Russell Reflects

Silence from the MoJ and HMPPS of course, but as HMI Justin Russell heads for the door later this month, it's worth reading his analysis of the last few years, not least in the hope that any in-coming Labour administration might learn something:- 

Chief Inspector's foreword

This will be my final annual report as His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Probation after four years in post, so it is an opportunity to look back over what has been a tumultuous and difficult period for the Probation Service and to offer some reflections on the future as well. 

During those four years, the service has undergone yet another major structural reorganisation (its fourth in 20 years). It has had to change its entire operating model overnight in response to the Covid pandemic and then, like the rest of the public sector, had to deal with the long-term impacts of that pandemic on backlogs, staff morale and the partners it works with. This made coming out of the pandemic, if anything, even more difficult than going into it. Added to that has been the more recent impact of the cost of living crisis on staff wellbeing and living standards. 

The simultaneous impact of all these factors has been profound and is illustrated clearly in our inspection ratings over the past year. And it’s been evident too in the high profile serious cases we have reported on since I became Chief Inspector – including those of Joseph McCann, Damien Bendall and Jordan McSweeney. 

In June 2021, when the private sector Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) and the public sector National Probation Service (NPS) were re-unified into a single public sector Probation Service, I cautioned that re-unification by itself was not going to be a silver bullet for all the problems that the unified service was inheriting. Merely shifting large volumes of cases from the private sector into the public sector, I said, wouldn’t improve the quality of work that probation staff are able to do. Real transformation was a long-term commitment, and re-unification was just the beginning of that journey. 

Two years on from re-unification, that prediction has sadly turned out to be true. As this annual report shows, the performance of the service against our quality standards has if anything got worse not better since it came back together in 2021. 

Why is that? Part of the answer is the depth of the problems inherited from the Transforming Rehabilitation period. That applies particularly to staffing levels and caseload pressures. In response to a real-terms reduction in funding caused by a flawed payment-by-results contract mechanism, many of the private sector probation providers were forced to cut the number of qualified probation officers (often replaced by unqualified and inexperienced PSOs) and to scale back investment in other areas. This pushed average individual caseloads up to unsustainable levels in some local areas. 

Given that staffing numbers for the CRCs were never published, the extent of this staffing shortfall didn’t become known until re-unification, when it became evident that the service was thousands of officers short of what was necessary to deliver manageable workloads. Ambitious recruitment targets were set to fill these gaps, and an additional £155 million was added to the service’s budget, taking it past £1 billion a year. However, an influx of inexperienced new staff all needing to be trained and mentored has created its own problems.

Working remotely and receiving all their training online during the pandemic, new staff found it difficult to access the practical support and advice that comes with sharing an office with more experienced colleagues. And in the meantime, those more experienced colleagues have been resigning from the service in greater numbers. While the number of probation officers with up to two years of service has increased significantly (by 46 per cent in the 12 months to 31 March 2023) the number with five or more years’ service has fallen. 

But not all of the problems we have seen in our inspections since re-unification can be put down to the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms or the pandemic. While I welcomed re-unification at the time, and praised the way this transition programme was managed at pace, it wasn’t without its downsides. In particular, I regret the way that transition disrupted some of the positive innovations and progress that the better CRC providers had been starting to make. 

That is particularly the case in relation to Through the Gate resettlement services. Our final round of CRC inspections had shown that these services were making real progress in some areas thanks to significant extra investment in enhanced provision after April 2018 and some increasingly mature and positive relationships with voluntary sector partners. All 12 of the CRC areas we visited in our final round of pre-unification inspections were rated as either ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ for their Through the Gate services. 

Re-unification brought an abrupt end to these partnerships in favour of a new set of centrally commissioned service contracts. This left staff in many Through the Gate teams up in the air and unsure of their futures. As our recent thematic inspections have shown, the Offender Management in Custody framework, which has replaced Through the Gate services for those serving longer sentences, has performed poorly, and we found that it is not understood well by staff and prisoners. 

In the longer arc of history, the most recent structural reorganisation marks the final step from probation being an entirely locally run and funded service at the beginning of the 20th century, to being an entirely national one in the third decade of the 21st, with probation staff now all government civil servants. While that may have created opportunities for probation staff to move into other roles across government, and economies of scale in terms of business partner arrangements, not everyone has been happy with this change. 

