Thanks to everyone for being part of it:-
A workforce that’s carried the service through every crisis is now breaking. HMIP says the system is failing, staff are being injured, and leadership looks out of touch. Security gadgets won’t fix a service that’s haemorrhaging experience and hope. If ministers don’t rebuild probation :- retaining experience, real support for staff and real autonomy, then more violence, more burnout and more avoidable tragedies are inevitable. This is the warning — ignore it at your own risk.
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Senior Management need to stop dressing this up as strain, transition or reform. Probation is in visible systemic failure, and the continued silence from those with the power to intervene now amounts to state negligence.
This is not a blanket attack on all managers. Many are trapped in the same machinery of impossible demands, reputational risk management and political cowardice. But that reality does not excuse the fact that harm is being absorbed at the bottom while truth is filtered out before it ever reaches the top.
We now have a workforce showing every recognised marker of institutional collapse: widespread moral injury, extreme sickness absence, and accelerating loss of experienced staff. That is not a resilience issue. That is a system issuing a distress signal, and it is being deliberately ignored.
At the same time, practitioners are being loaded with rising legal exposure, personal risk and expanding security functions such as searches, enforcement and control, without corresponding pay, status, authority or protection. This is not professional development. It is unmanaged role expansion with catastrophic consequences.
The contradiction at the heart of probation is now openly acknowledged while being actively sustained. Rehabilitation is still invoked in language, but containment, optics and political defensibility dominate in practice. That tension is being paid for daily by the workforce and by those under supervision.
And above all of this sits a political class that simply rotates through office while doing nothing to stabilise probation, nothing to rebuild professional sustainability, and nothing to confront the consequences of keeping it permanently tethered to a failing prison system. When Justice Secretaries can preside over this level of deterioration without consequence, the dysfunction is no longer individual. It is structural.
Unions, too, must be challenged here. Representation that documents harm without forcing structural change becomes part of the containment strategy rather than a barrier to it. When only practitioners are making noise, one conclusion becomes unavoidable: the human cost is being treated as administratively acceptable. You cannot hollow out a workforce through sickness, burnout and attrition, load it with coercive power, and still pretend public protection is being strengthened. This is not reform. This is managed collapse.
This is not a blanket attack on all managers. Many are trapped in the same machinery of impossible demands, reputational risk management and political cowardice. But that reality does not excuse the fact that harm is being absorbed at the bottom while truth is filtered out before it ever reaches the top.
We now have a workforce showing every recognised marker of institutional collapse: widespread moral injury, extreme sickness absence, and accelerating loss of experienced staff. That is not a resilience issue. That is a system issuing a distress signal, and it is being deliberately ignored.
At the same time, practitioners are being loaded with rising legal exposure, personal risk and expanding security functions such as searches, enforcement and control, without corresponding pay, status, authority or protection. This is not professional development. It is unmanaged role expansion with catastrophic consequences.
The contradiction at the heart of probation is now openly acknowledged while being actively sustained. Rehabilitation is still invoked in language, but containment, optics and political defensibility dominate in practice. That tension is being paid for daily by the workforce and by those under supervision.
And above all of this sits a political class that simply rotates through office while doing nothing to stabilise probation, nothing to rebuild professional sustainability, and nothing to confront the consequences of keeping it permanently tethered to a failing prison system. When Justice Secretaries can preside over this level of deterioration without consequence, the dysfunction is no longer individual. It is structural.
Unions, too, must be challenged here. Representation that documents harm without forcing structural change becomes part of the containment strategy rather than a barrier to it. When only practitioners are making noise, one conclusion becomes unavoidable: the human cost is being treated as administratively acceptable. You cannot hollow out a workforce through sickness, burnout and attrition, load it with coercive power, and still pretend public protection is being strengthened. This is not reform. This is managed collapse.
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We have been pointed in the direction of the view from the other side of the table. This from Inside Time:-
Outside Voices: This system is broken
The National Probation Service is the government department responsible for ‘managing offenders’ in custody and the community, with an annual budget of £1.5 billion.
When I say ‘managing’ I use this term loosely, as effective management models are collaborative and subject to independent review. What I should say is, the government department responsible for dictating to offenders in custody and the community, an organisation which self-polices and often blames someone else when things go wrong. (Great model for prisoners, right?)
In over a decade of engagement with the Probation Service, I have seen the good, the bad, and the institutionally inept. There are, of course, good people within probation working hard in a broken system to make a difference. Here comes the ‘but’: in my experience, they are not the majority. I’ve had at least 14 probation officers, and I can honestly say that only three were genuinely there to make a difference. The rest were concerned with doing the bare minimum, with a pure indifference to the consequences of their actions. Hardly a surprise, when the system is so broken it will take anyone into its employ and call them a professional.
