Kind-hearted Probation?

Yet again our ace contributor 'Getafix was alert to the following article published yesterday in the Daily Telegraph. The pesky paywall makes it difficult to access, but due to its importance and 'Getafix's efforts at extracting it on his mobile, I think it's worth piecing it together here. PSR's used to be a vital part of a PO's job and their demise has been a shocking loss to the profession's usefulness.  

How Britain’s ‘kind-hearted’ probation service is letting killers go free.

Inexperienced officers with an aversion to imprisonment are fuelling a surge in serious reoffending. Is this soft system costing lives?"

Damien Bendall is one of Britain’s most dangerous prisoners. The 36-year-old is serving a “whole life” order for murdering his pregnant partner and three children. In February, he was given another life sentence for attempting to bludgeon a fellow inmate to death with a claw hammer at HMP Frankland in Durham.Given Bendall’s savage behaviour, it is almost impossible to believe that a few years ago, before his murderous spree in Derbyshire, he was classified by a probation officer as posing only a low to medium risk of reoffending – and was recommended for a non-custodial community order.

The catastrophic miscalculation of Bendall’s risk serves as a reminder of the underlying flaws within England and Wales’s probation service when it comes to public safety, and the apparent aversion to imprisonment.

A series of damning inspections has highlighted weaknesses in the advice given by probation officers to the courts when offenders are sentenced, in documents known as pre-sentence reports (PSRs). Public safety is often the greatest casualty under a probation system that is now facing acute additional pressures due to the early release from prison of thousands of offenders.

In 2024-25, a record 872 criminals under probation supervision were charged with a serious further offence (SFO), including murder, manslaughter and rape. The number of these repeat offences has climbed by an extraordinary 75 per cent in four years, adding to a sense that the service has become too soft on offenders.

Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures show that non-custodial community sentences – often involving unpaid work – are 10 times more likely to be suggested by probation officers than imprisonment in the reports they write for the courts, with 85,376 recommended in the 12 months to September 2025, accounting for 88 per cent of the total number of probation reports. Custody was proposed in 7,571 cases (eight per cent).

Tellingly, in just over half of the cases where probation staff called for community penalties, judges ignored their advice, instead imposing a jail term, a suspended sentence or a fine. MoJ statistics also show that, over the past 13 years, judges have become more likely to jail offenders when a community punishment has been proposed.

According to some barristers, the frequency with which probation staff advocate against prison sentences has made judges dismissive of their recommendations.

“Every criminal practitioner will have had cases where probation has recommended a sentence which is wholly inappropriate,” says Thom Dyke, a leading criminal barrister. “The effect of that is that the PSR effectively loses credibility with the judge. So where there may actually be useful information in a report, if the overall conclusion is hopelessly unrealistic, the judge is going to pay less attention to the contents of the report overall.”

PSRs, which are typically up to 12 pages long, contain information about an offender’s background and criminal record, as well as a risk assessment and a proposed sentence. But the quality of the reports has been a source of deep concern for many years.

In 2018, defence lawyers at Forrest Williams noted a “worrying trend of completely unrealistic pre-sentence reports in cases where immediate custody is inevitable and yet the PSR recommends a community order”. The lawyers cited one case where sentencing guidelines had suggested a “realistic and fair” prison sentence of eight to 10 years, but where the PSR had recommended a community order.

It was described by the judge as “not worth the paper it’s written on”, the firm said. Although the reports are undoubtedly “written with the best of intentions by kind-hearted people who genuinely hope the decent individuals sitting before them are given a community order... they are dangerous”, they added.

An inspection of pre-sentencing probation reports in 2024 found “considerable gaps”, with fewer than half of those examined judged to be “sufficiently analytical and personalised to the individual”. The standard of the reports has deteriorated further since then, with a grading of “inadequate” in the six areas of England and Wales that were inspected, accounting for almost half the country.

Some of the problems are believed to be due to the greater use of “fast delivery” PSRs, which take less than a week to put together. But Dyke, who is based at Deka Chambers in London, believes magistrates are also to blame for giving probation staff instructions before they write the reports that are too “vague”.

In Bendall’s case, when he was sentenced for committing arson in June 2021, a probation officer did not recommend imprisonment, even though he already had an appalling record of violence, but instead suggested he carry out unpaid work in the community, undergo treatment for an alcohol problem, and be tagged and subject to a curfew.

Three months later, Bendall murdered Terri Harris, 35, who was pregnant with his child; her son, John Bennett, 13; and her daughter, Lacey Bennett, 11, whom he raped as she lay dying. Bendall also murdered Lacey’s 11-year-old friend, Connie Gent. A review of the case said the probation service’s assessment and management of the former cage fighter were “unacceptable” and “far below what was required”.

There are few signs, however, that the lessons from the tragedy have been learnt, with fears that probation staff are still too often prepared to give offenders the benefit of the doubt.

David Ford, national chair of the Magistrates’ Association, says probation officers get it right “most of the time”, but he acknowledges that calculating the risk posed by defendants is far from an exact science. “You are taking a leap of faith with risk – it’s a real worry,” says Ford, a magistrate for 32 years.

Risk assessment has long been the Achilles heel of probation, not only at the point of sentence, but also when offenders are managed in the community. Among the most egregious cases was that of the career criminal, Jordan McSweeney, who raped and murdered 35-year-old Zara Aleena as she walked home from a night out in east London in 2022.

A review concluded that McSweeney, who had 28 previous convictions for 69 crimes, should have been categorised by probation as a high-risk offender when he was released from prison nine days before the murder. Had he been, he would have been more closely monitored by senior staff under more stringent licence conditions.

The chief inspector of probation, Martin Jones, has been so alarmed by the service’s failure to gauge risk and keep people safe from the 240,000 offenders under its supervision that he has launched a series of “dynamic” inspections to bring about improvements.

“What we see across all of our inspections is that public protection work is the lowest-rated area that we’ve assessed, and that’s driven, I think, by significant staffing deficits and the level of inexperience... the majority of staff have less than five years’ experience in the job, some only one or two,” Jones tells The Telegraph.

A probation recruitment campaign is underway, but the service is still 1,700 officers short of its target staffing figure, while most of those taken on tend to be young graduates. More than 10,000 staff are in their twenties and thirties – 46 per cent of the total.

“Quite often, it’s more experienced probation officers who spot those small warning signs that something may be going wrong in somebody’s life, and actually then act upon them, following their nose,” says Jones. “It’s the professional curiosity to say, ‘I need to pick up the telephone, talk to the probation service, talk to the police service, talk to social services about what may be going on, because my alarm bells are going off, given the history that this individual has.’ And there’s not enough of that happening at the frontline.”

The chief probation officer of England and Wales, Kim Thornden-Edwards, has said the service needs to employ more older people and those with different life experiences, and increase the number of male staff. Three-quarters of probation staff are women, despite recent attempts to recruit more male officers, including through advertisements on Sky Sports and gaming channels.

