That takes us straight back to the uncomfortable question of what we actually want probation to do. If we want prevention, then practitioners need time. Not merely enough time to complete an assessment, satisfy National Standards, make the required referrals, record the contact and demonstrate compliance. Time to know somebody well enough to recognise change. Time to make the phone call that might secure the accommodation. Time to speak to the treatment service rather than simply signpost to it. Time to have the conversation that goes somewhere unexpected rather than ending it because the next appointment is waiting.
The irony is that much of the current direction seems to be travelling the other way. Reduce contact. Automate administration. Introduce online reporting. Increase caseload capacity. Measure activity. Manage risk. Recall when things go wrong. Then spend an extraordinary amount of money dealing with the consequences downstream.
Perhaps the question we should ask of every new probation policy is ridiculously simple: does this make another offence less likely? Not: does it save ten minutes? Does it produce a better-looking record? Does it improve a dashboard? Does it allow another five cases to be allocated? Does it demonstrate that a process has been completed?
Does it actually make another offence less likely? Because if prevention really is an investment rather than an expense, probation should be absolutely central to that thinking. But probation cannot prevent much in isolation either. A practitioner cannot manufacture a home, a job, drug treatment, mental-health provision or a functioning support network. Cut those things upstream and eventually their absence arrives at probation, the police, the courts and the prison gate wearing a much larger price tag.
Maybe that is the fundamental mistake we keep making. We keep trying to make the downstream response cheaper and faster instead of asking what investment upstream might have prevented the person reaching us again at all. And perhaps “advise, assist and befriend” doesn’t sound quite so antiquated when viewed through that lens. It sounds remarkably like prevention.
Anon
*****
A well argued point but... absolutely no-one with the authority to implement change will pay any attention to the argument. Why? Because they're all invested in a completely different set of imperatives, i.e. control & restraint via optics & metrics that nets votes for the political classes & wealth for their chums - tags, prisons, hardware/software & a layer of management to oversee it. All paid for by the taxpayer who has already been fleeced to the tune of £1billion+ by unnecesary, ineffective &/or failed projects. And STILL the emperor has no clothes!
Anon
*****
I fear you may be right about nobody with the authority to change things listening, but that almost makes it more important to keep asking the questions.
What troubles me is that the things we can measure and purchase increasingly seem to determine what probation becomes. Tags can be counted. Contacts can be counted. Compliance can be counted. AI can produce measurable time savings. Software can generate dashboards. Restrictions can be monitored. New systems can be commissioned and somebody can announce the number of hours or pounds they are expected to save.
What is much harder to quantify is whether a probation officer knowing somebody properly prevented something happening six months later. There is no neat metric for the conversation that changed somebody’s thinking, the relationship that meant they disclosed something before it became a crisis, or the experienced practitioner who spotted that something wasn’t right.
Perhaps that is precisely why those things become vulnerable. What is easily measurable starts being mistaken for what is valuable.
I don’t expect one blog comment to change Whitehall. But I do think we should keep challenging the assumption that because something produces impressive metrics it represents progress. Otherwise we eventually end up with a beautifully measured, technologically efficient, highly controlled Probation Service that has forgotten what probation was actually supposed to achieve. And then, as you say, everyone will admire the Emperor’s new dashboard.
Anon
*****
V. F. Ridgway published a paper in 1956 criticizing the measurement mantra. Simon Caulkin, a columnist, neatly summarized Ridgway’s argument as:
Ridgway clearly was onto something in 1956. Not everything that matters can be measured. Not everything that we can measure matters.
Goodhart's Law: Named after British economist Charles Goodhart. When a metric is used to reward performance or judge success, people change their behavior to optimize for that specific number rather than the real objective.
The Cobra Effect: A classic manifestation of perverse incentives. It gets its name from an anecdote during the British Raj in India, where the government offered a cash bounty for every dead cobra to reduce the snake population. Instead of lowering the population, enterprising citizens started breeding cobras to collect the reward. When the government cancelled the bounty, breeders set their snakes free, resulting in more cobras than before.
Campbell's Law states that the more a quantitative social indicator is used for high-stakes decision-making, the more subject it is to corruption pressures, and the more it will distort the social process it is meant to monitor.
*****
V. F. Ridgway published a paper in 1956 criticizing the measurement mantra. Simon Caulkin, a columnist, neatly summarized Ridgway’s argument as:
“What gets measured gets managed — even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so”.Indeed the paper’s title is “Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements”.
Ridgway clearly was onto something in 1956. Not everything that matters can be measured. Not everything that we can measure matters.