I’ve seen the 12 editions of my copy-and-pasted OASys reports produce over-inflated risk scores, affecting my chances of recategorisation, sentence progression, and parole, and resulting in excessively restrictive licence conditions. Probation officers change every year or two, so offenders have little consistency, and are constantly having to re-explain their lives. How is a professional and rehabilitative relationship supposed to be fostered and maintained under such circumstances?
As if to evidence my point, only last month, two weeks prior to my (cancelled) parole hearing, my most recent community offender manager (COM) told me “I think I’ve used out-of-date information and over-inflated your risk.” This same COM put in writing in my parole dossier that she wanted my (non-operational, civilian) prison offender manager (POM) to carry out “direct surveillance” on who I associate with, and “search my cell and my mail”, while accusing me of having “organised crime gang” links – all without any evidence to justify this. This resulted in my POM contacting my COM to say that what had been requested would be unlawful, and the prison would not do it.
This is the reality faced by many offenders in a broken system that is hidden from the public – underfunded, under-resourced, and understaffed. It helps no-one and is dangerous. It is not a mere topic of debate – it is our lives, our futures, our day-to-day. Probation needs investment, transparency, and collaboration – not lack of accountability, neglect, and political point-scoring.
V Lynch the Auditor is the pen name of a serving prisoner
This is also why Reset, Impact and the wider sentencing reforms being sold as “supporting staff to manage caseloads” are, frankly, a joke. They do not reduce demand. They redistribute risk. For staff, that means legal responsibility without the time or relational control to manage it safely. For people on probation, it means shrinking support under expanding surveillance and an ever-present threat of recall. That is not workload management. It is liability management.
For those under supervision, this translates into control without consistency, restriction without stability, and liberty shaped by administrative fear rather than truth. For staff, it deepens moral injury, professional erosion and burnout. Both are being harmed by the same structural failures. This is not an outlier account. It is a warning about what this system now produces as standard.
The National Probation Service is the government department responsible for ‘managing offenders’ in custody and the community, with an annual budget of £1.5 billion.
When I say ‘managing’ I use this term loosely, as effective management models are collaborative and subject to independent review. What I should say is, the government department responsible for dictating to offenders in custody and the community, an organisation which self-polices and often blames someone else when things go wrong. (Great model for prisoners, right?)
In over a decade of engagement with the Probation Service, I have seen the good, the bad, and the institutionally inept. There are, of course, good people within probation working hard in a broken system to make a difference. Here comes the ‘but’: in my experience, they are not the majority. I’ve had at least 14 probation officers, and I can honestly say that only three were genuinely there to make a difference. The rest were concerned with doing the bare minimum, with a pure indifference to the consequences of their actions. Hardly a surprise, when the system is so broken it will take anyone into its employ and call them a professional.
I’ve seen the 12 editions of my copy-and-pasted OASys reports produce over-inflated risk scores, affecting my chances of recategorisation, sentence progression, and parole, and resulting in excessively restrictive licence conditions. Probation officers change every year or two, so offenders have little consistency, and are constantly having to re-explain their lives. How is a professional and rehabilitative relationship supposed to be fostered and maintained under such circumstances?
As if to evidence my point, only last month, two weeks prior to my (cancelled) parole hearing, my most recent community offender manager (COM) told me “I think I’ve used out-of-date information and over-inflated your risk.” This same COM put in writing in my parole dossier that she wanted my (non-operational, civilian) prison offender manager (POM) to carry out “direct surveillance” on who I associate with, and “search my cell and my mail”, while accusing me of having “organised crime gang” links – all without any evidence to justify this. This resulted in my POM contacting my COM to say that what had been requested would be unlawful, and the prison would not do it.
This is the reality faced by many offenders in a broken system that is hidden from the public – underfunded, under-resourced, and understaffed. It helps no-one and is dangerous. It is not a mere topic of debate – it is our lives, our futures, our day-to-day. Probation needs investment, transparency, and collaboration – not lack of accountability, neglect, and political point-scoring.
V Lynch the Auditor is the pen name of a serving prisoner
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What is described here is exactly what system collapse looks like on the ground: churn, inflated risk, copy-paste OASys, unlawful requests, and life-changing decisions being taken on rotten data. There is no denying that poor practice and indifference exist, but what this testimony exposes is not just individual failure. It is institutional design failure. High turnover, defensive risk culture, political pressure and chronic understaffing manufacture the very behaviour described here.This is also why Reset, Impact and the wider sentencing reforms being sold as “supporting staff to manage caseloads” are, frankly, a joke. They do not reduce demand. They redistribute risk. For staff, that means legal responsibility without the time or relational control to manage it safely. For people on probation, it means shrinking support under expanding surveillance and an ever-present threat of recall. That is not workload management. It is liability management.
