Attention the Other Place!

Today is the day that the House of Lords are due to debate the Probation Service. Wouldn't it be great if one or two of them might get to read the following distilled from contributions made yesterday:-

The probation service’s crisis stems from chronic policy churn, de-professionalisation, and leadership failures, leaving the profession vulnerable both to political whim and internal inertia. Grounding this critique in official watchdog findings, structural reforms, and workforce data transforms it into a compelling, evidence-backed argument:

• Disastrous Political Reorganization: The ideological push behind the 2014 Transforming Rehabilitation agenda split the service into the National Probation Service and 21 private Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). By 2019, HM Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP) condemned the model as "irretrievably flawed," citing dangerous systemic risks and commercial failures that forced the government to renationalize delivery in 2021 at an estimated public cost of nearly £500 million.

• Dilution of Training & Identity: The transition from university-accredited social work qualifications (such as the DipPS) to accelerated vocational frameworks—notably the Professional Qualification in Probation (PQiP)—shortened foundational pedagogy to plug staffing gaps. While reducing upfront training costs, this shift dismantled probation’s identity as an autonomous, values-driven profession, absorbing practitioners into a standardised HMPPS civil service bureaucracy dominated by prison-centric metrics.

• Workforce Exhaustion and Brain Drain: HMIP annual reports repeatedly highlight unmanageable workloads, with some officers holding caseloads exceeding 130–150% of capacity. Experienced practitioners are exiting at record rates, leaving probation dominated by inexperienced staff without the institutional memory required to challenge Whitehall directives or advocate for genuine rehabilitation.

• Internal Fragmentation and Nostalgia: The workforce remains divided between legacy practitioners clinging to a mythologized pre-1990s "advise, assist, and befriend" era - which itself lacked robust empirical evidence of reconviction reduction - and newer cohorts accustomed to tick-box risk management. This division has weakened professional bodies like Napo and allowed executive roles to be filled by generalist Whitehall managers rather than reform-minded probation leaders.

Ultimately, lamenting an imagined golden age changes nothing. Reclaiming professional credibility requires probation professionals to organize around clinical autonomy, evidence-based risk assessment, and active leadership rather than passive compliance with bureaucratic mandates.

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There is something rather telling about police leaders apparently calling for a Royal Commission because reforming one part of criminal justice in isolation doesn’t work. Quite! Perhaps somebody could send that message down Whitehall.

For years we have behaved as though prisons, probation, police, courts, housing, mental health, substance misuse services and social care are separate machines which can each be “transformed”, made more “efficient” and given their own performance measures without considering what happens to the others.

• Prisons run out of space? Release people earlier.
• Earlier release increases community supervision? Probation absorbs it.
• Probation hasn’t enough capacity? Reduce the amount of activity through OFPS.
• Need additional reassurance in the community? Add electronic monitoring, restrictions and more conditions.
• More people breach conditions or are recalled? Prisons absorb them again.

And round we go. Meanwhile each individual reform can be presented as perfectly rational because somebody has drawn the boundary around that bit of the system for which they’re responsible.

HMIP's description of probation is hardly nostalgic: too few staff, too little experience, too many cases, with systemic pressures contributing to reactive and compliance-focused practice. So perhaps the question isn’t whether probation was once a “noble career”, it's whether we still understand that probation performs a function which cannot be separated from the health of the rest of the criminal justice and social system.

You can't compensate indefinitely for inadequate prisons, inaccessible mental health provision, unstable housing, court backlogs and insufficient community services by making the probation officer more “efficient”. Eventually there is nothing left to optimise except the amount of time spent with the human being. And judging by what I’m currently learning about supervision packages, home visits, remote check-ins and “released capacity”, we appear to have reached that stage.

Perhaps a Royal Commission should start with one remarkably unfashionable question - what do we actually want probation to achieve, and what resources does achieving it require? Then you design the system around the answer, rather than deciding what resources are available and continually redesigning probation until it fits.

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I don't at all disagree with your points here, that's not my intention...but "there's nothing left to optimise except time spent with the human being" is not a position I accept...it's the position we've been forced fed to believe by OFPS training and I see no evidence shown about what other attempts were made to optimise other areas of practice. 

As others have noted elsewhere, the mountain of policy dictats and unreasonable expectations, the huge amount of time filling out a so called "assessment system" which is flawed and sucks out vast amount of resource to little benefit...the huge resource that goes into targets and monitoring meaningless data and compliance...all of this left untouched. I do think there's a case to argue that too many people are sentenced to probation and it's seen as the catch all service to respond to all crimes...lower level first or second time offenders shouldn't really be getting probation supervision without justified reasons as an exception.

OFPS and the sentencing reforms have done nothing to address any of this...all left intact...and it makes me so angry.

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[This] comment has made me reconsider something. Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question when we talk about probation capacity. OFPS seems largely to ask: given the practitioner capacity we have, how do we make the work fit inside it? Hence supervision packages, fewer routine contacts, targeted home visits, remote reporting, progression and early termination. But there is another perfectly legitimate question:

Why does so much existing practitioner capacity disappear into activity which isn’t direct probation work in the first place?

Before rationing contact with people, I’d like to see a serious audit of the bureaucracy surrounding them.

• How many practitioner hours nationally are spent completing and updating assessments?
• How many recording information which exists elsewhere?
• How many satisfying performance measures and data-quality requirements?
• How many reading policy changes, completing mandatory learning, feeding dashboards, correcting administrative errors and demonstrating that something has been done rather than actually doing it?

Put a monetary value on those hours. Then tell us which activities have demonstrable value for rehabilitation or public protection and which primarily satisfy the organisation’s need for assurance. Because if OFPS can calculate that changing supervision will “release” 25% practitioner capacity, presumably somebody can calculate how much capacity the organisation itself consumes.

And the commenter raises an even more awkward question: why is probation expected to supervise such an enormous range of people in the first place? Perhaps genuinely low-risk first or second-time offenders with no identified rehabilitative need don’t require a diluted version of probation. Perhaps they require a proportionate sentence which doesn’t involve ongoing probation supervision at all. That isn’t being soft on offending. It’s asking what probation is actually for.

There is something backwards about extending community supervision as the solution to prison overcrowding and then reducing the substance of supervision because probation cannot absorb the resulting numbers. Reduce unnecessary bureaucracy. Decide who actually requires probation intervention. Resource properly the supervision of those who do.

Only after doing those things would I be persuaded that the remaining efficiency has to come from reducing human contact. Otherwise “efficiency” risks meaning something much simpler - everything surrounding the practitioner remains intact; the practitioner simply gets less time to practise.