There Is Another Way

It's good to see work continues to make the case for a different probation model and it must be hoped that Members of Parliament, the MoJ and HMPPS take careful note:-.  

Napo and WCCSJ set out a new vision for probation in Wales

Napo joined Welsh Government representatives and academic partners at the House of Lords to make the case for a standalone probation service for Wales separate from prisons, embedded in communities, and built around skilled professional relationships.

Welsh Minister Mark Drakeford was joined by Ella Rabaiotti, from the Welsh Centre for Crime and Social Justice (WCCSJ), and Napo’s Su McConnel, at a December meeting in the House of Lords focussed on the proposals to devolve Policing, Probation and Youth Justice.

Minister Drakeford gave an overview of the Welsh Government position and an update about developments in Youth Justice and Policing, before handing over to members of Wales Probation Development Group, part of WCCSJ. Ella Rabaiotti and Su McConnel presented a summary of a new model for probation in Wales. The recently published model builds on research and expertise outlined in earlier published papers “Towards a Devolved Probation Service in Wales”.

Su McConnel informed the meeting that the model of a Welsh Probation Service proposed in this publication would see “A standalone Probation Service, not within the civil service, and separate from Prisons, contributing to Welsh Government social policy and justice objectives. This Welsh Probation Service would be embedded in its communities, close to families and working with, and commissioning, local services and groups. It would impact on the prison crisis and reduce re-offending, be closely linked to courts, see increased restorative justice work, and foster relationships with the voluntary sector”

Former probation officer, Ella Rabaiotti, now a senior lecturer at Swansea University, emphasised the importance of highly skilled engagement between the probation practitioner and service user as central to reducing re-offending. “We know what works” she said, “and research confirms the centrality of a good professional relationship to potential success in Probation and in the absence of such a relationship, most if not all interventions would not be realised”

The small but influential group of Lords attending listened closely and asked searching questions.

Later, Mark Drakeford said “Many thanks to Baroness Ilora Finlay for calling together members of the House of Lords with an interest in the devolution of criminal justice to Wales, and particularly the probation service. The case for devolution is already made. What we are focused on now is demonstrating the positive difference devolution would make. Nowhere is that more evident that in the probation service. The House of Lords events brought together practitioners, academics and law-makers to affirm the case for a locally-based service, rooted in the courts and the communities which it can serve’.

Ella Rabaiotti said “ The Wales Probation Development Group remain keen to collaborate broadly, including with policy makers, probation allies, and particularly Napo members and probation practitioners to develop this model further”

Su McConnel commented “nothing proposed in our joint work with WCCSJ would not apply, broadly across England as well as Wales. The devolution debate allows us to reconsider models for a future Probation Service”

The Testimony Grows

Both of these comments underline something uncomfortable but unavoidable. What we’re describing here isn’t just burnout or disappointment, it’s prolonged exposure to organisational conditions that steadily strip people of agency, confidence and health. When staff talk about self-preservation, it’s because the system has normalised harm and then reframed leaving as personal weakness rather than a rational response.

The second comment is important because it shows how this damage travels downwards and sideways. SPOs and middle managers are left holding responsibility without support, absorbing HR functions, managing sickness, wellbeing and risk in an environment shaped by TR’s withdrawal of infrastructure. That doesn’t create reflective leadership, it creates containment and firefighting. People end up managing decline rather than developing staff or practice.

Taken together, these experiences point to the same conclusion: this isn’t about a lack of commitment or professionalism at any level. It’s about an organisation that has been redesigned to operate without adequate support, realistic capacity or genuine care for those expected to hold it together. In that context, leaving early isn’t abandonment of probation values, it’s often the last way people protect what’s left of them.

If this service is serious about retention, wellbeing and quality, it has to stop individualising harm and start owning the conditions that make self-preservation necessary in the first place.

*******
15 years in as a PO and could have written that myself. I felt it to my core reading that. I am at a crossroads. I have given so much of myself and so many unpaid hours over the years to do my best at work but feel like our purpose and meaning of our work is being eroded. Everything feels so much more transactional and box ticking. It feels like a culture of learned helplessness has been created since TR which is toxic. It feels like the message is as long as we skim over the cracks and make it look on paper like work is being done it’s like that’s good enough…. I’m not driven or motivated like that. I come to work to give my very best and as a result I am feeling increasingly disillusioned.

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As an SPO, I recognise every part of this thread. The idea that middle managers are “leading” anything right now is largely a fiction. Many are firefighting, absorbing HR work, managing sickness, risk and performance with inadequate tools, and doing so under constant pressure to keep the machine moving. That doesn’t create reflective leadership, it creates containment.

What worries me most is the number of experienced staff describing resignation rather than anger. That’s the point at which people stop believing change is possible. When probation reaches a stage where committed practitioners either numb themselves or plan their exit, the damage is already done. No amount of rebranding, recruitment or process tweaking will fix that unless the organisation is willing to confront the conditions it has created and stop relying on individual sacrifice to mask systemic failure.

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What’s being described here isn’t a morale problem, a bad year, or a failure of resilience. It’s managed decline. People are staying far longer than is healthy out of loyalty, guilt and professional identity, not because the organisation deserves it. Others are leaving quietly because they’ve reached the point where self-preservation is the only rational option left.

The most alarming thing in these comments isn’t the anger, it’s the resignation. That’s what develops when staff learn, over time, that raising concerns goes nowhere, formal processes protect hierarchy rather than truth, and commitment is rewarded with more pressure instead of support. At that point, people don’t fight the system; they disengage from it.

If probation leaders, managers or union representatives are reading this, the challenge is simple: stop explaining why things are hard and start responding to what is actually being said here. This isn’t noise, negativity or whingeing. It’s a detailed account of why experienced practitioners are switching off or walking away. If there is no credible, collective response to this, not another consultation, review or statement, then the silence will be taken for what it is: confirmation that decline is not an accident, but a choice.

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Reading this as someone still working in the probation service, I can only say how deeply it lands. What you’ve written articulates what many of us feel but struggle to say out loud — partly because there never seems to be a safe or meaningful space to do so.Those of us who are still here haven’t stayed because things are fine. We’ve stayed because of the same loyalty you describe: to the work, to the people we supervise, and to the colleagues sitting beside us who are carrying the same impossible loads. Caring is still what gets us through the day — and, paradoxically, what is wearing us down.

The feeling of having no real choice is already familiar, even for those who haven’t yet left. Many of us recognise that slow narrowing of options: adapting, absorbing, keeping going, telling ourselves we can hold on a bit longer. We speak up where we can, often carefully, often repeatedly, and too often into a void. The language of wellbeing and support exists, but the reality is relentless pressure, shrinking professional space, and a growing gap between what probation claims to be and what it has become.

It matters that we acknowledge managers in this too, because from where l stand, they are as trapped as anyone. Many are trying to shield staff, meet impossible demands, and keep services afloat within systems they did not create and cannot fix. The strain runs right through the organisation, and it shows.

What is hardest is knowing that people are already weighing up exit not as a career move, but as self-preservation. That staying may eventually come at too high a cost — to health, family, and identity. I don’t see clear solutions either. From inside, it often feels as though the choices are limited to enduring harm or stepping away.

So please know this: your decision is understood. Your honesty matters. And to everyone still here — practitioners, managers, administrators — doing their best in a probation service that feels increasingly dysfunctional and, at times, abusive towards its own staff: you are seen. You are not failing. If you reach the point where leaving becomes the only option, that is not weakness. It is survival.

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I didn’t choose this probation service. I chose a profession built on judgement, experience and human responsibility. What exists now is a hollowed-out system that extracts everything from staff while stripping them of voice, influence and protection.

Those of us who remain after decades aren’t here because we believe in the leadership or the direction of travel. We’re here because lives have been built around a career that no longer resembles what we entered - mortgages, children, geography, and the reality that walking away isn’t simple when your profession has been dismantled around you.

Risk has intensified, accountability has hardened, scrutiny has become punitive, yet professional autonomy has vanished. Experience is mined, not respected. Loyalty is demanded, not returned. Decisions are imposed by people who will never carry the consequences of them.

