Romeo Special

From Daily Mail:-
Andy Burnham's top mandarin is facing questions over her own role in the prison overcrowding crisis that is leading to thousands of criminals being released early.

Dame Antonia Romeo, now Cabinet Secretary, was in charge of the Ministry of Justice for four years as problems mounted with the plan to build more cells. She was accused by MPs of presiding over a 'ticking timebomb' as her department knew that existing jails were rapidly running out of space yet the construction of new sites was delayed.

On her watch the MoJ built just 6,518 new places were built out of a promised 20,000, and the target will only be reached five years late according to the National Audit Office. When grilled by the Public Accounts Committee last year, Dame Antonia admitted there had been a 'degree of slippage in the delivery' but blamed unexpected developments including planning hold-ups.

She was also challenged over the MoJ's decision to sign a 10-year lease on HMP Dartmoor despite knowing the site had high levels of radon gas, meaning that hundreds of much-needed cells cannot be used.

Former prison governor John Podmore told the Daily Mail: 'She dug a big hole and Andy Burnham jumped right into it. 'While she was at the Ministry of Justice she watched it all go wrong. I didn't see any intervention that she did. 'The overcrowding crisis has been around for a long time but they haven't taken any responsibility.'

He said the department could have created more room by stopping so many suspects being held in jail on remand ahead of long-delayed trials, or by reducing the large number of released prisoners being recalled to jail for minor licence breaches.

Instead, the Prime Minister is now having to consider more radical proposals to free up space - in order to prevent the killers of PC Andrew Harper being included in the looming early release scheme - such as putting men in women's jails.

Another ex governor, Prof Ian Acheson, pointed out that Dame Antonia was previously responsible for the disastrous £4billion part-privatisation of the probation service, which later had to be reversed. He said: 'The connected upper class of the Senior Civil Service giving the PM advice on this political crisis bear some of the blame for the mess the criminal justice system is in.

'Romeo now sits at the side of the Prime Minister and represents continuity of the administrative class who have presided over chaos with no answers apart from 'No, Prime Minister'.

'The Ministry of Justice in a tight field is one of the worst departments in Whitehall. When the dust settles on this latest debacle, Andy Burnham would do well to consider a wholesale clear out of officials who have served him so poorly.'

But a Government source insisted: 'It is totally ridiculous to claim that anyone is responsible for the prisons crisis Labour inherited other than the Tory ministers who ignored repeated warnings from officials and refused to take action.'

Insiders said that key decisions that led to the overcrowding crisis, including increasing prison sentences as well as failing to provide enough funding, were taken by Tory-era ministers rather than officials.

A Government spokesman added: 'As Permanent Secretary at the MoJ, Antonia led the programme for new prison places, which included opening three new prisons with over 4,500 new prison places and plans to deliver 14,000 by 2031.

'She and her team consistently worked to prevent the prison system reaching maximum capacity, including during the summer riots in 2024 where she led the response of the Criminal Justice System to bring offenders swiftly to justice.'

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A significant Twitter thread:-

I've absolutely avoided the tittle tattle around Romeo's previous conduct mainly because of my own experience of being a pushy outsider in CS. I've focused on aspects of her performance which have been effectively memory holed. 'Transforming Rehabilitation' is exhibit A.

Romeo while DG at the MoJ was Senior Responsible Officer for this part privatisation of the probation service which was a total disaster from start to finish. Government ideological vandalism certainly but implemented by her.

She assured parliament the doomed transformation programme “is going to work and isn’t taking on any unnecessary risk” It was a total fuck up from start to finish when Probation was returned to public sector after wastage of £467 million underestimated costs and bail outs.

The probation union said the process was a “shambles” with “zero communication”, increased paperwork, fragmented risk management, deskilling and demoralisation of staff, and poorer outcomes for offenders being supervised. In other words it put the community at greater risk.

£9 million alone was spent on consultancy trying to gild this turd while probation officers had their pay frozen. The National Audit Office demolished the programme finding 'systemic failings' in design and implementation, aspects she was fully responsible for as SRO.

So it's for this reason and this alone I have serious reservations about the spin that says she's equal to the task of 'rewiring government.' It doesn't matter that she's a women and ambitious (oh no!) or all the fluff around her media profile. What matters is *delivery*.

But airbrushing serious failures won't cut it either. The systemic rot in the senior lanyard class in public service is a 'mediocracy' - people promoted up to and well beyond their level of competence. Not sure she's the best exemplar of how to tackle that. We shall see.

Ian Acheson

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"The systemic rot in the senior lanyard class in public service is a 'mediocracy'"

After all of the failures & waste of public money la romeo has been responsible for, someone with media clout has finally said it out loud.

John Podmore also alluded to it last week on R4 (referred to on this blog previously), but without going as far as Ian (possible bbc editing? possibly being cautious?). But la romeo has been at the heart of the destruction of justice for a long time, at least 8 years' at the helm in varying roles:

2011-13, Director General, Transformation.
2013 -15, Director General, Criminal Justice
2021-25, Ministry of Justice as permanent secretary

Dame Antonia Romeo (Jan 2021 – Mar 2025)
Sir Richard Heaton KCB (Aug 2015 – Aug 2020)
Ursula Brennan (July 2012 – July 2015) – Retired
Sir Suma Chakrabarti (May 2007 – 2012)

There's also this motley crew from noms/hmpps who aided & abetted the catastrophe:

Martin Narey (2004 to 2005)
Helen Edwards (2005 to 2008)
Phil Wheatley as Director-General (2008 to 2010)
Michael Spurr (2010 to 2019)
Jo Farrar (2019 to 2022)
Amy Rees (2022 to 2025)
Phil Copple as interim (2025)
James McEwen (2025 to present)

And any assortment of shadowy senior civil servants who shun the limelight but happily impose stupid, uninformed policies upon the minions.