“It might be really good for a woman to be leading on a domestic abuse case, but it might also be good for a man to be challenging those kinds of issues around masculinity and power from a male perspective,” Thornden-Edwards said.

“The majority of frontline probation officers at the moment are young women... and they’re managing a complex group of men in the community, quite often much older,” says Jones. “And I think that makes part of the job challenging.”

There is no proven link between a female-dominated, largely inexperienced probation workforce and a service that underplays risk, and leans towards community-based punishments. But Jake Phillips, associate professor at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, says inexperience could make probation staff more risk-averse, as well as leading to “naivety”, which makes them less inclined to recommend prison.

However, Phillips, who edits the academic publication Probation Journal, believes there is also an ideological issue at play. For most of the 20th century, the service was regarded as a form of social work, helping criminals tackle their underlying problems. Although there was a greater emphasis on controlling and monitoring offenders after a moral panic about crime in the mid-1990s, the tendency of probation officers to favour alternatives to imprisonment still lingers to this day.

There has always been a fairly strong anti-custodial sentiment in the probation profession,” says Phillips. “Although I suspect that has shifted in the last couple of decades, it is probably still there strongly enough to dissuade some probation officers from recommending custody, or at least to make them think twice about doing so.”

Tipping Point Already Passed?

Once again we thank regular contributor 'Getafix for pointing us un the direction of this important contribution to the probation debate from Professor Mike Nellis and posted by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies:-  

Do We Want a High-Tech Future for the Probation Service?

The Independent Sentencing Review, chaired by David Gauke, was published in May 2025, and brought into the open – more or less – an alarming vision of the Probation Service’s future.

Implementation, under the rubric of ‘Plan for Change’, began apace, including, in May itself, the first roundtable discussion with the corporate tech sector about their expected contributions to justice innovation.

In June the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) announced £700m “new money” to support the Probation Service up to the 2028-29, although without any initial clarity as to how exactly it would be spent. Precise priorities had not then been set: The ‘Our Future Probation Service’ project, established in February 2025 to improve performance and reduce workloads by 25 per cent by 2027, was still working on them.

In his July McWilliam’s lecture, Lord Timpson, the Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending Minister, extolled the rehabilitative virtues of the old Probation Service, but was singularly unclear – no less that Gauke himself – as to how these would survive and thrive in a future Service focussed so explicitly on punishment and surveillance technology.

The MoJ made no official response to the Gauke Review, but published a Sentencing Bill in September 2025 to take forward what was, in effect, their joint agenda. A month afterwards the MoJ launched ‘Justice Transcribe’ into the Probation Service, a time-saving AI tool for speedily summarising and transcribing conversations with supervisees, in which massive hopes were being invested as a contribution towards resolving the crises of capacity, staffing and performance in the Service.

Keeping a close eye

The Sentencing Bill itself concentrated on more directly punitive technologies, which on the face of it contribute nothing towards resolving probation’s crises. It promised 30 per cent increase in the use of electronic monitoring (EM) – “the biggest expansion of tagging since the adoption of curfew tags in 1999”.

Numbers on EM were growing – 28,000 people were tagged at the end of 2025 – but achieving the MoJ’s target of 22,000 more (by an unspecified date) was a tall order. One contribution towards it was “a presumption that all individuals leaving custody will be electronically monitored for the period they would otherwise have been in custody... This will ensure probation can keep a close eye on thousands more individuals”.

“Keeping a close eye” was becoming a common trope in MoJ discourse on the future of the Service. Speaking of a new, four-site pilot scheme announced in September 2025, which would use remote check-in technology on offenders’ phones, and AI to confirm their identity, possibly in conjunction with GPS tracking, Lord Timpson said:

"This new pilot keeps the watchful eye of our probation officers on these offenders wherever they are, helping catapult our analogue justice system into a new digital age"

The emerging sense that the old Probation Service was being reconfigured as a punitive-surveillance agency was strongly affirmed when former Lord Chancellor Shabana Mahmood, looking back, declared her real intentions (£):

"When I was in Justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times."

Concerns over direction of travel

Over the twelve months following publication of the Gauke Review, the Probation Inspectorate (April 2025); the National Audit Office; the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee (PDF); and the House of Commons Committee on Public Accounts all published reports concerned about the state of the Probation Service and the direction of travel in which the MoJ was taking it.

The Inspectorate lamented continuing failings in leadership, staffing and services, inadequate material infrastructure (poor quality buildings) and outdated ICT systems. It noted cryptically that “there will need to be significant change to ensure sufficient capacity within the Probation Service to meet operational demand and improve the quality of services” without indicating what that change would be.

The recent HM Prison and Probation Service response (HMPPS) to the Inspectorate’s criticisms stated explicitly that the time-saving digital tools being introduced into the Service were indeed that change, the key to how capacity and quality of service was to be improved. It becomes increasingly difficult to resist the thought that the MoJ is using a human crisis in the Probation Service – one it has no interest in solving on its own terms – to accelerate its transformation into a punitive-surveillant agency.

The House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee “short enquiry” into EM was concerned with making EM a presumptive post-release measure, and – in an as yet unspecified way – “integrating” it into the Probation Service. The “blanket approach to tagging most prison leavers, regardless of crime and circumstances” troubled the Lords because it seemingly “diminishes the role of effective, targeted Probation interventions, and risks creating an unethical system that is overly punitive and disproportionate”.

Just because the MoJ had a legal justification for doing this, said the Lords, did not mean they should. EM had a place, they agreed, but it should not “become a proxy for effective probation work”, and they worried that some of the £700m notionally earmarked for probation would be spent in part on EM.

Wanting to forestall the MoJ’s perceived over-investment in EM, and restore confidence in rehabilitation, the Lords asked the MoJ to revise its most recent EM Strategy (2022), believing that any balanced and evidence-based assessment of EM and the Probation Service’s respective merits would favour the latter. The Lords were somewhat “retrotopian” here, not realising that within the new tech-driven paradigm in which policy on probation is now being taken forward, the MoJ regarded the evidence-base on which the old Probation Service’s authority had once rested, as a little passé.

The Lords’ concerns about EM were sadly not matched in their stance on AI. They did not demur when the MoJ spoke of “the potential for AI to revolutionise our approach” or of “maximising data use” to improve EM. They fell for the simple efficiency argument, that AI would lift “some of the burdens from probation practitioners’ shoulders so they can concentrate their time where it is most valuable.

They seem to have taken some cues from the Confederation of European Probation’s optimism optimism about AI tools, and accepted that any challenges they might pose for Probation would be risen to. Equally, the Lords may have been seeking a trade-off: go for AI, step back on EM.

The Committee for Public Accounts were more sanguine. Echoing the National Audit Office, which had mostly concentrated on the high-risk tech strategy which ‘Our Future Probation Service’ was pursuing, it too was unconvinced that reckless investment in digitalisation was adequate to resolving the staffing and standards challenges facing the Service.

