Duck and Cover

Oh deary deary me, what a pickle we're all in.

In prehistoric times probation officer training entry criteria in England and Wales were strictly governed under a social work framework. To qualify as a probation officer, applicants had to gain entry into a higher education program recognized by the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW) to obtain the Certificate of Qualification in Social Work (CQSW), which included a specialised probation option. Undergraduate applicants needed standard university matriculation requirements (typically 2 to 3 A-Levels or equivalent) to enter a 3- or 4-year undergraduate degree combining a social science discipline with the CQSW. Graduates holding a relevant first degree (such as Sociology, Psychology, or Law) could apply for an accelerated 2-year postgraduate CQSW program. Mature applicants without a degree could apply for a 2-year non-graduate CQSW diploma if they could demonstrate the academic capacity to cope with higher education.

But... Academic qualifications alone were insufficient. Candidates were strictly vetted on their practical experience in social care, voluntary work, or the criminal justice sector.

While applicants were generally required to be at least 20 or 21 years old at the start of training, the Home Office actively encouraged mature applicants, frequently recruiting individuals in their late 20s or 30s who brought broader life experience to the role.

Tuition was funded and candidates would receive a salary/stipend while training. Candidates had to pass a competitive selection process managed by the Home Office, who funded the sponsorship. To this end selection panels evaluated candidates for specific core character traits, including personal resilience, strong communication skills, emotional maturity, and a core belief in rehabilitation. Background checks were also mandatory to ensure suitability for working within the court system.

The artifical thing inside my machine provided the following analysis of that old dinosaur shit:

Training Structure and Context

• Social Work Foundation: Training was firmly rooted in social work discipline and casework models rather than standalone criminal justice curricula.
• Core Philosophy: Officers were trained under the rehabilitative tradition to "advise, assist, and befriend," focusing on personal relationships and domestic/community context.
• Court Preparation: Trainees learned how to interview offenders and compile social background reports (pre-sentence assessments) to guide judicial sentencing.

Sounds to me like them dinosaurs were pretty smart in many ways; but sadly not smart enough to stop the psychobullies in Whitehall nuking the lot & issuing the new Duck & Cover series of online training.

For the uninitiated, "Duck and Cover" is the official method of personal protection against the effects of pretty much, including a nuclear explosion:

"A log, a large rock, or any depression in the earth's surface provides some protection. Close eyes. Remain facedown until the blast wave passes and debris stops falling. Stay calm, check for injury, check for equipment damage, and prepare to continue the mission."

Anon 

*****

So when I started in probation over 10 years ago sitting in on two extremely rudimentary supervision appointments with 2 different officers and 2 different cases was sufficient training for me to go and manage a caseload of 30 cases of all different personalities and offences, ages etc etc. 

In my 15 month training whilst managing 30 cases I had 2 day motivational interviewing training, 3 day DV training, 4 day sex offender training and that's it and then could manage the most complex cases. Now all these years later they are finally telling staff how they should talk to offenders, how they should respond,.. Its just a joke, an absolute joke!!! 

I had imagined when I started my training I would be sitting in watching a qualified officer do intensive work with offenders with a range of personality types, learning styles and that I wouldn't even be allowed to speak to an offender for at least a year. Nope. 2 basic 15 minute supervision appts then off you go.. Basically you're qualified..no one gave a shit! No one gives a shit now - this training is all legal back covering whilst they destroy what's left of the smoking turd that is the probation Service in the uk.

Anon

That New Training

OFPS online training knowledge check question.
Q. What does EM stand for?
A. Electronic Monitoring!

I sh*t you not, how condescending are the ‘experts’ compiling this training for POs with Bachelor’s Degrees, MSc’s and other post graduate qualifications. Has it come to this because the probation qualifications have lost credibility, training reduced to 15 months, struggling to recruit educated individuals with lived experience? Then again it might be just so those further up the management chain can pass the online modules after all they have had their crayons removed. 

Let’s see what things look like in October, I have enough in my pension pots to retire and leave all this behind but I still want to get a few through their licenses and settled because I still have the positive probation skill set developed over several years, online training cannot teach you experience.

Anon

*****

I’m currently working my way through the OFPS mandatory learning and can confirm that the promised 25% increase in practitioner capacity is going extremely well. So far I have learned that home visits help us understand people’s circumstances, that we should consider risk when deciding whether to see someone, and that if somebody stops engaging we should apparently continue trying to engage them.

I’ve now completed the Supervision Packages module. I still have several more to go. At this rate I’m expecting the final module to explain that offending is generally discouraged.

The humour wears rather thin though, because underneath the painfully simplistic presentation are significant changes to how probation supervision actually operates: capped contacts, restricted home visits, contingency arrangements, new rules about when additional contact can take place and systems for monitoring how practitioners use them.

Those changes deserve proper professional discussion. What happens when the person in front of you doesn’t fit neatly into the model? When risk is changing but not sufficiently to satisfy a prescribed threshold? When professional judgement tells you more contact is necessary? And, inevitably, when something subsequently goes seriously wrong, whose judgement will be examined?

Apparently qualified practitioners can be trusted to manage serious risk, safeguarding, domestic abuse, complex offending and decisions which may have enormous consequences for the public — but first we must click through several screens explaining the purpose of a home visit.

I’m exhausted by it, frankly. Not because professional development is unnecessary, but because this isn’t professional development. It is information transfer dressed up as training, consuming the very practitioner capacity OFPS is supposedly designed to release.

Perhaps when I finally reach the end there’ll be a certificate confirming that I am now competent to press “Continue”. I’ll treasure it.

Anon

*****
Where has the real probation uplift training gone? Do you remember sitting in a room with 12 other people, catching up about what was going on in the area and then having knowledgeable colleagues delivering proper training, ice breakers, break out rooms, role play meaningful discussion and feedback. 

Now it is online training for dummies, that is exactly what the hierarchy think of us, let’s belittle them and not only give them massive caseloads, stress and anxiety for many, but give them the Peppa Pig Production of OFPS, you know the one that teaches experienced practitioners how to suck eggs but also at the same time ‘develop’ the ‘new’ workforce, automatons who do everything by the book, tick all the boxes, have never used professional curiosity, identified disguised compliance or exercised professional judgement without permission of their SPO and spend hours on RMP’s fearing the contact with offenders but talk a good plan and then go off and leave it to the old heads with resilience in abundance and the ability to develop professional meaningful relationships that actually matter.

The probation service that I knew is dead, the new one will not be able to cope with our communities which are declining into serious unlawfulness where the balaclava and [Surron?] rule!