- Ridgway observes that once a quantitative measure of performance is installed, people reorganise their behaviour around the measure rather than around the underlying purpose it was meant to track
- A single performance measure produces tunnel vision, with effort flowing to whatever is counted while everything uncounted is neglected
- Multiple measures reproduce the problem and add conflict between them, so that people optimise the easy or the rewarded number and trade off the rest.
- Composite measures, which try to solve this by rolling everything into a single weighted index, merely bury the arbitrary judgements about what matters inside a figure that then looks objective.
- The problem with measuring a construct like safety is not merely technical imprecision but the behavioural distortion that installing any metric sets off.
Goodhart's Law: Named after British economist Charles Goodhart. When a metric is used to reward performance or judge success, people change their behavior to optimize for that specific number rather than the real objective.
The Cobra Effect: A classic manifestation of perverse incentives. It gets its name from an anecdote during the British Raj in India, where the government offered a cash bounty for every dead cobra to reduce the snake population. Instead of lowering the population, enterprising citizens started breeding cobras to collect the reward. When the government cancelled the bounty, breeders set their snakes free, resulting in more cobras than before.
Campbell's Law states that the more a quantitative social indicator is used for high-stakes decision-making, the more subject it is to corruption pressures, and the more it will distort the social process it is meant to monitor.
Anon
Sources:
https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/what-gets-measured-gets-managed-its-wrong-and-drucker-never-said-it-fe95886d3df6
https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/ridgway-1956/
Sources:
https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/what-gets-measured-gets-managed-its-wrong-and-drucker-never-said-it-fe95886d3df6
https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/ridgway-1956/
BBC News website:-
ReplyDeleteAlmost half of electronic tags used to track offenders' movements are not fitted on time, with significant delays putting victims in England and Wales at risk, a report has found.
The report by His Majesty's Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP) says some criminals are waiting up to five months to be fitted with a tag, leading to repeated breaches of court and prison orders.
Only 55% of GPS and radio frequency tags were fitted on time, while 60% of alcohol monitoring tags were fitted promptly, according to the report's findings.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said the government was delivering the "biggest expansion of tagging in British history" with £100 million in funding.
Electronic monitoring is used by the Probation Service to track curfews and conditions of a court or prison order.
A total of 27,847 people were given tagging orders with equipment in England and Wales as of June 2026.
"There is a real danger that electronic monitoring creates a false sense of assurance if the technology is not matched by effective professional practice," said Martin Jones CBE, HM Chief Inspector of Probation.
"Expanding tagging programmes without addressing their weaknesses risks overpromising and underdelivering on public protection," he added.
In some cases, there were waits of more than two weeks for the equipment while one in 10 people waited five months to be tagged after the required time.
Some of the reasons for tags not being fitted on time included individuals not making themselves available.
Victims' Commissioner Claire Waxman OBE said victims needed to "know immediately" if tagging was delayed because this could give a "false sense of security".
She said a "robust response" was required in the event of breaches but there were "real concerns" over how "overstretched" probation services would be able to handle this.
Data from the tags was often found to be underused with major violations raised and explored in just 46% of relevant cases, the report also found.
Inspectors discovered little evidence that electronic monitoring was being used consistently to promote behaviour change.
There are three types of tags:
curfew tags
location tags
alcohol tags
They include strict controls of an offender's punishment to manage risk, safeguarding and the protection of victims.
Those who breach their orders either immediately return to prison, are given a court order or a formal warning.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said "public protection" was the government's priority.
They said: "That's why we are delivering the biggest expansion of tagging in British history, backed by £100 million in funding, with tag install rates up by nearly 50% since 2024.
"This is part of our record £700 million investment in probation and community services, recruiting 2,300 trainee officers over the last two years and a further 1,300 this year – ensuring dangerous offenders are kept under closer surveillance than ever before."
Plans to significantly expand electronic monitoring were announced earlier this year as part of the Sentencing Act 2026, which aims to ease prison pressures by managing more offenders in the community.
Thousands more prisoners will be released early from October as part of the new law. Most will require tagging.
ReplyDelete“We keep trying to make the downstream response cheaper and faster instead of asking what investment upstream might have prevented the person reaching us again at all.”
Ask the practitioners they’ll agree wholeheartedly, they know what probation can and should be, but nobody is listening. Probation can quite easily be rehabilitated and renewed, but not while technological efficiency and prison capacity dictates the direction of travel.
Ask practitioners. We know what good probation looks like. That’s what makes me so bloody angry about the direction we’re travelling in. We haven’t forgotten how to do probation. Increasingly, we’re being prevented from doing it.
