I think the following two contributions sum the situation up neatly:-
https://www.gov.uk/government/people/alex-norris
Minister of State (Minister for Border Security and Asylum) and Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice - Alex Norris MP
Biography
Alex Norris was appointed Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice on 20 July 2026. He was previously Minister of State at the Home Office between 6 September 2025 and July 20 2026.
He was previously Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government between 9 July 2024 and 6 September 2025.
He has been the MP for Nottingham North and Kimberley (and its predecessor Nottingham North) since June 2017.
Minister of State (Minister for Border Security and Asylum) - The Minister’s responsibilities are:
Border Security Command: reducing small boat arrivals and organised immigration crime
reducing the asylum caseload, exiting hotels and reducing the supported population
Immigration Enforcement: Increasing returns (including FNOs), immigration detention estate expansion, illegal working
asylum, illegal migration and returns policy, safe and legal policy and refugee resettlement policy
reducing net migration: legal migration policy
tackling visa abuse
innovative solutions
Immigration White Paper implementation
European Entry Exit System
modern slavery policy as it relates to immigration status
Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice
Oversight of all justice portfolios, policy, and Ministry of Justice strategy
Oversight of cross-cutting emergency issues, responses supported by other ministers according to portfolio
Oversight of international business and future relations with the EU
MOJ support for the Union
Resourcing of the department
Functions of the Lord Chancellor
Judicial policy including pay, pensions and diversity (these and other operational decisions affecting the judiciary are reserved to the Lord Chancellor)
--oo00oo--
I’m not going to write Alex Norris off before he’s even started. Every minister deserves the chance to prove themselves. But I do wonder how anyone without a substantial justice background can fully appreciate the scale of what they’re inheriting. Probation isn’t something you understand from a briefing paper. It sits at the intersection of housing, mental health, addiction, domestic abuse, children’s services, employment, policing, prisons and the courts. It is where the consequences of policy decisions made across government all arrive at once.
Andy Burnham has rightly spoken about ending rough sleeping. That’s an admirable ambition. But this is where I think governments often miss something fundamental.
They talk about the “golden thread” running through assessments. What probation sees every day is the golden thread running through society.
Housing affects employment.
Employment affects offending.
Mental health affects addiction.
Addiction affects family stability.
Family breakdown affects children.
Children become tomorrow’s adults entering the criminal justice system. None of these things exists in isolation, yet government too often organises itself as if they do.
Probation doesn’t have the luxury of seeing only one department’s problem. We deal with the whole person and the cumulative effect of every public service that has either succeeded or failed them. So I genuinely hope the new Justice Secretary spends less time asking, “What does justice need?” and more time asking, “How does justice fit into everything else?”
I’m not going to write Alex Norris off before he’s even started. Every minister deserves the chance to prove themselves. But I do wonder how anyone without a substantial justice background can fully appreciate the scale of what they’re inheriting. Probation isn’t something you understand from a briefing paper. It sits at the intersection of housing, mental health, addiction, domestic abuse, children’s services, employment, policing, prisons and the courts. It is where the consequences of policy decisions made across government all arrive at once.
Andy Burnham has rightly spoken about ending rough sleeping. That’s an admirable ambition. But this is where I think governments often miss something fundamental.
They talk about the “golden thread” running through assessments. What probation sees every day is the golden thread running through society.
Housing affects employment.
Employment affects offending.
Mental health affects addiction.
Addiction affects family stability.
Family breakdown affects children.
Children become tomorrow’s adults entering the criminal justice system. None of these things exists in isolation, yet government too often organises itself as if they do.
Probation doesn’t have the luxury of seeing only one department’s problem. We deal with the whole person and the cumulative effect of every public service that has either succeeded or failed them. So I genuinely hope the new Justice Secretary spends less time asking, “What does justice need?” and more time asking, “How does justice fit into everything else?”
Because until government starts seeing the same golden thread that frontline probation staff see every day, we’ll keep treating symptoms while wondering why the causes never seem to go away.
The government could do much worse than pick a random probation officer to serve in government, strictly not from management. The danger of that being they might actually acheive something which I don't think is the aim.
ReplyDeletesox
I want to republish this contribution from the previous blog post because it makes a very telling point:-
ReplyDelete"Lovely analysis. Remember when we spoke openly about the 'pathways' to rehabilitation and desistence? I'm now in voluntary service and have been consistently appalled by the way in which ALL the statutory agencies have withdrawn from public access. All the above agencies now seem to make it their business to do the bare minimum, rely upon folk giving up from accessing service and making deliberately wrong decisions to throw even persistent applicants off applying. Clearly this is a result of austerity but has now become the cultural norm. If we could return to the thinking of Total Place & adopt a strategy that integrated criminal justice into all public services I would be pleased. Ending rough sleeping would at least be a start, especially for the poor saps discharged from prison with a tent!"