For those under supervision, this translates into control without consistency, restriction without stability, and liberty shaped by administrative fear rather than truth. For staff, it deepens moral injury, professional erosion and burnout. Both are being harmed by the same structural failures. This is not an outlier account. It is a warning about what this system now produces as standard.
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Crises were central to Friedman's thinking. In the preface of his masterpiece Capitalism and Freedom from 1982, he wrote words that became a neoliberal mantra. I think it's worth quoting them in full. "Only a crisis," Friedman wrote, "actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function, to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."
IAIN WHYTE: I'm a Scottish Conservative councillor here in Edinburgh, so I'm probably one of your sceptics in the room, Rutger. I see a public sector that's spending all our money at the moment. We've got tax rates at the highest they've ever been in peacetime, as a share of GDP. We've got huge public spending. We've got a fifth of the working-age population in the UK not working. What is it that makes you feel that human nature won't get in the way of utopia?
RUTGER BREGMAN: Sure. Well, two things. One, yes, if you look at the whole share of GDP, the size of the public sector has grown. My point is that that is a good thing, and that is to be expected because of the Baumol effect. Because government is mostly responsible for things like education and healthcare, that are just much harder to make more efficient. Actually, if you make a doctor or a nurse more efficient, often you're destroying the very quality of — or the very point of, what they're doing. As I said, one hour of real human attention is not something you can easily automate. So that's one important thing. The second important thing is that, actually, the government is often doing the more meaningful work as well. So I talked about the phenomenon of BS jobs. It turns out that, according to a recent large-scale study, actually there are three times as many BS jobs in the private sector as in the public sector.
A Plan for a Probation Service Recovery
So here’s my starter for ten. It's not perfect - but then I'm not paid to think:
1. Rebuild Purpose Before Performance
Probation has been pushed so far into metrics that the mission has blurred. The service needs a restated purpose — written with, not imposed on, frontline staff. A modern charter of practice. A commitment that professional judgement is not a nuisance but the core skill the public depends on. And a recognition that autonomy isn’t a luxury; it’s what keeps people safe.
I've been listening to the Reith lectures and was struck by the following from number 3 repeated on Radio 4 last night. This from the transcript:-
And this from the questions section:-
IAIN WHYTE: I'm a Scottish Conservative councillor here in Edinburgh, so I'm probably one of your sceptics in the room, Rutger. I see a public sector that's spending all our money at the moment. We've got tax rates at the highest they've ever been in peacetime, as a share of GDP. We've got huge public spending. We've got a fifth of the working-age population in the UK not working. What is it that makes you feel that human nature won't get in the way of utopia?
RUTGER BREGMAN: Sure. Well, two things. One, yes, if you look at the whole share of GDP, the size of the public sector has grown. My point is that that is a good thing, and that is to be expected because of the Baumol effect. Because government is mostly responsible for things like education and healthcare, that are just much harder to make more efficient. Actually, if you make a doctor or a nurse more efficient, often you're destroying the very quality of — or the very point of, what they're doing. As I said, one hour of real human attention is not something you can easily automate. So that's one important thing. The second important thing is that, actually, the government is often doing the more meaningful work as well. So I talked about the phenomenon of BS jobs. It turns out that, according to a recent large-scale study, actually there are three times as many BS jobs in the private sector as in the public sector.
IAIN WHYTE: My concern is that I see a public sector here in Scotland where people are essentially working for themselves or within the system. And it's not really serving the public as the priority. Often, the way our trade unions and others work, they work for the workers in the system, or the middle managers work to ensure an easy life, your BS jobs, rather than making sure the front line is actually helping the public.
RUTGER BREGMAN: So that is a concern that I share. What we've seen since the '70s, as tax rates for the rich have been going down, is that a lot of the most talented people have been going not to government or academia or NGOs, but instead to big tech companies, big finance, big pharma companies, where often they contribute much less to society. So I'm really interested in the allocation of talent. And I think we've got to find ways to make government great again, to make it the coolest place. Like the Fabian Society was one of the coolest places you could be, to really convince our best and brightest that to work for the public, for the public good, is the most prestigious and most meaningful thing you can do with your whole career.
My emphasis - it's absolutely what I felt in 1985 at the start of my probation career.
