Dawn of MoJ Enlightenment?

Tomorrow is a significant day for the UK as yet another Labour leader 'kisses hands' and is invited to form a new government by HM King Charles III. Many of us hope dearly that almost certainly we will get a new Justice Minister, as well as a rowing back of the drive for digitisation at the MoJ and HMPPS. Lets hope that this, coupled with a drive for devolution and shifting of power may give support to a better-informed approach to the Probation Service and the chance of re-gaining its identity and function away from the dead hand of Civil Service command and control.

As always, staunch reader and contributor 'Getafix helps us focus on things and points us in the direction of a recent speech by HMI Martin Jones. Lets hope he has the ear of Andy Burnham and the new Administration:-   

Martin Jones’ keynote speech for StandOut
Published: 13 July 2026

On 08 July 2026 the Chief Inspector of Probation, Martin Jones, gave the keynote speech at an event for StandOut, a charity that provides coaching and support to bridge the transition between prison and the community.

“I am delighted to be here for this event and would like to start by congratulating and thanking you for the brilliant work you are doing.

Your work is making a difference every day for people preparing for release and ensuring they have a better chance of succeeding when they reach the community.

This success means better outcomes for people on release, their families and their communities and it is in all of our interests to ensure more people are supported to succeed.

I was appointed Chief Inspector of Probation in the Spring of 2024, having now spent well over three decades working in justice – including latterly time in charge of the Parole Board.

Much public and political attention is focused on prison. I would argue too much.

Traditionally public discourse has focused on whether prison sentences are long enough and the size of our prison population.

But too little attention is focused on the community. How do we avoid sending people to prison and break destructive cycles of reoffending? How do we better prepare people for release?

The numbers are stark: According to the last published figures:

• 87,342 people in prison
• 248,568 people on caseload of probation (70 per cent of whom are in the community)
• 56,923 releases in last twelve months as early release schemes and changes to fix term recall have started to impact.
• 48,327 recalls in latest period.

In essence there is massive change moving pressure from our overstretched prisons to our equally overstretched probation service – where we have too few staff, with too little experience, managing too many cases.

As Chief Inspector it is important I maintain a critical eye on the problems facing the service.

I am pleased that the Government is investing more in probation – and there have been some successes. But it needs care and attention. I might even say TLC.

The service still bears the scars of change over the last 10-12 years.

According to the Public Accounts Committee the service has a staffing gap of c 25 per cent, we have a workforce that has lost too many experienced staff, and new probation staff often have a full or excessive caseload far too soon.

There is a sense that some probation “craft” has been lost.

Does the service understand enough about the people they are working with? Do they understand their lives, their problems, their worries, their needs, their risks? Our inspections tell us they do not.

There are problems with information exchange and there is, in my assessment, an excessive fear of SFOs – but despite this fear, there is a shortfall in the quality of work taking place on public protection.

It is against that difficult backdrop that the sentencing review brings further changes. In essence more people will be dealt with in the community.

How well prepared is it for that change?

Huge efforts are being made to ensure the service is as well prepared as it can be and there have been some improvements in recruitment and retention rates.

There have been changes to reduce workload, so the resources better match the demand, and new initiatives – such as justice transcribe – are freeing up probation officers to spend more of their time with people on probation rather than form filling and stuck behind computer screens.

However, more is still needed – that is why I am delighted to be here today.

In reality, we need to better harness the expertise, innovation and resources within the third sector to ensure we provide better support and services for people.

We know that most people in prison have huge unmet need that contributes to reoffending and poor outcomes. Working with organisations like Stand Out we can surely better prepare people for their release from custody.

It has always been true that if we have the right plan, we massively increase success rates.

• Support with substance misuse and mental health.
• Somewhere to live
• Something worthwhile to do.
• Support in the community – (family/friends/a mentor) someone who wants you to succeed…

Unless we get that right we see predictable failure.

• Recall because of a lack of support with problems.
• Reoffending because we have not tackled the underlying causes.
• Harm to the community and to people on probation because people are not safeguarded.

I do however see a pathway to improvement.

Despite the pressure facing probation, I still see professionals who want to do a good job. I see so much determination (maybe with some frustration) in the third sector to achieve better outcomes. And I am seeing signs that probation performance is improving. Public protection scores are up in every reinspected region. Desistance and engagement scores are better.