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There is an interesting contrast between the discussion about Antonia Romeo and the SFO discussion above. When accountability reaches senior organisational level, suddenly context matters enormously: political decisions, funding constraints, planning delays, competing pressures and decisions made elsewhere in the system.

And actually, context should matter. Complex systems fail for complex reasons. But surely the same principle has to apply when examining the actions of an individual PP.

If a practitioner was carrying an excessive workload, covering sickness, working within an organisational supervision model, unable to access accommodation or treatment, dealing with poor information sharing and making decisions within the time and resources available, those aren’t excuses to be stripped away before examining their practice. They are part of the evidence.

Perhaps genuine organisational learning starts when we become as interested in the context surrounding frontline decisions as we apparently are in the context surrounding decisions made at the top.

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When there's glory to be grasped, Alpha Romeo is more than happy to be in the spotlight.

“To get large transformation programmes working, you’ve got to have really good assurance in place so that you know you’re not believing your own hype”

“My job as senior responsible officer is to make sure we deliver the benefits of the programme. We need to really understand what’s going on – and there are no prizes for not listening.”

Most offenders, she points out, have “a very complex and intractable set of problems that need to be looked at holistically.”

As the new system is established, these will be identified using what Romeo calls an “actuarial tool”: a piece of software that “looks at all the indicators and does something rather complicated and determines what level of risk someone is.” ... Romeo emphasises that the final decision will be made by NPS professionals – as will decisions over whether to recategorise offenders once the system is up and running.

There is clearly a political timetable behind the pace at which the MoJ is moving... Romeo acknowledges that the ministry hasn’t trialled its final proposals anywhere. “You have to turn on the statute once nationally,” she says.

“The Cabinet Office has a very clear process for awarding contracts.”

"I personally listen very carefully to what people tell me; and I go out all the time and talk to trusts, and to local authorities, and to police and crime commissioners.”

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Powerful friends are useful, especially when you share a longstanding agenda.

"The Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team broke into a safe and destroyed the department’s copy of a historic bullying investigation into the new head of the civil service. In 2022 Darren Tierney, the then director-general of the government standards watchdog, asked maintenance staff to force open the vault. Reports surfaced that the department's copy of the Romeo file was disposed of following the vault breach... He later said he had wanted access to a confidential report about Dame Antonia Romeo. The Cabinet Office stated that the manual opening of the broken safe was routine due to a mechanical failure" - The Times/Telegraph & others

* Darren Tierney previously worked under Antonia Romeo when she headed the Department for International Trade (DIT) before later becoming the Director-General for Propriety and Ethics in the Cabinet Office

It seems there's a strong link between Romeo & the Cabinet Office...

"In July 2022, Francis Maude launched an independent review of UK civil service governance and accountability... Antonia Romeo—acting then as the Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Justice—officially sponsored and supported the review alongside Maude.. Romeo later advanced to become Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, putting her at the head of the department where Maude previously drove major structural reforms as Minister for the Cabinet Office" civil service world & others.

"News of the government’s intention to reform the civil service began to emerge in 2020. At the time, the agenda was being pushed by then-Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser of PM Boris Johnson. Maude will chair the latest review, with the support of Ministry of Justice permanent secretary Antonia Romeo"

2010: Romeo transferred to the Cabinet Office as the Executive Director in the new Efficiency and Reform Group under Francis Maude.

But not everyone's in thrall to alpha romeo:

"Antonia did not arrive in the senior civil service by the usual route of decades in a single department. She arrived through the coordination layer, the place where the various arms of the British state meet and agree their stories.

[romeo's] is not the career of a specialist. It is the career of a fixer. Intelligence liaison, efficiency reform, transformation, implementation, delivery. Every job title is a verb dressed up as a noun, and none of them leaves a paper trail you can scrutinise in a newspaper.

There was a reason for the trajectory, and his name was Jeremy Heywood, later Lord Heywood of Whitehall, who was Cabinet Secretary from 2012 until his death in 2018... Heywood was Romeo's mentor. He personally asked her to stay in the civil service when she was considering leaving, and sent her to New York. He smoothed her path to DIT, reportedly striking a "trade-off" with Theresa May, according to the Mail on Sunday's 2020 reporting, to secure her appointment despite the New York investigation.

Past performance is the best predictor of future performance. On past performance, Antonia Romeo is precisely what a failing administrative state produces, elevates, and protects. Not despite the record. Because of it.

She will also, we are told, rewrite the Civil Service Code, which is a bit like asking the fox to redraft the henhouse security policy."

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Reading that old interview alongside this discussion is quite sobering. Forget personalities for a moment because the more important issue is institutional memory. We have been here before.

A major transformation programme. Pressure to release capacity. Increasing reliance on actuarial tools. Assurances that professional judgement will remain with practitioners. A nationally implemented model accompanied by confidence from the centre that the risks are understood and appropriately managed.