Anon

Ownership

Having worked as a probation officer for over 25 years, the most significant change I've witnessed isn't just in caseload volume — it's in ownership. Case management used to mean exactly that: we held the case, from initial contact through to the end of licence or order, coordinating referrals and services but retaining responsibility for the plan and the outcome. That model has eroded. Several structural shifts help explain why:

Fragmentation of the system. Since the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms and the subsequent 2021 reunification of the National Probation Service, practitioners have had to work across a patchwork of prison, community, and third-party interfaces that were never fully reintegrated. A case now passes through multiple institutional hand-offs — prison offender management units, community rehabilitation partners, housing, substance misuse services — each with their own reporting lines and none with clear overall accountability for the case as a whole.

Audit and compliance culture. The rise of centralised risk-management frameworks (MAPPA, OASys, structured risk assessments) has embedded a compliance layer over practice. HM Inspectorate of Probation reports have repeatedly flagged that administrative and recording burdens are consuming time that should be spent on direct engagement with people on probation. The result is that "doing the job well" is increasingly measured by paperwork completion and timeliness rather than by engagement quality or risk reduction outcomes.

Digital case management systems. Tools like nDelius were intended to streamline processes, but in practice they've generated their own compliance metrics — character counts in case notes, mandatory field completion, appointment-loading deadlines — that function as a parallel workload independent of the actual casework. Bloody Dashboards!

Asymmetric accountability. Perhaps most tellingly, the escalation culture runs one direction. A probation officer who is late on a task/Kpi faces automatic escalation to their line manager, then upward through the hierarchy. But there is no equivalent mechanism for probation to hold external agencies — EMS,housing, drug and alcohol services, prisons, police, social services etc — to the same standard when they fail to respond. This structural imbalance means us Officers absorb delay and dysfunction from across the system without the authority to push back.

Staff attrition figures — the Probation Service has struggled for years with vacancy rates and retention, according to its own workforce data and repeated union reporting — are, I'd argue, a direct consequence of this shift. It's not that the job became harder in a clinical sense; it's that practitioners lost ownership of the thing that made the job meaningful, while absorbing all of the accountability for a system they don't control.

******
This really resonates, particularly the point about ownership. Perhaps that’s why I reacted so strongly to the OFPS training in the first place. Taken in isolation, patronising e-learning is merely irritating. Put it alongside everything else that has happened to probation and it starts to look symptomatic of something much bigger.

• We increasingly don’t do things. We refer.
• We increasingly don’t own the intervention. Somebody else delivers it.
• We increasingly don’t determine the structure of supervision. A framework does.
• We increasingly don’t decide what constitutes sufficient work. A package, process, dashboard or target tells us.

Yet somehow, when the whole fragmented arrangement fails, responsibility has an extraordinary ability to travel back through all those interfaces and land on the desk of one probation officer. That’s the bit I find increasingly absurd.

If I’m going to carry professional accountability for complex risk, then treat me as a professional capable of exercising judgement about it. Don’t simultaneously remove ownership, prescribe practice, outsource interventions, give me Playschool-level mandatory training and then expect PhD-level foresight when something goes catastrophically wrong.

And the point above about the knowledge already sitting within probation is important too. We have practitioners with decades of operational experience, postgraduate qualifications and enormous accumulated knowledge of risk, rehabilitation and multi-agency working.

Were they meaningfully involved in designing OFPS? Were frontline practitioners presented with the evidence, invited to challenge the assumptions and allowed to shape the model? Were experienced POs asked what actually helps them manage complex cases? Because professional development could look completely different.

Give experienced practitioners difficult anonymised cases. Put six POs in a room. Give them incomplete and conflicting information. Ask them what they would do. Let them disagree. Introduce new information halfway through. Challenge their decisions. Bring in research. Bring in an experienced SPO. Debate recall versus continued management. Examine what happened afterwards without pretending hindsight was foresight. 

That is training for professional judgement. Clicking through cartoons until the system records “complete” isn’t. And perhaps we’ve arrived at the strangest contradiction of all:

Probation officers appear to have progressively less ownership of the work, while retaining potentially enormous personal accountability for its outcome.

If Registered Probation Officer status is going to mean anything, that imbalance needs addressing. Otherwise we’re not professionalising probation. We’re professionalising the blame.

Playschool Probation

Some critics and commentators have referred to the Our Future Probation Service (OFPS) programme as "Our Futile Probation Service."

*****
Our Future Probation Service training materials and online learning is academically demeaning. I have never been so embarrassed by the training they are pushing out, it is BBC bite size for probation. The sentence plans have no professionalism about them and I have had enough. It is Playschool Probation.Tomorrow my papers are going in, don’t need to be treated so abysmally as we are currently, registered probation officer status is a joke, remuneration package poor and there are less stressful options out there.

*****
I took a look at the OFPS training, came across the first question and demeaning doesn’t do it. I completely understand the anger and desire to leave. If you can -run for the hills. My motivation is so low I think I am going to have to get a sharp spade and dig down for a long time to find it. How on earth did I arrive at this soulless place after 30+years, I am embarrassed to be a Probation Officer. No energy or interest to work at all.

******
Mandatory training! Mandatory this, mandatory that, the probation service are a purveyor of online training aimed at the lower end of the market. I heard the moans and groans in the office today as we were directed to take an hour out to start it! I was so embarrassed to be expected to complete this. The cartoon character with a blue shirt and Captain Custer beard, the dieversity pictures, the condoning attitude of the presenter. The directorate for training, the directorate for this, that and the other, there is only one directorate and that is the one for the buffoons sanctioning this training, just shows the lack of respect for operational staff, Bob the Probation Officer, can he fix it? can he boll**ks. RIP probation. I think I will be moving on now this organisation is a joke.

*****

It is a bit much to call this new training……’training’ ….more like an insurance policy for the centre……they know it will be despised yet they will persist with it as it will be used against you in a future SFO……..as in ‘ did you complete your mandatory training’?

Petitions Decide Government Policy

Well, it hasn't taken long for a new PM that knows nothing about criminal justice to decide the best way to proceed is to let the media, victims and public petitions decide policy rather than Parliament:-

Prime Minister blocks hundreds more criminals from sentencing changes  

Unlawful killing and historic child sex offences will be blocked from upcoming changes to prison sentences after the Prime Minister ordered more serious offenders to be kept behind bars for longer.  

•  Prime Minister blocks manslaughter, death by drunk or dangerous driving and historic child sex offences from sentencing changes  
• Builds on action to keep those in prison for rape, child sex or grooming offences behind bars
• Victims of domestic violence will be better protected from perpetrators, with record numbers of offenders set to leave prison tagged and the new restriction zones put in place, some as little as a few miles wide, for some sexual and violent offenders
• The government will deport thousands of foreign criminals and bring the injustice of IPP sentences to an end during this Parliament 

Unlawful killing and historic child sex offences will be blocked from upcoming changes to prison sentences after the Prime Minister ordered more serious offenders to be kept behind bars for longer. 

The Prime Minister’s intervention will mean offenders in prison for killing an emergency worker in the line of duty will not be released any earlier. Historic grooming offences, all forms of manslaughter, death by dangerous driving and causing or allowing the death of a child will also be barred from the changes to the prison sentences.

