Probation Over Capacity

This confirmation of the situation from Channel 4 News Sept 3rd does not bode well for the impending emergency release of prisoners:- 

The probation service for England and Wales has been working over capacity every month since January 2023, FactCheck can reveal.

Figures obtained exclusively from the Ministry of Justice show the service has consistently been working at around 120 per cent capacity – meaning the average officer has about six days’ work to do in a five-day week.

Our findings come as the government plans to release around 2,000 prisoners on a single day next week as part of plans to ease overcrowding – which is expected to put even more pressure on the probation system. FactCheck takes a look.

How are probation workloads calculated?

Probation officers have access to a “workload measurement tool“ which estimates how many hours of work are required to manage their caseload. If an officer is assigned a certain case, the tool will estimate how many hours of work that case will likely demand from the officer.

We understand that the percentage workload compares the estimated number of hours it should take to manage all of an officer’s cases, to the amount of time that officer is actually contracted to work.

So if an officer has 12 hours’ worth of work to do, but only 10 hours in which to do it, they would be deemed to have a workload of 120 per cent.

Exclusive FactCheck figures

We obtained exclusive data about probation workload through a Freedom of Information request to the Ministry of Justice. The data shows that the probation service – which covers all of England and Wales – was working at an average of 120 per cent capacity across the months of 2023.

For an individual officer, this would be equivalent to having six days’ worth of work to do in a five-day working week. And the service has been working at 117 per cent capacity on average in 2024 so far. The data for 2024 goes up to June.

It’s important to note that the figures come in the form of snapshots – telling us about a single day at the beginning of the relevant month.

Even worse than the data shows?

The Ministry of Justice highlighted that the workload measurement tool data is “based on averages and assumptions, and gives an overall measure [of workload] across the system”.

It pointed out that as the tool is based on estimates, it is not a perfectly accurate reflection of real-life workload, or the “peaks and troughs of sentence management”.

NAPO, the union representing probation officers, told FactCheck that the workload measurement tool often underestimates how much time a given probation case will actually require from an officer. The union said that this means the percentage workloads calculated by the tool are understated too.

‘Excessive’ workloads?

The probation service has its own measure of overwork. It says that if a probation officer is working at 110 per cent capacity for four weeks in a row, their workload is “excessive”.

Our exclusive data suggests that the average officer would have been above this threshold in every month since January 2023. However, since we don’t have data on the workload of individual officers, we can’t say for certain how many officers were over this threshold for every week in the month.

But the probation officers’ union told us that they have anecdotal evidence of many of their members regularly working at 150 per cent capacity. (We put this to the Ministry of Justice, which did not directly respond to the claim.)

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson told us: “The new Lord Chancellor has already committed to recruiting 1,000 new trainee probation officers to bolster the supervision of offenders, ease workloads and better protect the public. We’ve also brought forward planned pay rises by six months meaning entry level frontline staff will receive a bonus of more than £1,000”.

What A Fine Mess

As recruitment for trainee Probation Officers opens, we await the new government finally getting around to setting up the promised Review into the Probation Service and the situation continues to deteriorate on a daily basis. This from Guardian yesterday:-

Union warns of probation officer shortage ahead of prisoners’ early releases

Up to 2,000 offenders due to be freed in England and Wales in September after serving 40% of sentence

Ministers will struggle to prepare for next month’s early release of thousands of prisoners, a union has warned, after the latest figures showed a drop in the number of probation officers.

Ministry of Justice data shows there were 178 fewer probation officers over the last quarter, as the service gets ready to monitor another 5,500 prisoners released over the next year despite deepening concerns over increased workloads for staff.

Up to 2,000 prisoners are expected to be released in the second week of September as part of an early release scheme, called SDS40, which will allow many prisoners to walk from prison after serving 40% of their sentences.

A second tranche of up to 1,700 prisoners, all jailed for more than five years, are expected to be freed in late October after the law was changed by the lord chancellor, Shabana Mahmood, to relieve pressure on overcrowded prisons.

A senior official from Napo, the probation officers’ union, said its members were trying to prepare for the early release scheme but the government was unable to maintain staffing levels, let alone recruit more, as required.

“At a time when probation is under even more pressure from workloads in preparation for the SDS40 early release scheme, we now see a drop in staffing numbers. HMPPS [HM Prison and Probation Service] needs to understand why people are leaving, and this will include pay. The crisis in our justice system is a result of years of cuts and the government must take urgent action to invest in the whole system,” Tania Bassett, a Napo national official, said.