But the gap in delivery? That is now the task.

Can we free probation up to deliver better results, with greater local autonomy and accountability, and better join up?

How do we build to deliver this at a greater scale. Surely the answer must be for a continued realignment and investment in community provision and support.

If we can do that, we can – perhaps achieve a virtuous circle – less failure in the community, lower reoffending rates, fewer victims, safer communities.

That must surely be a driving ambition of the next steps of reform.”

Martin Jones 

HM Chief Inspector of Probation

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Our mission

StandOut's mission is to empower people leaving prison to transform their lives, realise their potential, and leave the criminal justice system behind - for good.

Our values

At StandOut, we’re led by our values: Champions, Connected, Committed, First Class, and Courageous. They are at the heart of everything we do – from how we work with our participants, to how we relate to each other, our partners and stakeholders. We don't believe in quick fixes, nor that life runs in straight lines, especially if someone has experienced prison. Our values keep us focused and remind us of the things that matter most.

Our history

StandOut is the vision of our founders Penny Parker and Jo Fellows.

Penny’s background was in running the highly regarded Sycamore Tree restorative justice course, which she was involved in setting up in HMPs Wandsworth, Bronzefield and Pentonville. Too often she saw that having unlocked a motivation to change in people, the practical steps to prepare for the transition out of prison were missing. When she found Resurgo’s award-winning Spear Programme, Penny thought it could be adapted to work very effectively with people leaving prison. Working with Jo, whose background was in working with young people facing barriers to employment through the Spear Programme, they brought their shared vision to reality in 2017 as they piloted StandOut in HMP Wandsworth.

Having successfully established the programme in HMP Wandsworth, in 2019 StandOut launched in HMP Pentonville, and in 2023 we launched in our third prison - HMP Wormwood Scrubs.

Lament for Seasoned Instinctive Judgment

Thanks go to Ian Gould, another long term blog supporter, for pointing us to the Daily Telegraph again for a strongly-worded piece yesterday. Is it too much to hope the paper is on a mission? 

The public will pay the price for Britain’s toxic empathy towards criminals

Once the hard moral hinge between custody and liberty, our probation service is now compromised by sentimentalism

Britain’s probation service has become a tragic monument to well-intentioned ruin – a system where compassion without competence has curdled from virtue into vice.

Once the hard moral hinge between custody and liberty, probation is now compromised by what might be called fatal sentimentalism: the belief that kindness can substitute for control; self-discipline is oppressive; and that bureaucratic ideology can redeem lost public trust. The result is predictable and too often deadly – offenders released into communities not because they are safe, but because the machinery meant to protect us no longer believes it has to.

The late, unlamented experiment of merging probation with prisons was sold as reform. In truth, it was an annexation. The culture of seasoned instinctive judgment that once defined probation was submerged under the bureaucratic sludge of His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service.

The probation officer, once the clear-eyed guardian of moral authority, has been rebadged as a “rehabilitation practitioner”, a title designed to soothe rather than safeguard. Ideological management theories have supplanted hard-earned craft. The new catechism demands unconditional empathy, a “trauma-informed” gaze for every offender, and a reflexive suspicion of anything that smells of retribution for harm done.

The damage did not begin with the current branding. Under the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), a Blairite construction, known colloquially as the “Nightmare on Marsham Street”, probation was already being pulled away from its roots in local knowledge. Later the ruinous “Transforming Rehabilitation programme”, led for a time by Antonia Romeo, the new Cabinet Permanent Secretary, completed this ideological vandalism.

Dreamed up in Whitehall and executed with breathtaking incompetence, it fragmented a coherent probation system into public and private silos with conflicting priorities, before being abandoned in the face of mounting evidence of failure. Profit was pitted against prudence, frontline expertise drowned in contracts and targets, and the ancient professional identity of probation was smashed. Its collapse was as predictable as its conception was reckless. Though the scheme has now been formally scrapped, its corrosive legacy endures in a service still struggling to remember what it is for.

I’ve seen this syndrome metastasising inside our prisons too. Ministers and mandarins preach about “rehabilitative culture” in establishments you’d hesitate to house livestock in – violence rampant, green staff overwhelmed and basic order barely clinging on. When ideology outpaces reality this much, catastrophe is close behind. And probation, the fragile bridge between our feral jails and the public realm, is now collapsing under the same delusions.