With hindsight, knowing what probation has been turned into, I would not choose this career again. This isn’t resilience or commitment. It’s containment. We are not a workforce being supported, we are numbers being managed until we break or disappear.

********
"Risk has intensified" - primarily because the risk industry needed it to. And labelling theory works.

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That’s exactly it. Risk didn’t just increase, it was manufactured, expanded and monetised. Once risk became a product, it required constant inflation to justify tools, frameworks, audits, roles and oversight structures. Labelling theory does the rest: define people as permanently risky, then design systems that can never declare success. Practitioners are left carrying liability for risks that have been structurally exaggerated and procedurally impossible to manage. This isn’t public protection, it’s risk theatre, and staff are the expendable props.

********
This legislation expands community sentences, suspended sentences and post-custodial supervision while saying virtually nothing about workforce capacity, professional skill, or risk ownership. In other words, the courts are being given more options and probation is being handed more responsibility, liability and scrutiny without any guarantee of time, staffing or professional autonomy to deliver it safely.

This isn’t reform; it’s displacement. Prison pressure is being pushed downstream into probation, where risk is already concentrated, caseloads are already unsafe, and accountability is already punitive. Every new requirement, condition or recall power lands on an officer who will be blamed if it fails but has no say in how it was designed.

If Parliament passes sentencing reform without legislating for caseload caps, professional standards and proper resourcing, then it isn’t strengthening community justice, it’s knowingly loading more risk onto a service that has been hollowed out for over a decade. And when it goes wrong, we already know who will carry the consequences.

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I attended a briefing this week about E-POP where those pops who are low or medium risk (with no active safeguarding or MAPPA) will complete online tick box reporting rather than face to face appts to alleviate appointments and improve capacity…. Another step away from developing actual relationships with those you supervise. I can see the value for those with standalone requirements but for the majority, especially those who have been subject to probation for years this will feel like the service is trying to shut the door on meaningful contact. SFOs are mainly perpetrated by medium ROSH offenders if I recall rightly so what’s the evidence base for this??? Risk is fluid - how can know if risk is escalating from someone ticking a few boxes which they decide!?

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When I started in probation in the 1980s we called the people we worked with clients of the service. It was respectful and no one questioned it was the appropriate thing to do. I shudder now everytime I hear pop although nothing wrong with person on probation. This happened on Sonia Flynn’s watch and the present CPO Kim Thornden Edward’s lacks the understanding and wherewithal to realise it is wrong to allow this to go on and do something. As for the RPDs a disreputable bunch of uselessness you could ever hope to encounter. I have even heard trade unionists use the acronym that I think is a shocking example of collusion with a demeaning and dehumanising practice. Stop referring to the people we work with as pops and simply call them people. That is after all what they are.

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The claim that this is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” for probation doesn’t stand up when set against what was said to the Public Accounts Committee. The evidence given makes clear that senior officials have known for years about unsafe workloads, retention failure and a workforce model that no longer works. This is not a sudden moment of insight or ambition, it is overdue acknowledgement of problems that have been repeatedly raised and repeatedly ignored.What Parliament was told confirms what staff already know: probation has been running on deficit staffing, stretched capacity and goodwill for far too long. Dressing this up as transformation doesn’t change the reality. Recruitment promises, digital tools and legislative tweaks are being offered instead of the fundamentals the Committee was effectively probing for - workload caps, retention, professional confidence and stability.

If this really were a once-in-a-generation moment, the response to Parliament would include binding limits on caseloads, meaningful pay restoration and a clear commitment to rebuilding probation as a profession. Instead, we are hearing familiar language about efficiency, innovation and “doing more differently”, while the structural risks Parliament questioned remain unresolved. That isn’t renewal. It’s managed decline, repackaged and the people giving evidence won’t be the ones carrying the consequences on the frontline.

Self-preservation

"No Choice But to Leave” : When Self-Preservation Becomes the Only Option

I didn’t leave probation because I stopped caring. In fact, the hardest part of leaving was how much I still cared — about the work, the people on my caseload, and the colleagues I was leaving behind. But by the end, I genuinely felt I had no choice. Self-preservation wasn’t a preference; it was a last resort. The research article “No Choice But to Leave” captures something I recognise deeply. It describes probation staff who remain loyal to the vocational ideal of the service long after the organisation itself has become unliveable. That was certainly true for me.

Staying Longer Than Was Healthy

Like many others, I didn’t walk away at the first sign of difficulty. I stayed. I adapted. I absorbed more work, more pressure, more emotional strain. I tried to remain positive and constructive, even as workloads grew heavier and the space to do meaningful probation work shrank. I raised concerns. I offered solutions. I kept telling myself that things would improve, or that my experience and commitment could somehow make a difference. Over time, though, the cost became impossible to ignore. Exhaustion stopped being temporary and became my baseline. The research talks about constrained voice — that sense of speaking up without being heard. That resonates. It’s not that opportunities to speak don’t exist on paper; it’s that repeated attempts to engage are met with managerial language, structural inertia, or quiet deflection. Eventually, you stop believing your voice matters.

When Values No Longer Fit the System

One of the most painful aspects was the growing mismatch between what probation claims to be and how it often operates in practice. The vocational ideal — supporting people to change, exercising professional judgement, building relationships — increasingly clashed with a target-driven, bureaucratic reality. The legacy of Transforming Rehabilitation still hangs heavily over the service. Market-style thinking, excessive performance management, and administrative overload have reshaped probation in ways that erode professional identity. It becomes harder to recognise yourself in the role you’re doing. This creates an internal conflict: you’re still committed to the people you work with, but less and less able to do right by them.

Guilt, Loyalty, and Letting Go

Leaving brought relief, but it also brought guilt. I think that’s important to say out loud. I felt guilty about the colleagues I left behind — people I respected, people who were also struggling, people who would now carry even more weight because someone else had gone. That guilt is powerful, and it keeps many people in post far longer than they should stay. But I’ve come to understand something else too: I am not responsible for the conditions that drove me out. Those conditions were not of my making, and I exhausted myself trying to work within them, challenge them, and remain constructive until the very end. The research describes this as complicated loyalty — loyalty not to the organisation, but to the profession and to colleagues. It’s a loyalty that sustains commitment, but also masks systemic harm. At some point, staying becomes a form of self-neglect rather than solidarity.

Exit as Survival, Not Failure

When people talk about probation staff leaving, it’s often framed as a resilience problem or a retention issue. But “No Choice But to Leave” makes clear what many already know: exit is often a rational response to sustained harm. By the time I left, I wasn’t choosing between staying and going. I was choosing between continuing at significant cost to my health, or stepping away to protect myself. In that sense, it didn’t feel like a failure. It felt like survival.

What This Should Make Us Ask

If experienced, committed practitioners are reaching the point where self-preservation is their only option, then the problem is not individual weakness. It is organisational. People aren’t leaving because they don’t care. They’re leaving because caring has become too costly — and because staying any longer would mean losing themselves in the process. That should concern everyone. I think I have paid a high price for choosing probation as a career. Too high really, if I consider the impact on my family. I am still struggling with dealing with the impact of what I had to deal with. I regret now that I didn't leave earlier than I did. I know I am not alone.

Anon

The Discussion Goes On 3

With 207 comments on the last post we need to take a breath. This contribution seems as good a way to start ready for the New Year:-

It's astonishing that some 20,000 staff (give or take the lickspittles & collaborators who've had special treatment) have accepted such shit pay arrangements for so long. Is it 3 pay rises in 16 years? And none meeting any cost of living increases. "It’s a way of controlling costs while still claiming a pay rise has been delivered."

Its also a very effective way of controlling staff per the 'old school' adage of "treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen". Hmm, what does that remind you of?

It has been said by many here over the past decade or so that probation staff are the victims of a massive power imbalance, i.e. an abusive relationship that they can't, won't or are otherwise disabled from disengaging with that relationship through (predominantly) financial & emotional abuse, aka shit pay & bullying.