They feared that the pace at which the HMPPS was planning to introduce them could be counterproductive, and was highly likely to “disrupt services, contribute to poor outcomes and staff stress... the short time-frame carries a high level of risk and the MoJ does not have a strong history of implementing digital change programmes well”.

Tipping point

The four post-Gauke reports on the multiple crises facing the Probation Service – and the way those crises are being used by the MoJ to drive fundamental changes in its character and ethos – have yet to be properly synthesised and discussed. There is as yet no organised resistance to the move towards a punitive-surveillant agency, which is not helped by a clear statement from the MoJ on how far it actually wants it to go.

Reassuring talk about only using AI for efficiency measures like transcription is misleading: even Gauke expected it to go further, writing of using “advanced AI” and expecting this to encompass “AI agents” for planning supervision schedules and, possibly, chatbot-driven dialogue with supervisees. The MoJ’s tight relation with the tech industry – particularly its own contract with OpenAI – bodes ill in this respect. It is in the nature of the AI industry to promote continuous innovation, and to hook users with the self-deprecating guarantee that ‘this is the worst AI you will ever have’.

A tipping point may already have been passed, such that resistance to AI-driven public services is already impossible. The emerging ‘digital rehabilitation and desistance’ movement offers slender hope, because while it is expressly not aligned with a punitive-surveillance agenda, it presupposes that digitalisation will be constrained by the culture and values of the ‘old’ Probation Service, and go so far and no further than these values allow.

Quite apart from the manifest threat to these values, a culture of continuous AI innovation makes ‘so far and no further’ a rather pious hope.

Mike Nellis

A Plea

Although probation still lacks a convincing champion, might it come from the voluntary sector? I notice this powerful plea from former PO Kelly Grehan at the Revolving Door charity:- 

The Probation Service’s culture needs to change if we want it to work

In my 2001 interview to become a trainee probation officer I was asked what part of the job I was most interested in. Without hesitation, I said I was attracted to the role by the promise of being able to help people with their rehabilitation.

Over the next 19 years I spent in the Probation Service, under its many politically-led guises, it sometimes felt that rehabilitation was no longer a key part of its ethos.

We began our training by learning how probation officers originated as police court missionaries in the early 1900s, working under the motto ‘Advise, Assist and Befriend’. Over time, this had resulted in the formation of the official Probation Service.

Fast forward and by the beginning of the 21st century probation was in a strange place. A loss of faith in the service after the ‘nothing works’ era had led to social work being replaced as the route to becoming a probation officer with a new standalone qualification and probation officers being trained in-house. In an effort to show probation was a ‘tough’ option, Probation Orders were rebranded as Community Rehabilitation Orders and community service became known as Community Punishment Orders. Combined Orders were briefly known as Community Rehabilitation and Punishment Order before panic about the acronym of CRAPO saw it abandoned.

Eithne Wallis, the first Director of Probation set out its aim as being: protecting the public, reducing re-offending, proper punishment of offenders in the community and ensuring offenders’ awareness of the consequences of their behaviour.

At the same time Probation was being reshaped by government to focus on risk assessment, public protection, punishment, and law enforcement.

The word ‘rehabilitation’ seemed to be being erased. Still, we carried on with the (proven) notion that the relationship between a Probation Officer and the person they supervised (at this time called ‘the offender’ because ‘client’ was deemed too soft), could be transformative.

In 2004, after the horrific murder of John Moncton and the conviction of Hanson and White drew negative headlines about the faults in the Probation Service’s management. With hindsight this was the beginning of what can now be seen as ‘defensive probation practice which was solidified by the conviction of Danno Sonnex in 2009 for the murders of two men.

With the Probation Service generally only coming to the attention of those supervised by it, most people had only these two awful cases to base their view of the Probation Service upon.

I recall a new feel of panic that – should anyone you supervised go on to commit an awful crime you should not expect any defence from the organisation. Serious Further Offence (SFO) Reviews would be conducted. These were never seen by Probation Officers as being about learning – but were solely about allocating blame. In the worst cases Probation staff might expect their name, address and photo to appear in the newspaper. For a while ‘enforcement, enforcement, enforcement’ was a mantra told to staff and used to govern all probation practice.

It is in this context that recall has gone from there being 3,182in the year 2000/1 to 12,836 people recalled to prison in the three-month period between July and September 2025. Only 23% of recalls concern new offences.

Probation Officers have very strange jobs. On one hand they are expected to build a relationship with those they supervise which acts as a vehicle for that persons change, and at the same time are responsible for breaching and recalling that person when things go wrong. Managing this relationship is a skill, that should not be underestimated.

Then in the 2010s, Chris Grayling’s disastrous Transformative Rehabilitation project split the service in two with high-risk cases supervised by the new state run NPS and other cases supervised by commercial companies known as CRCs (Community Rehabilitation Companies). The problems that followed and led to the two service types being re-amalgamated are well documented. But the damage done was deep and since then only one inspection report has not deemed a local area to be in inadequate or requires improvement.

By the time I left in 2020, the Probation Service was a shadow of its former self.

Today reports continually point to a broken service with high caseloads, high staff turnover and high staff sickness and where staff spend little time with those they supervise and where risk aversion affects all decisions.

So – with the Sentencing Act now in place and many of the changes likely to impact Probation as attempts are made to keep prison numbers down – the time has surely come to decide what the purpose of a modern Probation Service is and what the culture of the organisation should be.

The Probation webpage described the service priorities as being ‘to protect the public by the effective rehabilitation of offenders, by reducing the causes which contribute to offending and enabling offenders to turn their lives around.’

Risk assessment and risk management are important, no one disputes that. But too often Probation practice is defensive – about providing a paper trail that would protect the Service in the event of something bad happening.

Rather than spending time with those they supervise, all too often Officers spend 10 minutes in the room with someone and then hours upon hours writing assessments about them. It’s hardly surprising, in the face of such unsatisfying work the Probation Service has a staff retention problem. Like me – people join to be rehabilitators – not to be dealing with endless forms and assessments.

Recently one of our members told me how he felt he had made a real connection with his new Officer and told her about the trauma that has led to his offending. He came in the next week looking forward to another good session. He was aghast when she began by asking him to remind her of his name. It’s not surprising, with caseloads so high that Probation staff are not able to remember all those they see. But we cannot expect people being supervised to be committing to sessions when this is the situation.

Probation is basically in a doom loop. Staff are miserable. Those on supervision wonder what the point of it is. The culture needs a reset. So, here are my top tips on what needs to happen to reset the culture in the Probation Service.

1. Smaller caseloads (yes, really)
Everyone in Probation knows this one, and everyone also knows how hard it is to achieve. But it’s impossible to talk honestly about culture without talking about caseloads. When officers are carrying too many cases, everything becomes rushed, reactive and defensive. The job turns into ticking boxes rather than working with people. Smaller caseloads would mean better risk management, better relationships, and better outcomes. It would also mean fewer people burning out, going off sick or leaving altogether – which is far more expensive in the long run than fixing the problem properly.

