are limited AP places, AP’s are closing, there is no housing, you can have a tent, you cannot have UC unless you fill the application on line and it’s the summer holidays and half the probation workforce are on late starts and early finishes to pick the kids up from summer activities! Is that supervisor in possession of an up to date DBS? Successive governments have not built enough prison places, so when a police officer is killed there is not enough room at the inn because you are on EDS and not mandatory life because again the woke CJS does not want bad press.

I know what, if we knock all the very high and high riskers down to medium we can pass the case on to unqualified staff and they can take the SFO hit. Never I hear you cry, oh yes is my response you must tick the box or the SPO will throw their toys out of the pram because the PDU lead has blamed them and so it goes, sh*t only runs one way and who catches the lot?

It was a bad news day today so they announced a review of work descriptions, there will be no more money because the unions are involved bowing serf like to the bosses selling the membership out. 

Roll on Friday, laptop off until Monday, whatever happens over the weekend you don’t pay me enough to give a damn. In fact as a seasoned and experienced PO I miss the meeting the punter in the cafe for breakfast, popping to the building site for a brew, a leisurely home visit on a sunny day, that was when we had a professional, advise, assist and befriend, now its let’s do 15 months, get my degree and a DBS and off I go. 

There is no loyalty as loyalty works two ways and there is no respect, you have to earn respect and frankly I don’t respect those above me all they want is the targets met no matter how and no matter what the cost whether that be a mental breakdown or resignation. 

Happy Tuesday.

Anon

Memo to Andy

Dear Prime Minister, Andy

I've just watched your unscripted speech this morning in Enfield, the home of my formative years, and I believe you must earn considerable praise for your obvious determination to at last address the shame social care has become and deliver a solution. Well done for bringing forward Dame Louise Casey's Review, even though I've personally never forgiven her for further stigmatising offenders on Community Service by making them wear orange high vis jackets.

You clearly speak passionately on the subject of social care and this is to be welcomed, but seeing as we are still awaiting the appointment of a Probation Minister, one is left pondering firstly regarding your knowledge of the criminal justice system, and secondly your appetite for addressing a topic that the public has come to regard as requiring 'reform' by means of locking more people up, for longer?

You quite rightly highlighted the wisdom of trying to work collaboratively with other political parties in the hope of finding common ground rather than resorting to irritating point-scoring, but you are going to have to have rather more 'bottle' to tackle criminal justice which is equally crying out for reform, but with little or no hope for political consensus or indeed public understanding. But the cost savings and benefits to society could be enormous as our European neighbours have discovered with prison numbers significantly falling. Yes, falling!

May I be so bold as to suggest now would be a very good time to fulfill the Labour manifesto pedge of a thorough Review of the role, organisation and functioning of the once gold standard Probation Service and ensuring it returns to being part of a solution rather than part of the problem it's become under centralised HMPPS command and control. It has to break free of HM Prison Service subjugation and the civil service and return to local control as it was prior to part-privatisation. The current model is utterly failed and long-past regarded by many informed commentators as unfit for purpose.

Unlike social care, you may not have personal experience of the criminal justice system, but I urge you to appoint a suitably experienced person to undertake a Review of probation at the earliest opportunity because this vital public service is close to collapse.

I will end by applauding your Downing Street words on assuming office and particularly the pledge to treat people with decency and end rough sleeping. Of course these should be honourable aims of any government, but is particularly striking because you chose to 'say it out loud'. One of the main routes to rough sleeping is of course via the criminal justice system, so this should fit perfectly with your core belief and of course desire for devolution.

Our Collective Addiction

Just spotted this interesting Prospect article on our love of locking people up for ever-longer periods, the crisis it has created and inability of politicians to do anything about it.

We’re addicted to locking people up—but it doesn’t make any of us safer

Does Andy Burnham have the attention span, the will and the courage to tackle a collapsing justice system?

And there’s another one gone. So, farewell then, Lord Timpson, who managed a daring escape from his role as prisons minister just days before the latest farce engulfed his former department. He was over the wall and gone. As a reward for his 24 months in the job, he can attend the House of Lords for the rest of his days. Think of it as a form of rehabilitation.

Timpson was an imaginative appointment by Keir Starmer—and, by all accounts, pretty ineffective. But at least he put in a shift. In the past ten years there have been no fewer than 13 prison ministers. On average they serve for about nine months, which is the sort of term you can expect for ABH or possession of Class A drugs with intent to supply.

There is no organisation on the planet—barring Sunderland and Andy Burnham’s very own Everton—who would expel the boss on such a regular basis and hope for a different result.