Are you the same people who deliver programmes intended to effect change in perpetrators of abuse in relationships and reduce risk of harm to others?

Domestic Violence Programmes

Building Better Relationships (BBR) - A programme for perpetrators of violence and abuse... BBR aims to increase understanding of motivating factors in domestic violence, reduce individual risk factors linked to violence and develop pro-social relationship skills

Community Domestic Violence Programme (CDVP) - A programme aimed at reducing the risk of domestic violence and abusive behaviour ... by helping perpetrators change their attitudes and behaviour and to reduce the risk of all violent and abusive behaviour in the family.

Healthy Relationship Programme (HRP) - A prison based programme for men who have committed violent behaviour in an intimate relationship. The aim is to end violence and abuse against participants' intimate partners. Participants will learn about their abusive behaviours and be taught alternative skills and behaviours to help them develop healthy, non-abusive relationships.

Cognitive Skills Booster (CSB) - Designed to reinforce learning from other general offending programmes (ETS, Think First and Reasoning & Rehabilitation) through skills rehearsal and relapse prevention.

Enhanced Thinking Skills (ETS) - Addresses thinking and behaviour associated with offending through a sequenced series of structured exercises designed to teach inter-personal problem solving skills.

Make the connections - empty promises, jumping through ever smaller hoops, withholding pay, lies, making examples of staff, catastrophising in order to punish... while the privileged few in control pocket bonuses & very healthy packages, and are never held to account for their failings as 'leaders'.

Its no accident that the mysterious invisible chief probation officer has temporarily appeared in written form in advance of an imminent decision that will be nothing short of further & increasing levels of abuse, i.e. you'll get fuck all AND you'll be blamed for it.

Wakey! Wakey! Get Organised!

The Discussion Goes On 2

First off I want to mention another BBC Radio 4 programme I was listening to last night, Radical with Amol Rajan and this episode: Jamie Oliver: Obesity and Debt are Killing Britain

Jamie Oliver thinks diet-related illness and growing levels of debt are killing the country he loves. In this frank and open conversation, he tells Amol why we need to go further to help people understand the nutritional value of the food they eat. And although his campaign for the sugar tax brought significant change, Jamie says there is still more to do on school meals, breakfast clubs and food packaging. But Jamie’s mission doesn’t stop at food. He wants children to be taught how to manage their money and he also sets out a case for reforming education so it better serves children with diverse ways of learning. Reflecting on his own dyslexia, he emphasises the importance of giving every child the support they need to thrive.

Now, what's this got to do with Probation and our predicament I hear you ask? Well, firstly it's worth listening to because Jamie goes on to talk about how many children are neurodivergent and many end up in the criminal justice system. But imagine a similar programme featuring a knowlegable person who is able to outline a radical way of fixing just as big a problem that we have. I don't think the radical plan would take much effort to knock together, but I suppose finding the voice might be.

--oo00oo--

Any plan has to deal with this:- 

“There were 11,041 licence recalls in a single quarter (April-June 2025), a 13% year-on-year increase. Most recalls are for non-compliance (74%), not new offences.”

This from Russell Webster back at the end of October:-

Indeed, the MoJ also published “Transparency Data” on the number of people released under the Standard Determinate Sentences 40% (SDS40) early release scheme yesterday which revealed that almost 40,000 (38,042) people were released from prison early in the 9 month period between 10 September 2024 and 30 June 2025 – all of whom, of course, were required to be subject to probation supervision. The accompanying data tables still exclude the one key piece of data that everyone wants to know – how many of people released early with minimal support are recalled.

However, we do know (from the OMSq) that 11,041 people were recalled on licence in this last quarter – an increase of 13% on the same quarter last year. There usually is more than one reason for recalling an offender on licence. Of recalls in April-June 2025, about 74% involved non-compliance, 36% involved failure to keep in touch, 23% involved failure to reside, and less than one quarter (22%) involved a charge of further offending.

******

For the love of God get rid of PSS.

*******

PSS is one necessary fix, but it is the lowest-hanging fruit in a garden that has been left to rot. Scrapping it does not amount to reform. It simply removes one failing mechanism in a system that is failing everywhere. If those in power want to talk about a probation recovery plan, they must first confront why the service needs recovery at all.

This collapse was not an accident. It was the result of political decisions. The workforce is depleted because ministers refused to resource it. Moral injury is endemic because leadership rewarded defensibility over truth. Recall culture spiralled because political optics were valued above rehabilitation. Reset and Impact exist not because they support staff, but because the service became structurally unable to deliver its core duties.

A real recovery plan means rebuilding staffing, restoring autonomy and dismantling the surveillance-first culture that now treats people on probation as risks to be contained rather than humans to be supported. Nothing changes until those facts are admitted by the people who created them.

If ministers want to claim they are easing caseloads, then they must fund the workforce, reduce unnecessary licence conditions, stop offloading risk downward and stop treating probation like an extension of the prison estate. Anything else is denial dressed up as reform.

Removing PSS without rebuilding the foundations is not recovery. It is political damage control masquerading as progress.

Unless those with power stop protecting their reputations and start repairing the damage they created, probation will remain a collapsing structure that punishes the people inside it more than the people it claims to supervise.

******

The service officially needs 3,150 more staff to deliver a “basic” standard, and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) itself underestimated the need by about 5,400 staff. Disgusting!!!

******

Staff lose an average of 13.2 working days to illness annually (compared to a national average of 5.7), with nearly 60% of these absences due to mental ill health. Get the f**k out and leave. You don’t deserve this and you can do much better. I have applied for other jobs. Leaving soon as I can. It’s going g to get worse.

******

You’re right that it’s going to get worse, because none of the pressures driving sickness, burnout and collapse are being fixed. The workforce is shrinking faster than it can be replaced, and whenever someone goes off sick their work just gets dumped on everyone else. No wonder so many are looking elsewhere now, myself included.

And the sentencing reforms won’t ease anything. A presumption against short custodial sentences sounds sensible, but in reality it means more people supervised in the community by a service that cannot safely manage the caseload it already holds. Organisations responding to the Bill have said openly that this will increase pressure on probation unless staffing and resources rise sharply, and the inspectorate has warned that expanding community sentences without capacity risks making things worse. Less prison time does not equal less probation work. It means more supervision, more admin, more risk and less time to do meaningful work.

Meanwhile, £700 million is being thrown at AI, tagging and “digital transformation” as if technology can substitute for a workforce that has been hollowed out. It is treated like a magic bullet, but it won’t build trust, it won’t support change and it won’t repair a service that has been systematically stripped of the basics required to function.

And through all this, the system still prioritises metrics and bureaucracy over listening, humanity and rehabilitation. Practitioners haven’t stopped caring. They’ve had the conditions for caring removed by people in power who treat connection as inefficiency.

It’s going to get worse because those with power refuse to confront the damage they created. Until they rebuild the foundations instead of managing the symptoms, the spiral will continue and probation will keep losing the very people it depends on to survive.

*****

What worries me more than anything is how numb we have all been forced to become. We are describing sickness, resignations, burnout, fear and moral injury as if they are just workplace inconveniences rather than signs that something fundamental has broken. Probation is not just strained. It is being hollowed out from the inside and everyone can feel it.

At its best, probation has always been a profession built on belief. Belief in change, belief in humanity, belief that dignity matters even when people are at their lowest. But belief does not survive in a system that exhausts its workforce, strips out time, piles on pressure and refuses to acknowledge its own part in causing harm. When the conditions for dignity are removed, the dignity itself disappears. When purpose is crushed, people walk.

And here is the truth that cuts deeper than caseloads or processes. A service that cannot protect the wellbeing of its own staff cannot pretend to be protecting the public. Exhausted, depleted, morally injured practitioners cannot sustain safe practice. Losing experienced staff is not just an operational problem. It is a public safety crisis unfolding in slow motion.