ReplyDeleteIt’s the reduction in human contact that worries me most. It feels increasingly like a conveyor belt. Assess somebody, put them into the appropriate box, prescribe X number of appointments, move them through the stages, reduce contact, move them online and call it proportionate supervision.
Except these are people. People are complicated enough without adding trauma, abuse, addiction, poverty, neurodiversity, mental ill-health, damaged relationships, institutionalisation and all the other experiences so many of the people we supervise bring through the door with them. Two people who look remarkably similar on an assessment can need completely different things from us.
You cannot dictate that somebody needs X appointments because they fit into an A box or an F box and pretend that tells you how long it will take to build a relationship with them. One person might tell me everything in their first appointment. Somebody else might take six months before they trust me enough to tell me the thing I actually needed to know.
That isn’t inefficiency. That is probation.
Give me a manageable caseload and I can actually know the people I supervise. If somebody who always attends suddenly doesn’t turn up, and I know they’ve been struggling recently, I can think that’s not like them. I can pick up the phone. I can speak to somebody who knows them. I can get in my car and do a home visit because my professional judgement tells me something might be wrong.
Under a conveyor-belt model, that same absence risks becoming something to process. Did not attend. Attempted contact. Warning. Rearrange. Next case.
Yet that person might have relapsed. Their mental health might have deteriorated. Their relationship might have broken down. They might have lost their accommodation or something else might be unravelling. Or there might be nothing seriously wrong at all. But I only know that their absence is unusual because I know what normal looks like for them.
That is what you cannot prescribe in a supervision package. It comes from knowing somebody well enough to recognise change and having enough space in your working day to do something about it.
Give me an impossible caseload and I don’t suddenly lose those skills. I lose the time to use them.
And apparently the answer to that is everything except fewer cases. Justice Transcribe saves minutes. Online reporting removes appointments. Supervision packages reduce contact. Electronic monitoring provides surveillance. AI creates efficiencies. Dashboards measure performance. Another e-learning package tells us how to implement the latest version of probation.
I’m not against technology. Use it to get rid of pointless repetitive administration and give me more time with people and I’ll welcome it. But technology is a tool. A tag can tell you where somebody is; it cannot tell you why their life is falling apart. An online check-in can tell you somebody has ticked “fine”; it cannot necessarily tell you that they very obviously aren’t.
What makes me angry is that we seem to be designing probation backwards. Prisons are overcrowded, so more people must be managed in the community. Probation hasn’t enough capacity, so rather than genuinely addressing that, we redesign probation until the available workforce can absorb the numbers. Less contact. More automation. More remote supervision. More “efficiency”. Human contact itself becomes the resource to be rationed.
Of course not everybody needs intensive supervision and of course contact should be proportionate. But proportionate should mean responsive to the individual in front of me and capable of changing when their circumstances change. It should not mean fitting a human being into a centrally designed package because somebody has calculated how many practitioner hours the system can afford them.
Cont...
...cont
ReplyDeleteWe talk endlessly about individualised, trauma-informed, relational practice while simultaneously building a system which increasingly standardises how often practitioners are permitted to have the relationship. Those two things simply do not sit comfortably together.
And please don’t keep telling practitioners to exercise professional curiosity while systematically removing the time in which to exercise it. Professional curiosity is useless if I haven’t got the time to act on what makes me curious.
Stop asking how little probation we can give somebody and still call it supervision. Ask what this particular person needs to make it less likely that they come back through the system, then give practitioners enough time and professional freedom to respond.
Because if we keep stripping human contact out of probation to create capacity, eventually we may have a wonderfully efficient conveyor belt.
I’m just not sure we’ll still have a Probation Service.
08:59 sums up the situation eloquently, and I applaud their contribution however, probation staff have been raising their objections to the direction of travel both in person and via this blog for several years, and the powers that be simply disregard us.
ReplyDeleteDo ‘they,’ not know our views? Do they not know that they have a crisis of confidence? Do they believe that they have a glorious vision of the future or that they know life at the sharp end better that frontline workers, or are they following a blueprint with an end point that has never been disclosed.
Dialogue, evidence, statistics, data and history are simply overlooked or disregarded either because of arrogance or a directive from above and we are playing a game without the privilege of holding a full deck of cards.
At the end of the day, bonuses will be paid, gongs awarded, promotions granted and the back slapping will continue.
‘They,’ have nothing to lose, they’re not listening and they don’t care what you say or do. It’s called abuse and they can do it because they have the power.
I agree with this, and I think that’s what makes me angrier than anything else. We need to stop pretending the problem is that nobody has explained it clearly enough.
DeleteHow many more times do practitioners have to say it? How many different ways do we have to describe what is happening before we accept that lack of information isn’t the problem?