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This came in over night:-
So here’s my starter for ten. It's not perfect - but then I'm not paid to think:
1. Rebuild Purpose Before Performance
Probation has been pushed so far into metrics that the mission has blurred. The service needs a restated purpose — written with, not imposed on, frontline staff. A modern charter of practice. A commitment that professional judgement is not a nuisance but the core skill the public depends on. And a recognition that autonomy isn’t a luxury; it’s what keeps people safe.
2. Stabilise the Workforce
Nothing changes until caseloads change. That means enforceable caps, emergency relief teams, and a three-year recovery plan that focuses on retention, recruitment, protected training time and genuine psychological safety. If staff can’t speak up without fear, the system can’t learn.
Nothing changes until caseloads change. That means enforceable caps, emergency relief teams, and a three-year recovery plan that focuses on retention, recruitment, protected training time and genuine psychological safety. If staff can’t speak up without fear, the system can’t learn.
3. End the Command-and-Control Reflex
The prison-service mindset has seeped deep: obey, don’t question, deliver the target at all costs. Flatten the hierarchy. Retrain leaders to coach rather than dictate. Protect whistleblowing. And start valuing managers who listen, not those who silence.
The prison-service mindset has seeped deep: obey, don’t question, deliver the target at all costs. Flatten the hierarchy. Retrain leaders to coach rather than dictate. Protect whistleblowing. And start valuing managers who listen, not those who silence.
4. Stop Pretending Prison Expansion Is Progress
If building thousands of new cells is your headline achievement, you’ve admitted failure. Probation’s recovery depends on shifting investment away from incarceration and into community supports: women’s centres, young-adult interventions, housing partnerships, restorative options. More prison is not more safety — it’s more of the same mistakes.
If building thousands of new cells is your headline achievement, you’ve admitted failure. Probation’s recovery depends on shifting investment away from incarceration and into community supports: women’s centres, young-adult interventions, housing partnerships, restorative options. More prison is not more safety — it’s more of the same mistakes.
5. Put Communities Back in the Frame
Recreate regional probation boards that involve courts, local authorities, voluntary organisations and people with lived experience. Give regions power to commission what their communities actually need, not what a template says they should want. Make probation visible again — not as a bureaucratic shadow, but as a neighbour, partner and problem-solver. I’m that desperate I’m even starting to think putting probation under the regional Mayors might be a good idea (accepting that some of them will likely be Reform).
Recreate regional probation boards that involve courts, local authorities, voluntary organisations and people with lived experience. Give regions power to commission what their communities actually need, not what a template says they should want. Make probation visible again — not as a bureaucratic shadow, but as a neighbour, partner and problem-solver. I’m that desperate I’m even starting to think putting probation under the regional Mayors might be a good idea (accepting that some of them will likely be Reform).
6. Cut Bureaucracy Before It Cuts Us
Review every mandatory form, template and process. Scrap what doesn’t directly improve safety or rehabilitation. Fix the digital mess so staff aren’t duplicating work across systems. Free the time that has been swallowed by audits and command emails.
Review every mandatory form, template and process. Scrap what doesn’t directly improve safety or rehabilitation. Fix the digital mess so staff aren’t duplicating work across systems. Free the time that has been swallowed by audits and command emails.
7. Put the Evidence Back in Charge
Create an independent evidence centre, insulated from political heat. Require proper research reviews before new policies land. Bring back research roles inside the service so staff can innovate and evaluate rather than firefight and hope.
Create an independent evidence centre, insulated from political heat. Require proper research reviews before new policies land. Bring back research roles inside the service so staff can innovate and evaluate rather than firefight and hope.
8. Repair the Bond With the Courts
Courts need to see probation again — in person, not at the other end of a duty line. That means embedding staff in courtrooms, restoring time for proper pre-sentence reports, and rebuilding a shared sense of justice between judiciary and probation.
Courts need to see probation again — in person, not at the other end of a duty line. That means embedding staff in courtrooms, restoring time for proper pre-sentence reports, and rebuilding a shared sense of justice between judiciary and probation.
9. Real Accountability, Not Empty Praise
Inspections shouldn’t applaud leadership while delivery collapses. Create transparent oversight of senior leaders. Publish meaningful data on staffing, caseloads, reoffending and SFO learning. Stop blaming practitioners for structural failure.
Inspections shouldn’t applaud leadership while delivery collapses. Create transparent oversight of senior leaders. Publish meaningful data on staffing, caseloads, reoffending and SFO learning. Stop blaming practitioners for structural failure.