What makes this so hard to swallow is that the people with the power to intervene still talk in managerial language while the service bleeds. They talk about innovation, transformation, efficiency and resilience as if this is a technical issue rather than a human one. It is not technology that keeps people safe. It is not dashboards or metrics that support rehabilitation. It is people. Skilled, steady, supported people.

And yet those very people are now leaving faster than they can be replaced. Not because they do not care, but because caring has been turned into a liability. Not because they lack resilience, but because resilience has been misused as an excuse not to fix what is broken. The workforce has not failed. The leadership has.

If the country genuinely wants probation to function, for staff, for people on probation and for public safety, then the conversation has to change. Not how do we squeeze more out of what is left, but how do we rebuild something worthy of the people who rely on it. How do we restore dignity, purpose and stability. How do we make it possible for staff to do the job the public believes they are doing.

Because if we cannot value the people who hold up the justice system, then we cannot claim to value justice at all.

*****

My most important take from Rutger's lectures thus far:

"one hour of real human attention is not something you can easily automate."

I'd go further - one hour of real human attention is not something you can automate at all. Ever. Regardless of what ellenmusk or markysuckerbugs or peterevilthiel or any of the so-called 'techbros' say.

What so many people could do with - whether one-off, weekly, monthly - is one hour of real, face-to-face human interaction, where the attention is focused upon the client/patient/attendee, when people are listened to, are heard, are acknowledged as part of the conversation.

It boils my piss when, in so many interactions with others, people talk over, shout down, cut across, or otherwise make it clear all they want to hear is their own opinion, their own voice.

One of the skills I learned on my (yawn) social-work-based CQSW was listening. We had a (double yawn) 'counselling' unit to complete which involved an assessment of a recorded interview (with a student colleague, not a client) as part of the exam. For me, this was one of the most critical pieces of leaning I undertook - not just for the probation work, but for life.

As a university tutor I would simply go silent when students were more interested in themselves than in the subject at hand. On numerous occasions it took several minutes for them to realise I had stopped speaking & sat down. It only took a couple of sessions with each group before they started to listen & engage respectfully. Only then did the sessions come alive, with great questions from students who had listened & who appreciated those questions being heard & debated by their peers and the tutor.

The art of listening is an art; a dying art.

******

Active listening, real human attention and the sense of being understood are at the heart of any rehabilitative relationship. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is that the system has made it almost impossible for practitioners to offer the very thing that makes probation meaningful. People on probation haven’t become harder to work with. The system has become harder to work within.

The quality of training used to prepare practitioners to work relationally, creatively and reflectively. Over time that has been eroded and replaced with training geared toward risk management, defensibility and procedural compliance. New staff are being trained into a model where listening is optional but box-ticking is mandatory. Experienced staff are burning out under the weight of moral injury because they remember what the job should be and cannot deliver it under current conditions.

The pressure to meet performance measures at a pace that bears no resemblance to the reality of current caseloads strips out the ability to slow down, to think, to understand and to listen properly. Every minute is accounted for. Every task is timed. Every action must produce a metric. Humanity has no measurable output, so the system quietly removes the space for it. Practitioners aren’t choosing not to listen. The structure has removed the oxygen that listening requires.

And this is where accountability sits. It is not the workforce who decided that surveillance matters more than understanding or that throughput matters more than trust. It is leadership and ministers who redesigned probation into a machine that values compliance over connection and defensibility over truth. They created an environment where the things that actually help people change are treated as inefficiencies to be eliminated.

Active listening is still essential. The tragedy is that the people with power treated it as expendable. Until they stop protecting their own narratives and start rebuilding the conditions that make real work possible, the system will continue silencing both practitioners and the people they supervise.

--oo00oo--

Then we have this just out from HM Probation Inspectorate:-

"It is of concern that there has been a sustained increase in the number of notifications of an arrest and charge for an SFO over the last two years. In the period 2023/2024 the figure increased from 478 to 770, and in 2024/2025 it increased further by 13 per cent to 872.

We have quality assured 90 SFO reviews this year, with 53 per cent of these rated as ‘Requires improvement’. In contrast, just 46 per cent were rated as ‘Good’, and one per cent as ‘Outstanding’. Disappointingly, these findings show no improvement from the previous year.

In last year’s SFO annual report we made 11 recommendations, seven of which were repeated from the previous year’s’ SFO annual report. It is discouraging to note that while HMPPS have taken forward some activity against most of these recommendations, the outcomes and their impact is still not clear."

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What Jones meant to write, but it got lost somewhere in Petty France:

"It is tedious to note that we have made eleven recommendations, seven of which were repeated from the previous year, yet despite HMPPS taking forward some activity against some of our recommendations, outcomes and their impact is still not clear. So unclear as to be invisible.

Thus it is of no surprise whatsoever that, in these tumultous times of new austerity, overflowing prisons & an overstretched probation service, there has been a sustained increase in the number of notifications of an arrest and charge for an SFO over the last two years.

We have quality assured 90 SFO reviews this year. One was okay. Inevitably, given the staffing crisis, the limited HMPPS response to previous recommendations & the general state of decaying morale within the probation service, these findings show no improvement from the previous year."

--oo00oo--

The government's answer published 9th December 2025:-

Prison building boom to make streets safer
A prison building boom is underway across the country as the Government presses ahead with the biggest jail expansion programme since the Victorian era.

The Discussion Goes On

Thanks to everyone for being part of it:-

I keep hearing despair from my colleagues. They don't think anyone who can make things better is either listening or bothered. It's like shouting in the wind they say. But I think the comments here are worse than that. They're actually reporting a collapse.

A workforce that’s carried the service through every crisis is now breaking. HMIP says the system is failing, staff are being injured, and leadership looks out of touch. Security gadgets won’t fix a service that’s haemorrhaging experience and hope. If ministers don’t rebuild probation :- retaining experience, real support for staff and real autonomy, then more violence, more burnout and more avoidable tragedies are inevitable. This is the warning — ignore it at your own risk.

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Senior Management need to stop dressing this up as strain, transition or reform. Probation is in visible systemic failure, and the continued silence from those with the power to intervene now amounts to state negligence.

This is not a blanket attack on all managers. Many are trapped in the same machinery of impossible demands, reputational risk management and political cowardice. But that reality does not excuse the fact that harm is being absorbed at the bottom while truth is filtered out before it ever reaches the top.

We now have a workforce showing every recognised marker of institutional collapse: widespread moral injury, extreme sickness absence, and accelerating loss of experienced staff. That is not a resilience issue. That is a system issuing a distress signal, and it is being deliberately ignored.

At the same time, practitioners are being loaded with rising legal exposure, personal risk and expanding security functions such as searches, enforcement and control, without corresponding pay, status, authority or protection. This is not professional development. It is unmanaged role expansion with catastrophic consequences.

The contradiction at the heart of probation is now openly acknowledged while being actively sustained. Rehabilitation is still invoked in language, but containment, optics and political defensibility dominate in practice. That tension is being paid for daily by the workforce and by those under supervision.

And above all of this sits a political class that simply rotates through office while doing nothing to stabilise probation, nothing to rebuild professional sustainability, and nothing to confront the consequences of keeping it permanently tethered to a failing prison system. When Justice Secretaries can preside over this level of deterioration without consequence, the dysfunction is no longer individual. It is structural.

Unions, too, must be challenged here. Representation that documents harm without forcing structural change becomes part of the containment strategy rather than a barrier to it. When only practitioners are making noise, one conclusion becomes unavoidable: the human cost is being treated as administratively acceptable. You cannot hollow out a workforce through sickness, burnout and attrition, load it with coercive power, and still pretend public protection is being strengthened. This is not reform. This is managed collapse.

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We have been pointed in the direction of the view from the other side of the table. This from Inside Time:-

Outside Voices: This system is broken

The National Probation Service is the government department responsible for ‘managing offenders’ in custody and the community, with an annual budget of £1.5 billion.

When I say ‘managing’ I use this term loosely, as effective management models are collaborative and subject to independent review. What I should say is, the government department responsible for dictating to offenders in custody and the community, an organisation which self-polices and often blames someone else when things go wrong. (Great model for prisoners, right?)