2. Tiny caseloads for trainee officers
Trainees should be learning how to do probation well, not just how to survive it. Giving new officers large caseloads early on almost guarantees stress, anxiety and bad habits. Smaller, protected caseloads would give trainees time to observe experienced staff, reflect on their work and actually develop professional judgement. If we want officers who stick around and feel confident in their role, we must stop treating trainees as a quick fix for staff shortages.

3. SFO reviews need to be about learning, not blame
At the moment, Serious Further Offence reviews are widely seen as something to fear. That’s a problem. When people feel exposed or scapegoated, they practise defensively – over-recording, over-restricting and avoiding professional judgement. That doesn’t protect the public. SFOs should be about understanding what really happened, including system pressures like time, caseloads and resources, and using that learning to improve practice. Until staff feel genuinely protected, honesty and learning just won’t happen.

4. Bring back full Pre-Sentence Reports – written by the supervising officer
Full PSRs should be the norm again, not a luxury. And they should be written by the person who will actually supervise the order. It’s one of the best ways to start a working relationship properly, make sure people are on the right order, and assess risk in a meaningful way. No tool or short report comes close to the depth and understanding that a well-written PSR provides. Losing this has damaged both practice and probation’s voice in court.

5. Talk about what goes well
Probation almost never shouts about its successes. Internally, staff mostly hear about failures and risks. Externally, the public rarely hears about the people who stop offending, rebuild their lives, or the officers who help make that happen. Good practice happens every day – it just doesn’t get noticed. Celebrating it would boost morale, strengthen professional identity and help change the narrative about what probation actually does.

6. Value the time spent in the room
Change doesn’t happen in databases or audits – it happens in conversations. Time spent face-to-face with the person being supervised is the heart of probation work, yet it often feels like the least valued part of the job. If the service genuinely valued that time, it would protect it, reduce unnecessary admin, and trust officers to use their judgement. Relationships are not a “soft” extra – they are central to public protection.

7. Make ‘rehabilitation, rehabilitation, rehabilitation’ the motto of the Probation Service
Probation needs to be clear about what it is for. Public protection matters – but rehabilitation is how you achieve it. Rehabilitation should not be treated as a hopeful add-on or something you get to do if there’s time. It should be the core purpose that everything else flows from: how caseloads are designed, how success is measured, how staff are trained, and how practice is judged. When rehabilitation is genuinely prioritised, probation becomes less about managing failure and more about supporting desistance – which ultimately makes communities safer.

Kelly Grehan is Policy Manager at Revolving Doors. She previously worked as a Probation Officer for 19 years, until 2020.

At Revolving Doors, we believe a better Probation Service will come from combining lived and learned experience. People with direct experience of the system bring insight into what works in practice; professionals bring evidence and structural understanding. Keeping co-production at the heart of reform ensures services are designed with people, not for them.

We urge policymakers, practitioners and partners to commit to meaningful co-production in probation reform to ensure it is meaningful, sustainable and works for those in the system.

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.    

MoJ Undermine Rehabilitation

As I continue to ponder on my own despair regarding current criminal justice policy, I see InsideTime are in despair at latest decisions by the MoJ in the prison estate that astonishigly undermine rehabilitation programmes:-  

The MoJ: Look on their works and despair

I want to start with a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1818. It is entitled ‘Ozymandias’ and describes a large stone in the Egyptian desert bearing an inscription from the great king Rameses II. It says “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair”. It was Rameses intention that the city with magnificent buildings and monuments on which it was placed would last forever, and that all those passing by would be jealous of his fame. Yet this stone was just lying on the floor amongst ruins, the city having been worn down and destroyed by the baking sun and the sandstorms. Nothing remained.

I thought of that because there were great works within the prison system that are now lying in ruins, not because of sandstorms but because of the action of the Ministry of Justice’s own team of investigators, the National Framework for Interventions Panel. They did not take 2,000 years to tear down the structures, just a couple of days of sitting in an office, putting ticks and crosses into little boxes on a sheet of paper during a Teams meeting, and then pulling the plug and stopping hundreds of those in prison from having the chance to improve and progress. So here is why I despair.

Hard to believe

The Ministry of Justice have informed Inside Time that the highly praised rehabilitation course Time4Change that has run in Pentonville since 2019 has been scrapped. They tell us that it “does not meet the evidence standards required for approval” as an “intervention designed to reduce reoffending”. These are the same standards that led to the cancellation of the Sycamore Tree Restorative Justice scheme without any replacement being provided, a decision that was much-criticised by contributors to this paper.

The Ministry of Justice told us their “system provides a consistent and transparent process” to assess such schemes. We asked, as it was transparent, if we could interview someone who undertook this particular study and receive a copy of their points based assessment process to find out how they reached the decision but, despite the ‘transparency’, they refused to arrange an interview and told us to apply under Freedom of Information for the marks. That is not my understanding of transparency at all.

Time4Change was commended by Charlie Taylor, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, when he issued an Urgent Notification for Pentonville in 2024. He called it “valuable” and praised the “experience and ability of the facilitators with this hard to engage age group of men”. In September 2024, Lord Hastings raised the scheme with Prisons Minister Lord Timpson in the House of Lords telling him: “I am attending a graduation for 100 young men in Pentonville along with men who have been through the Time4Change course and moved on to positive lives.” Lord Timpson responded: “I am always pleased to know of schemes like this that succeed in this all important task.”

A source close to the course told us that the assessors said that they wanted changes in the key role of psychologists which the course team feel would undermine the programme, and they would not run a third-rate version. It is in limbo unless the MoJ review their decision.

A modern history

The scheme was created in 2016 when a group of the men talked to CM Ricardo Lafuente-Dyer about how lockdowns could be avoided. It was arranged for Rapper Big Narstie to come in for a large gathering in the prison, and following that a series of one-off events was staged. CM Dyer then developed the concept with more activities.

In 2019 the first Time4Change course was run, for young adults, with debates, counselling, conversations about consent, knives, parenthood, and more. It was run by officers with specialist support, and changed the atmosphere on the wings. During COVID this was the only course that continued with face-to-face sessions, as it was considered essential. Funds were provided through charities approached by the Revd Jonathan Aitken, one of the prison’s chaplains, and also from the prison Governor’s discretionary budget. Courses ended with a graduation ceremony, with speakers with lived and life experience. Previous graduates came and acted as mentors.

Key staff were CM Lafuente-Dyer, officers Green and McCracken, and Jason Brown. CM Lafuente-Dyer was awarded the Butler Trust award for his work with young adults and in creating Time4Change, whilst officers Green and McCracken have just received community awards for their success in changing lives and making society safer. The MoJ says Time4Change does not meet its standards, but will not explain how they reached that view which is clearly not shared by others.

Because the MoJ assessors do not visit prisons – they “are too busy”, and just do a paper exercise – they did not meet anyone who had been through the course. They did not see Godfrey Poku, whose attendance in Time4Change turned his life around. He now teaches in a primary school, stopping children drifting into crime. The assessors also failed to meet the headteacher who gave Godfrey the post, and who attends the graduations. Godfrey says: “I cannot believe this is happening.” Mr Aitken told us: “I am astonished and appalled at this truly bad decision by the MoJ umpires.” He has seen every course and every participant.

