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.
Perhaps, for posterity, we should start naming the architects here then as and when we identify them across our various regions, so that their misdemeanors are not lost over time.
DeleteIf I may offer some suggestions for starters, @14:11 -
Delete1. Eithne Wallis & The New Choreography
2. Martin Narey & noms
3. Danny Clark et al & OASys
4. The Offender Management Act 2007 - introduced in the House of Commons by Home Secretary John Reid and managed through the House of Lords by Baroness Scotland of Asthal
5. The Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014 led by Chris Grayling (Secretary of State for Justice) and supported by peers like Lord McNally
6. The usual suspects (grayling, romeo, brennan, spurr, etc) & TR
Very well off bunch of arseholes should have jailed them in the court of justice for people
DeleteAnother woman murdered by a screw driver in the hand of an illegal migrant who got 29 years today. There is a clear risk management issue and how the government ignored any duty to people. Hardly surprising they won't care much if at all for our work.
ReplyDeleteAnger is understandable, but turning this into name-calling or abuse just lets the real accountability slip away.
ReplyDeleteThe issue isn’t personalities, it’s policy. TR, OASys, marketisation, repeated reorganisations and now population-management sentencing were deliberate choices, taken over decades, often against professional advice, with predictable consequences.
Naming those decisions matters so they aren’t quietly rebranded and recycled. Abuse feels satisfying, but it obscures responsibility. Structural damage needs structural accountability, not a pile-on.
@ 01:27 - I understand what you're saying but don't think I entirely agree with it anymore. Successive poor policy-making has brought the CJS to its knees. No doubt about that. But it's often been cynically enabled or facilitated by 'senior leaders' along the way, with knowingly workforces told fibs and sold down the river. This has sometimes been conveniently accompanied by personal gain (see Heather Munro OBE's pension). The same is true of their roles in the radical change of culture in some regions where staff were beaten down by increasing rates of HR investigations as RPDs competed (and sometimes failed) to climb the greasy Civil Service pole (see Kilvinder Vigurs). Sitting at the same table have been (and still are) numerous Heads who have nodded along knowing full well of the sliminess and intent, but choosing to sell the same message to their own middle managers and PDUs and raising few if any concerns about the shameful working conditions or salaries of their underlings. Yes people of this ilk are following orders, driven on by personal ambition, and like lots of us having to pay the rent. But that doesn’t relieve them of responsibility. Does it? If you don't feel you can safely raise those concerns through legitimate channels anymore, why not air them here?
DeleteWhen there was or still is a crisis in APs because of bedspace issues and capacity, the community probation officer is then expected to administer a tedious crapshoot of housing referrals- the CAS-3 being War and Peace and the AP one following close behind with an Duty to Refer and then a CRS referral to Single Homeless Project etc. Since when did probation become an annex of Right Move and Purple Bricks? I haven't got time or energy to write out form after form after form to cover myself in terms of contingencies because there are too many releases and not enough bed spaces and only certain tiers of offender get priority for those spaces. Where is the planning for all this? Where is the contingency? Where are the temporary APs to deal with the increase? Where is the extra funding? Where is the accountability? It's a complete farce. I don't blame the AP or CAS-3 system- they must be beleaguered, but why put them in that position? Probation in the community is a miserable dumping ground for the ill-thought out policies that favour prisons that are in no great shakes themselves. We are sullied with this lack of professional respect and are a clearing house for failure of will, leadership, joined-up thinking and a lack of planning. Yes, the prisons need to reduce capacity. But if you don't just warehouse them in the first place and make sure their needs are identified and addressed rather than wait until they are in the community, we are less likely to have recalls. Having an offender off the books of prisons for a few weeks only to be placed back in there is just musical cells and distorts figures.There needs to be proper investment in community probation and for those officers to be given their dignity and professional acumen back and, if necessary, be able to voice concerns before release. It seems the most efficient thing prisons do, is have the POM's name removed on Delius about 5 seconds after they've left the prison gates: Not our problem, matey. Yours now. Ta! Ta! Although... the tapping of that Part A is often not a long way off.
ReplyDeleteWhat you’re describing is exactly how risk and failure get quietly displaced onto probation.