According to Bassett, SDS40 requires probation staff to carry out extensive pre-release work. This includes reviewing risk assessments, making referrals to accommodation including probation hostels, carrying out home visits, coordinating with victim liaison officers and domestic abuse support officers and developing robust multi-agency safeguarding plans.

“Doing this work at a time when many staff are on annual leave has put enormous pressure on probation staff. HM Prison and Probation Service has been telling unions that probation will be fully staffed since 2014,” she said.

MoJ figures show there were 5,160 full-time band 4 probation officers in post in June 2024, which is a decrease of 178 compared with March 2024.

Martin Jones, the chief inspector of probation in England and Wales, told the Guardian in July that the current probation model was “not sustainable” and suggested ministers should free up capacity by no longer asking probation officers to monitor 40,000 people released from prison after short custodial sentences for crimes such as shoplifting.

As part of an overview of the probation system, which manages more than 240,000 offenders a year, Jones said each of the service’s 12 regions in England and Wales were already struggling to cope with the number of cases. More than 95% of probation delivery units examined by the watchdog were falling below the standards set for good practice, he said.

The way that offenders are monitored in the community has come under intense scrutiny since the murder of Zara Aleena, a law graduate, in east London in 2022. Her killer, Jordan McSweeney, who had a long history of misogynistic and racially aggravated incidents, should have been seen by probation officers as a high-risk offender and recalled to prison after missing appointments. Instead, he was incorrectly assessed as being of medium risk and remained free to attack Aleena.

That case followed the exposure of failings by the probation service before Damien Bendall murdered three children and his pregnant partner in Derbyshire in 2021.

On Monday, the government said it would launch Operation Early Dawn, a longstanding plan that means defendants waiting for a court appearance can be held in police cells for longer until prison space is available. The emergency scheme has been announced as hundreds of rioters are jailed in the wake of unrest this summer.

The director of public prosecutions has said the criminal justice system requires “considerable investment” as the jailed rioters continue to put pressure on overcrowded prisons.

In a piece for the Times, Stephen Parkinson defended the “brisk” nature of the disorder prosecutions, saying cases such as rape and domestic violence take longer to build and are more “complex”.

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “We inherited a prison system in crisis and have taken difficult but necessary action to make sure we can keep locking up dangerous criminals and protect the public, and since then the Probation Service has been planning for these releases.

“Everyone released will be strictly monitored, face tough licence conditions like electronic tagging and curfews and could be recalled to prison if they breach licence conditions.”

--oo00oo--

Of course building more prisons is not the sustainable answer to the prison crisis. This from the Guardian last week:-

Labour urged to scrap £4bn Tory mega-jails plan and fund rehabilitation

Exclusive: Former chief inspector of prisons Nick Hardwick says money would be better spent preventing crime

Ministers should scrap Conservative plans to build new mega-jails and pour £4bn into the prevention of crime and rehabilitation instead, the former chief inspector of prisons has said.

Nick Hardwick, who is also a former head of the Parole Board, said a huge expansion of the prison system would not solve the problem, especially when average custodial sentences are rising.

Keir Starmer inherited a crisis in the prisons system when he took office, and blamed the previous government for letting prisons operate at 99% capacity for 18 months with a net number of 100 prisoners added every week. He announced an expansion of the Tory scheme of releasing tens of thousands of inmates early to try to prevent jails becoming full.

On top of the early release scheme, Labour has suggested it will keep the Conservatives’ plan to expand the prison system by at least 14,000 places in England and Wales, up from about 89,000 now, including six new prisons, at a cost of £4bn. Planned “super-prisons” in Lancashire, Leicestershire and Buckinghamshire have been hit by delays.

Pressure on prisons has only increased with riots across England this month leading to more than 1,000 arrests. But, in an interview with the Guardian, Hardwick said hugely expanding the prison system was not the solution and that the current size of the incarcerated population was unsustainable.

“The basic problem is that people are coming into the system faster than they are going out. If you think of it like a bath, the bath is overflowing and water is still coming in,” he said.

“The strategy has been up until now – and what Labour is continuing to do – is bail out the bath … That will certainly buy them some time. But it doesn’t solve the problem completely. The system is set to continue to increase.

“Labour have said they were going to spend billions, literally billions, on new prisons. But if they bought themselves a bit of time, would it be better to reinvest that money in trying to stop people going into prison in the first place – working in schools, in health, in mental health?