In over a decade of engagement with the Probation Service, I have seen the good, the bad, and the institutionally inept. There are, of course, good people within probation working hard in a broken system to make a difference. Here comes the ‘but’: in my experience, they are not the majority. I’ve had at least 14 probation officers, and I can honestly say that only three were genuinely there to make a difference. The rest were concerned with doing the bare minimum, with a pure indifference to the consequences of their actions. Hardly a surprise, when the system is so broken it will take anyone into its employ and call them a professional.

I’ve seen the 12 editions of my copy-and-pasted OASys reports produce over-inflated risk scores, affecting my chances of recategorisation, sentence progression, and parole, and resulting in excessively restrictive licence conditions. Probation officers change every year or two, so offenders have little consistency, and are constantly having to re-explain their lives. How is a professional and rehabilitative relationship supposed to be fostered and maintained under such circumstances?

As if to evidence my point, only last month, two weeks prior to my (cancelled) parole hearing, my most recent community offender manager (COM) told me “I think I’ve used out-of-date information and over-inflated your risk.” This same COM put in writing in my parole dossier that she wanted my (non-operational, civilian) prison offender manager (POM) to carry out “direct surveillance” on who I associate with, and “search my cell and my mail”, while accusing me of having “organised crime gang” links – all without any evidence to justify this. This resulted in my POM contacting my COM to say that what had been requested would be unlawful, and the prison would not do it.

This is the reality faced by many offenders in a broken system that is hidden from the public – underfunded, under-resourced, and understaffed. It helps no-one and is dangerous. It is not a mere topic of debate – it is our lives, our futures, our day-to-day. Probation needs investment, transparency, and collaboration – not lack of accountability, neglect, and political point-scoring.

V Lynch the Auditor is the pen name of a serving prisoner

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What is described here is exactly what system collapse looks like on the ground: churn, inflated risk, copy-paste OASys, unlawful requests, and life-changing decisions being taken on rotten data. There is no denying that poor practice and indifference exist, but what this testimony exposes is not just individual failure. It is institutional design failure. High turnover, defensive risk culture, political pressure and chronic understaffing manufacture the very behaviour described here.

This is also why Reset, Impact and the wider sentencing reforms being sold as “supporting staff to manage caseloads” are, frankly, a joke. They do not reduce demand. They redistribute risk. For staff, that means legal responsibility without the time or relational control to manage it safely. For people on probation, it means shrinking support under expanding surveillance and an ever-present threat of recall. That is not workload management. It is liability management.

For those under supervision, this translates into control without consistency, restriction without stability, and liberty shaped by administrative fear rather than truth. For staff, it deepens moral injury, professional erosion and burnout. Both are being harmed by the same structural failures. This is not an outlier account. It is a warning about what this system now produces as standard.

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I've been listening to the Reith lectures and was struck by the following from number 3 repeated on Radio 4 last night. This from the transcript:-

Crises were central to Friedman's thinking. In the preface of his masterpiece Capitalism and Freedom from 1982, he wrote words that became a neoliberal mantra. I think it's worth quoting them in full. "Only a crisis," Friedman wrote, "actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function, to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."

And this from the questions section:-

IAIN WHYTE: I'm a Scottish Conservative councillor here in Edinburgh, so I'm probably one of your sceptics in the room, Rutger. I see a public sector that's spending all our money at the moment. We've got tax rates at the highest they've ever been in peacetime, as a share of GDP. We've got huge public spending. We've got a fifth of the working-age population in the UK not working. What is it that makes you feel that human nature won't get in the way of utopia?

RUTGER BREGMAN: Sure. Well, two things. One, yes, if you look at the whole share of GDP, the size of the public sector has grown. My point is that that is a good thing, and that is to be expected because of the Baumol effect. Because government is mostly responsible for things like education and healthcare, that are just much harder to make more efficient. Actually, if you make a doctor or a nurse more efficient, often you're destroying the very quality of — or the very point of, what they're doing. As I said, one hour of real human attention is not something you can easily automate. So that's one important thing. The second important thing is that, actually, the government is often doing the more meaningful work as well. So I talked about the phenomenon of BS jobs. It turns out that, according to a recent large-scale study, actually there are three times as many BS jobs in the private sector as in the public sector.

IAIN WHYTE: My concern is that I see a public sector here in Scotland where people are essentially working for themselves or within the system. And it's not really serving the public as the priority. Often, the way our trade unions and others work, they work for the workers in the system, or the middle managers work to ensure an easy life, your BS jobs, rather than making sure the front line is actually helping the public. 

RUTGER BREGMAN: So that is a concern that I share. What we've seen since the '70s, as tax rates for the rich have been going down, is that a lot of the most talented people have been going not to government or academia or NGOs, but instead to big tech companies, big finance, big pharma companies, where often they contribute much less to society. So I'm really interested in the allocation of talent. And I think we've got to find ways to make government great again, to make it the coolest place. Like the Fabian Society was one of the coolest places you could be, to really convince our best and brightest that to work for the public, for the public good, is the most prestigious and most meaningful thing you can do with your whole career.

My emphasis - it's absolutely what I felt in 1985 at the start of my probation career.

*******

This came in over night:-

A Plan for a Probation Service Recovery

So here’s my starter for ten. It's not perfect - but then I'm not paid to think:

1. Rebuild Purpose Before Performance
Probation has been pushed so far into metrics that the mission has blurred. The service needs a restated purpose — written with, not imposed on, frontline staff. A modern charter of practice. A commitment that professional judgement is not a nuisance but the core skill the public depends on. And a recognition that autonomy isn’t a luxury; it’s what keeps people safe.

2. Stabilise the Workforce
Nothing changes until caseloads change. That means enforceable caps, emergency relief teams, and a three-year recovery plan that focuses on retention, recruitment, protected training time and genuine psychological safety. If staff can’t speak up without fear, the system can’t learn.

3. End the Command-and-Control Reflex
The prison-service mindset has seeped deep: obey, don’t question, deliver the target at all costs. Flatten the hierarchy. Retrain leaders to coach rather than dictate. Protect whistleblowing. And start valuing managers who listen, not those who silence.

4. Stop Pretending Prison Expansion Is Progress
If building thousands of new cells is your headline achievement, you’ve admitted failure. Probation’s recovery depends on shifting investment away from incarceration and into community supports: women’s centres, young-adult interventions, housing partnerships, restorative options. More prison is not more safety — it’s more of the same mistakes.

5. Put Communities Back in the Frame
Recreate regional probation boards that involve courts, local authorities, voluntary organisations and people with lived experience. Give regions power to commission what their communities actually need, not what a template says they should want. Make probation visible again — not as a bureaucratic shadow, but as a neighbour, partner and problem-solver. I’m that desperate I’m even starting to think putting probation under the regional Mayors might be a good idea (accepting that some of them will likely be Reform).

6. Cut Bureaucracy Before It Cuts Us
Review every mandatory form, template and process. Scrap what doesn’t directly improve safety or rehabilitation. Fix the digital mess so staff aren’t duplicating work across systems. Free the time that has been swallowed by audits and command emails.

7. Put the Evidence Back in Charge
Create an independent evidence centre, insulated from political heat. Require proper research reviews before new policies land. Bring back research roles inside the service so staff can innovate and evaluate rather than firefight and hope.

8. Repair the Bond With the Courts
Courts need to see probation again — in person, not at the other end of a duty line. That means embedding staff in courtrooms, restoring time for proper pre-sentence reports, and rebuilding a shared sense of justice between judiciary and probation.

9. Real Accountability, Not Empty Praise
Inspections shouldn’t applaud leadership while delivery collapses. Create transparent oversight of senior leaders. Publish meaningful data on staffing, caseloads, reoffending and SFO learning. Stop blaming practitioners for structural failure.

10. Build a Long-Term Political Settlement
Probation cannot survive policy lurches driven by headlines. A cross-party Probation Futures Commission could secure a 10-year settlement — stable funding, evidenced direction, and annual parliamentary scrutiny. The public deserves a service built on safety, not soundbites.