DeleteNone of this is sentence management. It’s crisis administration. Endless housing forms, contingency paperwork and referral ping-pong because the system released people with nowhere to go and called it “resettlement”.
Probation hasn’t become an annex of Rightmove by accident. It’s what happens when prisons empty beds faster than the community is funded to receive people. The planning gap is simply pushed downstream and individual officers are expected to plug it with admin and goodwill.
And you’re right about the absurdity. We warehouse people in custody, do very little meaningful preparation, then expect probation to solve homelessness in 48 hours with a CAS-3 referral and a prayer. When it collapses, it becomes a “probation failure” and triggers recall. Round they go again. Musical cells is exactly it.
It isn’t inefficiency. It’s design. Cost and pressure are shifted to the cheapest part of the system and frontline staff are left carrying the liability.
Until community probation is funded and treated as infrastructure rather than an afterthought, this cycle just repeats.
Another aspect of probation that needs seriously overhauling is SPOs hiding behind their grade, even though all our lanyards do not have our grade on our IDs. Too many SPOs enacting do as I say not as I do decisions, which reduce adult, professional conversations and concerns from POs. This is probation internally eating itself. Don't hide behind your grade. Don't sit in meetings and dictate to POs etc what needs to be done and not do it yourself or expect to be challenged. Hiding behind your grade or having that protect your decision making causes resentment and creates a culture in a PDU that is not equitable. Have enough integrity to admit when you're wrong and work with the PO to ensure a better outcome for the future. I can't remember how often I've been spoken down to by SPOs who are clearly promoted beyond their capabilities or covering for their failures and, like prisons, don't want to be challenged on their decisions. This needs to stop. Yes, you might be senior to me, but i'm doing all the work for this case and I need help. It's bad enough that the prisons dictate far too much of our work, as does the Parole Board and their administrators, but the internal culture of a given PDU has to be more harmonious and we all need to be treated with respect and have our time valued. Don't use your grade to protect your shortcomings. Be a better manager. Improve the culture. Invite constructive criticism. You are supposed to be the example you set below. Trouble is, then POs divide amongst themselves and the micro aggressions and lack of respect soon follows and so it goes on.
ReplyDelete👏🏻This is the part people don’t talk about enough.
DeleteWe can criticise ministers and policy all day, but culture is set locally. And when managers hide behind grade instead of leading properly, it corrodes trust fast.
SPOs are still qualified probation officers with added responsibility for managing staff. That’s it. The grade doesn’t magically make someone more professionally right or more qualified to dictate decisions. The same goes further up the chain. Experience and judgement don’t disappear the higher you go, and they shouldn’t be overridden by “because I said so”.
Probation work is complex and contextual. It should be professional discussion, challenge and shared reasoning. Not “I think this, therefore you’re wrong”.
If someone is carrying the risk and the workload on a case, their voice should carry weight. Good SPOs know that. They back their staff, own decisions and admit when something isn’t working. Poor ones manage by hierarchy and defensiveness, and that’s where resentment starts.
Leadership isn’t a badge or a lanyard. It’s behaviour.
There is no leadership in the probation service just a bunch of lackeys with a yes we will do it attitude. The stories of staff been bullied into higher caseloads than colleagues because they are not in the social circle with that manager. People promoted without the requisite knowledge and experience just because they can answer a couple of scenarios. Sifting out professional and experienced staff because they are great practitioners and their caseload too challenging for other team members. Operational staff COMs and POMs are disenfranchised, struggling under heavy caseloads with the threat of competency proceedings when it is the managers that should be pushing backwards but just sit in their offices on teams calls and reticent to explain decisions just do it and that behaviour goes all the way to the top, which results in the claim that they have negotiated a strong pay award with the some and mirrors show the other day.‘ It comes after public sector pay rose by an average of 7.9pc in the year to October, compared with 3.6pc in the private sector, according to the Office for National Statistics.’ so why have we been shafted with a measly 4%. The article talks about pensions for civil servants, that band that we were added to as part of TR but with none of the benefits, we still get LGPS managed in Manchester! It is ‘them and us’.
DeleteI’ve been around long enough to remember when SPOs actually led.
DeleteTwenty five years ago most SPOs had the experience and confidence to push back. You could have a proper professional disagreement without it turning into a hierarchy issue. They trusted your judgement because they’d done the job themselves. You felt backed, not managed.