We’ve explained the workload. We’ve explained what relentless change does. We’ve explained why relationships matter. We’ve explained the danger of reducing human contact. We’ve explained what happens when professional judgement is squeezed between national processes, targets and performance demands. We’ve explained why people are exhausted, why experienced practitioners are leaving and why confidence in the direction of the service is disappearing.
And still we get another transformation. Another model. Another package. Another dashboard. Another e-learning module. Another “efficiency”. Another announcement telling us how much better probation is going to become.
So yes, I agree. At some point you have to consider the possibility that they already know what we think.
And that is far more frightening than believing they simply haven’t listened properly.
Because if you know that the people delivering the service are deeply concerned about its direction and you carry on regardless, what exactly is “staff engagement” for? If practitioners are invited to meetings, surveys, consultations and events but the fundamental direction is immovable, stop calling it engagement. Tell us what has already been decided and spare everybody the pretence.
The power imbalance in that is what I find increasingly disturbing. The practitioner still carries the case. The practitioner still carries the risk. The practitioner will still have their decisions scrutinised when something goes catastrophically wrong. Yet how much genuine influence does that same practitioner have over the systems, workloads, contact models and processes within which those decisions have to be made?
And eventually people learn. They stop putting their hand up. They stop challenging in meetings. They stop answering honestly. They sit through the presentation, complete the training, tick the box and keep their head down. Not because they agree, but because they have concluded that speaking achieves nothing except potentially marking them out as “difficult”, “negative” or “resistant to change”.
For an organisation supposedly dependent upon professional curiosity and people being prepared to say something doesn’t feel right here, that should be absolutely terrifying.
I’m angry because I still care. I still believe probation can be better than this. But I’m increasingly tired of hearing that practitioners need to make their voices heard.
Our voices have been heard. The question now is why so little appears to change when we use them.
And perhaps that is the crisis of confidence we should really be talking about.
Thursday 1 October 2026: one for the probation history books. Apart from the introduction, and eventual unwinding, of Transforming Rehabilitation, Thursday could be one of the most significant days the Probation Service has faced in recent times - again. The media attention around the Sentencing Act may have died down, but that does not change what is about to happen across prisons and probation. The new Progression Model comes into force with hundreds of prisoners estimated to be released on the first day, followed by implementation across 10 tranches between October 2026 and June 2027. These are modelled estimates rather than fixed numbers, so the scale of the challenge is clear. There is an enormous amount of work happening behind scenes and credit is due where it is due, but the level of guidance, communication, instructions and mandatory learning accompanying all this change does not make the situation better. We do not need to return to the past, but you’d think they’d have learnt from it. No rational person thought they’d be reversing rehabilitating, revitalising or renewing probation into something better. It is possible, but not if the future of probation success is primarily framed around justice transcribe, AI, tagging and reducing the prison population, with little serious consideration of what probation actually is or what it could become. Probation has become the mechanism for implementing whatever happens elsewhere in the justice system, but without its own identity, professional voice and purpose. I do not even think there is real sympathy for probation staff being pulled from pillar to post through yet another major programme of change, while continuing to deliver a demanding public service, while poorly paid.. It’s totally ignored that within there is a legitimate sense of anger at those who have been complicit in allowing probation to become increasingly defined by the demands placed upon it rather than by what it can contribute. This force fed approach is simply that Thursday is where the policy document ends and operational reality begins, take it or leave it because once again the change machine is upon us and this time the Progression Model risks becoming another missed opportunity to properly understand, develop probation, rehabilitation and justice.
DeleteIn a word, another omnishambles.
Our opinions are wanted to support whatever they want to bring in, as previous commentators have stated, if they really listened things would be very different !
ReplyDeleteThe reduction in contact will only be highlighted when there is an SFO and the officer is criticised for……not having sufficient contact…….we are being placed over a barrel and our hands metaphorically tied by the process…..in all of these changes were are the safeguards for the officer?
ReplyDeleteThis is the bit that needs answering: where are the safeguards for the practitioner?
DeleteThere is something deeply uncomfortable about an organisation determining the operating model, setting the frequency of contact, increasing reliance on technology, removing WMT and deciding what constitutes an “efficient” use of practitioner time, while the consequences when something goes wrong can still become intensely individualised.
Policy decisions are made collectively and several layers above the practitioner. Accountability has a remarkable tendency to travel in the opposite direction.
If HMPPS genuinely believes these changes represent safe and effective probation practice, then it should be prepared to stand behind practitioners who work within them. An SFO cannot become the moment when organisational decisions suddenly disappear from view and everything is reconstructed as a series of choices made by one individual officer.
