Hunt Continues for Probation Officers

MoJ announces funding for 1,300 extra probation officers

New recruitment to come on top of 2,300 pledged since Labour came to power

An extra 1,300 probation officers will be recruited, the Ministry of Justice has announced.

The department has announced a £700m investment in probation by 2028-29, which includes recruiting an additional 1,300 trainee probation officers across 2026-27, on top of the 2,300 pledged since Labour came to power in 2024.

The funding also includes a £100m expansion of electronic monitoring, meaning that thousands of extra domestic abusers, thieves and burglars across the country will face GPS and alcohol monitoring. The MoJ described this as “the biggest expansion of tagging in British history”.

As part of the investment, a £5m pilot will be launched to introduce proximity monitoring technology which alerts the Probation Service when offenders convicted of crimes such as domestic abuse and stalking come within a preset distance of their victim – a key commitment from the government’s strategy to end violence against women and girls.

As part of the expansion, frontline probation staff will be given access to cutting-edge technology allowing instant access to the location of certain tagged offenders, which will help to identify escalating risk and allow for earlier interventions.

The Probation Service will also change its approach to supervision so that officers can focus their time on the most dangerous offenders, with those assessed as lower-risk to require fewer routine appointments.

It is also investing £8m in new technology to reduce time-consuming admin tasks and save up to 250,000 days of valuable time every year, allowing frontline staff to spend more time monitoring offenders and keeping the streets safe.

The MoJ said the crisis it inherited in the Probation Service has placed too great a burden on hardworking staff, with new statistics showing that between 2023 and 2025, 31% of target probation appointments did not take place due to unmanageable workloads.

It said this has meant officers have been unable to pay enough attention to those offenders who pose the greatest risk.

It said the reforms, announced on Thursday, “will enable overworked probation staff to focus on the parts of their job that have the greatest impact on public protection, and will unburden them from tasks that are less impactful when it comes to protecting the public”.

Martin Jones, the chief inspector of probation said: “I welcome the government’s plans for further investment in the Probation Service, and attempts to focus time and resources where they matter most.

“I have been clear that urgent action is needed to support a service that is currently facing significant challenge, with too few staff, who have too little experience, managing too many cases.

“We are entering a crucial period as the implementation of the Sentencing Act reforms begins. There must be a sharp focus on ensuring the Probation Service can recruit, train and retain sufficient staff, and give them the tools and support they need – both to keep the public and victims safe, and to turn offenders’ lives around.”

Lord Timpson, minister for prisons, probation and reducing reoffending, said: “This is the biggest expansion of tagging in British history and means the most dangerous offenders will now be watched more closely than ever before.

“By combining new technology with a stronger probation workforce, we’re making sure those who pose the biggest risk are under constant scrutiny to better protect victims and the public.”

New Pay Offer

I note there's a new pay offer:-

New Probation Pay offer to go before members 

After overwhelming rejection of a 4% offer, probation unions have secured a revised 6% pay proposal alongside commitments on workload reform and future pay negotiations. Napo members will now decide whether to accept the deal or consider next steps. 

Following the outcome of the indicative ballots organised by Napo UNISON and GMB on the 2025-2026 pay offer, the Unions were invited to meet with Lord Timpson and HMPPS CEO James McEwen on Monday 9th March.

Since then, extensive negotiations with senior officials have taken place and have resulted in an improved but conditional offer of a 6% increase to pay and allowances, the continuation of talks on the future of the Probation Service and a joint review of future arrangements for pay, in particular the Competency Based Framework (CBF). Your Probation Negotiating Committee have been meeting regularly to receive reports from your Negotiators.

The latter stages of this process has been facilitated by the involvement of the Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Timpson and the TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak.

Position of the Probation trade unions

The Joint Statement sets out the factual position that has been arrived at via these negotiations. We have been advised by our sister unions UNISON and GMB that they will be recommending acceptance of the offer.

Napo will now be presenting the offer to our members following confirmation from the parties that this is the best position that can be achieved through negotiation following HMPPS’s rejection of a counteroffer from Napo for an 8% increase, as requested by your Probation Negotiating Committee (PNC), on the basis that no further money was available from the Government.