Now it feels very different. Too often the role has become procedural rather than professional.
A lot of newer SPOs simply haven’t had the depth of frontline experience that builds the confidence to challenge upwards or to hold difficult, nuanced conversations about risk. So instead of discussion you get instruction. Instead of judgement you get “because I said so”. It’s management by rank, not leadership by credibility.
And you can see why. The system rewards people who interview well, speak fluent civil service, and tick competency boxes, not people who’ve spent years actually doing the work and learning the craft. Career progression depends on saying the right things to senior managers, not occasionally saying “no, this isn’t safe or realistic”.
So pushing back disappears. Professional debate disappears. What’s left is compliance flowing downward.
That’s not a criticism of individuals. It’s what the structure selects for.
But the result is predictable. Practitioners feel unsupported, managers feel defensive, and the service slowly loses the very experience it claims to value.
Leadership used to feel like someone had your back. Now it too often feels like someone checking you’ve done what you’re told.
The pension point made by @anon 10.33 isn’t just perception. It’s structural.
DeleteWhen probation was absorbed into Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, staff were told we were now civil servants. We adopted civil service processes, controls and pay restraints. But we were not moved into the Civil Service Pension Scheme that most other MoJ and Whitehall staff belong to.
Instead, probation staff remained in the Local Government Pension Scheme, administered locally. That means we operate under civil service expectations without civil service terms. It’s a hybrid arrangement that consistently disadvantages probation when national comparisons are made on benefits and reward.
Transforming Rehabilitation fragmented things further. Staff who transferred to Community Rehabilitation Companies generally stayed in LGPS, but employer contribution rates varied by provider and many new starters were not offered LGPS at all, instead placed into cheaper defined contribution schemes. So two people doing identical work could be accruing very different pensions depending purely on which side of the split they happened to land.
That isn’t about performance or responsibility. It’s about cost control.
Taken alongside below-inflation pay awards, stalled progression and ongoing recruitment gaps, the pattern is consistent. Other parts of the justice system protect pay and long-term benefits to retain experience. Probation has repeatedly been treated as the place where savings are made.
Over time that creates exactly what we now see: churn instead of retention, loss of experience, and a workforce that feels permanently second tier.
Worth remembering this didn’t happen by accident and it wasn’t some technical glitch.
DeleteThe unions did flag it at the time, but the legal bar was set laughably low. The law only protects access to a pension scheme, not equal outcomes. Government just had to show “broad comparability,” not fairness. In other words, if it looked vaguely similar on paper, it passed. Good enough was good enough.
So you ended up with a situation where two officers who qualified at the same time, doing the same job could build very different pensions and somehow that’s considered compliant. Unfair, yes. Unlawful, no. That tells you everything about the standard they were working to.
This is the bit people mean when they talk about “them and us.” Probation got dragged under civil service controls, pay stagnated, half the workforce was carved off to private companies, and yet we never got consistent national terms to protect us. All the risk sat with staff.
So some of us literally lost money on our retirement because of a restructuring we had zero choice about. That isn’t reform. It’s cost shifting dressed up as modernisation. TR didn’t just fragment the service. It quietly transferred the bill onto the people doing the job.
I retired recently after 40 years. Now volunteer in a community centre. The amount of homelessness didn't surprise me, but the barriers and indifference of the housing providers and local authorities is astounding. The comments above about housing provision for offenders coming out of prison chimes with me as a probation officer but most folk have no access or advocacy. I am ashamed, but the principles of 'less eligibility ' remain a corner stone of our Elizabethan poor law; and I mean the first not the second!
ReplyDeleteThis hits hard because it shows the problem isn’t just probation, it’s structural.
DeleteWe’re trying to stabilise people who leave prison straight into homelessness, chaotic services and indifference, and then everyone acts surprised when they fail or get recalled. It’s not rehabilitation, it’s obstacle courses. Probation ends up being the last person in the chain, expected to somehow magic stability out of nothing while every other system says “not our responsibility”.
That old idea of “less eligibility” still lingers in practice. Support is rationed, help is conditional, and the people with the least are expected to navigate the most barriers. Then we blame them, or us, when it collapses.
You can’t build public protection on top of neglect and call it justice.