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.

Burnham Causes Chaos

It didn't take long did it for the new Prime Minister to plunge prison and probation into chaos. This from the Guardian:-

Prisoner early release scheme paused by Andy Burnham may still go ahead

Probation union and crime victims had raised doubts over plan to free 6,000 offenders across England and Wales

An early release scheme for thousands of prisoners paused by Andy Burnham after an outcry from victims could still take place this autumn, despite warnings by probation officers of potential chaos.

The prime minister ordered an urgent review into the proposed early release of about 6,000 prisoners, due to begin in September with an initial group of about 700, saying he wanted to “minimise risk to the public” and would not hesitate to make changes.

But with government officials accepting that the prison system remains near capacity, and no appetite to use alternatives such as police cells beyond emergencies, it is unclear what options exist beyond continuing with the plan, even in a different form.

Victims groups had objected to the proposal for 6,000 people to be freed early under the new Sentencing Act, with Debbie Adlam, the mother of the police officer Andrew Harper, saying the proposed inclusion of two of her son’s killers – Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers – was “another letdown” for their family.

In the latest of a flurry of policy announcements since he took over in No 10 on Monday, Burnham said: “I am working closely with the new justice secretary and have instructed my team to put a pause on the changes that were due to start in September.

“No prisoners will be let out under this policy until we have conducted an urgent review and done everything we can to minimise risk to the public. Where changes are needed, we will not hesitate to make them.”

With officials warning that without the scheme, prisons in England and Wales will run out of capacity by November, the most likely outcome appears to be a tweak to the early release system, with some offenders held back.

Officials have refused to say if the plan could be amended to block early release for people convicted of offences against emergency workers, such as Harper’s killers, or against women and girls.

Alex Norris, the new justice secretary, told reporters on Thursday the government needed “time to get it right”. He said: “We’ve put an important pause on this policy. It gives us a little bit of time to look at this, to make sure we do our best by you.”

Probation officers have warned that a “sense of chaos” had descended across the Prison Service, with staff unable to make preparations for the mass release. Tania Bassett, Napo’s national officer, said that after the trade union asked the Prisons Service if staff should continue with preparations for the early release scheme, it was now informing them it has been paused.

She said: “Napo’s concern is this will mean probation staff stop doing pre-release work. Whatever the prime minister’s final decision is, he has created a delay as well as confusion amongst the staff tasked with dealing with this.

“He needs to be more decisive about critical public protection issues and we urge him to treat this situation with the upmost urgency.”

According to the union, preparations for release require probation staff to carry out extensive work that usually takes at least six to eight weeks.

This includes reviewing risk assessments, making referrals for accommodation, carrying out home visits, coordinating with victim liaison officers and domestic abuse support officers and developing multi-agency safeguarding plans.

It can also take several weeks to ensure that tagging measures are in place before an offender is placed in accommodation. Unless probation staff received “imminent, concrete direction” about who will be considered, established release plans could collapse, a union official said.

The review has caused chaos in prisons, where managers are responsible for calculating release dates over several weeks from 2 September.

The Sentencing Act 2026 introduced an “earned progression model” that replaces automatic halfway release for prisoners serving standard determinate sentences in England and Wales with a tiered, behaviour-based system.

It will allow most prisoners to be released after serving a third of their sentence behind bars rather than 50%, with the rest of their sentence served under strict supervision in the community with the help of electronic tagging.

Prisoners serving time for sexual or violent offences where the automatic release stage is set at two-thirds will become eligible for release at the halfway point, provided they have not committed serious breaches of prison rules.

This applies to Bowers and Cole, two of Harper’s killers who were jailed for 13 years in 2020 for manslaughter. Burnham confirmed that Henry Long, the main perpetrator, “will not be subject to any early release” under the scheme.

After news of the pause emerged, Debbie Adlam told ITV News that this was “not enough”. She said: “It’s a good start, and it really is a good basis to begin working on some sensible alternatives and looking at options for going forward, because there’s so many people this affects, it’s not just us.”

An Impossible Job

I think the following two contributions sum the situation up neatly:-

So who thought that justice would be a priority?

https://www.gov.uk/government/people/alex-norris

Minister of State (Minister for Border Security and Asylum) and Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice - Alex Norris MP

Biography

Alex Norris was appointed Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice on 20 July 2026. He was previously Minister of State at the Home Office between 6 September 2025 and July 20 2026.

He was previously Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government between 9 July 2024 and 6 September 2025.

He has been the MP for Nottingham North and Kimberley (and its predecessor Nottingham North) since June 2017.

Minister of State (Minister for Border Security and Asylum) - The Minister’s responsibilities are:

Border Security Command: reducing small boat arrivals and organised immigration crime
reducing the asylum caseload, exiting hotels and reducing the supported population
Immigration Enforcement: Increasing returns (including FNOs), immigration detention estate expansion, illegal working
asylum, illegal migration and returns policy, safe and legal policy and refugee resettlement policy
reducing net migration: legal migration policy
tackling visa abuse
innovative solutions
Immigration White Paper implementation
European Entry Exit System
modern slavery policy as it relates to immigration status

Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice

Oversight of all justice portfolios, policy, and Ministry of Justice strategy
Oversight of cross-cutting emergency issues, responses supported by other ministers according to portfolio
Oversight of international business and future relations with the EU
MOJ support for the Union
Resourcing of the department

Functions of the Lord Chancellor

Judicial policy including pay, pensions and diversity (these and other operational decisions affecting the judiciary are reserved to the Lord Chancellor)

--oo00oo--

I’m not going to write Alex Norris off before he’s even started. Every minister deserves the chance to prove themselves. But I do wonder how anyone without a substantial justice background can fully appreciate the scale of what they’re inheriting. Probation isn’t something you understand from a briefing paper. It sits at the intersection of housing, mental health, addiction, domestic abuse, children’s services, employment, policing, prisons and the courts. It is where the consequences of policy decisions made across government all arrive at once.