“You could ask people: do you want people to go to prison for a few months longer at a cost of billions of pounds, or spend that money on hospitals and schools?”

Hardwick said he thought prison was “right for those involved in the riots, and the speed at which this was done – in contrast to how the system usually works – will be a deterrent”.

But he added: “I think the system will cope until [the end of] August provided there are no more crises but in the longer term the current prison population is unsustainable without billions being spent. And even then I don’t think the new places can be delivered in time to deal with the sustained upward pressure in the population.”

Hardwick was chief inspector of prisons from 2010 to 2016 and then head of the Parole Board until 2018. He quit the Parole Board after judges overturned the release of the rapist John Worboys, though Hardwick played no role in the decision.

Hardwick, who was a professor of criminal justice at Royal Holloway, University of London, until last month, said the policy of building more big jails would simply mean prisoners spending a few extra months inside, which was unlikely to act as a deterrent to crime:

“I don’t think it’s a good way to spend money to build big new prisons. We are spending billions on an untested model that we don’t know works. We’ve not run prisons of this size before.

“Even if in the longer run they work, by the nature of these prisons they will have new, inexperienced staff, so you are going to have real problems in some of them, I think. You might want to replace some of the crumbling Victorian ruins. But I think they need to think very carefully about whether they want to invest at this level given how short of money they are and put that money somewhere else.”

The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, told the Telegraph in an interview before the election that Labour would build more prisons by prioritising them in the planning system. However, Labour’s manifesto did not commit to a specific number of new prisons or amount of prison places.

Starmer’s government has said solving the prisons crisis is a priority, and appointed James Timpson, a businessman who employs former prisoners, to the role of justice minister. Timpson has previously said that he thinks prison does not work for many people, and that only a third of inmates should really be there.

Victims’ groups have raised concerns about plans to release some prisoners after 40% of their sentences, but Hardwick said this would allow some suspects who are on bail and yet to be convicted to be sentenced and off the streets sooner.

“Mistakes will be made. I’m sure about that, because you’re talking about big numbers and some people will reoffend,” he said. “They will reoffend a bit sooner than they would otherwise have reoffended. But if we leave the system as it is we have no possibility of addressing their behaviour.

“And we are in a position now where, because the prison system is full, you have people on bail accused of domestic violence – who might be innocent – but if they’re guilty we can’t process them quickly enough to reduce the threat because of the problems in the system.

“You have victims waiting for years for the trial and to know what will happen. They can’t sort the backlog unless they sort the prison population out.”

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “This government is committed to addressing the crisis in our prisons, and ensuring our jails make better citizens, not better criminals.

“That has started with the emergency capacity measures introduced by the lord chancellor last month, and we will set out a 10-year strategy for prison supply later this year. We will also introduce a new focus on driving down reoffending, linking up prison governors with local employers to break the cycle of crime.”

New Pay Offer

This published and circulated to members by Napo yesterday:-

Government agree to RE-OPEN PAY TALKS

Napo’s Probation Negotiating Committee met yesterday to consider a pay offer that had received the personal endorsement of the new Lord Chancellor Shabana Mahmood. While the PNC noted that the offer does not wholly satisfy the terms of Napo’s current trade dispute on pay and workloads, it follows the joint unions’ campaign to re-open the three year pay award to give probation staff more pay now. The unions submitted a claim to get more pay back in 2023, which HMPPS rejected in April this year.

But following votes in the UNISON and Napo consultative ballots of members which showed strong support for consideration of industrial action, the change of government, the escalating prison overcrowding crisis and the embarrassment of probation pay falling further and further behind prison pay, HMPPS finally agreed to re-open the award and offer more money in this final year of the Multi Year Pay Deal MYPD to our members. Of course, It would have been better if the employer had done this much earlier, but their hands were tied by the previous Conservative government.

The HMPPS offer would not have happened without the unions’ campaign to re-open the pay talks over the last year and a half.

HMPPS OFFER

The offer which HMPPS made to the unions this week is for:

1. The pay rise for all staff which was due on 1 October 2024 to be brought forward to 1 April 2024. This will deliver much needed additional cash to staff 6 months earlier than set out in the current three year pay award. The back pay owing will be paid in a single lump sum as soon as possible. This money will be subject to tax and national insurance in the usual way. staff who have left the organisation since 1st April 2024 will be entitled to the pay rise back pay so we ask colleagues who may be in touch with them to tell them to write in to claim it.