The assessors did not talk with the other officers in the prison, who tell me whenever I visit that schemes such as Time4Change are exactly the sort of thing they joined the prison service to run. They did not meet the motivational speakers who join the graduation ceremonies to share their life experiences, many of whom spent time in prison and have moved on to either great success, or to leading happy and healthy lives outside.

They did not meet the families who attend the graduation. They did not speak with Nur, a young woman who was standing outside Pentonville looking lost at one graduation and who told me her brother was graduating. She said he had been excluded from school, got caught up in crime, was arrested with a knife, and sent to prison. Her parents were ashamed of him, but she knew how proud he was of taking Time4Change, and how proud she was of him. She has kept in touch. He now works for Transport for London as a Customer Assistant and is going to college. I told her of this decision. She says she will pray during Ramadan that this decision is overturned, and for those who will miss out on the chances her brother was given, and then accepted, to get a future.

They did not meet the father of the young man who played a classical improvisation on his violin and received a standing ovation from the 18-25-year-old men, or the mother who cried when her son performed a rap starting “I wish I had listened to my mum.” I cried too, as did everyone there. If they had met the families who come along, with children, they would have understood that this is an important part of the course as it reminds those in jail what they are missing and what they can go back to.

They would have seen the mutual respect and appreciation of those members of what Mr Taylor says is a “hard to involve group” and understood that this course not only impacts on the future lives of the graduates, but actually makes a difference to day to day life on the various prison wings, as people on the course mix together regardless of their previous postcodes and backgrounds. But they don’t visit. It is a paper exercise. And they will not talk about it with us.

If it was me

I love the Winter Olympics. If I were asked to judge the Ice Dance competition I would jump at the chance, even though I know nothing about it. But I would go and watch, not just stare at sheets of paper, and if my scores were different from those given by experts such as Torvill and Dean, I would question my judgement. Perhaps I gave too many points because it is so slippery out there.

Here, however, the judgements were made with absolute certainty. And regardless of what people like Charlie Taylor, who knows quite a bit about prisons, and Lord Hastings, who knows about rehabilitation, and Lord Timpson, who has it in his job description, think. Also they ignore what the students did, and how it impacts on the prison. I do not blame those who carried this out, but think they could explain. I blame the ridiculous system.

Look at Sycamore Tree. Its Restorative Justice sessions ran for 25 years around the country, so it would not have been hard for any assessors to get to one near them. The sessions featured victims of serious crime talking directly to those in prison about how crime has wider implications than just losing a few quid to a thief, or having stuff stolen from your home. One such victim, whose brother was beaten up by a gang and thrown into a pond where he drowned, told me that he felt his brother was with him when he walked into prisons, and that Sycamore Tree being scrapped killed his brother again. He knew he was steering people away from crime. I would not sleep if I was responsible for his renewed sorrow.

There is a long list of people who changed completely after Sycamore Tree, and dedicate their lives to stopping others from getting involved in criminality. That is not happening now as there was nothing better to replace it, thanks entirely to this exercise. It is clearly bringing down great schemes. That is the work of the Ministry of Justice, and I despair. And yet nobody will come forward and explain why it is a good thing.

You cannot assess anything properly on paper, you have to look at it to understand it. It is an academic exercise but it is all about people’s lives, futures, and chances in life. They should not be subject to a superficial analysis like some sort of cheap TV game show. I am sure those doing this work mean well, but this has to stop before other schemes are destroyed.

Final thoughts

Two last points, the first of which is a hope and expectation. I know CM Lafuente-Dyer will not run a third rate version of Time4Change, as it would betray the young men. However, I am certain he will want to produce something new that will meet their aspirations, as he did back in 2016. I know those who have been through the scheme, and the inspirational speakers who attended graduations, will help him. So something will come from this, and I trust the sad, dead, hand of the Intervention policy does not try and crush that.

The second is this. Perhaps this is not the story of Ozymandias with the crumbled stones. Perhaps this is the story written by Percy’s famous wife, Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. A side issue here; she finished that notorious tale in a house in Marlow in Buckinghamshire which still stands though it is now a number of small cottages. Years ago a friend of mine owned one of those properties, and so I spent a number of nights sleeping in the room in which Mary Shelley completed her horror story. That is of no importance at all, but I like to remember it once in a while.

Anyway, apologies for that pointless digression and back to Frankenstein. The doctor was an academic who put together a plan to create a living creature from various parts, but instead made a monster that went around destroying life and hope with wanton abandon. In the end, people got together with pitchforks and burning torches and drove both Frankenstein and his creation away. They vanished, never to be seen again.

Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, that could happen here. If enough people are angry over this academically-invented monstrosity of a scheme, administered by the National Framework for Interventions Panel, then they could make a fuss with metaphorical pitchforks and metaphorical burning torches. If anyone has a metaphorical pitchfork, I could provide some metaphorical matches. This monster must not harm any more lives.

--oo00oo--

As an aside and given the astonishing Green Party victory in Thursday's Gorton and Denton by-election, AI reminds us of their criminal justice policies:-

The Green Party criminal justice policy focuses on rehabilitation, crime prevention, and reducing the prison population through a "justice reinvestment" approach. Key proposals include a presumption against custodial sentences under two years, investing heavily in probation services, ending routine stop and search, and legalising or decriminalising drugs to treat addiction as a public health issue.

Key Criminal Justice Policies:

Prison Reform & Alternatives: Proposes a presumption against prison sentences of under two years, favoring community-based rehabilitation, especially for women and young people.

Sentencing & Courts: Advocates for a £2.5bn investment to repair the "crumbling" court system and reduce case backlogs.

Drugs Policy: Supports the decriminalisation of personal drug possession, focusing on harm reduction programmes, with leadership discussing the legalisation of all drugs.

Policing & Rights: Seeks to repeal the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and the Public Order Act, which they argue restrict the right to protest.

Stop & Search: Calls for an end to routine stop and search and the use of facial recognition, citing disproportionate impact on Black and minority communities.

Victim Support: Promotes restorative justice to give victims a greater voice and help offenders take responsibility.

The Greens argue that many crimes are driven by poverty and austerity, advocating for investment in social services rather than building more prisons.

Leadership Death Spiral

As I continue pondering what to do about this blog and take enormous heart from the many recent reader contributions, it's situation normal as far as HMI Probation is concerned with the usual "strong leadership", but "delivery of work not meeting required standards". 

There are "significant shortfalls" in the West Midlands probation service, inspectors have found.

HM Inspectorate of Probation undertook a review of public protection measures across the region, inspecting 84 cases.

Martin Jones, chief inspector of probation, said: "Despite strong leadership commitment and clear strategic priorities to improve public protection, the delivery of work to keep people safe was not yet meeting the required standard. Staff understood its importance however, worryingly, this was not reflected consistently in the quality of assessment, planning, and delivery."