Civil Service procurement and recruitment processes can be notoriously slow. Equipment that could be purchased in days, can now take weeks to procure; posts can take many months to fill; multiple layers of approvals and standardised and centralised commissioning processes stifle innovation and can feel disempowering for local leaders. 

To that must then be added the impact of the new, merged ‘One HMPPS’ structure for prisons and probation. His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) has lost the separate Director General role for probation, which I had previously welcomed as giving the service strong and visible leadership. Past experience with the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) is that the day-to-day operational and political demands of the prison service can all too easily distract from the Probation Service and its particular (and very different) needs. The insertion of new HMPPS area executive director posts between regional probation directors and national HMPPS leadership will also, I suspect, feel like a downgrading of their status and influence to regional probation leaders. 

I know that strong concerns have been raised about these changes and it’s important that the voice and interests of the Probation Service continue to get the leadership attention they so desperately need. Many in the service hark back to the days (not that long ago), when probation was a genuinely local service – locally accountable rather than run from Whitehall, focused on local partnerships and able to act autonomously within them. Given our results from the past year, and after speaking to probation leaders and managers around England and Wales, I have to say I have increasing sympathy with this view. The Prison Service will always need to be national, given the constant pressure on prison places and the need to manage scarce functions like the high security, women’s and youth estate at a national level.

And some probation functions, like the management of terrorist offenders after release and perhaps of the approved premises estate, are best managed nationally too. But for the great majority of the probation caseload, all of the most important relationships for probation staff and the people they work with are local, with locally run and accountable partners. These include local police services; local authority housing and social service departments; local mental health trusts; and local drug and alcohol services. The Probation Service should be a key player in these partnerships, and it has a seat at all the important partnership meetings – but to make the most of that seat, local leaders need the freedoms to commit resources and staff; to agree local contracts; to decide on investments in local infrastructure and to be able to speak publicly to both defend and advocate for their local services. Local probation leaders are heavily constrained in relation to all of these freedoms and flexibilities by current structures. It is telling that our inspection scores for youth offending services, which can do all of these things, have been far better than for probation over the past year and if anything seem to have improved, in spite of the pandemic. 

In part, of course, this is because youth justice services (YJS) have much more manageable caseloads – far lower than probation equivalents. But I think it also reflects the greater resilience and potential for flexibility and innovation that’s possible with a locally run and accountable service, with YJS now for the most part firmly embedded in local authority children’s services. Strong local relationships are also cemented by local YJS management boards. These include senior representatives of all of the local services with which YJS staff and service leaders will be working, who have the power to get things sorted within their own services on behalf of the children on each YJS caseload. 

While I recognise that another reorganisation of the service, and any shift in this direction would have to be with the explicit agreement of local managers and staff, I think the time has come for an independent review of whether probation should move back to a more local form of governance and control, building on the highly successful lessons of youth justice services – 70 per cent of which we rated as ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ last year. 

In the second part of this report, we consider the needs of people on probation that may be driving their offending behaviour – such as a drug or alcohol problem; insecure accommodation or a lack of employment; or poor thinking skills – and whether these are being met. The short answer is that they are not. We rated the quality of service provision as ‘Inadequate’ in 13 out of 31 of the local PDUs we had inspected by May 2023. These judgements were borne out by our individual case assessments, where my inspectors found that in only 44 per cent of the cases they inspected did the implementation and delivery of services effectively support the person on probation’s desistance. And for services like drug or alcohol treatment, the picture was even worse. In almost half of the local cases we inspected, the individual had a drug problem linked to their offending, but in only 29 per cent of these was delivery of services sufficient to meet that need. 

In an important new initiative, we have also started to ask people on probation whether they think their needs are being met. Since April 2022, the organisation User Voice, which is run and staffed by people who have been through the criminal justice system themselves, has been surveying and interviewing people on probation on our behalf in every local area that we inspect. Of over 1,350 people on probation who answered their surveys across 21 local PDUs, only 61 per cent said they were getting the services they needed, although the high number who said they didn’t need any services suggests that many didn’t recognise their own needs or the services that might have been available to them. 

The impact of the pandemic can still clearly be seen in the low start rates and long waiting times for the accredited programmes ordered by the courts and in the high numbers of unpaid work orders reaching the 12-month point without being completed. Here, too, high staff vacancy rates and poor enforcement and compliance have taken a toll. 