Andy Burnham has rightly spoken about ending rough sleeping. That’s an admirable ambition. But this is where I think governments often miss something fundamental.

They talk about the “golden thread” running through assessments. What probation sees every day is the golden thread running through society.

Housing affects employment.

Employment affects offending.

Mental health affects addiction.

Addiction affects family stability.

Family breakdown affects children.

Children become tomorrow’s adults entering the criminal justice system. None of these things exists in isolation, yet government too often organises itself as if they do.

Probation doesn’t have the luxury of seeing only one department’s problem. We deal with the whole person and the cumulative effect of every public service that has either succeeded or failed them. So I genuinely hope the new Justice Secretary spends less time asking, “What does justice need?” and more time asking, “How does justice fit into everything else?”

Because until government starts seeing the same golden thread that frontline probation staff see every day, we’ll keep treating symptoms while wondering why the causes never seem to go away.

Time to say 'no'!

Some recent contributions:-

There's growing disconnect between the wellbeing message coming from HMPPS nationally and the day-to-day experience being described by many frontline staff. If people consistently feel that targets take precedence over wellbeing, then the issue isn’t the message, it’s whether that message is translating into practice.On the removal of the WMT, the FAQs repeatedly refer to line management discussions, professional judgement and management oversight. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with that. The WMT was never perfect. But it did provide a shared reference point. PP and SPO could both see the same information and have a discussion based on objective evidence.

From September, the emphasis appears to shift much more towards SPO judgement informed by dashboards, operational data and discussion. That inevitably changes the power dynamic.

Im sure a lot of SPOs will continue to act fairly and professionally. But good systems should be designed to protect people when relationships become difficult, not only when they are good. If a PP believes their workload is unsafe and their SPO disagrees, what independent evidence is there to resolve that disagreement? A good governance system shouldn’t rely solely on trust between individuals; it should provide transparent evidence that both parties can rely upon.

For me, that’s the real concern. We seem to be moving from an evidence-based conversation about workload to a relationship-based one. If trust is high, that may work well. But if trust has already been eroded, it risks creating inconsistency, discouraging challenge and leaving some staff feeling they have little objective basis on which to question workload decisions. That, more than the removal of a percentage figure, feels like the real cultural shift taking place.

--oo00oo--

HMPPS has completely lost touch with what it feels like to be a frontline PP. Every answer seems to be another dashboard, another AI tool, another restructure, another “holistic approach”, another management conversation. What nobody ever seems willing to acknowledge is the obvious: there is simply too much work.

No amount of dashboards will create more hours in the day.
No amount of management discussion will reduce an impossible caseload.
No amount of corporate wellbeing rhetoric will undo the damage of years of relentless pressure.

We’re expected to carry more risk, more responsibility, more bureaucracy and now, apparently, accept that if we feel we’re at capacity we’ll just have a conversation about it. What happens when that conversation ends with “I think you can take another case”? That’s not workload management. That’s asking PPs to negotiate their own breaking point. And let’s stop pretending this is about modernising the service. It’s about normalising overload.

The WMT may have been flawed, but at least it gave practitioners something objective to point to. Now even that is disappearing, replaced by assurances that everything will be fair because managers will use their judgement. Forgive me if I don’t find that reassuring.

Every year we’re told the next reform will fix things. Every year workloads increase, experienced colleagues leave, sickness rises and the people left behind are expected to absorb even more.

At some point HMPPS needs to stop telling us to be resilient and start admitting the truth: the system only functions because frontline staff are sacrificing their own health, family life and professional wellbeing to keep it afloat. That isn’t leadership. It’s exploitation.

--oo00oo--

Good points, all the things that we try to as POs such as building trust, discussions, focus and understanding the offenders we work with has unfortunately not only reduced in that work but also relationships between frontline POs and the SPO’s who sit in their offices dishing out work to those they know can take pressure and on the other hand protecting their friends with the easier cases. 

Possibly a delicate subject but how many of us are holding extremely high caseloads because others cannot cope? I am sick to death of people receiving a full wage when they are on a reduced caseload because they are ‘stressed’ we are all stressed and adding to my caseload stresses me more and more especially when so many people appear to be working from home more than they should be and those of us in the office have to deal with the fallout from their cases. 

How many times do you see your SPO out of their office? How many times is the SPO in after you and left before you? A lot of the new SPO’s are freshly qualified can make up a good story for interviews but never asked the basic leadership questions and that is why there is no leadership in the NPS just a full on ‘do as I say, not do as I do’. 

I no longer can have serious risk based conversations with the SPOs in my team as they are hardly there and so inexperienced, what happened to the five year post qualification rule? I hear you ask why don’t I get an SPO role, well it is because it does not pay enough for me to listen to moans, record sick and holidays and at the same time make life easier for some and not others.I also enjoy working with people who need my support and guidance and I am good at that and dealing with the violent ones who other people will not work with. 

However, a warning for those further up the greasy pole, people like me are now rare in probation a dying breed, a dinosaur some may say, however with three months left to go, I can already hear the voices, 'I cannot take that case', 'I won’t be taking that' and just the other day, ‘miserable bast*rd why are they taking early retirement, how can they do this to us.‘ 

I say, time to pick up the gauntlet, baton or the reins and get on with it, time to stand up and be counted and it is alright to say no, which is a lot harder than saying yes. What does the future hold, I don’t know but will be watching the next episodes from outside.