This builds on the action already taken by the Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor to stop anyone in prison for rape, serious child sexual offences and grooming from being released earlier. Murderers or anyone deemed the most dangerous by a court and handed a life or extended sentence were already blocked from seeing any reduction to their sentence and will stay locked up until they go before a Parole Board.

As a result of these changes today, hundreds more victims will no longer face the anxiety of seeing their offender coming out sooner than they were expecting.

Since coming into office, the Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor have made significant changes to the plans they inherited. They want to go even further, but cannot do so without risking the entire justice system collapsing. This would mean the police would be unable to make arrests, the courts would stop sending criminals to jail and criminals would be left unchecked on our streets.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said:  

I know how strongly people feel about this issue. I understand the concern and anger because I share it. That’s why I took action during my first weeks as Prime Minister to block some of the very worst in society being released before they should. We moved quickly to block vile criminals who commit rape, sexually abuse children and groom vulnerable young people.

But I always said I wanted to do more. We will now not only be keeping offenders serving time for indecent assault locked up, but also those in prison for manslaughter and death by dangerous driving. This means that the awful criminals responsible for the killing of PC Andrew Harper will not have their sentence shortened.

The truth is I wanted to go even further. But I’ve pushed the system to the very limits of what’s possible without risking the prison system collapsing within months, putting the public at enormous risk. To protect victims, we will be introducing the toughest ever supervision measures for offenders, which effectively mean that someone’s sentence will not end when they leave prison. This includes tagging offenders and, for the very first time ever, putting restriction zones in place to stop offenders getting anywhere near their victims.

The Prime Minister has also announced that he will end the injustice of Imprisonment for Public Protection sentences this Parliament, meaning people will no longer be trapped indefinitely under a sentence abolished more than a decade ago.

This decision recognises how deeply unjust it is that some offenders who have been locked up for nearly twenty years remain in prison, despite serving their sentence many times over, whereas many serious criminals convicted in recent years could have their jail time cut. While work on this will begin immediately, and on a cross-party basis, it will take time to get this right and balance fairness with public safety.

This is just one part of the government’s plan for a fairer justice system, looking at how some people can be punished more effectively outside prison – freeing up cells for those who pose the greatest risk to the public.  

This will include considering how to safely reduce the number of and young offenders and women in custody, in particular those who are pregnant or have young children.

Powers will also be implemented early next year to deport some foreign criminals immediately after sentencing, blocking them from ever returning to the country, while keeping those in prison for the most serious crimes locked up for a substantial period before they are removed.

Justice Secretary Alex Norris said:  

The Prime Minister and I have rightly looked again at these reforms and we are clear that people responsible for taking a life, or for appalling crimes against children, should be kept behind bars for longer.    

But protecting the public also means fixing the prison system for good. We will build the cells we need, put offenders under much tougher controls when they leave prison and end the historic injustice of IPP sentences.   

This is a government running towards problems and not shying away from the tough decisions needed to build a justice system that is firm, fair and protects the public.

The Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor have also insisted that victims must remain at the centre of the justice system, with survivors of domestic abuse seeing offenders put under some of the toughest restrictions to date.

This includes a presumption that all prison leavers will be tagged and imposing possible bans on pubs and public events.

Perpetrators could also be confined to a specific area – some just a few miles wide – giving victims greater freedom to live their lives. In a world first, new ‘restriction zones’, which have been directly shaped by the experiences and campaigning of victims, will limit the movement of some sexual and violent offenders, with victims having a say in how zones are drawn up.

Victims advocates Hetti Barkworth-Nanton CBE, chair of Refuge, Frank Mullane MBE, CEO of Advocacy After Fatal Domestic Abuse, and Jo Early, chief executive of Support after Murder and Manslaughter, said:

We welcome the Prime Minister’s decision to exclude all manslaughter cases from the early release scheme.

The original sentence lengths for these offences were, in part, intended to protect the public. The problem of prison capacity does not alter that underlying need for public protection. Therefore, making manslaughter offenders eligible for early release would risk undermining a key purpose of their sentences and could represent a significant compromise to public protection. This also re-assures families bereaved by homicide that they are not being asked to trade justice so prison overcrowding can be resolved.

The government inherited a prison system on the brink of collapse with fewer than 100 spaces left in the summer of 2024. 

A lack of investment in the prison estate with just 500 net places added for over a decade has led to a situation where adult male prisons are now at 98% capacity. That is why this government is taking decisive action to fix the broken prison system for good.  

Under this government, more than 3,200 prison places have already been built, with 14,000 expected by 2031 under the largest prison build expansion since the Victorian era.

The Sentencing Act will restore order to the prison system and make sure we have cells available for dangerous criminals. Alongside record prison building, the reforms will put prisons on a sustainable footing and end the cycle of emergency release measures used before July 2024 when prisons repeatedly came close to running out of space.  

Why So Many Recalls?

Typed in "recall rates uk"... this was the summary presented by whichever AI bot is hiding inside the machine:

"Prison recall rates in England and Wales have reached record highs, with over 51,400 people recalled to custody in the 12 months leading to March 2026.

Key Statistics

Record Highs: Annual recalls reached 51,419, surpassing new court sentencing admissions (around 47,000) for the first time.

The Recall Rate: In early 2026, the quarterly recall rate exceeded 100%—meaning more people were pulled back into prison than were released during that window.

Reasons for Recall: Only about 21% to 22% of recalls involve a charge for further criminal offending. The vast majority are driven by technical licence breaches, such as non-compliance (9,683 in Q1 2026) or failing to keep in touch with probation (5,025 in Q1 2026)."

[Sources were variously quoted as The Times; PrisonAdvice & Care Trust; BBC; Russell Webster]

In the Red Corner: "Only about 21% to 22% of recalls involve a charge for further criminal offending... The vast majority are driven by technical licence breaches"

In the Blue Corner: " What I object to is the lazy leap from that figure to 'probation is recalling too many people'. "

And I have an answer to the question posed: "what is it within the system that has led to a much much higher use of recall as a risk management tool?" A simple four-letter word. Fear.

• Fear generated by the system to ensure the system remains intact.
• Fear perpetuated by the layers of authority who need y'all to do as you're told.

And then y'all have your own issues:

• Fear of getting it wrong (but that can also be a healthy & valuable tool in the box)
• Fear of losing your job.
• Fear of being crucified by the obedient box-tickers who can't see past their own fears.
• Fear of recognising that your expertise, your knowledge of the job, your professional judgement is worthless in the eyes of the organisation.

And more widely:

• Fear generated in the media
• Fear magnified by worthy groups & representative organisations

Anon

--oo00oo--

Yes, we’ve heard it all time and time again: “Probation recalls caused prison overcrowding.” It’s simply not that straightforward and the figures need to be scrutinised. Overcrowding is also about crumbling prisons, the number of people held on remand, and early-release schemes that can result in people being released at very short notice without the support they need. Those schemes can then increase the likelihood of recalls. How many women, children and foreign nationals are in prison unnecessarily?