10. Build a Long-Term Political Settlement
Probation cannot survive policy lurches driven by headlines. A cross-party Probation Futures Commission could secure a 10-year settlement — stable funding, evidenced direction, and annual parliamentary scrutiny. The public deserves a service built on safety, not soundbites.
Probation cannot survive policy lurches driven by headlines. A cross-party Probation Futures Commission could secure a 10-year settlement — stable funding, evidenced direction, and annual parliamentary scrutiny. The public deserves a service built on safety, not soundbites.
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But 'Getafix makes a very valid point about dispensing with some of the pointless work completely:-Probation provides a very damaging environment for those employed in the service. However, for many of those subjected to supervision it's just as painful and damaging. In many cases supervision become counter productive. I refer particularly to the 12mth and under cohort that were ensnared by TR. There is really nothing probation can do for this group, and since TR they have only found themselves on the merry go round of perpetual release and recall. For this group post sentence supervision is akin to a community based IPP sentence. They represent a significant proportion of the 3000 recalls every month, swelling the prison population, and creating perpetual churn for both prisons and probation, only to be released again a few weeks later, ofen homeless, but certainly to the same circumstances, with the added complexities have having to jump through the same hoops as they've previously tackled with regard to registering for housing, benefit claims etc, etc.
The reality is it's costing a lot of money and resource to create unnecessary problems. The 12mth and under group need to be removed from automatic post sentence supervision. It's the last part of TR that hasn't been reversed. I'm in total agreement with anon [above], but I do wonder if its only 'practitioners making noise' now? There has been two very serious assaults on staff with weapons very recently, and it's a sobering and very serious and concerning thought, but perhaps those being supervised are starting to make noise too?
What replaces post-sentence supervision is not less control. It is more community supervision, more licence conditions, more tagging and more enforcement under a different badge. If probation continues to operate as the soft arm of the prison service, these reforms will not ease caseload pressure, they will not restore morale, and they will not reduce harm for the people trapped inside the system.
Reset and Impact sit squarely inside this problem. They are being sold as intelligent prioritisation, but what they really represent is the formal withdrawal of meaningful supervision in response to workforce collapse. For staff, they become another performance demand layered onto exhaustion and moral injury. For people on probation, they mean being left under legal control with minimal support, then recalled when predictably things unravel. That is not rehabilitation. It is managed risk disposal.
Rolling back one failed mechanism while entrenching surveillance, enforcement and withdrawal of support simply redistributes the same damage across a wider population and calls it reform. All that changes now is the branding of the machinery that breaks both staff and those supervised.
The reality is it's costing a lot of money and resource to create unnecessary problems. The 12mth and under group need to be removed from automatic post sentence supervision. It's the last part of TR that hasn't been reversed. I'm in total agreement with anon [above], but I do wonder if its only 'practitioners making noise' now? There has been two very serious assaults on staff with weapons very recently, and it's a sobering and very serious and concerning thought, but perhaps those being supervised are starting to make noise too?
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You’re absolutely right about the TR cohort. It became a recall factory and a community-based IPP in all but name, and everyone in power knew it. Yes, automatic post-sentence supervision is now being rolled back, but only after years of human churn, wasted millions and swelling prison numbers. And you’re also right that the noise is no longer only coming from practitioners. When people on probation start making it too, through crisis, resistance or violence, that is the system speaking through those it is failing.
What replaces post-sentence supervision is not less control. It is more community supervision, more licence conditions, more tagging and more enforcement under a different badge. If probation continues to operate as the soft arm of the prison service, these reforms will not ease caseload pressure, they will not restore morale, and they will not reduce harm for the people trapped inside the system.
Reset and Impact sit squarely inside this problem. They are being sold as intelligent prioritisation, but what they really represent is the formal withdrawal of meaningful supervision in response to workforce collapse. For staff, they become another performance demand layered onto exhaustion and moral injury. For people on probation, they mean being left under legal control with minimal support, then recalled when predictably things unravel. That is not rehabilitation. It is managed risk disposal.
Rolling back one failed mechanism while entrenching surveillance, enforcement and withdrawal of support simply redistributes the same damage across a wider population and calls it reform. All that changes now is the branding of the machinery that breaks both staff and those supervised.
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Everyone wants someone else to fix the problem. It's someone else's duty, responsibility for this shit but it isn't mine. I'm at the coalface and I'm suffering. You keep on wearing it, keep on accepting it, then frankly you deserve what you have. If you don't resist, you're complicit.