A report by the inspectorate said its findings revealed significant shortfalls in practice across the region, with effective work to keep people safe being evident in 49% of the assignments inspected. Of the cases they inspected, most involved white men, aged 36-55, with violence and sexual offending the most frequent offence types, with concerns about domestic abuse and risk to children also prevalent across the sample.

According to the inspectorate, child safeguarding practice in the service was found to be "underdeveloped and an area for urgent attention". However, inspectors found that domestic abuse information sharing had improved as a result of joint efforts by probation and police leaders.

'Systemic barriers'

The report added that managers were not consistently identifying practice deficits and opportunities to protect the public were missed.

Recruitment was also hampered by excessive vetting delays, while pay and workloads were frequently cited as retention concerns. While staffing challenges were less acute than in other areas of the country, resourcing was found to have remained a challenge for rural areas in the region such as Herefordshire, which had acute recruitment difficulties and resulted in high workloads.

Jones said: "Systemic barriers, including resourcing, organisational complexity and insufficient multi-agency communication remained significant challenges for the West Midlands region to overcome. Strengthening the skills and improving the confidence of practitioners will be essential in ensuring the region can consistently meet its public protection responsibilities."

The report made seven recommendations, with four for the West Midlands region, including to develop practitioners' confidence and skills in the use of professional curiosity, and using challenging conversations to identify and respond to indicators of risk effectively.

There are a further three recommendations for the HM Prison and Probation Service, including to develop a national strategic approach to information sharing with police and children's services.

--oo00oo--

What does AI make of this intractable paradox?

Reconciling "strong leadership" with "poor delivery" requires recognizing that a leader can be charismatic, visionary, and authoritative (strong) while lacking the operational, supportive, or strategic skills needed for successful execution (poor delivery). This paradox is frequently caused by a misalignment between high-level ambition and ground-level execution, often leading to a "leadership death spiral" where increased efforts by the leader actually hinder performance.

Here is how this misalignment can be reconciled and addressed within an organization:

1. Identifying the Root Causes

"Ideation Infatuation" vs. Follow-Through: The leader excels at dreaming up new ideas but lacks the discipline to execute them, moving on to the next "flavor of the month" before the first is completed.

Micromanagement: Strong, controlling leaders may feel they need to handle everything themselves. This stifles team autonomy, creates bottlenecks, and limits organizational growth.

Lack of Psychological Safety: Strong, dominant leaders can create a fear-based culture where employees are afraid to report mistakes or voice concerns, leading to hidden failures.

"Cement Mindset": The leader believes they know everything and stops seeking growth, training, or feedback, while ignoring the operational realities of their team.

Disproportionate Focus on Strategy over Execution: The leader focuses on high-level vision but fails to provide the "execution-level" detail needed by their teams.

2. Reconciliation Strategies

Bridge the Gap with "Operational" Leadership: Pair the visionary, strong leader with a "doer" (e.g., COO, Project Manager) who excels at implementation, structure, and accountability.

Shift from "Push" to "Pull" Leadership: Instead of pushing for results through micromanagement, the leader should focus on creating a "pull" environment—inspiring and motivating teams by fostering a, vision-aligned culture.

Implement 360-Degree Feedback: Utilize 360-degree feedback to bring awareness to the leader about how their strong, dominant behaviors are limiting, rather than enabling, team performance.

Formalize Accountability Structures: Reconcile the gap by setting clear, measurable goals and holding regular, structured check-ins that focus on "lead indicators" (progress) rather than just "lag measures" (final results).

Encourage "Respectful Dissent": Foster a culture where team members can safely challenge the leader's decisions, preventing costly mistakes.

3. Structural & Cultural Changes

Redefine "Strong": Shift the definition of strong leadership from simply being "commanding" to being "supportive and empowering".

Focus on Development: Provide coaching to help the leader transition from a "doer" to a "multiplier" who empowers others to deliver.

Align Incentives with Delivery: Ensure that the leader's incentives are tied to successful delivery, not just the articulation of a vision.

In summary, this scenario is reconciled by recognizing that "strong leadership" is often just "passionate direction," and it must be coupled with "systemic discipline" to deliver results. If the leader is unwilling to change, they may need to be moved to a role more suited to their skills, or "forced" to adopt better operational habits.

--oo00oo--

A leadership death spiral is a self-perpetuating, downward cycle of declining performance, morale, and trust caused by poor management decisions like micromanagement, lack of strategy, and poor communication. It often starts when leaders, feeling overwhelmed, try to do too much, resulting in chaos, high staff turnover, and, ultimately, failure.

Key Stages and Causes of the Leadership Death Spiral

Initial Overwhelm & Mismanagement: The cycle often begins with new or stressed managers trying to "do it all," leading to broken processes, lack of prioritization, and micromanagement.

Loss of Trust and Credibility: Leaders stop acting as mentors and focus on theory rather than practice, creating a disconnect with their team.

"Half-Delegation" Trap: Leaders assign tasks but fail to provide necessary context or authority, leading to inevitable failure and frustration.

Cultural Decay: A "blame culture" emerges, where negative feedback becomes self-perpetuating, resulting in low morale and disengagement.

The "Firefighting" Mode: Instead of fixing root causes, leaders focus on desperate, short-term fixes, which causes further, deeper, dysfunction.

How to Break the Cycle

Prioritize Ruthlessly: Stop trying to fix everything at once and focus on core, high-impact tasks.

True Delegation: Empower employees by providing them with both tasks and the context required to succeed.

Focus on Communication and Empathy: Actively listen to the team and rebuild trust by being consistent and transparent.

Address Root Causes: Shift from "firefighting" to addressing the underlying issues, rather than just treating symptoms.

Letter From a Vanished Profession

To whoever now performs the functions once known as probation,

We are writing from what you would probably describe as an earlier model - back when this work was considered a profession rather than a process.

We were trained to exercise judgement, not simply to apply guidance. We were expected to challenge decisions, including those made above us, if we believed risk or fairness required it. Disagreement was not automatically treated as non-compliance. It was part of the craft.

That word 'craft' may sound strange to you. It implied something learned slowly, through experience, supervision, mistakes, and reflection. It could not be downloaded, standardised or accelerated without loss.

Much of the work happened in conversations that were not scripted and outcomes that could not be guaranteed. Change, when it came, was uneven, fragile and often invisible to anyone not directly involved. That was understood. It was still considered worthwhile.

You may have inherited a system that prioritises consistency, auditability and risk transfer. We recognise the logic. Systems prefer certainty, and human judgement is inconveniently unpredictable.

What disappears, however, is the relational core that made probation distinct from surveillance. Once the relationship becomes secondary, the role changes even if the title does not.

We watched this transition happen gradually. New language appeared first. Then new metrics. Then new technologies. None of them individually abolished the profession. Together, they reshaped it until something recognisable only in outline remained.

The public narrative suggested modernisation. Internally, it often felt like subtraction.

Experienced practitioners left faster than they could be replaced. Those who arrived later were expected to perform complex work without the apprenticeship that once sustained it. The system called this resilience. We recognised it as exposure.