2. The deletion of the lowest pay point in pay band 2. The unions have been battling for months to get HMPPS to treat pay band 2 staff fairly who were affected by the implementation of the national living wage in April 2024. The offer from HMPPS will delete the lowest pay point in pay band 2 and move all staff on this pay point to the next highest pay point of £23,250 (full time salary) backdated to 1 April 2024.

3. The temporary extension of premium overtime rates to pay bands 4, 5 & 6 until 31 March 2025. Currently, staff on pay bands 4, 5 & 6 are only entitled to time off in lieu or payment at plain time for any additional hours worked above contractual hours. The unions have been seeking the extension of premium overtime rates since the start of this year, so this is a welcome move. However, the Unions want to see this made permanent. The extension of premium overtime rates is undoubtedly linked to the demand which is coming Probation’s way from SDS40. There is very little likelihood of this demand having receded by 31 March 2025, so Napo will be arguing that these overtime rates will have to be extended again.

4. A temporary overtime bonus scheme. In addition to the extension of premium overtime pay to pay bands 4, 5 & 6, HMPPS has offered an overtime incentive scheme as follows:

a. £125 payable to staff after two weeks in which the employee has committed to work at least 5 hours per week over a two week period.

b. £250 payable to staff after four weeks in which the employee has committed to work at least 5 hours per week over a four week period.

Napo ACCEPTS the offer Napo’s PNC met on 1 August to consider the offer. The Committee agreed to accept the offer with the following reservations.

1. HMPPS to confirm when the lump sum back pay will actually be paid

2. HMPPS to set out what staff on each pay point in pay bands 2-6 can expect by way of lump sum backpay (gross pay) when the offer is paid
3. HMPPS to set the detail of the pay band 2 proposal
4. HMPPS to enter into urgent negotiations with the unions with immediate effect to agree the protocols which will govern the award and payment of overtime and the overtime incentive scheme going forward for staff on pay bands 2-6. Both overtime and the incentive scheme must be administered fairly and transparently AND GIVE ACCESS TO ALL STAFF WHO CHOOSE TO TAKE UP THE OFFER IRRESPECTIVE OF PAYBAND AND ROLE. These talks must also clear up the on-going misapplication of sessional pay for overtime and the confusion over the relationship between overtime and unsocial hours to the unions’ satisfaction.

Napo’s Negotiating Committee also AGREED THAT OUR CURRENT TRADE DISPUTE IS NOT FULLY RESOLVED AND TALKS CONTINUE AT HIGH LEVEL ON THE NEED TO REDUCE WORKLOADS.

WHAT NEXT?

Subject to the urgent talks next week, the rules for the extension of overtime and the overtime incentive scheme should be published shortly. HMPPS should also confirm to staff what they are entitled to by way of backpay for the early payment of this year’s salary increase with effect from 1 April.

With probation pay falling further and further behind prison service pay (Prison staff got a 5% pay rise last week) our attention will then turn to next year’s pay claim. Members can expect to be consulted on your ideas for our 2025 pay claim in the autumn.

THANKS

Thanks to all the Napo members who took part in our digital consultative ballot back in June. Of those voting, 98% said that they would be prepared to consider industrial action to get HMPPS to offer more pay if formally balloted. This showed HMPPS the strength of feeling of members over their pay and this could not be ignored.

End of An Era

We need to get probation out of HMPPS and the civil service. Napo mailing yesterday:-

Today is a day for reflection, particularly for our members who were working in the Divisional Sex Offender Units, as today, technically these units no longer exist. It is an end of an era for the Probation Service, which has historically prided itself on being an evidence based and research driven organisation, and these teams were held in high regard by sentencers, police, social services and by sentence management colleagues for the knowledge and insight they bought in working with people who have committed sexual offences. 

No reason has been given for the removal of these experienced teams, other than "career progression" for those without a probation qualification and who will now be expected to deliver Horizon and New Me Strengths (for those with intellectual disabilities), in the main without the experience and same level of training as those gone before and without an increase in pay, whilst moving into the rollout of Building Choices, which will be one programme whatever the offence may be.

Napo and our sister unions, along with our members (THANK YOU), have worked hard over the last 4 years to raise the concerns for public safety by removing the divisional sex offender units, but sadly the wider HMPPS has refused to hear these. Be assured though, we are still continuing to challenge this in every way we can.