*******
The idea that probation is collapsing because frontline staff “don’t resist enough” is a comforting fiction. It lets the people with real power off the hook. This system is not failing because practitioners lack courage, it is failing because those with the authority to change direction have chosen, repeatedly, not to. The architecture crushes dissent, absorbs challenge and punishes anyone who dares to stick their head above the parapet. Calling that “complicity” is not analysis. It is victim-blaming dressed up as toughness.
And yes, Napo’s inaction deserves anger. But the real question isn’t where the union’s spine went, it’s why a government department can preside over a decade of workforce collapse, moral injury, violence, burnout, recalls, unlawful practice and public-safety risk without being forced to answer for any of it. That isn’t a “spine” problem. That’s a power problem.
Meanwhile, Reset, Impact and the sentencing reforms are being sold as relief for staff, but they exist for one reason, which is to compensate for a government that has gutted the service to the point where it can no longer deliver its own mandate. They don’t reduce caseloads; they ration supervision. They don’t support people on probation; they strip away the little support that remains. They don’t help practitioners; they expose them.
So if we’re going to talk about who “deserves what they get,” let’s be honest. It isn’t the frontline workforce. It’s the political leadership and senior machinery that built, defended and doubled-down on a model that everyone can now see collapsing in real time. If blame is going to land anywhere, it should land where the power sits and not on the people already carrying the consequences.
And yes, Napo’s inaction deserves anger. But the real question isn’t where the union’s spine went, it’s why a government department can preside over a decade of workforce collapse, moral injury, violence, burnout, recalls, unlawful practice and public-safety risk without being forced to answer for any of it. That isn’t a “spine” problem. That’s a power problem.
Meanwhile, Reset, Impact and the sentencing reforms are being sold as relief for staff, but they exist for one reason, which is to compensate for a government that has gutted the service to the point where it can no longer deliver its own mandate. They don’t reduce caseloads; they ration supervision. They don’t support people on probation; they strip away the little support that remains. They don’t help practitioners; they expose them.
So if we’re going to talk about who “deserves what they get,” let’s be honest. It isn’t the frontline workforce. It’s the political leadership and senior machinery that built, defended and doubled-down on a model that everyone can now see collapsing in real time. If blame is going to land anywhere, it should land where the power sits and not on the people already carrying the consequences.
For the love of God get rid of PSS
ReplyDeletePSS is one necessary fix, but it is the lowest-hanging fruit in a garden that has been left to rot. Scrapping it does not amount to reform. It simply removes one failing mechanism in a system that is failing everywhere. If those in power want to talk about a probation recovery plan, they must first confront why the service needs recovery at all.
DeleteThis collapse was not an accident. It was the result of political decisions. The workforce is depleted because ministers refused to resource it. Moral injury is endemic because leadership rewarded defensibility over truth. Recall culture spiralled because political optics were valued above rehabilitation. Reset and Impact exist not because they support staff, but because the service became structurally unable to deliver its core duties.
A real recovery plan means rebuilding staffing, restoring autonomy and dismantling the surveillance-first culture that now treats people on probation as risks to be contained rather than humans to be supported. Nothing changes until those facts are admitted by the people who created them.
If ministers want to claim they are easing caseloads, then they must fund the workforce, reduce unnecessary licence conditions, stop offloading risk downward and stop treating probation like an extension of the prison estate. Anything else is denial dressed up as reform.
Removing PSS without rebuilding the foundations is not recovery. It is political damage control masquerading as progress.
Unless those with power stop protecting their reputations and start repairing the damage they created, probation will remain a collapsing structure that punishes the people inside it more than the people it claims to supervise.
My most important take from rutger's lectures thus far:
ReplyDelete"one hour of real human attention is not something you can easily automate."
I'd go further - one hour of real human attention is not something you can automate at all. Ever. Regardless of what ellenmusk or markysuckerbugs or peterevilthiel or any of the so-called 'techbros' say.
What so many people could do with - whether one-off, weekly, monthly - is one hour of real, face-to-face human interaction, where the attention is focused upon the client/patient/attendee, when people are listened to, are heard, are acknowledged as part of the conversation.
It boils my piss when, in so many interactions with others, people talk over, shout down, cut across, or otherwise make it clear all they want to hear is their own opinion, their own voice.
One of the skills I learned on my (yawn) social-work-based cqsw was listening. We had a (double yawn) 'counselling' unit to complete which involved an assessment of a recorded interview (with a student colleague, not a client) as part of the exam. For me, this was one of the most critical pieces of leaning I undertook - not just for the probation work, but for life.