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But 'Getafix makes a very valid point about dispensing with some of the pointless work completely:-

Probation provides a very damaging environment for those employed in the service. However, for many of those subjected to supervision it's just as painful and damaging. In many cases supervision become counter productive. I refer particularly to the 12mth and under cohort that were ensnared by TR. There is really nothing probation can do for this group, and since TR they have only found themselves on the merry go round of perpetual release and recall. For this group post sentence supervision is akin to a community based IPP sentence. They represent a significant proportion of the 3000 recalls every month, swelling the prison population, and creating perpetual churn for both prisons and probation, only to be released again a few weeks later, ofen homeless, but certainly to the same circumstances, with the added complexities have having to jump through the same hoops as they've previously tackled with regard to registering for housing, benefit claims etc, etc.

The reality is it's costing a lot of money and resource to create unnecessary problems. The 12mth and under group need to be removed from automatic post sentence supervision. It's the last part of TR that hasn't been reversed. I'm in total agreement with anon [above], but I do wonder if its only 'practitioners making noise' now? There has been two very serious assaults on staff with weapons very recently, and it's a sobering and very serious and concerning thought, but perhaps those being supervised are starting to make noise too?

*******

You’re absolutely right about the TR cohort. It became a recall factory and a community-based IPP in all but name, and everyone in power knew it. Yes, automatic post-sentence supervision is now being rolled back, but only after years of human churn, wasted millions and swelling prison numbers. And you’re also right that the noise is no longer only coming from practitioners. When people on probation start making it too, through crisis, resistance or violence, that is the system speaking through those it is failing.

What replaces post-sentence supervision is not less control. It is more community supervision, more licence conditions, more tagging and more enforcement under a different badge. If probation continues to operate as the soft arm of the prison service, these reforms will not ease caseload pressure, they will not restore morale, and they will not reduce harm for the people trapped inside the system.

Reset and Impact sit squarely inside this problem. They are being sold as intelligent prioritisation, but what they really represent is the formal withdrawal of meaningful supervision in response to workforce collapse. For staff, they become another performance demand layered onto exhaustion and moral injury. For people on probation, they mean being left under legal control with minimal support, then recalled when predictably things unravel. That is not rehabilitation. It is managed risk disposal.

Rolling back one failed mechanism while entrenching surveillance, enforcement and withdrawal of support simply redistributes the same damage across a wider population and calls it reform. All that changes now is the branding of the machinery that breaks both staff and those supervised.

*******

Everyone wants someone else to fix the problem. It's someone else's duty, responsibility for this shit but it isn't mine. I'm at the coalface and I'm suffering. You keep on wearing it, keep on accepting it, then frankly you deserve what you have. If you don't resist, you're complicit.

*******

The idea that probation is collapsing because frontline staff “don’t resist enough” is a comforting fiction. It lets the people with real power off the hook. This system is not failing because practitioners lack courage, it is failing because those with the authority to change direction have chosen, repeatedly, not to. The architecture crushes dissent, absorbs challenge and punishes anyone who dares to stick their head above the parapet. Calling that “complicity” is not analysis. It is victim-blaming dressed up as toughness.

And yes, Napo’s inaction deserves anger. But the real question isn’t where the union’s spine went, it’s why a government department can preside over a decade of workforce collapse, moral injury, violence, burnout, recalls, unlawful practice and public-safety risk without being forced to answer for any of it. That isn’t a “spine” problem. That’s a power problem.

Meanwhile, Reset, Impact and the sentencing reforms are being sold as relief for staff, but they exist for one reason, which is to compensate for a government that has gutted the service to the point where it can no longer deliver its own mandate. They don’t reduce caseloads; they ration supervision. They don’t support people on probation; they strip away the little support that remains. They don’t help practitioners; they expose them.

So if we’re going to talk about who “deserves what they get,” let’s be honest. It isn’t the frontline workforce. It’s the political leadership and senior machinery that built, defended and doubled-down on a model that everyone can now see collapsing in real time. If blame is going to land anywhere, it should land where the power sits and not on the people already carrying the consequences.

Some Reactions

After reading Guest Blog 107: Probation - An Extension of the Prison?  I had the same immediate reaction: how many times do we have to say the same thing before anyone pays attention?

Lord Ramsbotham said it best: “people are not things.” Yet the system keeps treating not only those on probation, but probation practitioners themselves, as if interchangeable parts in a failing machine, expected to absorb endless pressure with no regard for the human cost.

Probation cannot function when those doing the work are stretched, silenced, and sidelined. It cannot deliver safety or rehabilitation when leadership treats frontline expertise as optional noise. And it certainly cannot claim to value people while burning out the very professionals holding the system together.

We know what probation should be, we’ve said it enough times. They don’t. Our probation leaders refuse to step away from the narrow, risk-management, “public protection above all else”, “do what we say” mantra because it keeps their political masters satisfied.

Napo, Unison, the Probation Institute, the Probation Service, none of them truly hear us, and none of them amplify our voices or our calls for change. These issues have been raised repeatedly. So the real question isn’t “Do they know?” They do know. The question is: When will they finally act instead of pretending not to hear us?

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Reading this, I felt the weight of every line — and also a need to widen the frame. Because the cultural shift you describe hasn’t just hollowed out frontline practice; it has reshaped the entire organisation, managers included. The expectation that instructions will be followed without dissent — a blend of prison-service command culture and civil-service compliance — has seeped into every layer. And once that takes root, genuine dialogue becomes almost impossible.

I don’t believe most senior leaders are uncaring or cynical. Many of them entered probation with the same values we did. I think they genuinely feel they are doing the best they can within the constraints they’re given. The trouble is they no longer see a viable path to steer a different course. Whether it’s fear of repercussions, lack of psychological safety, misplaced loyalty to authority above them, or simply exhaustion of their own — they feel as trapped as we do, just in a different room of the same burning building.

But that doesn’t make the consequences any less damaging. When leadership absorbs the culture of obedience rather than advocacy, the service loses its voice. When dissent becomes career-limiting, purpose becomes optional. And when leaders feel unable to challenge the direction of travel, the rest of us are left absorbing the fallout of decisions nobody truly believes in.

That is how a service with a soul becomes a service with a script.

You’re right: something fundamental has to change. But that change won’t happen through equipment, slogans or ever-tighter instructions. It will only happen when leaders — at every level — rediscover the courage to disagree, to push back, to name what is happening instead of managing around it. Probation didn’t decline because its values were wrong; it declined because its values were slowly silenced.

And until those who still hold those values — whether on the frontline or in management — can speak together rather than in parallel, the service will continue to drift, defended but not directed.

We don’t need heroes. We need honesty. We need leadership that listens, and leadership that dares. And we need a culture where protecting the ethos of probation is seen not as dissent, but as the most loyal act of all.

*******
I agree. As a probation officer I am used to thinking in terms of culpability and the need for people to accept responsibility for their actions (or lack of action) but I don’t find that blame gets us very far. A lot of the comments on this blog tend to want to focus on blame. Whether that’s managers, unions, HQ, the Government or whatever. But pointing fingers won’t pull probation out of the nosedive it’s in. The real issue isn’t really who’s to blame - it’s that probation culture has drifted so far from rehabilitation that everyone feels boxed in, just in different corners.

In my experience most leaders didn’t come into this work to parrot a script. They mostly came with the same hope for a constructive, fair, humane and effective service. But a system built on compliance, fear and crisis-management squeezes the voice out of all of us. And while blame might feel satisfying, it only widens the cracks at the very moment the prison population is exploding, and community supervision is buckling under the strain.

We need something bigger than “who’s at fault.” We need a shared, evidence-led commitment to rehabilitation as the centre of gravity. Because sidelining rehabilitation while doubling down on control in the community isn’t a strategy — it’s a panic reaction. You can’t stabilise a collapsing system by tightening the screws on the only part designed to reduce harm.