The watchdogs have been barking the alarm for years. Inspectors’ reports describe a probation workforce that is often well-meaning and sometimes impressive, but terrifyingly under-prepared for the offenders they supervise. They emerge from training steeped in therapy-speak and empty slogans about “believing in change”, yet many have never confronted a manipulative career criminal, or managed a volatile offender under pressure. In this vacuum of experience, risk assessments become box-ticking rituals. Offenders learn the script of contrition, the service duly records “progress”, and the cycle rolls on, until another tragedy drags the policy euphemisms into the headlines.

Probation has always needed heart – understanding what drives offending is part of the craft – but that heart must beat inside a ribcage of hard realism. Accountability is not cruelty. Retribution, properly understood, is society’s signal that wrongdoing has meaning and consequence. When probation loses that principle, it ceases to be justice and becomes social work with potential body counts.

The first step in recovery is honesty. The service must admit that it has lost its ethical backbone and professional confidence. We need to reclaim the language of responsibility and risk – not as relics of a punitive past, but as foundations of any credible public service. Training must return to first principles: risk management, proportionate enforcement, sound judgement, and deep knowledge of criminal behaviour. Senior leadership must be chosen for front-line competence, not ideological orthodoxy or “lived experience”.

Above all, probation must divorce itself from prison governance. The fiction that a single “correctional service” can simultaneously protect the public, manage custody, and engineer rehabilitation has crippled both arms. Probation belongs in local communities, as a professional service rooted in justice, truth-telling, and operational integrity. Not as a satellite of prisons, nor a branch of social care. The best probation officers (and somehow we have retained some brilliant practitioners) know this in their bones.

A probation service so stripped of confidence, experience and principled judgement, cannot be patched up with another review or a new “values framework”. It needs wholesale reconstruction: rigorous professional training, unapologetic public protection as its central creed, and leadership unafraid to confront the sentimental dogmas that have hollowed it out. I’m aware of how battered the service feels with endless, often fatuous, reinventions. But until we find the courage to perform this radical surgery, more innocent people will pay the price for the state’s fatal confusion between mercy and naivety.

Professor Ian Acheson is a former prison governor and senior official with the Home Office

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

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.

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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.

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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.

Thought Piece 5

It’s almost impressive how much spin can be wrapped around numbers this bad. We’re told to feel reassured.

“Investment”
“Transformation”
“Technology”
“Opportunity”

Meanwhile HM Inspectorate of Probation has just reported that less than half of cases are meeting the standard to keep people safe. Less than half. Apparently that’s what “rebuilding the service” looks like now.

• Two thirds staffing.
• SPO shortages.
• AP beds full.
• Pre-release planning collapsing.
• Reset disrupting risk work.
• Early releases dumped on already stretched teams.

But don’t worry, we’ve got AI transcripts and tagging contracts. Because nothing says public protection like a laptop and an ankle bracelet.

The language is the giveaway. “Difficult choices will need to be made.” Translation: 

• cut contact, 
• script supervision, 
• move people through faster and hope nothing blows up.

It’s not reform. It’s rationing. They’re not strengthening probation. They’re shrinking it and calling it innovation. And the real insult? This is all being sold as a success story, while the people actually doing the job are told to clap for 4% and be grateful. If this is what £700 million buys, I’d love to see what underfunding looks like!

• You can’t run public protection on PowerPoint slides and pilots.
• You can’t replace experience with “digital solutions.”
• And you can’t collapse standards to under 50% and still pretend the system is fine.

This isn’t transformation. It’s a slow managed decline with better PR.

Anon

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Yup, and the following is just cringeworthy bollox:

"While sufficient work to keep people safe was not evident in enough of the cases we inspected, following the region’s inspection in 2024, we also saw strategic progress in strengthening public protection work, improved staff accountability and engagement, and a commitment to building a culture that supported learning and psychological safety."

Riddle me this, Jones: how the fuckity fuck fuck can "sufficient work to keep people safe was not evident" be construed as "strategic progress in strengthening public protection work, improved staff accountability and engagement, and a commitment to building a culture that supported learning and psychological safety."

It's word salad; it's meaningless drivel... it's a sequence of non sequiturs throughout. But t'was always thus in HMI probation reports, with areas/OMU's scoring teen% yet leadership rated as strong. Gotta protect that pension pot (and the gong they promised if you behave).