TR subsequently failed, at enormous financial and human cost. So surely one of the most important questions for OFPS is: what has HMPPS actually learned from that experience? Because the line from that 2014 interview that really stands out now is: “You’ve got to have really good assurance in place so that you know you’re not believing your own hype.”

Quite.

If OFPS is deliberately attempting to release 25% of practitioner capacity through new tiering and supervision arrangements, where is the independent assurance that the model can safely do that? What happens if the assumptions underpinning the actuarial tools prove wrong? How will unintended consequences be identified once implemented? And crucially, who owns that risk?

That’s why this connects directly with SFO accountability. It cannot be acceptable for the organisation to design the model, determine the available resource and set the parameters of supervision, but for the individual practitioner to inherit the consequences if those assumptions subsequently prove wrong.

TR should have taught HMPPS that organisational optimism is not evidence. The question is whether anyone retained the lesson.

Burnham Causes Chaos

It didn't take long did it for the new Prime Minister to plunge prison and probation into chaos. This from the Guardian:-

Prisoner early release scheme paused by Andy Burnham may still go ahead

Probation union and crime victims had raised doubts over plan to free 6,000 offenders across England and Wales

An early release scheme for thousands of prisoners paused by Andy Burnham after an outcry from victims could still take place this autumn, despite warnings by probation officers of potential chaos.

The prime minister ordered an urgent review into the proposed early release of about 6,000 prisoners, due to begin in September with an initial group of about 700, saying he wanted to “minimise risk to the public” and would not hesitate to make changes.

But with government officials accepting that the prison system remains near capacity, and no appetite to use alternatives such as police cells beyond emergencies, it is unclear what options exist beyond continuing with the plan, even in a different form.

Victims groups had objected to the proposal for 6,000 people to be freed early under the new Sentencing Act, with Debbie Adlam, the mother of the police officer Andrew Harper, saying the proposed inclusion of two of her son’s killers – Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers – was “another letdown” for their family.

In the latest of a flurry of policy announcements since he took over in No 10 on Monday, Burnham said: “I am working closely with the new justice secretary and have instructed my team to put a pause on the changes that were due to start in September.

“No prisoners will be let out under this policy until we have conducted an urgent review and done everything we can to minimise risk to the public. Where changes are needed, we will not hesitate to make them.”

With officials warning that without the scheme, prisons in England and Wales will run out of capacity by November, the most likely outcome appears to be a tweak to the early release system, with some offenders held back.

Officials have refused to say if the plan could be amended to block early release for people convicted of offences against emergency workers, such as Harper’s killers, or against women and girls.

Alex Norris, the new justice secretary, told reporters on Thursday the government needed “time to get it right”. He said: “We’ve put an important pause on this policy. It gives us a little bit of time to look at this, to make sure we do our best by you.”

Probation officers have warned that a “sense of chaos” had descended across the Prison Service, with staff unable to make preparations for the mass release. Tania Bassett, Napo’s national officer, said that after the trade union asked the Prisons Service if staff should continue with preparations for the early release scheme, it was now informing them it has been paused.

She said: “Napo’s concern is this will mean probation staff stop doing pre-release work. Whatever the prime minister’s final decision is, he has created a delay as well as confusion amongst the staff tasked with dealing with this.

“He needs to be more decisive about critical public protection issues and we urge him to treat this situation with the upmost urgency.”

According to the union, preparations for release require probation staff to carry out extensive work that usually takes at least six to eight weeks.

This includes reviewing risk assessments, making referrals for accommodation, carrying out home visits, coordinating with victim liaison officers and domestic abuse support officers and developing multi-agency safeguarding plans.

It can also take several weeks to ensure that tagging measures are in place before an offender is placed in accommodation. Unless probation staff received “imminent, concrete direction” about who will be considered, established release plans could collapse, a union official said.

The review has caused chaos in prisons, where managers are responsible for calculating release dates over several weeks from 2 September.

The Sentencing Act 2026 introduced an “earned progression model” that replaces automatic halfway release for prisoners serving standard determinate sentences in England and Wales with a tiered, behaviour-based system.

It will allow most prisoners to be released after serving a third of their sentence behind bars rather than 50%, with the rest of their sentence served under strict supervision in the community with the help of electronic tagging.

Prisoners serving time for sexual or violent offences where the automatic release stage is set at two-thirds will become eligible for release at the halfway point, provided they have not committed serious breaches of prison rules.

This applies to Bowers and Cole, two of Harper’s killers who were jailed for 13 years in 2020 for manslaughter. Burnham confirmed that Henry Long, the main perpetrator, “will not be subject to any early release” under the scheme.

After news of the pause emerged, Debbie Adlam told ITV News that this was “not enough”. She said: “It’s a good start, and it really is a good basis to begin working on some sensible alternatives and looking at options for going forward, because there’s so many people this affects, it’s not just us.”

An Impossible Job

I think the following two contributions sum the situation up neatly:-

So who thought that justice would be a priority?

https://www.gov.uk/government/people/alex-norris

Minister of State (Minister for Border Security and Asylum) and Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice - Alex Norris MP

Biography

Alex Norris was appointed Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice on 20 July 2026. He was previously Minister of State at the Home Office between 6 September 2025 and July 20 2026.

He was previously Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government between 9 July 2024 and 6 September 2025.