Nobody is denying that probation can sometimes be trigger-happy when it comes to recalls. But perhaps we should ask why.. Before we even get into that, if we really don’t want recalls, there are some fairly obvious options: make people serve their full sentence, abolish post-release licences, or make probation supervision voluntary. It really is that simple.

Here’s a hypothetical example or maybe it’s real!! Three men walk into a bar one evening. A serious incident takes place and all three are arrested on suspicion.

The first is on probation after being released from prison. He has missed his last two probation appointments. He had earlier explained to his probation officer on the phone that he didn’t have the money to get to the office, and the bus tickets he had been given weren’t accepted on the bus.

The second is living in a probation hostel after being released from prison. He has missed his sign-ins since that morning. He had earlier phoned a hostel worker who emailed his probation officer to explain that he was in hospital with a minor injury.

The third was also recently released from prison. He had been arrested twice in the previous week but released without charge. He had told his probation officer that he had been wrongfully arrested.

The probation officer recalls all three men for breach of licence after they are charged with the serious incident. An SFO investigation follows.The conclusion? All three men should have been recalled before they ever stepped into the bar. The probation officer is blamed.

The investigation also finds that the probation officer should have carried out immediate home visits in all three cases and more thoroughly scrutinised the explanations by contacting the bus company, hospital and police. The probation officer explains that they are carrying a double workload. It makes no difference. They are punished.

They are given actions requiring home visits to be completed on cases, their enforcement decisions are audited for the next 12 months by an SPO who has only just completed their NQO period, they are required to meet with a QDO who has also just completed their NQO period, and following a disciplinary meeting with a PDU Head who has never actually been a probation officer, a warning is placed on their file. They challenge the warning themselves because their union representative is too busy to provide sufficient support.

Meanwhile, two of three men have the charges against them dropped. They remain in custody because they are still subject to recall. The third, the man that was staying at the probation hostel (and was in hospital), is found guilty and sentenced to time served.

People wonder why probation becomes increasingly risk-averse when it comes to recalls. When every decision is judged with hindsight, when the expectation becomes “you should have known”, and when the consequences of not recalling someone are potentially career-ending, is it really surprising that probation officers start recalling people who might otherwise have been managed safely in the community?

The problem isn’t simply that probation recalls too many people. The problem is the system that expects probation officers to do.

Anon

Reality Check

World-first crackdown to restrict offenders’ freedom and give it back to victims

So, it’s 2:30 am, little Johnny has had one over the eight, triggering his alcohol tag……he is at his ‘mates’ house who told him to ignore his curfew at 11 pm, but being the good little soldier he is, he decides to walk home and in the dark mistakes Sevestapol Terrace for Florizel Street and breaches his proximity tag……he gets home safely and decides to get his head down…..that’s three breaches to address at 9am by his PO …..

In a bad night if you have two or three in a similar position it will be afternoon before you have done all the paperwork……but don’t worry the SPO says let the AI do it……but as his PO is covering two officers on maternity and stress leave, it’s closer to mid afternoon before it gets done….in the meantime little Billy has been picked up by the Feds for dropping his trousers in Tesco, it was in Lidl that triggered the original offence last time….and little Amelia has failed to turn up for her appointment....

Two Parole reports to be completed by Friday……a Mappa referral for little Billy at the insistence of the SPO and all day is spent trying to complete a housing referral for houses that don’t exist.The next day on the all staff call, the PO is told how much they are valued but the questions and comments are turned off as the management don’t want to hear what the valued staff members think…..it now turns out that Little Billy held a worker against their will for 15 seconds and has also been charged with False Imprisonment triggering an SFO…………..but don’t worry, our staff are the heartbeat of the organisation…………..

A fairy tale or an apocryphal future, coming soon to an office near you…….with apologies to the London and Manchester offices as it has already arrived there………

Anon

--oo00oo--

So the annual recruitment fiasco is now complete. Three different closing dates tells the tale, they cannot recruit enough staff, nobody wants the job and the attrition rate amongst the newbies is high. The reasons are simple, the recruitment process is flawed, partially because of the online process and like the promotion interviews give people the opportunity to inflate their knowledge and experience and then are found wanting in the role. 

Those of us with 25 years plus service are seen as dinosaurs by the management, the young thrusters are all 'yes' people and cannot deal with push back and this will not work. Recalls are through the roof because POs are not as versatile or able to deal with challenges and I am aware of certain SPOs operating a recall process to reduce caseloads especially those with 18 months and less to serve. 

There is a culture of giving many license conditions to those that don’t really need them but it is a 'just in case' scenario, not a fully fledged risk assessment and management process. There are far too many SPOs that should be back on the floor learning the profession and get all these QDOs back on field duties and have their crayons and bar charts removed and PTAs should have at least ten years post qualifying experience. 

Hark, I hear, 'why don’t you take up a SPO role?', because I am not a mouthpiece for management, I can do a lot more good managing complex and risky cases and pushing back and annoying the management and not ticking boxes, keeping a list of things that I have not done this week because I did not have the time. 

Work your hours and push back, we are in a position of strength and the worst they can do is threaten you with competency, but if you get your team to do it with you, you have the power and the upper hand. Be strong, be brave but most of all be honest to yourself and live a life.  Switch the phone and laptop off on Friday and leave it until 0900 Monday morning and switch off every day when you want to, but only do the hours and then the SPOs will have to pick up the incomplete work not you and not your colleagues.

Anon

Editor's note

Who writes this crap?

Probation Has Leverage

Probation probably has more leverage now than it has had for years. The Government’s entire current strategy depends on probation.

• Earlier release depends on probation.
• Community sentences replacing short custody depend on probation.
• Electronic monitoring, restriction zones, curfews and tighter licence conditions depend on probation.
• Recall decisions depend on probation.
• OFPS depends on probation.
• Public reassurance that people released earlier can be “safely managed in the community” depends on probation.

So perhaps the question is no longer whether probation staff are angry enough to strike. It is whether the unions are prepared to use the leverage that is sitting right in front of them.

We have been here before. There was industrial action during TR, but the Government still pushed the reforms through. Whatever view people take of what happened then, the lesson surely has to be that symbolic action is not enough.

If industrial action happens this time, it needs to have a clear objective and it needs to matter operationally. There is little point in a protest that allows the machinery of the system to continue almost unaffected while everybody congratulates themselves for having “made their voice heard”.

The Government needs probation functioning. That is the bargaining power. And this cannot be reduced to “staff want more money”. Pay matters because retention matters, but the dispute is much bigger than that: workload, professional judgement, staffing, experience, safety, OFPS, the removal of workload visibility and the expectation that probation will absorb every consequence of the prison crisis.