The pay offer is accompanied by conditions, specifically; a commitment to workload reform and commitment to a negotiated pay review process

It is now for Napo members to decide on the merits of the offer. We will present a factual account of how we have arrived at this position and allow our members the opportunity to vote for it.

Commentary

The improved headline offer of 6% has come because of the tremendous response from our members who roundly rejected the previous 4% offer by a huge 89% majority in a ballot result that was unprecedented in Napo’s recent history. As stated above, Napo did our best to seek further improvements but this approach was rejected on the basis of the current economic situation and the fact that the new offer is among the very highest within the civil service in this pay year which, unlike a current offer in another government department does not come with a requirement to agree material changes to contractual terms and conditions.

This is the best offer available through negotiation. If members decide that the offer is unacceptable then, as has been made clear throughout the pay campaign, it would require a sustained campaign of industrial action to try and convince the government to return to negotiations where any outcome would be uncertain. In making their decision on the likelihood of such a campaign succeeding, members will want to take into account the Government’s decision to reject our counter-offer, the limited impact of other such campaigns elsewhere in the public sector, as well as their own financial situation.

If members vote to accept the offer of 6%, the employer has indicated that the pay uplift would be paid in May 2026 and backdated to April 2025.

Members are invited to read the various documentation attached in advance of balloting arrangements and consultative meetings for Napo members. Details of which will follow at the earliest opportunity.

The final decision to accept this offer rests with Napo members.

--oo00oo--

Editors note - the blog remains on Care and Maintenance but this is a significant event and if the comment thread gets too long things will get unmanageable.

Care and Maintenance

Following quite a bit of soul and heart-searching I thought I'd share my thoughts regarding both the future of probation in England and the blog. To keep things as simple as possible, I've reluctantly decided there is no future for the current iteration of probation under MoJ and civil service control, or indeed under the current Labour administration. I see no agency, body, institution or individual willing and capable of speaking up for the Service being anything other than part of the problem rather than a solution. Academic institutions currently delivering PO training, or others interested in bidding, are willing to agree and sign up to not allowing any negative expressions as to the direction of travel. 

We have a home secretary who wants AI, universal tagging and facial recognition technology to usher in the modern equivalent of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon and we only just stopped her bringing back a modern version of the stocks by photographing, publishing, naming and shaming those undertaking Community Payback. The final straw was the BBC radio 4 Free Thinking episode on criminal justice policy which never mentioned probation at all. Lord Jeremy Sumption summed things up perfectly by declaring that "all the public and politicians want is retribution".

I could go on with a litany of other contributing factors, but as regular readers will be fully aware, all these have been aired and discussed ad nauseam over the years to little effect and therefore the number one priority becomes ensuring the audit trail remains for posterity and benefit of future researchers and historians. With this in mind, I've recently had the following from the British Library:-

"I have set the web crawler to capture the site quarterly. Our initial capture was a successful, in-depth crawl that archived approximately 11 GB of data. The crawler follows internal links back through your archives to capture any published material and comments from the beginning. Moving forward, the crawler will return every three months to ensure new posts and discussions are preserved.

The Library will keep this copy as part of non-print legal deposit regulations, meaning a version of the site will indeed reside with us for long-term preservation and access across Legal Deposit Library Reading Rooms. Please be advised that this is not considered a backup copy."

Now I think this must be viewed as good news and indeed it gives me a degree of satisfaction, however I also need to point out that if or when it might ever be available is in the lap of the gods due to the catastrophic hack the Library suffered in October 2023. If you want a scary read as to what the future looks like, read the report the Library published in 2024. I've heard it said privately by the Library that the 'safest form of archive is paper'. Bear that in mind as you all continue to put stuff 'in the cloud'.

So, what happens to the blog now? It stays available and I will continue to monitor it and reserve the right to publish new posts as and when I think something interesting and significant occurs. It tends to spring into life at times of crisis and I will give it more attention at such times, but from now on I think it's fair to say I've given up on any hope probation can be anything but part of the problem uniquely here in England. To be perfectly frank, only a major crisis on the scale of the Post Office scandal and declaring the MoJ to be 'unfit for purpose' will shift the dial and even the Green Party will realise there's no votes in talking about rehabilitation and building less prisons. It's been fun though and we did change government policy once according to the National Audit Office. I suppose doing it a second time was always going to be a long shot.