That contribution really resonated with me because it identifies something probation sees every day but rarely gets discussed.
DeleteProbation hasn’t become harder simply because probation has changed. It’s become harder because so many other public services have become harder to access.
Housing waiting lists have grown.
Mental health services are stretched.
Drug and alcohol services have reduced capacity.
Children’s services are under pressure.
Adult social care struggles to meet demand.
Employment support has become increasingly conditional.
Each individual service has understandable reasons. Limited budgets. Rising demand. Staff shortages. But what happens is that the unmet need doesn’t disappear. It accumulates.
And eventually it lands on a probation officer’s desk.
That’s why I keep coming back to the “golden thread”. We don’t just supervise offending. We see the cumulative consequences of failures across multiple public services.
When people ask why probation feels so much harder than it did 15 or 20 years ago, perhaps that’s part of the answer. We aren’t just managing more risk. We’re managing more unmet need.
Until government starts seeing justice as something that runs through housing, health, education, employment and social care, not alongside them, we’ll continue dealing with the consequences rather than preventing the causes.
I posted this last week,
ReplyDeleteAnonymous17 July 2026 at 13:09
Just watched Andy Burnham deliver his leadership speech.
It was interesting to see who he paid homage to.
Neil Kinnock who expelled socialist activists from the party in the hope of bolstering his election aspirations and whose son was amongst the first to turn on Jeremy Corbyn when he became party leader.
David Blunkett, right wing architect of the IPP sentence and possibly the worst Home Secretary in my years in the probation service and The Right Honourable Margaret Beckett another time server resistant to progressive politics.
It seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
I would now add that Kinnock Jnr. And Angela Eagle who claim loyalty to the party but who both tried to unseat Corbyn early doors (Ms. Eagle eventually made a grovelling tearful retraction in order to avoid being de-selected by her CLP)have now been rewarded with promotions to cabinet.
Watch your back Andy. Keep your enemies close and your friends closer still.
"The creation of a new Office for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet has been announced, with cabinet secretary Dame Antonia Romeo tasked with leading it... the new OPMC will oversee a new OneGov Delivery Agency which will manage operational services at arm’s length, including the Government Recruitment Service, pensions, shared services strategy, and security vetting."
ReplyDeleteGod help us all.
"Further changes will see the Cabinet Office take the lead on AI adoption across the civil service, with responsibility for AI strategy, public sector AI adoption and the AI Security Institute all moving to the department."
* That will sit veerry nicely with la romeo, what with her being super chummy with Louis Mosley (Oswald's grandson) & Palantir:
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-trade-department-courted-us-firm-palantir-over-untapped-nhs-data-potential/
& also skynews:
"In April 2019, Dame Antonia Romeo (then Permanent Secretary at the DIT) met with Palantir's UK head, Louis Mosley, at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The objective of the meeting was to encourage Palantir to expand its software business in the UK, with Romeo’s department offering government assistance to help the firm with visa planning, recruitment, and finding real estate... During subsequent follow-up meetings at her London office, Romeo and her officials actively briefed Palantir on the potential of the NHS"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9d8p0l29pxo
"Civil servants working for government departments based in London have been offered relocation packages to encourage them to move to the North of England, the BBC understands.
It comes as the first details are emerging about the new No 10 North, which Downing Street says is already up and running."
* Meanwhile. la romeo is quick to secure her preferred lieutenants across the departments:
https://www.civilserviceworld.com/professions/article/civil-service-success-profiles-to-be-scrapped
"Reforms including scrapping success profiles, cross-cutting capability reviews and a rapid review of the Fast Stream have been unveiled.
The reforms are detailed on a website outlining plans for the Future Civil Service, a programme cabinet secretary Dame Antonia Romeo has launched to build a civil service that is “famous” for excellence in delivering for ministers and the public; use of tech and AI; and being “trusted by the people we serve”."
* Her fast stream scheme leaves greater scope for nepotism & loading of strategic bases.
UKplc has been stitched up like a kipper, trump-style.
https://www.civilservant.org.uk/misc-history.html
"The Northcote Trevelyan reforms had been a reaction to widespread, nepotism, corruption and inefficiency."