Practitioners have spent years being told that they are essential, valued and the “hidden heroes” of the justice system. Fine. Then perhaps it is time to discover exactly how essential probation really is. Because if the Government genuinely cannot deliver its sentencing reforms, early-release programme and community supervision model without probation, then “without probation none of this can happen” should not just be a slogan in a press release. It should be the starting point for negotiations.

And if ever there were a moment for the unions to stop asking politely, stop “urging”, stop accepting warm words and actually use the collective power of the workforce they represent, surely this is it. The Government has built its solution to the prison crisis on the assumption that probation will somehow absorb the consequences. Perhaps probation should finally stop making that assumption safe for them.

Anon

Lessons to be Learned?

It's been some time since we highlighted Rob Allen's reflections, now regularly appearing on the Substack platform:- 

Releasing Tension
Thoughts on the Latest Prison Crisis

When I was seconded to the Criminal Department in the Home Office in the early 1990’s, a paper used to be circulated by the Prison Department each week listing convicts of particular note who were due for release.

In the days before “end to end offender management,” one function of it seemed to be to alert ministers and officials responsible for police and probation about the need to ensure practical arrangements were made in high profile cases. I recall colleagues wrestling with the idea of locating a notorious sex offender on a remote island.

The lists also confronted those making policy with its real world consequences, which were sometimes intended, quite often not. And of course they enabled the preparation of “lines to take” in the unwelcome event of press interest.

So I was surprised that the present day Ministry of Justice were caught so badly unawares about the impending human impacts of the earlier release provisions which became law earlier in the year and are due for implementation this autumn.

During the passage of the Sentencing Bill, officials and ministers will have understandably been focussed on avoiding unsustainable demands on prison places to prevent the apocalyptic vision of a gridlocked justice system which they faced two years ago.

I can see how having rejected David Gauke’s proposal to bring forward the potential release dates for prisoners deemed dangerous by the courts and given extended sentences, an exemption for any offenders on standard determinate sentences from earlier release would have seemed unattractive to the MoJ in terms of its impact on prison numbers.

But surely less unattractive than the huge row and last ditch review which has led to the decision that prisoners convicted of serious sexual offences will now be excluded from the scheme. Given the widespread outcry about the proposed earlier release of two men convicted in the dreadful case of PC Harper, it seems likely those sentenced for manslaughter or particular forms of it will also find themselves staying behind bars until the two thirds point of their sentence has elapsed rather than being released under supervision at the halfway point.

So what are the broader lessons from this fiasco?

First, obviously enough, for a government to use its parliamentary majority to whip and rush through legislation in the teeth of widely held concerns only stores up trouble. When I was in the Home Office, it was only after the implementation of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act that problems came to light. An over rigid system for setting fine levels and unworkable limitations on courts ability to consider previous convictions when sentencing were rapidly repealed. Then as now it was a new Secretary of State who inherited the task of implementing (and then unimplementing) controversial legal provisions.

This time, it is a new Prime Minister who has applied the brakes prior to provisions coming into force. He was not an MP when they were enacted. But had his predecessor and colleagues properly considered a more flexible approach earlier on, this summer’s unseemly mess might have been avoided or mitigated.

Second, while the government could conceivably have stuck to their Sentencing Act guns, the forces ranged against them- bereaved family members, almost the entire police service and most of the media- as well as a 1 million strong petition -have been simply too powerful to withstand.

It’s 20 years since Tony Blair pledged that the legal system must dispense justice to the victim as well as the accused. But it seems to me that a settled and well understood view has never been reached about what that should mean in practice. What is the appropriate level of say which victims of crime should have about sentencing and release decisions in individual cases and policy terms. That’s something that needs to be carefully reviewed along with a much more vigorous promotion of restorative justice.

But as things stand, having parroted in their 2024 manifesto promises of “a justice system that puts victims first” and acknowledged that sentences “often do not make sense either to victims or the wider public”, making the case for the automatic earlier release of serious offenders surely needed much fuller justification than the need for prison space. The case would have been easier to make with the exceptions we have ended up with and potentially a greater involvement of the Parole Board in certain cases.

Third, the failure to make that fuller justification revealed the depressing fact that for most of the public and it seems many in the government, the only purpose of sentencing is punishment, and the only punishment is prison. Never mind the proportions involved, the basic idea that a sentence of imprisonment comprises a period locked up followed by a spell at home under supervision with a liability to be recalled to prison is not widely enough understood. Even less I suspect the admittedly confusing notion of the three phase Progression Model, which requires so little for prisoners to progress along.

Nor is it appreciated that sentence lengths for serious crimes have increased so much in the last 20 years that half the average prison sentence now exceeds two thirds of what was the average in 2006. In their 2024 critique of sentence inflation, the most senior former judges in England and Wales argued that release at the half way point should be restored. It’s disappointing that they and many others have not at least sought to defend the Sentencing Act provisions which do just that.

After the failings of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act, whose aim had been to reduce the use of prison, there followed what one academic described as the biggest volte face in penal history. The revised law paved the way for a sustained rise in prison numbers whose consequences we are to an extent still living with.

One can only hope that the 2026 crisis does not lead to a similar result.

Rob Allen

Whatever the Question: £700m

"Pull a string and they mention the £700m.".

 ****

"Actually, "The Irony Of It" is that the £700m that is being banded about in every other sentence from the Government, is roughly only about the amount that was stripped out of the service through austerity and TR. £700m could really be seen only as a refund?

The real investment that probation needs is in all the things that went as a consequence of that financial stripping. Identity, experience, independence, autonomy, training etc etc. Good investment is not always about looking for a financial fix."

******

I am absolutely sick to death of hearing about the £700 million. Every single time practitioners raise a legitimate concern about workload, staffing, experience, public protection or what is coming down the line, somebody at the MoJ presses the same bloody button:

£700 million. 1,400 recruits. More tagging.

We know. We’ve heard it. Repeatedly. What we are telling you is that IT ISN’T FIXING THE PROBLEM.

I don’t manage £700 million. I manage people. Real people, with complicated lives, changing circumstances and risks that don’t conveniently fit into a tier, an actuarial score or a bloody dashboard.

A trainee isn’t an experienced PO because you’ve counted them in a recruitment figure. A GPS tag isn’t supervision. AI isn’t professional judgement. An exclusion-zone alert isn’t risk management. And reducing contact with people doesn’t magically create a safer probation service simply because somebody in HMPPS has labelled the missing hours “released capacity”.

Meanwhile those of us actually carrying the cases are expected to absorb OFPS, new tiering, sentencing reform, early releases, more electronic monitoring, more information, more potential breaches and recalls, and whatever else arrives next — while being told the answer is to spend less professional time with some of the people we’re responsible for. And:

When we tell you we’re worried? Thank you for your resilience.

When we tell you we’re exhausted? Here’s a wellbeing webinar.

When we tell you workloads are unsafe? We’re taking away your ability to see the WMT.

When we tell you we’re frightened something will be missed? £700 million.