If you now work in an environment where discretion feels risky, where time for reflection is scarce, and where success is measured primarily by compliance rather than change, please understand this was not the original design.

Probation once assumed that people desist from crime through human connection, accountability, and the slow rebuilding of ordinary lives. It was imperfect, inconsistent and sometimes frustratingly slow. It was also profoundly human.

We are told progress required something more efficient.

Perhaps it did.

But efficiency answers a different question from rehabilitation.

If you find yourself wondering why morale is fragile, why turnover is high, or why the work feels heavy in ways not captured by workload tools, it may be because you are carrying responsibilities shaped by a profession that no longer exists, without the authority or conditions that once made those responsibilities sustainable.

Should you encounter references to “advise, assist and befriend,” or to probation as a service grounded in social work values, treat them not as myths but as artefacts. They belonged to a period when public protection was understood to depend on relationships as much as controls.

No formal announcement marked the end. There was no closure notice, no ceremony, no final day. The profession dissolved through incremental change while everyone was busy managing the consequences.

If this message reaches you at all, it is because someone believed a record should survive, not of policies or structures, but of what the work once felt like from the inside.

Whether that matters to you will depend on what the job has become.

We hope you have more room to be human than we did at the end. If not, then probation did not evolve it was replaced.

Signed,
A probation officer from before

Future of Blog

Jim,

I can understand the weariness in that conclusion. After years of writing, arguing, documenting and warning, there must be a temptation to step back and say: “What’s the point?” If the prevailing mood — as aired on Free Thinking — is that the public and politicians want revenge, then perhaps the honest response is simply to accept it and move on. But from where I sit — retired, yes, but still profoundly attached to what probation once meant — I don’t believe it is quite that simple.

It is certainly true that political rhetoric increasingly trades in punishment. “Toughness” wins headlines. Nuance rarely does. Yet in over four decades of practice, I never found the public to be a monolith baying for vengeance. I found fear, yes. Anger, certainly. But also confusion, contradiction and — when given the space — a surprising appetite for prevention over spectacle. The appetite for revenge is often amplified; the appetite for effectiveness is simply quieter.

What troubles me more is not that politicians talk tough — they always have — but that we in probation risk internalising that narrative and conceding the ground. If we say, “All anyone wants is revenge,” then we effectively declare the rehabilitative project obsolete. And that feels less like realism and more like surrender.

Your blog has not been shouting into the void. It has been documenting — patiently, persistently — the slow re-engineering of a service away from relational work and towards managerialism and surveillance. It has provided testimony. And testimony matters, particularly when institutions are being reshaped in ways that future generations will struggle to understand without a record.

If you wind it up, I would understand. No one is obliged to carry the burden of bearing witness indefinitely. But I would gently suggest this: the moment when it feels most futile is often the moment when the record becomes most important. Revenge may be fashionable. It may even be electorally useful. But probation was never meant to be fashionable. It was meant to be principled.

If those of us who still believe in that principle fall silent, then the narrative really does become “End of story.” And I, for one, am not yet ready to concede that the story of probation — real probation — is over. And by the way, you deserve a medal for your work on this blog overall the years!

*******
Hi Jim 

I think it is time to call it a day. Probation as we knew it no longer exists. Once you accept that it is a relief. An old friend fondly remembered has died. You have mourned. Let it go and move on. You did your bit. When HMPPS want advice and inspiration they head to Texas the workforce has no voice. AI is very much in ascendancy with the aim of replacing Probation professionals with call centres and Tags. Is Probation even fit to call itself a profession- where is the independent professional association? Those who manage AI are the new bosses with all the power and the money. Who are they even and all others like the laughably named Chief Probation Officer are all froth, frills, and window gazers. How is this blog even relevant. It is wailing in the wilderness. We will all be slaves to the machine with everything we say and do will be recorded and scrutinised and scripted by the machine. We are living the Orwellian dream.

Unions watch in bewilderment as the white heat of AI tools  march on crushing them and drowning their feint cries in the relentless onward surge. At best we will have some oversight as rubber stampers. I would wrap it up now and admit defeat. Defiance was admirable but in the words of the late great Douglas Adam’s ‘We’ll see who rusts first!!!’ but then the Vogons destroyed the world and nothing much else mattered from that moment. It was good while it lasted. So long and thanks for the blog.

*******
"probation was never meant to be fashionable. It was meant to be principled."

There are too few people left in the world who understand those words, the work they do & the weight they carry. This blog took a principled stance. It has been a cheerleader for commentary on the realities of probation work, the positives and negatives, and it has always delivered; having been managed with considerable skill & judgement whilst retaining the option of allowing contributors to post anonymously. Relatively few have abused that privilege, save for a handful of disruptive posts.

Was I hallucinating or do I recall some way back that Jim announced the blog was being saved as a contemporaneous record of the probation story?

For what its worth, given the mindless vandalism being dished out by politicians & civil servants, I think now is as important a time as any - maybe more so - to keep the running reports on record. Then the eyes of the future can understand that not everyone was in thrall to the liars & bullies & greedmongers... some of us are fucking furious at the disgraceful, shameless, amoral shitshow.

*******
Jim, don’t wind the blog up, this is a safe space for discussion and getting rid of the frustrations of working for buffoons. The current Our Future Probation Service 2026 update just highlights how the work has and will change. Courts will no longer gate keep PSR’s all will be FDR’s , no layer 3 OAsys, reduces the input and knowledge base which means you can get Band 4 staff back into operations. Justice transcribe means that you can have a queue of punters and just roll them in and record the conversations, so no need for QDO’s they can get back into the operational roles as well. It is pointless releasing prisoners they just get recalled so let’s get all the POMs back into operations and save money from additional pay. Get all Band 4 qualified operational staff on the same pay banding if you’re not a qualified probation officer you don’t need band 4 pay or put all band 4 probation officers up to band 5 like NSD.

Do you see where we are going? The management have been divisive in splitting probation into groups playing staff off against each other, promoting non-qualified operational staff into higher pay bands , promoting more SPO’s and PDU Deputies forcing larger caseloads on already overworked staff, forcing an increased stress, sickness absence and resignation of those experienced staff close to pension maximum and leaving a group of newly qualified staff to take the hits with SFO’s etc. AI is here, it is 1984 come to fruition, Animal Farm is the management model and I am off to buy a De Lorean.

*******
Jim,

I’ve been reading your blog a long time and I can understand why you are thinking it might be time to wind the blog up – but I really hope you don’t. Whatever else has changed, this space has become something far more important than commentary. It’s a record. A living archive. A witness statement. Probation as many of us knew it has, for all practical purposes, been dismantled, reshaped, centralised, rebranded and bureaucratised beyond recognition. Structures have come and gone but what this blog has done – patiently, stubbornly, week after week – is document it as it happened. And that matters. Because memory is fragile. Institutional memory even more so. The official version of events will always tidy things up. It will speak of “modernisation”, “improvement”, “alignment”, “public protection outcomes”. It will rarely speak of what it felt like on the ground: the loss of professional discretion, the hollowing out of relationships, the quiet exodus of experience. This blog does.