He has been the MP for Nottingham North and Kimberley (and its predecessor Nottingham North) since June 2017.

Minister of State (Minister for Border Security and Asylum) - The Minister’s responsibilities are:

Border Security Command: reducing small boat arrivals and organised immigration crime
reducing the asylum caseload, exiting hotels and reducing the supported population
Immigration Enforcement: Increasing returns (including FNOs), immigration detention estate expansion, illegal working
asylum, illegal migration and returns policy, safe and legal policy and refugee resettlement policy
reducing net migration: legal migration policy
tackling visa abuse
innovative solutions
Immigration White Paper implementation
European Entry Exit System
modern slavery policy as it relates to immigration status

Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice

Oversight of all justice portfolios, policy, and Ministry of Justice strategy
Oversight of cross-cutting emergency issues, responses supported by other ministers according to portfolio
Oversight of international business and future relations with the EU
MOJ support for the Union
Resourcing of the department

Functions of the Lord Chancellor

Judicial policy including pay, pensions and diversity (these and other operational decisions affecting the judiciary are reserved to the Lord Chancellor)

--oo00oo--

I’m not going to write Alex Norris off before he’s even started. Every minister deserves the chance to prove themselves. But I do wonder how anyone without a substantial justice background can fully appreciate the scale of what they’re inheriting. Probation isn’t something you understand from a briefing paper. It sits at the intersection of housing, mental health, addiction, domestic abuse, children’s services, employment, policing, prisons and the courts. It is where the consequences of policy decisions made across government all arrive at once.

Andy Burnham has rightly spoken about ending rough sleeping. That’s an admirable ambition. But this is where I think governments often miss something fundamental.

They talk about the “golden thread” running through assessments. What probation sees every day is the golden thread running through society.

Housing affects employment.

Employment affects offending.

Mental health affects addiction.

Addiction affects family stability.

Family breakdown affects children.

Children become tomorrow’s adults entering the criminal justice system. None of these things exists in isolation, yet government too often organises itself as if they do.

Probation doesn’t have the luxury of seeing only one department’s problem. We deal with the whole person and the cumulative effect of every public service that has either succeeded or failed them. So I genuinely hope the new Justice Secretary spends less time asking, “What does justice need?” and more time asking, “How does justice fit into everything else?”

Because until government starts seeing the same golden thread that frontline probation staff see every day, we’ll keep treating symptoms while wondering why the causes never seem to go away.

Cause For Hope?

From a contributor:-

Strong indications now that Lammy, not regarded by anyone as the sharpest tool in the box, is heading towards the back benches or even out of government entirely. Game over. Will the Justice shakeup see ministers such as Kiers buddy Timpson also ousted? Very likely. It is currently unconfirmed who will replace Lammy, or if he will be retained in Burnham's government at all. While some say he’ll be one of the first to get his marching orders on 20/07 others say his future at the Ministry of Justice is a subject of heavy speculation regarding how fast he is removed so he may be left hanging about whilst negotiations regarding his replacement proceed or policies are scrapped as a fall guy. Burnham is reportedly planning to scrap some of Lammy's recent policies, including the curbs on the right to trial by jury and the early release scheme aimed at easing prison capacity. Better to remove him rather than force him into humiliating U-turns.

Given these policy clashes, a change in leadership at the Ministry of Justice seems highly likely. The incoming cabinet appointments will be critical to watch, as they will undoubtedly signal a significant shift in the department's strategic and operational direction. The approach to AI and technology may see significant changes with much hyped MoJ Justice Digital and Justice AI being seen as expensive failed centralised projects the very opposite of the new decentralised approach. Burnham is for example is said to favour devolved more locally accountable Probation Services developing their own initiatives as appropriate that may see prison and probation regions playing more of a role. What is certain is that he will want to get a firmer grip on Justice with Thornberry rumoured to be first among several people being considered as a smarter upgrade who will want to have a good clear out. Streeting and Jarvis also mentioned as possible options if they do not land plum jobs elsewhere. You heard it here first.

Blimey! Tags Not Being Fitted

Thousands of offenders not wearing electronic tags, report says

Almost 9,000 people in England and Wales required to have an electronic monitoring tag did not have one, a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) has found. They are likely to include violent offenders and prisoners released from jail who need to be checked on. The NAO said, as of March 2026, prison authorities were reviewing around 8,900 cases of individuals recorded as having an active monitoring order but no tag.

However, the Ministry of Justice has disputed the figure, saying its own review puts the number of unmonitored individuals at 5,450. It said the NAO figure referred to the total number of cases they are checking to see if they need monitoring.

The NAO called the current system "inefficient".

Electronic monitoring, also known as tagging, is used in England and Wales as a way of monitoring curfews and conditions of a court or prison order.

Criminals and people deemed to pose a potential risk are sometimes fitted with an ankle tag so that their movements can be monitored. These individuals can include serious offenders such as rapists and murderers. There are three types of tags: curfew tags, location tags, and alcohol tags.

A total of 28,700 people were recorded as being tagged in England and Wales as of March 2026. The NAO said some of the 8,900 cases in its report would include people who were registered as being tagged by mistake. But it also said the real number of those slipping through the system could be "significant".

People can be identified as being "unmonitored" for a number of reasons. These can include errors in the system, refusal to wear a tag, a delay in the fitting of the tag, or an arrest where the tag is removed. But it can also include people who haven't been tagged when they should have been.