And now practitioners apparently have to speak anonymously to Channel 4 because shouting inside the organisation isn’t working. That should shame HMPPS.

These aren’t disgruntled staff moaning because they’re busy. These are professionals warning before the event that they do not believe they have sufficient capacity to safely deliver what Government is promising the public. So record it. Date it. Remember it. We told you.

If this goes wrong and somebody is seriously harmed, don’t you dare come back afterwards with an SFO review, work backwards through an individual practitioner’s records and ask what they should have done differently. Ask what you did when the workforce warned you. Ask why you kept piling work into probation while reducing meaningful supervision. Ask why recruitment headlines mattered more than retaining experience. Ask why you removed workload visibility.

Ask why every warning was answered with investment figures and corporate platitudes rather than evidence that the service could safely cope. And please, spare us the inevitable “lessons will be learned.” The lesson is being handed to you right now.

You’re just not bloody listening.

*****

And there, buried underneath all the recruitment headlines, are the figures that actually matter.

Qualified Band 4 POs: DOWN 2%.
Band 3 PSOs: UP 13.6%.

Yet apparently we’re supposed to hear “1,400 new probation officers recruited” and conclude that the staffing crisis is being fixed. It isn’t.

You can recruit thousands of trainees, increase PSO numbers and issue endless press releases about recruitment targets, but none of that changes the number of qualified, experienced practitioners actually available today to carry the work and the risk.

And this little gem deserves translating:

“The shortfall in probation officers has increased relative to the March release mainly due to an increase in probation officer target staffing.”

In plain English: we’ve finally admitted we need more POs than we previously said we did, so the hole is even bigger than we were admitting. Meanwhile the Government is shifting thousands more people into community supervision, massively expanding electronic monitoring and telling probation to absorb the consequences of sentencing reform. And their answer?

“We’ve recruited 1,400.”

No. You’ve recruited people towards becoming probation officers while the number of actual Band 4 POs has fallen. There is a difference. Stop pretending there isn’t.

Getafix is also absolutely right about the £700m. Investment isn’t just money. What probation has lost over successive “reforms” is experience, professional identity, autonomy, confidence, continuity and institutional knowledge. You cannot buy 25 years of practitioner experience with a recruitment campaign. You certainly can’t replace it with a tag, an algorithm or AI.

Perhaps instead of endlessly telling us how much money you’re putting into probation, somebody could finally explain what sort of Probation Service we’re actually getting for it. 
Because from where I’m sitting, we’re getting fewer qualified POs just as Government expects probation to do more. That’s not investment. That’s deprofessionalisation with a press release attached.

*****

Then factor in the leaving rates:

Band 4 @ 5% That's 275 POs gone.

Band 3 @ 10% So, recruit 1,400 at band 3 (which is where trainees start), but lose 592.

Staff loss: (592+275) = 867

Claims about recruitment:

1. "In the past year, 1,622 probation services officers were appointed, some of whom will be training to become qualified probation officers."

2. "The Probation Service onboarded 1,389 new Trainee Probation Officers (PQiP) across the 2025/26 financial year"

Yeah, but more than half that number have left..

net staffing (depending on which figure is used):
= (1622 - 867) = +755... or...
= (1389-867) = +522

Neither of those figures gives 1,300 net increase. Whilst the lies fall from their mouths, it would be preferable that the scales fell from their eyes.

The Irony Of It

"The irony is almost insulting. On the very day HM Inspectorate publishes a paper saying the service needs to create “psychological safety” and take staff wellbeing seriously, Probation Day apparently involves a national call where staff can’t even use the chat or Q&A.

We’re thanked for our commitment. We’re praised for our resilience. We’re told our wellbeing matters. We’re told the frontline is being listened to. Then somebody switches off the microphone. Perhaps that is the most accurate metaphor for modern probation anyone could have devised."

****

But hey it's probation day today so let's pretend everything is rosy

National call BS = ✔️
Kim late to join the call ✔️
Turn off chat and Q&A for staff ✔️

****

Is it apt that Probation day falls on the same day as National Survivors day?

--oo00oo--

The cost of caring: compassion fatigue in probation practice

1. Introduction 

Despite the explosion of trauma-informed approaches within frontline services that work with society’s most excluded and vulnerable individuals, researchers have been slower to recognise the related harms that may befall staff or practitioners (in this case probation workers). There is a growing understanding of a list of secondary or ‘vicarious’ traumas but often with little to no recognition from wider organisations and a limited evidence base regarding the full effects of these occupational risks and the true extent of their prevalence in our working lives (Powell, Walton and Scott, 2024). Many professionals within these roles, e.g. nurses, police officers or even researchers in challenging spaces, experience cumulative and multiple distressing events over time. Although not included in any job description, they are routinely implied within the roles and sense of professional identity, where exposure to secondary trauma is simply ‘part and parcel’ of the job, a form of occupational duty. Furthermore, staff in such frontline fields often report a series of barriers to help-seeking, for example a high degree of stigma when coming forward, with roles routinely being tied to notions and expectations of endurance and stoic toughness (Cogan, 2026).

--//--

2.3 The state of play in probation

As is widely known, the Probation Service has, and continues to be, under considerable strain. There has been the destabilising Transforming Rehabilitation era (2014-2021) followed by the difficult unification of probation services during the Covid-19 pandemic, sitting alongside a history of underinvestment. At the staffing level, the challenge is just as acute. The service has experienced consistent shortfalls in staffing numbers (Orakci, 2025) and significantly higher levels of absence than the national average, with ‘mental health’ being the most commonly reported reason (ONS, 2026). Not enough is known about the exact state of the mental health of probation practitioners, other than using the simplistic labels of ‘stress’ and ‘depression’, which tell us little about the complex mental lives or the struggles that they face. Practitioners often feel disillusionment and frustration at not being able to make the kind of difference to their clients’ lives that they intended when joining the service, recorded in experiences of practitioner burnout, and the psychological costs of emotionally ‘taking the work home’ (HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2025). 

It would be difficult to overstate the considerable challenges faced by probation practitioners in their everyday working lives. They must manage high-pressured, emotionally and intellectually demanding cases, and balance the goals of rehabilitation and public safety. Not only does probation have one of the highest rates of staff attrition in the public sector, but often cited reasons for staff leaving the profession are highly relevant to any discussion on CF. Although probation does not assess for the presence or prevalence of CF, there is strong evidence to suggest that the features and duties of probation staff place them at higher risk of developing CF than in many other professions. The Probation Service also experiences far higher levels of public criticism and scrutiny than in many other professions (see Martin, 2025). Whilst this is perhaps unsurprising, given the risks to public safety, this can lead to negative and stigmatised appraisals of probation practitioners’ work, adding an additional risk factor in developing CF.