You cannot centralise the decisions and decentralise the blame.
Off topic, but if Ed Milliband, as quoted, has said "it was never anyone’s intent to criminalise “elderly people, vicars and grannies” who have been arrested for supporting Palestine Action." and as we all know David Blunkett now regrets IPP's due to being poorly thought out and implemented, maybe Labour Justice Ministers et al should start thinking things through before knee jerking in the future and possibly engage experts and those who deal with people going through the criminal justice system day to day first
ReplyDelete"On Sunday, police forcefully detained and handcuffed a young man under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act. They stripped him of clothing while dragging him across the floor.
DeleteHe had not committed any crime.
15 minutes later, they admitted their mistake and released him without any apology.
He was in the area outside the Labour Party conference with his dog, his mum and his sister witnessing the arrests of over 150 peaceful sign-holders, and at no point did he hold a sign himself.
This ban is unenforceable. The police can’t even identify who the “terrorist” signholders are."
This is the shitfest that the lawmakers have made, putting police officers & citizens in jeopardy, wasting police time & public £££'s on nonsensical arrests.
In a similar vein:
"The Fairford incident was either an embarrassing cockup or a failed false flag - Ricky from Council Estate Media, Sep 29
The five men arrested over the Fairford incident have been released on bail, and as many have pointed out, that looks rather odd.
Social media users are now speculating that the men might have been diesel thieves rather than terrorists. There are good reasons, including fake diesel-company liveries on the vans, barrels in the vehicles, and claims that the men were seen siphoning fuel. None of that is proven, but it certainly seems plausible.
The most important thing to say is that I don’t believe for one second the men were actual terrorists. Police found no evidence of bomb making equipment in their vans. They will also have gone through phones, devices, and intelligence records."
If there was evidence of terrorism, the men would most likely have been held for up to 14 days but hey, they were released on bail.
The justice system's all gone a bit pete tong.
Other examples include:
Delete"Roger Pearce, head of the controversial counter-terrorism command from 1999 until 2003, told the ongoing ‘spycops’ inquiry that sexual relationships could be authorised as “a means of infiltrating activity involving, for example, a breach of military bases with an intention to inflict serious economic damage on, as we’ve seen recently… [an] aircraft”.
But... "it is being reported that Home secretary Shabana Mahmood is planning to severely limit or scrap the later stages of the Spycop inquiry"... thus... "the Home Office is looking to severely limit or scrap the later stages, leaving the full extent of wrongdoing by the police hidden."
Where will it all end?
Meanwhile, we await the opening of the flood gates as the New Progression approaches... what could possibly go wrong?
To the best of my knowledge, the spycop enquiry has run for 15 years and they are predicting several more years before it reports. Talk about kicking it into the long grass!
ReplyDeleteI recall one of the witnesses telling the enquiry very early on that, ‘what you have to remember is that what we (SWP) were doing was entirely legal.
I also remember a documentary series on the left many years ago (Reds, I think) in which an activist called Duncan Hallas said something to the equivalent of,’ its not like a game of cricket where when we bowl them out, they say, Ok, its your turn to bat’
When was the last time you sat in a cafe having a coffee with a punter? A lunchtime sandwich with someone on their lunch break or a home visit after 1800? If you used to do it, why don’t you do it now? If you have never done it would you consider it? When was the last time you booked yourself out of the office for the day and just went and sat with people? When was the last time you stood in court supporting the revocation of an order or requesting that a lifer had the supervision element of their licence suspended? When was the last time a former punter stopped you in the street and showed you pictures of their family now? This was not the golden age of probation, it was the age of nurturing and understanding and accepting people can change. If you do t believe that people can change, look for a new job tomorrow!
ReplyDeleteTbh a lot of practitioners do these things. Many do build good relationships. Not all are just about tagging and enforcement.
DeleteEqually a lot of practitioners have been encouraged to build a wall between them and their clients with the mantra of professionalism and the threat of overstepping the line. Friday was always coffee day for me when a couple of lifers would wait at the end of the car park for me and my colleague who supervised the other gentleman. We took them for a coffee and a cake until one day I was asked where the risk assessment was…this was a process that had been going on for years but now it was fraught with danger,apparently. This was the start, the post 1800 home visit was accompanied by a risk assessment form which had to be signed twice, so the ‘ last minute’ visit became untenable in the longer run…..the era of back covering had arrived in force and still persists……good individual practice does continue, usually under the radar with the constant threat of censure if you are ‘discovered ‘……..officers are creative but sometimes that creativity is only encouraged when it suits the machine !
ReplyDelete