As a university tutor I would simply go silent when students were more interested in themselves than in the subject at hand. On numerous occasions it took several minutes for them to realise I had stopped speaking & sat down. It only took a couple of sessions with each group before they started to listen & engage respectfully. Only then did the sessions come alive, with great questions from students who had listened & who appreciated those questions being heard & debated by their peers and the tutor.
The art of listening is an art; a dying art.
Ann 09:19 Interesting! I was a mature student when applying for Uni and had been a Samaritan volunteer for quite a few years, so was already well-versed in being an 'active' listener. Certainly still a vital skill.
ReplyDeleteThe service officially needs 3,150 more staff to deliver a “basic” standard, and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) itself underestimated the need by about 5,400 staff. Disgusting!!!
ReplyDeleteStaff lose an average of 13.2 working days to illness annually (compared to a national average of 5.7), with nearly 60% of these absences due to mental ill health.
ReplyDeleteGet the f**k out and leave. You don’t deserve this and you can do much better. I have applied for other jobs. Leaving soon as I can. It’s going g to get worse.
You’re right that it’s going to get worse, because none of the pressures driving sickness, burnout and collapse are being fixed. The workforce is shrinking faster than it can be replaced, and whenever someone goes off sick their work just gets dumped on everyone else. No wonder so many are looking elsewhere now, myself included.
DeleteAnd the sentencing reforms won’t ease anything. A presumption against short custodial sentences sounds sensible, but in reality it means more people supervised in the community by a service that cannot safely manage the caseload it already holds. Organisations responding to the Bill have said openly that this will increase pressure on probation unless staffing and resources rise sharply, and the inspectorate has warned that expanding community sentences without capacity risks making things worse. Less prison time does not equal less probation work. It means more supervision, more admin, more risk and less time to do meaningful work.
Meanwhile, £700 million is being thrown at AI, tagging and “digital transformation” as if technology can substitute for a workforce that has been hollowed out. It is treated like a magic bullet, but it won’t build trust, it won’t support change and it won’t repair a service that has been systematically stripped of the basics required to function.
And through all this, the system still prioritises metrics and bureaucracy over listening, humanity and rehabilitation. Practitioners haven’t stopped caring. They’ve had the conditions for caring removed by people in power who treat connection as inefficiency.
It’s going to get worse because those with power refuse to confront the damage they created. Until they rebuild the foundations instead of managing the symptoms, the spiral will continue and probation will keep losing the very people it depends on to survive.
Active listening, real human attention and the sense of being understood are at the heart of any rehabilitative relationship. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is that the system has made it almost impossible for practitioners to offer the very thing that makes probation meaningful. People on probation haven’t become harder to work with. The system has become harder to work within.
ReplyDeleteThe quality of training used to prepare practitioners to work relationally, creatively and reflectively. Over time that has been eroded and replaced with training geared toward risk management, defensibility and procedural compliance. New staff are being trained into a model where listening is optional but box-ticking is mandatory. Experienced staff are burning out under the weight of moral injury because they remember what the job should be and cannot deliver it under current conditions.
The pressure to meet performance measures at a pace that bears no resemblance to the reality of current caseloads strips out the ability to slow down, to think, to understand and to listen properly. Every minute is accounted for. Every task is timed. Every action must produce a metric. Humanity has no measurable output, so the system quietly removes the space for it. Practitioners aren’t choosing not to listen. The structure has removed the oxygen that listening requires.
And this is where accountability sits. It is not the workforce who decided that surveillance matters more than understanding or that throughput matters more than trust. It is leadership and ministers who redesigned probation into a machine that values compliance over connection and defensibility over truth. They created an environment where the things that actually help people change are treated as inefficiencies to be eliminated.
Active listening is still essential. The tragedy is that the people with power treated it as expendable. Until they stop protecting their own narratives and start rebuilding the conditions that make real work possible, the system will continue silencing both practitioners and the people they supervise.
Yes relatable across the board but please it's 220 mill per year over 3 so a drop in the ocean split nationally it won't go far and won't fund more staff.
DeleteWhat worries me more than anything is how numb we have all been forced to become. We are describing sickness, resignations, burnout, fear and moral injury as if they are just workplace inconveniences rather than signs that something fundamental has broken. Probation is not just strained. It is being hollowed out from the inside and everyone can feel it.
ReplyDeleteAt its best, probation has always been a profession built on belief. Belief in change, belief in humanity, belief that dignity matters even when people are at their lowest. But belief does not survive in a system that exhausts its workforce, strips out time, piles on pressure and refuses to acknowledge its own part in causing harm. When the conditions for dignity are removed, the dignity itself disappears. When purpose is crushed, people walk.