--//--

3. Conclusion 

This paper has introduced the concept and risk of CF for probation practitioners. While it is only one of many potential vicarious harms experienced by probation staff, an increased focus on the complex reasons for practitioners leaving the profession would no doubt reveal dimensions of the phenomenon, while providing an opportunity to reduce the burden on those undertaking this most essential role in our society. Otherwise, CF is likely to continue contributing to practitioners moving away from the service. 

Any future discussion must start with the recognition that human needs are inherently infinite, whereas practitioners’ time, resources and their level of emotional resiliency are not. The fundamental and relational challenge of probation work is regular exposure to human suffering and traumas from people on probation, alongside a combination of complex decision-making, routine system instabilities, and high degrees of responsibility. Taking CF seriously validates these challenging lived experiences of probation staff. It acknowledges the everyday struggles, including the emotional labour involved in the work, and the inherent moral and social justice element to compassion itself. 

The quality of care provided by frontline staff in any helping profession should be a primary concern of any employer or organisation. Investing in a model of psychological safety for probation staff, prioritising staff wellbeing, would be beneficial both to the practitioners themselves and in terms of wider public safety by increasing staff effectiveness and the likelihood of their long-term retention in the service. In the same way that a firefighter would wear protective equipment before entering a property engulfed in flames, we too must provide probation practitioners with appropriate psychologically-informed safeguards and supports, working towards a system and culture that promotes psychological resilience and safety.

Burnham Doesn't Get It

Just as we thought, Andy knows nothing about the Criminal Justice System and the proof comes in his new government's announcement last night:-

Fixing the prison and probation crisis

The Government is taking action to keep the most dangerous offenders locked up, expand prison capacity and strengthen protections for victims and the public.

This Government inherited a prison system in crisis, putting the public at grave risk. Prisons were on the brink of collapse, with capacity dangerously close to being exceeded. That’s why the Government is taking decisive action.

1. The Government is building new prison places. By 2031, there will be more prison places than ever before

• This Government has already built around 3,200 new prison places and aims to create 14,000 by 2031, giving communities confidence that those who pose the greatest risk will be locked up.

• We are also speeding up the deportation of foreign criminals, saving money for taxpayers and protecting the public from dangerous offenders. Over 11,700 foreign criminals including murderers and rapists have been removed since July 2024.

2. The Government is making changes to sentencing so that prison places are used for the most dangerous criminals

• The most dangerous offenders must be locked up for a long time. That will not change.

• We are introducing reforms to prison release arrangements through the Sentencing Act 2026 which change the amount of time offenders will spend in prison. However, over 18,000 offenders serving life and extended sentences, murderers and those serving sentences for rape and serious sexual child and grooming offences, are completely excluded from these changes.

• For offences with sentences of 12 months or less, there will be a presumption against custodial sentences in favour of community sentences – including unpaid work, electronic monitoring tags, curfews and exclusion zones. Courts will still be able to send offenders to prison when there is significant risk of harm to the victim or public.

3. The Government is improving the monitoring of offenders when they are released from prison

• Prisoners who are released will not be free and can be recalled to prison at any time if they step out of line. Victims will have a say over tough new restrictions on offenders leaving prison.

• A record £700m investment going into probation by 2028/29, which has already helped us hire 1,000 new trainee probation officers, will enable 1,300 more to be added by March 2027.

• It also means we can ramp up the electronic tagging of offenders on release from prison, with nearly all offenders tagged and subject to curfews and exclusion zones to keep victims safe.

• Rape and certain child sex offenders will now face tighter controls than ever before after leaving prison, with more intensive probation supervision and a mandatory condition that will give constant access to their location via a GPS tag.

• We are also expanding other protections including chemical suppression for sex offenders, random drug testing, and bans from driving, pubs and events such as football matches.

4. The Government is improving support for victims

• The Government is introducing a stronger package of support for victims, including increased and improved contact to all affected victims.

• This will be supported by a £10m boost for victim support to fund extra local frontline services for victims to get trauma-focussed support.

• This is on top of the largest ever investment into specialist services that offer practical and emotional support to victims and witnesses. Over half a billion pounds of funding over the next three years will help charities and others deliver support like counselling and advice on attending court.

• A dedicated victim helpline will be available by October for all those affected by the reforms to provide emotional support and practical guidance.

--oo00oo--

The future appears to be already written. Published a few hours ago, here's the answer, here's the fix! I personally struggle with the logic of creating more routes to recall people back to prison whilst at the same time trying to free up space. Available capacity stands at around 1800 places. Early release scheme hopes to free up a further 1500 places. Recall figures however exceed 50,000 in the last year. My maths are not great, but I just can't see how they hope to achieve anything.

'Getafix

*****
The order of priority & language is essential to understand that nothing has changed in downing street or whitehall for decades & decades:

"As Home Secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s government from 1979 to 1983, Willie Whitelaw pursued a hard-line law and order agenda. He is best known for introducing the "short, sharp shock" policy for young offenders and embarking on major prison-building programs to tackle rising street crime."

Michael Howard: "Prison Works": Argued that keeping serious and persistent criminals behind bars reduces crime rates through incapacitation and deterrence.

Deterrence and Detection: Advocated for an across-the-board approach focusing heavily on measures to catch and punish lawbreakers rather than relying solely on social or economic explanations for crime.

Rejection of Fatalism: Maintained that rising crime is not an inevitable fact of modern life and can be reversed with political will.

The bliarweasel project: "Tony Blair famously defined his approach to law and order with the 1993 political slogan: "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime." This dual strategy balanced strict enforcement and punishment for offenders alongside social interventions addressing poverty, lack of opportunity, and family breakdown" - sadly he unleashed tough on criminals but failed to deliver when it came to "the causes of crime", viz- "The government policy under Tony Blair has been one of relentless attack on our civil liberties; the expansion of new police powers, the introduction of new offences, and harsher penalties with longer custodial sentences – all of which has been matched by an increased weakening of the safeguards in the criminal justice process."

Now we have burn'em & co:

1. The Government is building new prison places. By 2031, there will be more prison places than ever before "HUZZAHH!"
2. The Government is making changes to sentencing so that prison places are used for the most dangerous criminals "LOCK 'EM'UP"
3. The Government is improving the monitoring of offenders when they are released from prison "MAKE THE PUNISHMENT LAST AS LONG AS POSSIBLE"
4. The Government is improving support for victims

A serious point can be made here whereby prioritising & elevating the victim's status whilst confabulating it with the means or severity of the punishment is not healthy. It runs the risk of making the victim a 'legitimate' target (in the eyes of the perpetrator) & potentially places the victim in greater peril, e.g. if the victim can be silenced then the punishment might be less harsh. The victim's voice is undoubtedly important, but the justice system should be the arbiter of punishment, not the volume, articulation or skill of the victim's opinion. Similarly I would argue that the imposition of victim work upon the probation service was, again, a big mistake. It has led to some terrible conflicts of interest.

*****
And there it is again.

The Government’s shiny new “Fixing the prison and probation crisis” page tells the public that prisoners released under these reforms “can be recalled to prison at any time if they step out of line”, that nearly all offenders will be electronically tagged, and that short sentences will increasingly be replaced by community sentences.