Responding to the NAO's report, the Ministry of Justice said: "Public protection is our priority, which is why we're investing £100m in electronic monitoring, tagging offenders before release for the first time and strengthening victim protections via new alert systems – all of which will help cut the number of unmonitored offenders."

The National Audit Office argues the current monitoring system is not fit for purpose.

"Electronic monitoring is central to managing pressures on prisons, but it is not working effectively, creating risks to public protection," NAO chief Gareth Davies said. "Improvements are required to ensure that those who should be monitored are monitored and that breaches are responded to effectively," he added. The report also says police and probation staff often lack information or capacity to respond quickly to breaches.

People tagged are placed under strict conditions as part of their punishment. This can include having to remain in a specific area or sticking to a curfew. If someone breaches their conditions, it can result in a formal warning, being taken back to court, or an immediate return to prison.

Earlier this year, the Ministry of Justice announced plans to significantly expand electronic monitoring as part of the Sentencing Act 2026, which aims to ease prison pressures by managing more offenders in the community.

Thousands more prisoners may be released early from autumn this year as part of the new law. Reports suggest killers, rapists and sex offenders could be among them. Most will require tagging.

Several probation officers have told the BBC they are worried about how they will cope.

Probation officers are responsible for checking offenders are following the terms of their release from prison. This could include things such as wearing ankle tags or not taking drugs.

"The report makes clear we're overworked. And it's only going to get worse with more people set to do their punishment in the community," one probation officer said. "There aren't enough of us, and we have no idea how the government is going to make it work so that nobody is at risk. Because something bad will happen, someone who is dangerous and isn't monitored will kill someone," the probation officer added.

The NAO says that part of the problem is a shortfall of around 2,200 full time probation officers, which the government expects to reduce to around 1,500 by September of this year.

The watchdog also says even though the security contractor Serco - which manages the tagging system for the government - met its 95% timeliness target for tag fitting visits, "it was only successful in fitting tags on 62% of the individuals it visited within its two attempts".

In a statement, Serco told the BBC it had made "significant improvements" and was "tagging a record number of people" and "consistently" meeting key contractual measures, as recognised by the Ministry of Justice and NAO report. It added that efforts to fit tags "rely on us receiving the correct information" from relevant authorities and partners. "We attempt to fit a tag to every person who should be wearing one. Where, for reasons beyond our control, we are unable to do so, we report those breaches to the relevant authorities."

The NAO is calling on the government to improve data quality and management of the monitoring system. It added the government had been working with Serco to improve performance and reduce the backlog in fitting tags. Ministers estimate a further 22,000 people per year will need to be tagged from 2027.

"The government needs to improve the service's resilience and efficiency, otherwise expanding electronic monitoring risks wasting public money and puts public safety at risk", said Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the Committee of Public Accounts.

The Ministry of Justice said the government inherited "a failing tagging system with record backlogs". "As this report shows we have worked hard to fix this, with install rates up by nearly 50% since 2024," it said. "This is in addition to our record £700m investment in probation, recruiting 2,300 trainee probation officers over the last two years, and recruiting a further 1,300 this year - making sure the Probation Service has the resource it needs to keep dangerous offenders under closer surveillance than ever before."

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

MoJ Undermine Rehabilitation

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

The MoJ: Look on their works and despair

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

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

Hard to believe

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

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

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

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

A modern history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If it was me

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

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

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

--oo00oo--

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

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

Key Criminal Justice Policies:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thought Piece 7

In case anyone hasn't realised it thus far, irrespective of PAC & uncle tom cobbly, NO-ONE in Westminster or Whitehall or MoJ or HMPPS gives a crap about the predicament of probation staff. Why? Because it doesn't affect *them*.

Only when someone's job or promotion or public reputation is on the line will anyone with half-a-chance of making a difference raise an eyebrow &, at a stretch, wonder what the fuss is about. They're not in positions of power because they give a crap; its because they *DON'T* give a crap. They're teflon.

The cobbler, lammy, the invisible woman, young ewan mcgregor (or whoever it is)... they're all invested in tech & prisons - probation staff are merely cannon fodder. Ask yourselves: why would they be interested in reversing all of the PR & vested interest & public cash spent building cosy relationships with the tech & incarceration industries? What is the biggest risk they take?

1. Pissing off powerful people with excellent corporate entertainment & razor-sharp lawyers? OR
2. Stuffing up a handful of whiny bastards who they've been treating like shit with impunity for a decade or two? Less than a third are in a frail union led by a hapless wannabe, and even fewer are in a union that says "yes" to every govt proposal.

As of December 2025, resident doctors (formerly known as junior doctors) in England have staged 14 separate rounds of strike action since the dispute began in March 2023. They've voted again in favour of a further 6 months of action if required:

Number entitled to vote in the ballot: 54,432
Number of votes cast in the ballot: 28,598 = 52.54%
Number of spoilt/invalid voting papers returned: 17

Result of voting:
Yes: 26,696 (93.40%)
No: 1,885 (6.60%)

27,000 of the most committed & critical workers in the country have not yet achieved their aim because the teflon-coated, cloth-eared ideologues in Westminster & Whitehall feel able to ignore them for the past 3 years. The most recent ballot *might* just have twisted Streeting's lugs BUT... I suspect it's more likely he's positioning himself as Starmer's successor & making himself out to be the resolver of the issue.