Probation must stand for something clearer and braver: that change is possible, and public safety is built on enabling it. That requires honesty up and down the organisation, not silence. It requires leaders who listen and staff who feel safe to speak. It requires consensus, not camps.

*******
The Wall

So, Chris is 45 years old, on ~£65k a year with civil-service terms & conditions, a decent pension lined up & looking to move up a tier. S/he joined probation in the mid-2000's, was fast-tracked into temp SPO when their manager popped his clogs, appointed SPO & kept moving up during the TR kerfuffle. S/he has therefore enabled TR as directed, expedited all hmpps recent commands & is regarded as suitable material for a significant promotion. S/he has suspended all past belief in the historical ethos to achieve personal career goals.

Its been a rough old journey for the past couple of decades, a lot has passed under the bridge, some relationships have suffered/ended & there are many commitments to fulfill, not least being the mortgage & the car loan & the bills.

How does s/he change their trajectory? They risk losing their career, their pension, any future references... but hey, they might discover a scintilla of loyalty. To what? To who?

*THIS* is but one example (a hybrid of several people I know) of the obstructions that have to be overcome; layers of people who are embedded in the current structure, who are wedded to the current culture, who burned their boats years back & now feel they have no means of escape beyond completing their pre-ordained journey to retirement via the HMPPS script.

As they rose through the ranks they have been followed & underpinned by the new recruits, all schooled in the new reality, the way of hmpps.

The architects of the current structure have been planning & preparing the ground for this over decades; from 1980 onwards, if not before. Its been a political triumph to have finally unravelled those woolly jumpers, debagged those grubby do-gooders; to have grasped the probation nettle, uprooted it & burned it on the bonfire of inanities.

How proud they are that they've finally introduced a sense of decency & decorum, ambition & compliance; law & order, if you please.

A very experienced & highly regarded colleague from many moons past told me she had attended her university interview for social work-based training in a bit of a blur. Some kind of delay meant she had landed from her holidays shortly before the interview, so drove straight there in her jolly-holibobs kit (and explained this to the panel). She said there was a grim-faced "man from the ministry" in a very severe dark suit, starched shirt, mirror-shiny shoes sitting next the course tutor. At the end of what she felt was a good interview the man in the suit said words to the effect of "Thank you but if you can't be bothered to make the effort, we don't want your sort on this course. Goodbye."

She *was* offered a place, qualified with flying colours & went on to enjoy a highly regarded career. (I expect Martin is still lurking around in Petty France in a suit pocketing a handsome civil service salary).

Open Letter

To those in leadership, 

I want you to hear this honestly. Reading pieces like this brings up a sadness and an anger that has become far too familiar. Many of us joined probation when it still had a soul. When the work was hard but meaningful. When relationships mattered. When professional judgement was respected. When the service still recognised itself.

What we are living through now feels like standing inside the ruins of something that once meant a great deal. The culture has shifted so far from what probation used to be that some days it barely resembles the service we committed our careers to. You talk about public protection, about risk, about operational needs, but you never seem to acknowledge the depth of what has been lost along the way.

We are watching probation become more hollow, more defensive, more enforcement-led, more afraid. And the burden of that shift always falls on the front line. We are the ones absorbing the fallout from collapsing services, rising crises, unrealistic expectations and decisions made far above us that bear no resemblance to the reality we work in. Each time the system fails, it is practitioners who are left to carry the consequences.

What makes it harder is the feeling that leadership either cannot see this or has chosen not to. You respond to tragedy with equipment. You respond to pressure with instructions. You respond to risk by telling us to be more resilient. But you do not respond to the truth. The service is unsafe because the structure around us has been stripped back to the point where staff themselves are the last line of protection.

That is not resilience. It is exhaustion disguised as professionalism.

I am angry because probation did not need to become this. And I am sad because the ethos that once defined us is slipping away in full view. The people who still believe in it are doing everything they can to keep it alive, but goodwill is not an infinite resource, and it should never have been the foundation the entire service rested on.

If leadership genuinely wants probation to recover, then listen to the people doing the work. We are telling you what is wrong every single day. Listen to the sadness in our voices when we say this is not the probation we joined. Listen to the anger when we say we are being asked to carry risks we cannot manage safely. Listen to the quiet honesty when we tell you that the service is losing its purpose, and that we feel we are losing ours with it.

Probation deserves more than equipment and slogans. The public deserves a service rooted in purpose, skill and support. And the staff holding this together deserve leadership that finally accepts what we already know. Something fundamental has to change.

And so let me say this plainly. Probation is not being held together by strategy, policy or leadership. It is being held together by exhausted practitioners who still care enough to keep turning up. We are the safety net, the scaffolding and the shock absorbers of a system that has forgotten its own purpose. If leadership continues to look away, if nothing meaningful changes, it will not be staff who have failed. It will be those who were trusted to protect this service and instead presided over its slow, avoidable decline. We deserve better. The people we supervise deserve better. And the truth is no longer quiet.

Anon

Guest Blog 107

Probation: An Extension of the Prison?

Against the backdrop of the recent attacks on Probation Officers in Oxford and Preston, we expected credible and meaningful safety measures to finally be put in place, like visible security personnel in every probation office, the kind used by virtually every other public-facing organisation. Instead we’re told:

“Probation officers will be given self-defence training, bleed kits, body-worn cameras, knife arches and metal-detecting wands.” 

If HMPPS applied the same principles to itself that it routinely applies in Serious Further Offence investigations, security measures would have been implemented across England and Wales the moment the Preston incident occurred. Instead, the consequences of systemic inaction and leadership failure are being handed back to us to manage. We are already responsible for supervising, rehabilitating and supporting people with nowhere near enough resources; now we are apparently expected to search, scan and physically protect ourselves as well. Probation is being dragged in two fundamentally incompatible directions at the same time.

Let’s not pretend otherwise: this service has been reshaped into a top-down bureaucracy obsessed with enforcement, metrics, referrals and compliance. That is the inevitable product of an increasingly authoritarian leadership culture within HMPPS, one reinforced by a workforce that lacks diversity in age, race, gender, thought, and credible professional experience. This is hardly surprising when probation remains a chronically underfunded and underpaid profession, if we can still call it a profession at all.

But the latest expectation, that probation practitioners will function as security guards or de facto prison officers, is a profound and dangerous misstep. Yes, some staff thrive in the current enforcement-heavy culture because it aligns with their preferred approach. But suggesting this represents the whole profession is fiction. Many probation officers did not join to search, scan or restrain people. They did not sign up to be enforcers, monitors or “risk managers” in the narrowest sense. They entered this work to help, support, and guide, and many are still offering thoughtful, trauma-informed, principled support every single day. That reality simply doesn’t fit the image being imposed from HMPPS, endorsed by the Chief Probation Officer, the Justice Minister, & Co.

We also need honesty about the wider context of poverty, violence, drug markets, knife crime, housing insecurity, racial divisions and acute mental health crises, which now permeate every corner of the UK. Probation offices are not insulated from this landscape, nor should we pretend that turning practitioners into quasi-security staff has anything to do with addressing it. The reality is simpler: the country is in crisis, the justice system is fractured, and probation is being forced to absorb the fallout with inadequate staffing, unmanageable workloads, poor leadership, and no professional security support.

It is devastating to imagine that the colleagues attacked in Oxford and Preston were almost certainly offering support at the very moment they were harmed. Every serious threat I have faced in this job has emerged during attempts to help, not confront. No knife arch or body-worn camera would have prevented those moments. Many of the people we supervise are in crisis, traumatised, or navigating health, justice and community services, that have already failed them. When people are imprisoned without meaningful rehabilitation or support, or pushed through courts without regard to their needs or humanity, the outcomes are predictable. The probation officer becomes the one who absorbs the consequences.