If it disappears, a primary source disappears with it. Future researchers, practitioners, historians – even policymakers with a conscience – will have one less window into what really happened during these years of fragmentation and centralisation. Penal policy has long been vulnerable to populism. But that’s precisely why spaces like this remain necessary. When the public mood hardens, when nuance gets drowned out, when complexity is inconvenient – someone still has to say: this is what probation was for. This is what it did well. This is how it was undone. And crucially – this blog has never shied away from an uncomfortable truth: that what happened to probation cannot be laid entirely at the feet of politicians or civil servants.

Yes, there were catastrophic structural decisions imposed from above. Yes, ideological experiments caused damage. But the profession itself was not blameless. There were times when practitioners disengaged from leadership. Times when we failed to articulate our value clearly enough. Times when managerialism was tolerated in the hope it might pass. Times when professional confidence ebbed and collective voice weakened. Acknowledging that isn’t self-flagellation. It’s honesty. And honesty is the foundation of any meaningful record.

The strength of this blog has always been that it allows complexity. It holds anger and affection in the same space. It publishes dissent. It captures disagreement. That in itself reflects the best traditions of probation: reflective, critical, rooted in evidence and experience. Even if probation never returns to what it once was, the story of how it changed deserves to remain accessible. Not as nostalgia, but as evidence.

And there is another reason to continue: morale. For those still inside the system – often feeling isolated, unheard, or professionally diminished – knowing that there is a space where their experience is acknowledged has real value. It reminds them that what they remember wasn’t imagined. That standards once existed. That principles mattered.

You may feel the tide has turned irrevocably. Perhaps it has. Recording what has been lost is not futile; it is an act of professional integrity. If all the public and politicians want is revenge, then it becomes even more important that someone keeps writing about rehabilitation, proportionality, and the human realities behind risk labels. The blog has become part of the historical record of probation’s transformation. To close it now would be understandable. But to continue it would be quietly defiant – and profoundly useful.

*******
Jim,

I think the previous comment captures something fundamental about what this blog has become. It is no longer simply commentary. It is, as they say, a record — and not just of policy decisions, but of mood, morale, dissent, disillusionment, stubborn hope and professional memory. That matters. It really does. But I also think there’s something important to say that perhaps doesn’t get said enough: you have carried this thing for a very long time. Through restructures, privatisation, reunification, centralisation, endless “operating models”, shifting ministers, and more than one cycle of collective despair — you kept it going. Through thick and thin. And not just institutional upheaval, but your own health challenges as well. Most readers will never fully understand the toll that takes.

Producing a sustained, thoughtful, moderated space like this is work. Emotional work as much as intellectual work. It absorbs frustration. It absorbs anger. It absorbs grief for what was lost. That doesn’t come without cost. So yes — this blog is an archive. Yes — it is a witness statement. Yes — it has documented what the official narrative will never quite capture. But you are not an institution. You are a person. You should absolutely feel proud of what this blog has achieved. It has outlasted governments. It has outlasted policies that were once presented as irreversible. It has given practitioners a place to recognise themselves when the formal structures around them seemed designed to erase professional identity. That is no small thing. At the same time, you owe it to yourself to put your health first. No archive is worth your wellbeing. No act of quiet defiance should come at the expense of your recovery or peace of mind.

Perhaps the answer is not closure, but evolution. If the burden has become too heavy, then sharing it seems the obvious path. Bringing in someone trustworthy — someone who understands the history, the tone, the complexity — could both preserve the record and ease the load. Getafix certainly springs to mind as someone with the intellectual grounding and steadiness of judgement to help carry it forward. There may be others too. Succession is not surrender. It’s stewardship.

Whatever you decide, no one could reasonably accuse you of giving up lightly. If you chose to stop tomorrow, the blog would still stand as a substantial and important body of work. If you choose to continue — alone or with support — it will remain what it has always been: a place where probation’s story is told without slogans. You have done more than enough to justify stepping back if that’s what you need. But if there is a way of preserving this space without it costing you further personally, that would feel like the best of both worlds — for you, and for those who still find strength in reading it.

*******
Hi Jim,

Personally, I hope you’ll keep going. The blog has been a steady and important voice for probation through some very turbulent years, and that still matters. There is always something to say about probation; even when things seem to go quiet for a while, it’s rarely long before new issues emerge that deserve reflection or challenge. If, however, there were to be another structural upheaval on the scale of TR, particularly something as symbolic as a name change, that might be a natural point to pause and reconsider. Not because the conversation lacks value, but because it would signal that something more fundamental had shifted, locking probation into a quickening death roll.

And when I talk about an end, I don’t just mean for the blog. I mean for this particular chapter of probation as we’ve known it and worked within it. If it did ever come to a final post, it would need to be something fitting, somewhere between symbolic and a cracker, with comments closed after a few weeks, then left to stand as an ever-present record, resurfacing in conversations and Google searches for years to come. Whatever you decide to do, thank you for the thoughtful reading over the years, and for keeping our mini-rebellion alive.

--oo00oo--

Thanks to everyone for taking the trouble to respond so eloquently to my feelings of despair - it's important to know how people feel and it's giving me much to ponder on. One thing I need to be clear about is that the collective memory must be secured and I'm currently giving thought to the matter of Digital Executor and how the record can be archived safely. I'm genuinely unsure about this, but wonder if some academic institution might be an appropriate avenue?   . 

Thought Piece 12

I was reminded of the following from a previous read, more relevant now than ever:

“Similarly, if probation is unable to develop a clear and credible identity, distinct from narratives around punishment, public safety, use of technology, cost-effectiveness, or custody alternatives, and to resist the urge to overpromise on risk management, public protection, and crime control, then it may continue to face the challenge of misrepresentation.”

Probation 2026 isn’t really a “parallel universe” anymore. It is reduced, forgotten, and often airbrushed out of existence in policy and public imagination.

This is made more urgent by the Sentencing Act, and expanded technological monitoring. Technology and AI are presented as solutions to efficiency pressures, managing caseloads, reducing admin, analysing data, increasing remote supervision. Used properly, these tools can support professional judgement and reduce bureaucracy.

But if probation is to be a sentence and agency in its own right, not just a cheaper alternative to custody or an extension of surveillance, then how can it rehabilitate people and improve practice when the focus shifts to security, tagging, remote monitoring, and efficiency metrics?

AI can process information and flag patterns, but cannot build trust, hold difficult conversations, exercise moral judgement, or navigate human realities that underpin change. If efficiency and security dominate, and probation does not define what must remain human and relational, technology then replaces relationships with surveillance tool.

The question is not whether technology has a role, whether it serves probation’s rehabilitative mission, or quietly reshapes it into something else. At that point, it is no longer simply misrepresentation; it is existential if being used to serve probation’s purpose by redefining it beyond recognition.

Anon