Probation staff do not have the same leverage & will not have the same effect upon lammy, a deputy pm desperate to step-up, because he's already laid out his tag'em & bag'em agenda.

*******
I understand the frustration behind this, but I don’t think it’s as simple as “they don’t care.” It’s worse than that. Probation doesn’t move votes. Hospitals collapsing move votes. Trains not running move votes. Doctors striking move votes. When 27,000 resident doctors vote 93% for industrial action, it makes front-page news and creates immediate political risk.

Probation? We operate in the shadows. When it fails, it’s framed as individual practitioner failure, not systemic collapse. When it holds things together, no one notices. That’s the difference. It’s not personal malice. It’s political calculus.

And right now the political calculus favours:
• prisons (because visible custody reassures the public),
• tagging (because tech looks modern and decisive),
• “tough community sentences” (because it sounds robust).

What doesn’t generate headlines?
Workload ratios.
Case quality.
Professional discretion.
Emotional strain.
Retention.

You’re right about leverage. Doctors can withdraw labour and the NHS feels it immediately. Teachers can strike and parents feel it within hours. Probation withdrawing labour would cause disruption, but it’s slower, more diffuse, easier to spin as irresponsibility. That doesn’t mean we’re powerless. It means influence won’t come from outrage alone. It comes from unity, turnout, credibility and sustained pressure.

If less than a third of staff are union members, and turnout is patchy, decision-makers will calculate that the noise is containable. The uncomfortable truth is this: power responds to risk. Until probation creates political risk (reputational, operational, electoral) it will remain a lower priority than prisons and headline management. That’s not because staff are “whiny.” It’s because we’re structurally easy to ignore. The question isn’t whether they care, the question is how we make it cost them not to.

Rejoice!

Press release

Government action to avert summer prison disaster

The prison system would have collapsed entirely by summer if not for the Government’s decisive action to keep the public safe, new analysis has revealed.

• Government action finally puts jails on a sustainable footing, projections show
• Jails would have fully run out of space by June if Government had not acted to keep public safe.
• Prison crisis will be ended through sentencing reforms and largest prison expansion since Victorian era.

Annual capacity statement published to increase transparency, part of Plan for Change.

Published today (29 January), new projections show that without the Government’s Sentencing Act – which received Royal Assent last week – the country would have completely run out of prison places as early as June this year.

This Government’s decisive action has safeguarded the police, courts, and wider criminal justice system, and avoided a potentially catastrophic breakdown of law and border.

Under the last Government, prisons were regularly run red-hot at 99% capacity, with police chiefs warning that they would need to pause “non-priority” arrests.

Without action, the police would have been unable to make arrests, and courts would have been unable to send dangerous offenders to jails.

The last government added only 500 places to the prison estate in 14 years, but this Government will never accept putting public safety at risk.

That is why alongside sentencing reforms, it is pressing ahead with the biggest jail expansion programme since the Victorian era – delivering 14,000 extra prison places by 2031 with 2,900 already built.

Deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy, said:

These figures are a stark reminder of the ticking time-bomb we inherited in our prison system, brought on by a legacy of neglect, with only 500 places added to the estate in 14 years.

We have moved at speed to fix this and make our streets safer, as part of our Plan for Change. We’re overhauling sentencing and building thousands of prison places fast to protect the public and make sure there is always a cell for dangerous criminals.

The prison estate has operated at over 95% occupancy for more than twelve years. At one point in 2024, fewer than 100 spaces remained in the adult male estate.

Now, projections set out in the Government’s Annual Prison Capacity statement published today, show that without further action the situation would again become critical by March with demand for prison places fully exceeding supply within six months. This is despite the rapid rate at which jail spaces are currently being built.

The Sentencing Act will grip this crisis, making sure future governments always have the prison places needed to keep people safe. This will keep dangerous criminals locked up, while bringing in tough new punishments that cut crime. To keep the public safe, more criminals will be tagged than ever before, and the probation service will be backed with £700 million extra funding.   

The Act will also make changes to the recall system, with offenders who breach the conditions of their licence returned to prison for a set 56 days. This will cut the number of prisoners waiting for a Parole Board decision after being returned to custody for often minor infractions and give the Probation Service more time to prepare for a release. The most serious and violent offenders will be excluded from this change, who will only be released after they are considered by the Parole Board.

The prison population is expected to rise significantly throughout this Parliament, at around 3,000 a year without intervention, due to continued growth in police charging and prosecutions, increased court activity and longer sentence lengths.

The combination of changes to sentencing, which will slow the projected rise in the prison population by 7,500 by 2028, with £7 billion investment adding thousands of extra prison places over the next five years, will put an end to the chronic crises of the last 15 years and enable our prisons to be managed effectively with public safety the top priority.

The Government is committed to greater transparency around how prison places are managed, publishing the first Prison Capacity Annual Statement in 2024. The Sentencing Act now makes this an annual statutory requirement, setting the standard for future governments.

Background

The Government has committed up to £7 billion over the next five years to deliver 14,000 new prison places by 2031. Since July 2024, 2,900 places have been delivered, including the new HMP Millsike in Yorkshire.

There are also more than 5000 places currently under construction. Meanwhile, around 500 more prison places are undergoing maintenance work compared to this time last year.
The full annual statement is available at Annual Statement on Prison Capacity: 2025 - GOV.UK

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."