But it is in the area of public protection that my concerns remain greatest. The Probation Service’s ability to accurately assess and robustly manage potential risks of serious harm from people on probation was already its weakest area of performance before the pandemic, and has become even worse since re-unification. We have rated two-thirds of the individual cases inspected across 10 regions as insufficient. The picture is even worse for medium risk cases, which generate a majority of the murders committed by people on probation and so will often need as careful management as higher risk cases. Large caseloads have reduced the time that practitioners can spend assessing, planning or managing each individual case. In too many cases, this has reduced face-to-face appointments to little more than welfare check-ins, which is not helped by the reduced time that staff are spending in the office rather than working from home. And heavily loaded line managers (senior probation officers) lack the time to properly scrutinise the work of their teams or engage in the sort of coaching and support needed to improve the practice of large numbers of trainee or newly qualified staff – so mistakes are being missed. Across the cases we’ve inspected management oversight was insufficient in an alarming 72 per cent of cases. 

Time and again we’re also finding that practitioners are failing to draw on a wide enough range of information when assessing risk. Domestic abuse enquires with the police, for example, were made in only 49 per cent of the cases where we felt they should have been and safeguarding enquiries were made with local children’s services in only 55 per cent. A focus solely on the most recent conviction means that past evidence of risk such as violence against previous partners or evidence of weapon use or gang membership is being missed.

All of these factors were clearly evident in the high-profile independent reviews we published earlier this year into the supervision of Damien Bendall and Jordan McSweeney, which attracted huge media interest. While we did find clear failures in the quality of individual probation practice in both cases, there were also broader systemic issues that we are seeing time and time again in our local probation inspections and thematic reviews. These included overloaded practitioners and line managers with well above their target workloads; significant delays in handing over cases from prison to community probation staff, resulting in last-minute and inadequate release planning; incomplete or inaccurate risk assessments being carried out at both the court stage and start of supervision; and very inexperienced staff being handed inappropriately complex cases with minimal management oversight. 

But what of the future? While this has been a disappointing year on which to finish my term of office as Chief Inspector, I hope for better things to come. We now know that good quality probation practice makes a significant difference to outcomes. In an important research report we published earlier this year, based on an analysis of cases inspected before re-unification, we found that effective probation practice in individual cases significantly correlated with the outcome for that person on probation, as revealed by the Police National Computer and the service’s own data. In the cases where our inspectors judged that the delivery of probation supervision both engaged the person on probation and supported their desistance, the sentence completion rate was 24 percentage points higher and the reoffending rate was 14 percentage points lower than in cases where both judgements were negative. This shows not only that we are inspecting the right things when making judgements on quality, but also that those things make a real difference to the life outcomes of the people the service is working with. 

A new Chief Probation Officer has made public protection her number one priority for the service, and I’m pleased that HMPPS has accepted all the recommendations from our reviews of the Bendall and McSweeney cases. New staff have been recruited to provide the police and children’s safety enquiries that we’ve found missing in too many cases. A major recruitment drive is finally paying off, with the number of practitioners and senior probation officers starting to increase in the past 12 months. A three-year pay deal may encourage more people into the service, and there are some signs in our inspections that individual caseloads may be coming down, even if that is not yet feeding into the quality of practice. Staff are back in the office after the pandemic and seeing people on their caseloads face-to-face (albeit sometimes only once a month) and unpaid work parties are back out on site as normal. But most of all I sense a determination amongst service leaders and managers to improve. I’ve been lucky enough to meet hundreds of probation staff across England and Wales in my time as Chief Inspector and I’ve never doubted their desire to do the right thing. In the effective practice guides that I’ve introduced as Chief Inspector, we’ve been able to showcase the many things that individual staff and managers are doing right and the innovations that still survive – to balance what we’ve had to say in our inspection reports about what’s going wrong. And as our interviews with people on probation show, when things are done right it can be life changing (and sometimes life-saving) for the people involved, so I’d like to finish on a positive note by quoting one of them: 

“Probation has been really supportive of me and I'm so glad to have them. I was really worried about my future and probation continue to help me keep calm and focus on the future not the past.” 

Justin Russell 

HM Chief Inspector of Probation

--oo00oo--

Postscript - Keen observers might have noticed a staggering increase in viewing figures over the last week or so, just shy of 10,000 yesterday and 9,000 the previous day. I could pretend this is due to a genuinely massive interest in this blog and the world of probation, but sadly it appears to be as a result of 'bots' based in Singapore. I have absolutely no idea why, but maybe someone could enlighten us?