Anon

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It’s the classic inspection paradox, isn’t it. “Work to keep people safe not sufficient in most cases”…but somehow also…“strategic progress, strengthened protection, psychological safety, positive culture.”

If this were any other profession, failing in over half of cases would be called what it is:failure. In probation it gets translated into management poetry. Because admitting the obvious, that the service is under-resourced and unsafe, would mean confronting the people who control the budget. So instead we get paragraphs of soft language and “green shoots”. It’s not analysis. It’s cushioning.

When less than half of cases meet the required standard, that isn’t “progress”. That’s a red warning light. But red doesn’t look good in a ministerial briefing, so we get beige.

Anon

--oo00oo--

"It’s not analysis." Fucking too right... Jones' lukewarm fudge would have been dismissed out of hand by a judge.

I know I'm reaching back in time here, bear with me... if such equivocal nonsense had ever been submitted to a court in a full PSR (remember them, peeps?) the judge/magistrate would have had a dickie fit. On one occasion the Crown Court liaison PO told me "the judge asked me to tell you to make your bloody mind up. He's adjourned the case for a week to allow you time to have a good, hard think & re-submit something of value." Those were the days when a report would be read in advance by the sentencing judge and the CCLO quizzed about any discrepancies or outlandish proposals.

I dread to think what passes as a report these days.

Anon

The Inspector Speaks

Sentencing Act January 2026

I was pleased to see the Sentencing Act receive royal asset yesterday evening, together with the government’s reassurance that the reforms are supported by plans to rebuild the Probation Service – including investment of up to £700m over the next three years, increased ability to tag offenders, and new technology aimed at reducing administration, so staff can focus on work that reduces reoffending.

It is positive that the Act will not take effect immediately, giving the Probation Service time to prepare for the incoming changes. However, we know that some measures, including the extension of Suspended Sentence Orders and changes to Remand, will come into force in just two months, while implementation planning continues for more complex changes.

I have spoken recently about my support in principle for many elements of the Act and the opportunity it provides to transform the justice system.

However, I have been clear that there will be challenges in ensuring the gap between probation resource and the requirements of the Act are reconciled, and that difficult choices will need to be made around what to prioritise for maximum impact.

I have also warned that there is a danger of the reforms collapsing public confidence in probation unless they are implemented with great care and thought, and the right investment is made in the service in the short to medium term. Failing to address these point risks setting the service up to fail.

I look forward to continuing to work closely with the Department throughout 2026 to advise on how our inspection findings can inform next steps. In particular, I will be sharing the results of our Dynamic Inspection of Public Protection programme, which publishes its first report next week (29 January), with a focus on what improved probation practice can do to make the public safer and reduce harm to victims.

--oo00oo--

Dynamic Inspection of Public Protection in Kent, Surrey and Sussex

Chief Inspector’s judgement

This review of the Probation Service’s public protection across Kent, Surrey and Sussex revealed that, whilst there had been improvements since our last inspection, concerningly, work to keep people safe met the required standard in less than half the cases inspected for ‘assessment’ and ‘implementation and delivery’. In addition, just over half the cases met this standard for case ‘planning’ and ‘reviewing’.

The region’s public protection work had been made more challenging by large-scale national changes in response to prison overpopulation. We found that more support was needed for staff managing complex cases, particularly those involving domestic abuse, and work needed to be done to ensure consistency across all cases.

A primary concern was a lack of quality information sharing of the risks posed by individuals on probation, with probation service and police colleagues highlighting the challenges faced by both organisations to balance public protection with proportionate, compliant information sharing. We were encouraged to see work underway and resource allocated to strengthen relationships. However, there remained no centrally driven directive on what should be shared. This was a long-standing issue which continued to undermine the region’s ability to understand fully the risk posed by those they supervised. A national strategic approach to ensure consistency and compliance from both probation and partners was required to facilitate effective public protection work.

The region was affected by ongoing workforce challenges, with understaffing at both probation officer and senior probation officer grades at the time of the inspection. This inevitably affected capacity to manage demanding caseloads and risk to the public. Constraints including proximity to London, associated high costs of living, lengthy vetting procedures and limited autonomy in recruitment continued to compound these workforce pressures.

In response, the region had introduced a range of innovative strategies to optimise resources, including the use of technology and artificial intelligence, and was working to address training gaps to improve the quality of case management, despite limited resources.