Follow the Blueprint?

This response is in two parts1/2

Thank you for this vital and clear-eyed analysis. You’ve perfectly framed the collision of ideology, profit, and political convenience that has hollowed out probation’s soul. Your question—‘unintended consequences or quiet conspiracy?”, pushes beyond the ‘how’ to the more profound ‘why.’

Reading your words, I was struck by a chilling thought: what if we are not witnessing a unique policy failure, but the latest activation of a very old blueprint? Your observations about the shift from care to control, the bureaucratisation of indifference, and the political theatre of punishment echo across centuries of systems designed to subjugate.

I’ve tried to trace these echoes below, not to contradict your excellent summary, but to place it in a darker, historical context. You ask if we’re willing to reverse the trajectory. I believe the first step is to recognise the ancient pattern we are up against.

The Blueprint of Control: What Probation's Decline Teaches Us About Systems of Subjugation

The story of probation’s slow transformation—from a service of social work to an arm of enforcement—feels like a modern, bureaucratic tragedy. But to view it only through a contemporary lens is to miss its deeper, more unsettling resonance. What we are witnessing is not an anomaly; it is the latest iteration of a historical blueprint for the subjugation of marginalised populations.

You asked if this damage was “unintended or ideological,” pointing to a pattern that repeats across centuries. The mechanisms may differ—no shackles or explicit pogroms—but the functional architecture of control remains recognisable.

The outsourcing of probation and prisons to corporate contractors mirrors a foundational tool of oppression: the commodification of human beings and their destinies.

The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Plantation System. Human beings were literally converted into capital assets, their value measured in labor output and market price. Their well-being was secondary to profit margins and contractual obligations between traders and owners.

Today, the “offender” becomes a revenue-generating unit within a Ministry of Justice contract. Success is measured by cost-per-case and contract compliance, not by healed lives or restored communities. The profit motive, when applied to human correction, inherently creates a perverse incentive to manage rather than solve, to process rather than liberate. It is the enclosure of the social realm, turning public duty into a private revenue stream.

The obsession with KPIs, dashboards, and audit trails is not neutral efficiency; it is the bureaucratisation of indifference.

The meticulous ledgers of colonial administrations and the cold, procedural efficiency of certain authoritarian regimes. These systems perfected the art of reducing complex human communities to data points—taxable units, resource quotas, census numbers—to be administered from a distance. South Africa apartheid was an example, propelled not just by hate, but by terrifyingly meticulous bureaucracy that turned ethnic control into a logistics problem.

The professional judgement of a probation officer, rooted in a relationship, is replaced by a drop-down menu of risk factors. The complex, messy human story is flattened into a “case file” for throughput. This illusion of scientific control strips away context, empathy, and humanity. It is a system designed to be blind to the individual, making oppressive outcomes feel like administrative inevitabilities rather than moral choices.

2/2

Politicians choosing “tough on crime” rhetoric over evidence-based rehabilitation are playing a very old game: consolidating power by defining and punishing an “other.”

The Roman practice of bread and circuses included the spectacle of brutal punishment in the Colosseum, pacifying and uniting the populace through the violent subjugation of a designated group (slaves, criminals, enemies). For centuries, rulers have used public punishment—stocks, pillories, executions—as theatre to reinforce social boundaries and state power.

The political theatre of announcing longer sentences, tougher conditions, and more surveillance serves the same purpose. It defines the “law-abiding” public against the “dangerous offender,” offering a narrative of safety through control rather than through complex social investment. It is a short-term political strategy that sacrifices long-term human and social well-being, exploiting fear for gain.

The move from care to control is the story of institutional mission drift, where systems designed for one purpose are warped into instruments of oppression.

The transformation of some religious missions, orphanages, and “schools for assimilation” (e.g., for Indigenous children). Founded under banners of salvation or education, they often became systems of cultural erasure, emotional abuse, and control, their original ethos corrupted by the unchecked power dynamics and punitive logic embedded within their operation.

Probation’s original mission—“advise, assist, and befriend”—has been corroded. The relational, social-work heart has been replaced by a surveillance-and-enforcement mechanism. The system no longer exists primarily to elevate the individual, but to manage the risk they are presumed to pose. The helper has been recast as the guard.

The retired officer is correct. You don’t need a conspiracy when ideology, profit, and political convenience align. History shows us this alignment is how oppressive systems are built: not always with a grand plan, but step-by-step, through the rational language of efficiency, safety, and order.

So where is the humanity? In this historical light, humanity is the first casualty of the blueprint. It is deliberately designed out of the system because it is inefficient, unpredictable, and resistant to metrication.

To fight for a humane justice system, then, is to do more than argue policy. It is to recognise and name these historical patterns of subjugation when they reappear in managerial dress. It is to insist that a system processing human beings must be built on a foundation of dignity, redemption, and relational trust—principles that have always been the antithesis of control and the bedrock of true liberation.

The question for us now is: having seen the blueprint, will we have the courage to stop building by it?”

ANARCHIST PO

--oo00oo--

What you describe as the “blueprint of control” is exactly what frontline probation staff are trapped inside. The hardest part isn’t recognising the problem—it’s acting against it when your job security is tied to the very bureaucracy you’re trying to resist.