Napo wish to acknowledge our members in those lost units and their commitment to the work to give those convicted of sexual offences an opportunity to address their reasons for making those choices to ensure no more victims going forward, their commitment to ending violence against women and children, their commitment to supporting colleagues in sentence management and overall their commitment to keeping the public safe.

Thank you for your service, we value and respect you.

We Are Waiting

The new Labour Government has barely been at the helm for a month and yet has quickly come to the conclusion that the NHS is broken; the Care Quality Commission is not fit for purpose: the Criminal Cases Review Commission chair needs sacking and the Prison system is at the point of collapse. Clearly the new government is not shy at admitting failure when they find it, so it can't be long before their forensic gaze falls upon the Probation Service because that is utterly broken as well. 

Contributors to this blog have been saying it for ages, and yes all the key players read it, HMPPS; MoJ; HMI; National Audit Office and Cabinet Office, so here's what's come in over the last 24 hours to help them add probation to the list of things to sort out. 

The following was added to a blog post from December 2022 entitled 'Is Probation Toxic?' 

"After 20 years service in the Probation Service, I was eventually forced out following a campaign of bullying, harassment, falsification of records and a deliberate drive to force me out. Why? well It was simply down to me being viewed as an 'expensive resource' because the service could not afford to maintain my role owing to my disability (mental health diagnosis). Whilst physical disabilities attract funding to allow for workplace adaptations, nothing as such exists for mental health. Despite complaints to every conceivable dept and mailbox to ask for assistance and for the issue to be looked into, not one came forward. I eventually had my grievance considered but that in itself was a joke as the allegations were not even addressed and I was referred to as being fixated in wanting to blame someone.

I am relieved I am out of this extremely unpleasant and toxic organisation where the value and respect of treating everyone fairly and with dignity went out with the trust closures. When those at the helm of a service meant to rehabilitate offenders, engage in questionable and some on the periphery of corrupt/collusive practices, it remains to be asked - is the probation service fit to continue to rehabilitate offenders?"

This also came in over night:-

"I think the challenge is the heart and soul of probation feels like it has been totally lost under the loss of experienced staff and the disaster of TR and the aftermath. Probation has never been without its challenges but right now it feels like the focus is on ticking boxes and doing the bare minimum to get through instead… how is that satisfying for anyone… !? Also with lots of new staff being recruited in the past year or so their expectations and messages around work quality are based [on] current practice which does not help at all. When areas may come out of amber and red measures in the future, how will staff cope that have only known the stripping back in amber and red?

Instead of ticking those boxes to make it look like work is being done on the surface, why isn’t the focus on quality and making sure the work that is done is done well.. the actual assessment and it’s actual implementation. Inspection after inspection they are consistently an abysmal read. How can nearly every area of the country either be inadequate or requires improvement and yet it’s getting very little media coverage despite the imminent releasing of extra prisoners?

I have come across so many poor ISPs over the years but not like it is now…. but hey they say let’s just get that done, sign it off and hope there isn’t an SFO … oh and if there is one it’s ok because we are all understaffed so the “I didn’t have time and so overworked” applies… it’s just not good enough, where is the integrity! Get it done and oooo it looks good in the stats in the monthly performance meeting… wrong answer … equally what’s the point of writing a gold standard one if the subsequent RMP is not actually delivered or utilised…. We are we told to write we will do x,y,z interventions in court reports when we know in reality it won’t get delivered….it’s dishonest to courts and false expectations given to POPs. If the POP gets through their order without breaches it’s terminated as a success… wrong answer…. We need to stop focusing on stats and start getting the dialogue going around what drives us to do our work… why did we get into this work in the first place… what is our purpose and what is our individual and collective WHY. If we can get the pre TR culture, energy and passion back then quality will naturally improve.

There are so many amazing Officers in the service more needs to be done to keep hold of them as experience is just so so so important within teams to build the confidence, knowledge and foundations in others. I learnt so much training in a team full of officers many many years ago that had been in the service for years - it was invaluable!

Why can’t the service be more transparent about what is actually going on… or not. We shouldn’t need inspections to call it out but the messages from it can’t be much clearer."

This:-

"I’m Off. Coming up to 20 years and I have had enough. I have just booked an appointment with a financial advisor and will be looking to leave either the end of the year, or end of the financial year. … I might not ever get rich, but let me tell you it’s better than being a HMPPS Bit£# ….. I’m off to work at a Car Wash."