Some will protest that the decision to grant early release to violent thugs isn’t the fault of the prisons: they just sit at the tail-end of a criminal justice system that is utterly broken. But you’re wasting your time looking for accountability. There have been ten justice secretaries in ten years. Average term: one year. About the same you’d get for carrying a knife or for dangerous driving.

Why are we releasing dangerous criminals back onto the streets? Because prisons are at a bursting point and by November there will be nowhere to put new offenders.

The easy thing here is to point the finger at one obvious cause. But there isn’t just one. After 14 years in power the Tories had expanded the prison estate by fewer than 500 places. So, it’s the Tories' fault. The Starmer government claimed to have opened a further 2,500 places. But most of those were due to a prison building programme started by the Tories. So, not all the Tories’ fault.

If we had a properly functioning probation service things might work better. A staggering number of ex-convicts—around 40,000 a year—are currently being recalled to prison. At any one time there are 13,000 to 15,000 people held in prison on recall, compared with the early 1990s when the figure was less than 100. So let’s not forget to blame Chris Grayling, whose dramatic reform of the probation service just over 10 years ago failed on every single count.

But the bigger problems lie further up the food chain. As a country, we are addicted to the pathetically deluded idea that by locking up more and more people for ever lengthier periods of time, we are solving anything.

Have we ever stopped to wonder why in England and Wales we incarcerate twice the proportion of the population of Germany and three times that of the Netherlands, Norway or Finland? We are currently scrambling to empty the bath at the bottom while both hot and cold taps are gushing away at the top.

We sling convicts in cells for up to 22 hours a day at a cost per head (£58k) which roughly equates to the school fees at some of our more exclusive private schools—say, Uppingham, where Lord Timpson spent his formative years. Do we educate or otherwise attempt to rehabilitate them while they’re in? Only in your dreams.

So let’s blame the judges, who will insist on locking people up for ever longer sentences. Unless you have the memory of a goldfish you will recall that barely a year ago David Gauke, one of those ten hapless MPs who briefly served as justice secretary in the last decade, published a weighty review about our addiction to sentence inflation. In 1993 we locked people up for 16 months on average: now it’s 22 months. For murder you used to get 12 years: now it’s 21 years.

But the judges are only doing what the law obliges them to do. Which takes us back to the politicians who keep ramping up prison sentences. Why? Well, Gauke partly blames the media for its persistent “tough on crime” narrative which has, over the years, convinced the general public that—in Chris “failing” Grayling’s words—our “jails are like holiday camps”.

So MPs think they are responding to public pressure. But public opinion is, in fact, all over the place when it comes to our criminal justice. More than three quarters of us believe that sentencing in England and Wales has become shorter in length, whereas the opposite is true. In other words, we’re not soft on offenders, but the public thinks we are.

However, public opinion is also much more nuanced on the effectiveness of prison. We do think violent people should be locked up, but 75 per cent of us think the prison system is failing. And we’ve got this far without even mentioning the crisis even further up the chain.

Two blockbuster reports from Lord Leveson have warned us that the court system has been so catastrophically destroyed that we have to contemplate junking aspects of the cherished jury system for it to stay afloat.

With some serious offences, you might now have to wait until 2030 to have your case heard: that’s four years of kicking your heels in a prison cell costing the taxpayer over £50k a year. As Leveson notes, the real day-to-day budget of the Ministry of Justice is set to be 14 per cent lower than in 2007/08. So let’s remember to blame George Osborne.

But don’t worry, because we have a new justice secretary, one Alex Norris. He is not a lawyer, but then neither were Chris Grayling (2012-15) or Liz Truss (2016-17), so there are, um, precedents. Mr Norris’s main professional experience hitherto is as an East Midlands area organiser for Unison while serving as councillor for the Basford ward on Nottingham City Council.

If the past is a guide to the future, he’ll be lucky if he’s still in post in a year’s time. Ands who would bet on the latest prisons minister, Catherine McKinnell, still being there in 10 months’ time?

When Andy Burnham walked into Downing Street he acknowledged that politicians haven’t been good enough and that they needed to raise their game. He promised a “circuit-breaker”.

If any part of government needs a circuit breaker it’s the entire shattered, malfunctioning criminal justice system. Is Burnham the man to have a painful and honest conversation about the multiple failures and the need for a drastic rethink of attitudes to crime and punishment? He has the vibes. Does he have the attention span, the will and the courage?

Alan Rusbridger

Alan Rusbridger was editor of Prospect from 2021 to 2025 and is the former head of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He was editor of the Guardian from 1995 to 2015.