Who exactly does Government think is going to manage all of this? Because every one of those policies creates work for probation. More people managed in the community. More licence supervision. More electronic monitoring information. More curfews and exclusion zones. More potential breaches. More decisions about whether behaviour represents escalating risk. And, inevitably, more recall decision-making.

Then comes the reassurance: £700m and recruitment. Except read the Government’s own words carefully. The investment has apparently helped recruit 1,000 new TRAINEE probation officers, with another 1,300 to be added by March 2027.

We have literally just been discussing Millsike, where the Government accepts that having physical capacity isn’t enough because inexperienced staff require time to develop the skills and confidence to operate safely. Apparently probation works differently. And Getafix raises another rather obvious problem. Government is desperately trying to create prison capacity while simultaneously creating more routes through which people in the community can be recalled back into those same prisons.

Meanwhile OFPS is supposed to release 25% of probation capacity by reducing the amount of professional supervision some people receive. Which part of this is the coherent strategy?

More people in the community. More tagging. More surveillance. More potential breaches. More recalls. Less practitioner contact. An inexperienced workforce being recruited at pace. And a WMT that’s about to disappear. Yet the Government page presents all of this under the wonderfully reassuring heading:

“Fixing the prison and probation crisis.”

From the frontline it looks rather more like moving the crisis out of the prison gate and expecting probation to carry it. And when that doesn’t work, I suspect we’ll hear the same thing we always hear: “Lessons will be learned.” Perhaps somebody could try learning them before this time.

Listen to the Front Line!

What did HMPPS and the MoJ formally learn from TR about large-scale transformation, modelling risk, implementation at pace and listening to practitioners? And where can we see those lessons reflected in the design and implementation of OFPS today? And perhaps that question now needs putting directly to ministers, including the Probation Minister who we've heard nothing from since her appointment.

What lessons from TR have you personally satisfied yourself have been learned before another fundamental redesign of probation is implemented? Because this isn’t some interesting historical comparison. TR had an enormous financial cost, but it also had a human one. Experienced staff left. Professional identity was damaged. Services were fragmented. Practitioners spent years working through successive restructures before reunification attempted to put the service back together again.

And now, barely having recovered from one transformation, probation is being transformed again. Once again staff are being told about efficiency, technology, new models and releasing capacity. Once again the centre appears remarkably confident about what can be achieved. And once again the people expected to make it work will undoubtedly be thanked for their “hard work”, their “commitment” and their “resilience” when the reality on the ground becomes difficult.

Frankly, those words are wearing very thin. Resilience should not mean repeatedly asking a workforce to absorb the consequences of organisational decisions and then congratulating them for surviving them. Nor should “listening to the frontline” mean thanking staff for raising concerns before proceeding regardless.

This is why ministerial silence on probation is becoming increasingly difficult to understand. Probation is apparently important enough to carry a substantial part of the government’s answer to prison overcrowding and sentencing reform, but where is the political voice explaining what is happening to the service expected to deliver it?

Where is the Probation Minister explaining OFPS to the workforce and the public? Where is the acknowledgement of what happened under TR? Where is the assurance - backed by evidence rather than another set of comforting phrases - that the same mistakes are not being repeated? Because if an organisation can experience a failure on the scale of TR and, little more than a decade later, find itself using eerily similar language while embarking upon another fundamental redesign of probation, asking “what did you learn?” is hardly unreasonable.

Romeo was absolutely right about one thing in 2014: there are no prizes for believing your own hype. The financial and human cost of getting probation reform wrong doesn’t disappear simply because Whitehall has moved on to the next transformation programme.

So perhaps the question for HMPPS, the MoJ and the minister responsible for probation is no longer where is the institutional memory? It’s: what evidence is there that you learned anything at all?

*****
"Nor should “listening to the frontline” mean thanking staff for raising concerns before proceeding regardless."

That perfectly describes the attitude & approach in 1999 when, as the sun was eclipsed by the moon, a group met in London to discuss the findings of the first OASys paper-based pilot. Staff from prisons & probation sat around a large table while civil servants asked for their feedback. A number of legitimate &/or worrying concerns were raised by the staff. Those comments were acknowledged &, for the most part, immediately dismissed. There was an agenda.

The 'centre' had a plan & they were merely going through the motions so they could say they had consulted & piloted the project before imposing it across the board. It was cumbersome, it was repetitive, it was judgemental. It was a crude stick used to beat the person being 'assessed' into shape such that they would fit into the round or square hole. And so began a series of carefully choreographed impostions - NPSv.1, NOMS, Trusts, TR, HMPPS, reunification, reset, OFPS.

*****
I couldn't agree more that, looking back, OASYS signalled the beginning of the end for probation. We spend our lives servicing a badly designed system. The unrelenting lists of standards, feedback, audits, QDOs, shows me it isn't staff who are "doing it wrong" but the system itself is fundamentally flawed. And yet management have spent years of wasted time on this ridiculous endeavour, ultimately blaming the staff for incompetence rather than admitting it was their own for enabling such poor use of our time and resources filling it out with an ever increasing list of requirements and quality audit tools.

What I don't know is whether ARNS will sort this out...has anyone used it or seen it that can give us some reassurance that there is light at the end of the assessment tunnel?

*****

I don't think OFPS was based on staff consultation. Are we really saying that staff have genuinely supported and asked for reduced contact with people on probation as the key to unlocking the 25% workload reduction? Certainly if someone had asked me, I would have pointed to the duplication and unnecessary time spent completing OASYS...how easily could 25% of my time be saved if that system was completely redesigned and the unrelenting impossible standards underpinning it wripped up.

Think about the targets, the data, the measurement, the monitoring, the duplication and unnecessary tasks we are forced to complete on a daily basis. All this has been left completely intact while probation supervision has been diluted, reducing contact and cancelling any contact at all through a push for early termination motivated not by success but convenience, with one to one work replaced with a preset list of "conversations". Is this really what staff have said when asked for ideas about reducing unnecessary workload?

And are we now going to be passively brow beaten once again to bring in yet another "model" we don't support, or am i wrong and staff are really supportive of a probation service that spends the vast majority of its time "assessing" in the most unimaginably laborious and ineffective way possible while implementing absolutely nothing at the end of it? Are staff not as angry as I am that out of all the things that could have been cut, contact was seen as the most unnecessary and dispensible element of our role?

******
And once again probation/government have increased punitive control measures by applying them to all, whether they are needed, worthwhile or necessary. In my mind this (inadvertently) changes the culture of probation officers by both seeing all as more dangerous than they really are, and diluting any remaining critical analysis or professionalism that used to be needed to determine who needs these monitoring tools at all or for whom they are necessary and proportionate.

Romeo Special

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian Acheson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not everyone's in thrall to alpha romeo:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quite.

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

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

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