To be absolutely clear: nothing justifies the attacks on probation practitioners, but the government’s response is the wrong one. Probation offices need actual security: properly trained personnel, clear protocols and modern safety systems. That is not controversial, it is common sense. We also need access to functioning support services: mental health care, housing pathways, addiction treatment, crisis provision, employment support. Without these, probation becomes the default service for everything the rest of the system is unable, or unwilling, to deal with. Ironically, I recently read this perspective in a quietly published 2025 MAPPA report outlining the “Voice of the Practitioner” 

Every day, people enter probation offices seeking help we do not have the means to offer, others expecting decisions that may be devastating. Probation offices and probation practioners are not perfect, but transforming them into an extension of the prison, with metal detectors and practitioners trained to physically intervene, is dangerous and completely out of step with “what works”. There is no shortage of insight, research and professional expertise pointing toward a better model. Much of it has been shared, published and lived. Much of it has been ignored.

Despite the dire findings of the HM Inspectorate of Probation over the past decade, there is evidence of probation working as it should, although I’d rarely describe it as “magic”: This from the Probation Institute. But this is not universal. It is clear that the public and political narrative about probation urgently needs to change. This from Revolving Doors charity.

And we have been repeatedly told that our once world-renowned probation service is now an international “outlier”, and it’s identity drastically needs to be shaped and changed. 'Outlier England' published in July on this blog. 

Fixing this is not complicated. We could upgrade probation qualifications to the standard of social work tomorrow, restore professional status, and pay salaries that reflect the responsibility of the role as referenced by 'Important Read - Part Four' of an article by Prof Rob Canton re-published on this blog. 

We could even restore the ethos of probation’s past, because that worked too and we could actually listen to those with lived experience; there are credible voices who know what support, supervision and reform look like when they work. 

Responsibility for fixing this crisis lies squarely with senior probation leadership, HMPPS and the Justice Minister. For starters, they could easily divert a chunk of that £700 million hoarded for tagging and AI that won’t improve frontline outcomes. Secondly, our unions should be collectively demanding urgent safety measures, the immediate separation from HMPPS, and not quietly accepting the further conversion of probation into a poorly paid, deprofessionalised service that is being dragged into being a low-status enforcement arm of the justice system dressed up as “public protection” and “risk management”.

As we continue to process the shocking attacks in Oxford and Preston, we have to accept they may not be the last. We have waited years for meaningful action to keep staff safe and to recognise the real value of our work. What we are being offered is superficial, performative and dangerously misguided. Some will relish the opportunity to wield search wands; others will walk away. The rest of us will carry on doing what we always do: absorbing the consequences of decisions made far above us, quietly working, quietly worrying, quietly waiting… for safety, for change, for pay, for leadership, for a way out… just waiting.

Probation Officer

Taking Stock

I've been trying to get my head around exactly what's been going on over the last few weeks and to be honest my head has been spinning. Looking back, it began to feel like we were on a roll heading towards the end of November with a series of themes around morality, encouraged by the on-going BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures. I guess it was the dreadful news of a further attack on a PO in Oxfordshire, following on from the summer Preston stabbing. 

For me it crystalised my generally perceived way in which probation must be being viewed by the clientele - we're the enemy, in no way being part of any solution, just an uncaring route to recall, and that must surely put everyone working in this field in danger. Knife arches, body cameras, security guards are clearly not any kind of answer if we're seen as the problem. Why on earth can't intelligent, sensible people in authority see that abandoning our core aim of assisting rehabilitation by endlessly focussing on 'risk' puts us all in danger and does nothing to reduce the prison population?

I think it was the blog post 'What Probation Has Become' at the end of November that cemented the upward trajectory both in site visits and contributions, rising to 1,500 and things have been steadily climbing ever since, despite festive activity providing distractions. Recent contributions have been stunning and I sense returning to some of the heady days of the TR fight when I know the MoJ got quite worried about the traction the blog was getting. But that's the problem now, it doesn't get the same traction for a whole host of reasons. It's quite clear that this site goes completely unnoticed by newer colleagues and especially PQiP students. This is not a particularly hopeful message on the private Facebook PQiP Training page boasting 2,800 members:-

"This group is to support PQUIP’s as such we need to ensure the group remains positive, supportive and helpful at all times. In order to do so posts may not be allowed if they are aimed at organisation change or policy, specific workload issues, specific colleague or caseload issues."

Academics at the three training Universities take no interest in it, but then we know all are contractually bound by the MoJ/HMPPS to say nothing publicly that might question probation policy or practice! It still surprises me though at the lack of 'professional curiosity' because any google search of 'probation' brings up this blog almost as quickly as HMPPS itself and there's some very good stuff on here.

Of course we've sadly lost key supporters, particularly in Parliament and both the PI and Napo voices are simply not strong enough. Although it's pretty clear to many of us what any sustainable solution might be, despite the appalling performance of the top HMPPS/MoJ team at last week's PAC hearing, appart from a couple of notable exceptions, committee members seem pretty clueless to me. I loved the input from one particularly useless member who 'had done some research at the weekend' and was effectively slapped down by the Chair. Like most people, parliamentarians including my MP haven't a clue or interest in probation and we still lack any kind of authoritative voice. But I don't want to sound down-hearted because I still  believe it could all come right - remember the immortal words of Harold Macmillan "events dear boy, events".  

Seeing as we know how keen Lord Timpson is on AI being able to sort much of probation's staffing problems by freeing up a day a week for more cases, I've finally understood why the blog viewing figures rocketed by several millions last year. It seems 'bots' based in Vietnam were trawling all over it, operated by poorly-paid humans, scooping up all the fine words in order to inform 'Large Language Models' that all AI platforms require. So, it seems we've all unwittingly helped enormously with the AI revolution.

I'll end this bit of reflecting with a word of extremely grateful thanks to all the many faithful readers, supportes and contributors who on a daily basis help keep my faith in probation returning to being a noble and worthwhile endeavour and prevent me from feeling it's time to pack it all in. If you are up for the ride, then so am I. So, on that note and back to the fray, this from overnight:-

We’re Normalising Failure

Let’s stop pretending. Those of us inside probation can see what’s happening every day. The reality is we’re normalising a level of failure that would once have triggered emergency action.

Most cases are now managed at the bare minimum. Real rehabilitative work is rationed. Risk management has become thinner, more administrative, and more about covering organisational exposure than actually keeping people safe. And this didn’t start with Covid.

TR didn’t just reorganise probation – it broke its professional spine. It stripped out experience, fragmented delivery, replaced values with contracts, and taught a generation of staff that survival mattered more than craft. Covid just accelerated the damage.

Yes, the pandemic disrupted face-to-face work. But what we’re dealing with now isn’t a temporary hangover. It’s structural: unsafe workloads, chronic vacancies, constant churn of inexperienced staff, and a system that quietly depends on goodwill and moral injury to keep functioning.

Unification was meant to be the reset. It wasn’t. We didn’t get a stable, well-resourced public service. We got a bigger version of the same fragility – with better branding. You can see it in the gaps: 

– Programmes that exist in theory but not in practice
– RARs that quietly translate into “telephone check-ins”
– Commissioned services that are commissioned but not really available
– Risk management done fast, not well
– Public protection framed as compliance, not craft

We’ve shifted from professional judgement to defensive practice. From “What does this person need to change?” to “What do I need to record so I don’t get blamed?” That’s not what any of this was meant to be. Staff aren’t the problem. They’re holding up a broken system with skill and integrity that goes largely unrecognised. The danger is that we start to accept this as normal. Because once failure becomes normal, recovery stops being possible.

Probation needs honesty, investment, and the return of trust in professional practice. And those of us inside the system know exactly how far away that is.

--oo00oo--

"Sometimes people ask me what's it like being a probation officer. I say : part social worker, part security guard, part clairvoyant — basically the Avengers, but with worse pay. Still you'd be amazed at what you can achieve when you replace experience with optimism and a mandatory e-learning module."

******
"I tell them it's basically a factory job with a human conveyor belt, transporting people from prison, to court, to the community then back to prison. We wrap them up nicely and label them High, Med, Low to ensure correct delivery and obviously we have to hit daily targets and also check for any damaged goods. So basically the criminal justice version of Amazon as we always accept returns and constantly introduce new ways to trap people into thinking we're offering a decent service."