Practitioners are told to use their professional judgement, but the moment that judgement conflicts with targets or risk narratives, it gets shut down. You can’t easily challenge a system when the system controls your workload, your appraisal, and your future employment. That dependency keeps people compliant, even when they can see the damage it does.

If power is going to shift back to professionals, it has to start with three things:

(1) collective voice rather than isolated dissent, (cue the NAPO complaints)
(2) structures that genuinely trust practitioner judgement, and
(3) protections that make humane practice safe, not risky.

Probation can’t rebuild its humanity unless the people doing the work are free to act like humans—and right now, the bureaucracy holds too much of the power for that to happen.

Personally I'm not very optimistic about this getting any better anytime soon. I've had a lifetime of doing my best in difficult circumstances, but I can't wait for this to all end for me personally and I hope that there is life outside of probation where I can do something useful.

********

Thank you for this. You’ve put your finger on the exact tension: seeing the blueprint isn’t enough if we feel powerless to redraw it.

I hear you about NAPO—it’s a common feeling that the official machinery of change moves slowly, if at all. But maybe hope doesn't live there right now. Maybe it lives in the spaces between us—in the conversations like this one, and in the small, stubborn ways practitioners keep humanity alive despite the system.

When you say collective voice is needed, you’re absolutely right. And perhaps that voice begins long before it reaches a union podium. It starts when officers:

• Share their moral dilemmas openly, not just as complaints, but as evidence of a broken system.
• Document quietly, not just for cases, but for the record—noting when policies harm rather than help.
• Support each other’s judgement in team meetings, backing colleagues who advocate for a person over a procedure.
• Connect across offices, informally at first, building a network of the disillusioned but determined.

So when we talk about collective voice, maybe step one is exactly this: using spaces like this to name what’s happening, to mourn what’s been lost, and to imagine what could be. Every time someone shares a story like ours, it becomes harder for the system to pretend everything is working. We are building a living archive of frontline truth.

These aren’t dramatic revolts. They’re the daily, quiet work of keeping the professional conscience alive. And that conscience is like a seed—it can look dormant for a long time until conditions change.

You also mentioned making humane practice safe. That might begin with us deliberately protecting each other’s humanity—covering for one another, validating difficult choices, refusing to internalise the system’s contempt for our own values.

I don’t know if the big structures will change in time for those of us nearing the end of our careers. But I do know this: every time someone like you speaks plainly about what’s happening, we make it easier for the next person to do the same. We’re not just waiting for the end—we are passing on the clarity that will be essential whenever the cracks in the system finally widen.

Hope doesn’t have to mean believing the system will transform tomorrow. It can mean believing that what we protect now—our ethics, our empathy, our solidarity—will be the foundation for whatever comes next. We are already building that foundation, even on the days it feels like we are just surviving.

Thank you for staying in the conversation. It matters.

ANARCHIST PO

********

This guest blog hits hard because it calls out what many inside probation already feel in their bones: we didn’t stumble into this mess — we were steered into it. Bit by bit, the service drifted from rehabilitation to risk-orthodoxy, from social work to surveillance. And now, in an era of rising authoritarianism and populist “law-and-order” swagger — not just in England but across the world — probation risks becoming nothing more than a political prop.

But this doesn't need to be the end of the story. Staff still have agency, and there are ways to take back control and recover the rehabilitation mission before it is lost to the slogans and spreadsheet

Here's my top five suggestions for action.

1. Reclaim professional judgement like a tool left rusting in the shed.
For too long, discretion has been treated as a risk rather than a strength. It’s time to insist that time spent with people — not time feeding data into hungry dashboards — is what actually changes lives. Rehabilitation isn’t an algorithm; it’s a relationship.

2. Build alliances across the social landscape.
If probation waits for ministers to rediscover humanity, it’ll be waiting a long time. But local partnerships — with community groups, housing leads, mental-health teams, addiction workers — can rebuild what central government keeps stripping away. When probation becomes a bridge rather than a border checkpoint, rehabilitation breathes again.

3. Speak truth to power, loudly and consistently.
Document the reality on the ground. Not only what is failing, but what still works when staff have the space to practise properly. Counter the tabloid myth that “punishment equals safety.” Make the case — publicly, relentlessly — that rehabilitation is the only strategy proven to reduce reoffending.

4. Protect relationships from the rising tide of tagging and surveillance.
The more we outsource public safety to devices and recall culture, the more we amputate the core of probation: trust, hope and skilled human engagement. Tagging can track someone’s ankle; it cannot steer their life.

5. Tell the story of probation as it was meant to be.
The public is bombarded with political theatre — “toughness,” “crackdowns,” “zero tolerance.” But probation was built as the quiet counter-narrative: the lighthouse, not the searchlight. Staff, ex-staff and supporters need to say clearly what’s at stake. When rehabilitation is sidelined, communities don’t get safer — they get more fractured, more chaotic, more fearful.

We are living through a global moment when authoritarian instincts are growing louder and more confident. If probation doesn’t assert its purpose now, it risks being swept into that current, transformed from a service of hope into one more cog in the machinery of control.

This is the moment to grab the wheel.

Rehabilitation was never meant to be a footnote — it was the headline. And if staff stand together, insist on evidence over rhetoric, and keep practising the craft of change even in small daily acts, the rehabilitation initiative can be reclaimed.

Probation doesn’t need to wait for permission to rediscover its purpose. It only needs the courage to remember it.