Strip away the victory laps and what this press release actually says is this: the system was driven to the edge of collapse, and the “solution” is to move the problem somewhere quieter. Prison capacity is stabilised not by fixing demand, prevention or sentencing culture, but by exporting pressure, risk and failure into the community and calling it reform.
Apparently the Sentencing Act now “grips the crisis”. It does, provided you accept that probation is an infinite sponge. Early release. Fixed-term recalls. Expanded tagging. “Tougher” community penalties. All of it only works if probation absorbs more people, more volatility, more scrutiny and more blame, without any meaningful expansion in staffing, pay, autonomy or infrastructure.
We’re told probation is being “backed with £700 million”. Again. As if repetition makes it real. That money isn’t going to retention, workloads or professional judgement. It’s going to tags, contracts, surveillance and tech — things that look reassuring in a press release and don’t argue back. Practitioners remain the cheapest, most expendable component of the system.
The 56-day recall cap is sold as relief. In reality it turns recall into a population-management device rather than a public protection decision. Probation still manages the destabilisation, the rapid re-releases, the risk escalation and the inevitable fallout, while ministers point at the spreadsheet and declare the crisis “under control”.
What’s missing is louder than what’s said. No acknowledgement that probation was already stretched beyond credibility. No mention of record recall rates. No reference to staff safety, attrition or the haemorrhaging of experience. No explanation of how “tougher community punishments” are delivered by a service paid below comparable roles and increasingly designed to function without professional memory.
This isn’t reform. It’s displacement.
The prison crisis has been averted by redefining where the crisis lives and then congratulating yourselves for it. Probation isn’t being backed. It’s being used.
Anon
https://hmiprobation.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/document/dynamic-inspection-of-public-protection-in-kent-surrey-and-sussex-2026/
ReplyDeleteStaffing level (Staff in post FTE)
SPO PO PSO (inc. PQiP)
88% 64% 140%
https://hmiprobation.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/news/chief-inspector-of-probation-flags-concerns-in-first-public-protection-inspection/
Same story everywhere, too many SPOs, not enough POs, and offices crammed with PSOs and PQiPs but no one to teach them the job. Then management act surprised when they leave straight after qualifying.
DeleteThose figures actually expose the sleight of hand perfectly. We’re told staffing is “recovering”, but what’s really happened is grade distortion. You can over-recruit PSOs and PQiPs quickly, you can inflate SPO numbers, but you cannot magic experienced POs into existence. That gap is not an accident, it’s structural. The service now has plenty of people to process work and manage compliance, but far fewer with the experience to teach judgement, manage risk confidently or push back when something is unsafe. Calling that recovery is misleading at best.
DeleteThis is the inevitable outcome of a system that rewards management throughput over professional depth. You end up with layers of oversight and assurance, but very little capacity where it actually matters. New officers qualify into environments where there’s no time, no space and often no one experienced enough to properly induct them into the reality of the job. When they leave soon after, it’s framed as a generational issue or lack of resilience, rather than the obvious truth that we’re burning people out before they’ve even had a chance to become competent.
DeleteThe Sentencing Act is shaping up to be another disaster for probation. Just like the Offender Rehabilitation Act, it was sold by managers as revolutionary. That’s the pattern. Ten years on, we’ll still be untangling the consequences.
ReplyDeleteThat comparison is painfully accurate. ORA wasn’t a single bad idea, it was a cascade of unintended consequences that took years to unravel, most of them landing squarely on probation.
DeleteThe Sentencing Act has the same warning signs: ambitious headlines, managerial enthusiasm, and almost no serious engagement with how this actually plays out on the ground.
By the time the risks are obvious, the architects will have moved on and probation will be left managing another “transitional period” that quietly becomes permanent damage.