And here is the truth that cuts deeper than caseloads or processes. A service that cannot protect the wellbeing of its own staff cannot pretend to be protecting the public. Exhausted, depleted, morally injured practitioners cannot sustain safe practice. Losing experienced staff is not just an operational problem. It is a public safety crisis unfolding in slow motion.
What makes this so hard to swallow is that the people with the power to intervene still talk in managerial language while the service bleeds. They talk about innovation, transformation, efficiency and resilience as if this is a technical issue rather than a human one. It is not technology that keeps people safe. It is not dashboards or metrics that support rehabilitation. It is people. Skilled, steady, supported people.
And yet those very people are now leaving faster than they can be replaced. Not because they do not care, but because caring has been turned into a liability. Not because they lack resilience, but because resilience has been misused as an excuse not to fix what is broken. The workforce has not failed. The leadership has.
If the country genuinely wants probation to function, for staff, for people on probation and for public safety, then the conversation has to change. Not how do we squeeze more out of what is left, but how do we rebuild something worthy of the people who rely on it. How do we restore dignity, purpose and stability. How do we make it possible for staff to do the job the public believes they are doing.
Because if we cannot value the people who hold up the justice system, then we cannot claim to value justice at all.
No doubt any of this low mood and deep dissatisfaction in our situation. Sickness record highs says a lot . Why oh why are the unions not surveying this into lawful argument to protect us.
DeleteHugely powerful, candid and poignant words 16.24 I do hope these blogs and indeed ALL your comments get a much wider circulation via X and FB too. Also, either by email or via social media with MP’s too. Simply]e words, I know but many are hearing your voices and deeply care too. I recall HMPPS Leaders were challenged at the Public Accounts Committee about Public Safety issues and the acute staffing levels and the attrition crisis . You know doubt will be aware of their response. I believe you succinctly defined the deeper moral crisis ‘Exhausted, depleted, morally injured practitioners cannot sustain safe practice. It is a public safety crisis unfolding in slow motion. Although, my own MP has yet to show any interest I will share some of your words via X and email over the next few days iangould5
DeleteI know this blogs love stats- so here is something that I know you will love.
ReplyDelete“There were 11,041 licence recalls in a single quarter (April-June 2025), a 13% year-on-year increase. Most recalls are for non-compliance (74%), not new offenses.” https://www.russellwebster.com/the-pressures-on-the-probation-service/
Attitude - recall
DeleteCame late - recall
Forgot to tell about new relationship- recall
Smoked abit of weed - recall
Farted during supervision contact - recall
F**kin joke.
salt, rub, wound
ReplyDeletePRISON SERVICE PAY REVIEW BODY – 2026 REPORT
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/693aa25433c7ace9c4a42001/PSPRB_letter_confirming_2025_report_timetable.pdf
"I can inform you that we will aim to submit our 2026 Report to you in late February – early March... allowing the remit group to receive their pay award closer to the due date of 1st April than has recently been the case."
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prison-building-boom-to-make-streets-safer
Deleteupdated version 9 dec 2025
https://hmiprobation.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/document/annual-report-2025-serious-further-offences/
ReplyDelete"It is of concern that there has been a sustained increase in the number of notifications of an arrest and charge for an SFO over the last two years. In the period 2023/2024 the figure increased from 478 to 770, and in 2024/2025 it increased further by 13 per cent to 872.
We have quality assured 90 SFO reviews this year, with 53 per cent of these rated as ‘Requires improvement’. In contrast, just 46 per cent were rated as ‘Good’, and one per cent as ‘Outstanding’. Disappointingly, these findings show no improvement from the previous year.
In last year’s SFO annual report we made 11 recommendations, seven of which were repeated from the previous year’s’ SFO annual report. It is discouraging to note that while HMPPS have taken forward some activity against most of these recommendations, the outcomes and their impact is still not clear."
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What jones meant to write, but it got lost somewhere in petty france:
"It is tedious to note that we have made eleven recommendations, seven of which were repeated from the previous year, yet despite hmpps taking forward some activity against some of our recommendations, outcomes and their impact is still not clear. So unclear as to be invisible.
Thus it is of no surprise whatsoever that, in these tumultous times of new austerity, overflowing prisons & an overstretched probation service, there has been a sustained increase in the number of notifications of an arrest and charge for an SFO over the last two years.
We have quality assured 90 SFO reviews this year. One was okay. Inevitably, given the staffing crisis, the limited hmpps response to previous recommendations & the general state of decaying morale within the probation service, these findings show no improvement from the previous year.
Huzzah! G&Ts all round!! More champers, james?
Love, jonesy."