While sufficient work to keep people safe was not evident in enough of the cases we inspected, following the region’s inspection in 2024, we also saw strategic progress in strengthening public protection work, improved staff accountability and engagement, and a commitment to building a culture that supported learning and psychological safety.

--oo00oo--

Inspection commentary (highlights)

Case inspections highlighted that, for both assessment and implementation and delivery, less than half the cases met the required standard to keep people safe. Planning and reviewing met the required standard in just over half the cases. There were indicators that the sufficiency of work to keep people safe was on an upward trajectory in Kent, Surrey and Sussex across all the above areas. Practitioners were completing meaningful home visits and speaking to the families and support networks of people on probation where appropriate to improve risk management. MAPPA cases (multi-agency public protection arrangements) were also managed effectively. Planning for restrictions and monitoring was generally stronger than planning for interventions and programmes to address risk. Restrictions were consistently included in plans and compliance arrangements were clear, although there was less detail on interventions that would take place to address attitudes and behaviour.

Large-scale national change and responses to prison over-population, as well as delays in sentencing, had a destabilising effect on people on probation, making public protection work in Kent, Surrey and Sussex more challenging. Those sentenced and released on the day from court, due to time served on remand, meant pre-release planning could not be delivered in a meaningful way. The increase in people on probation due to early release from custody schemes also affected the time available to set services up to meet their needs and manage their risks. Short recall periods were at risk of disrupting continuity and partner agency involvement, often leaving probation practitioners as the only consistent presence throughout the sentence.

Although Probation Reset arrangements were outside the region’s control, they had a detrimental impact on public protection work. Planned service delivery including challenging conversations or interventions were often disrupted by reset, a concern that was most pronounced in complex domestic abuse cases. Regional leaders were implementing a model to transfer all reset cases to a dedicated hub, though this process was still being refined and audited. ‘Quick guides’ outlined eligibility criteria and checklists for pre-reset tasks, with guidance focused mainly on recording and concluding processes. However, casework inspections highlighted varied and inconsistent practices in which victim and risk information was prioritised at transfer, creating a sense of instability and lack of coherence. Reset hubs were in the early stages of implementation, with communication and monitoring mechanisms already in place, though their intended effect on consistency had not yet been fully realised.

Challenges faced in managing risk to the public were compounded by long-standing staffing challenges, influenced by proximity to London and the associated high cost of living. Since the previous inspection, the percentage of qualified probation officers in post had declined, with current staffing at approximately two-thirds of the target level. There was also understaffing of senior probation officers by over 10 per cent. This inevitably affected capacity to manage demanding caseloads. The region was actively implementing measures within its control to optimise resources, such as a focus on the retention of PQiPs, where significant numbers were resigning or withdrawing. However, additional constraints, such as vetting processes and limited autonomy in recruitment, continued to complicate efforts to address these workforce pressures.

In response to continuing staffing pressures, the region had introduced a range of innovative and accountable strategies to optimise resources. These included the use of technology, artificial intelligence, and the See the Way Forward approach, which streamlined complex or duplicate processes. Sometimes tasks were reallocated, to free practitioners’ time for meaningful work, including activities that promoted public protection. The region sought to identify gaps in training by conducting training needs analyses and exploring new ways to improve this activity. The region introduced a range of activities to strengthen staff capability and support informal learning. Examples included deploying quality development officers (QDOs) to provide specialist guidance and development in key areas and implementing pod structures to promote informal learning and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. Technology had been particularly effective, offering practitioners practical support and reassurance that solutions were being developed to alleviate workload pressures. The region was proactive in engaging in trials from central HMPPS, designed to improve the recording and accessibility of information for practitioners.

Capacity issues with APs were identified in both weeks of the inspection, compounded by lack of available bed spaces, transfers, co-working arrangements, and contingency measures that were not always effective. The region was concerned about this issue and had pursued conversations with national AP colleagues, which they felt had reached a conclusion but with no resolution. People on probation posing the highest risk of serious harm in Kent, Surrey and Sussex were often refused an AP bed due to capacity issues or placed throughout the country. This contradicted public protection principles of developing stability through support networks and resettlement.

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."

******
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.

******

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.

******

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

******

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.

******

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.

********

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?

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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.

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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.

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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.