Twitter has been lively with exchanges as well:-

"It beggars belief that the HMIP reports conclude every probation PDU inspected (with one exception) requires improvement and yet the leadership / senior management are all excellent. It is simply not possible and we on the front line know it is simply not true. Emperors new clothes!"

"Why not? Leaders are sadly not wizards. They can’t magic up extra staff or resources. Doesn’t mean they aren’t leading well with what they have and don't have appropriate long term plans that HMIP consider positively."

"Sadly the strategy and leadership in resolving the prisons and probation crisis is one dimensional. Senior leaders don’t recognise the distorted value base which staff struggle to buy into and quite frankly don’t care in my opinion."

"Out of interest, who is it you mean when you said ‘senior leaders’ ?"

"Those at the highest level in HMPPS who have had very little or no experience of working with our client base."

"So Exec level rather than probation region level? I think there’s a very valid argument they are out of touch and/or not well advised of the current realities on the ground. But think it’s a stretch to say they collectively have “little or no experience with our client base. The CPO and 3 Area Execs (out of 7), have longstanding probation careers. Many others have direct and longstanding prison careers. The RPDs are a strong and powerful group, all with extensive probation careers and front line experience."

"But fundamentally they do not or are not able to openly say what’s needed to sort this mess. Recruitment will not be enough. We need to look at sentencing, interventions, services and staff retention, with a robust extensive strategy. More admin will not build a quality service. As our leaders we need to feel that they are making representations to the MOJ, sharing strategy in national calls to staff and talking about how the service will manage the additional work. Not repeating rhetoric, making staff feel like the poor relative to the prison service. A feeling results from actions and may well be linked to mentality. However if we look at culture, mentality and staff perceptions then leaders need to acknowledge this and do something different. This situation has not happened accidentally- it’s been created."

"Agreed. It’s not enough to ignore it as the mentality/ staff perception (actively stirred by unions and X commentators in my opinion), clearly isn’t going away any time soon. Top brass definitely do not do enough to actively combat it. It’s frustrating to all of us who care."

"I’m with you… until the poor relations thing. It’s often said but I'm yet to witness anything said by senior leaders that actually reinforces that. Tends to be a perception of probation staff; victim mentality; than a real position of senior leaders in my experience."

"I take the "victim mentality" as a really inappropriate comment about the reality of the environment in which probation staff are operating in."

The Labour Manifesto promised a Probation Review

"After 14 years of chaotic reorganisations, the national probation service is struggling to keep the public safe. A lack of co-ordination between prisons, probation and other local services also means prison-leavers are not getting the right support, raising the risk that they go straight back to crime.

In some areas of the country, we have seen Labour Mayors pioneering a more joined-up approach to reduce reoffending. In Greater Manchester, probation is linked up with housing and health services to ensure offenders leaving custody receive the support they need. Labour will conduct a strategic review of probation governance, including considering the benefits of devolved models."

We are waiting.......

Probation Staff Leaving

The plight of probation continues to get good media coverage. This from the Independent yesterday:-

Probation staffing crisis laid bare in damning reports as alarm sounded over public safety

Inspectors warn of ‘unsustainable and counterproductive’ situation as one local probation unit found to be 55 per cent short of officers

A string of new probation watchdog investigations have laid bare the staffing crisis blighting the service’s ability to supervise offenders in the community and keep the public safe. With prisons already dangerously full, justice secretary Shabana Mahmood announced this month that some 5,500 prisoners will be freed 40 per cent of the way into their sentence, starting from September.

But questions have been raised over how the probation service will be able to cope with this new influx of offenders who will pass into their care, amid warnings that the early release scheme enacted by the Tories – which saw 10,000 inmates freed in nine months – had caused “absolute mayhem” for the service.

Each of the four reports published by HM Inspectorate of Probation in the week following Ms Mahmood’s announcement highlighted understaffing as an issue which is already undermining probation workers’ efforts to keep the public safe.

In Essex South, the watchdog found just 45 per cent of the required number of probation officers in post – something inspectors said was understandably hampering the probation unit’s ability to supervise offenders.

As a result, the delivery of probation services in Essex South were judged to be to a level sufficient to effectively support public safety in as little as 23 per cent of cases examined by inspectors. Improvements were also needed in assessments to assess and manage the risks offenders posed in the community.

Similarly, in Northamptonshire, the probation officer vacancy rate was 40 per cent and workloads were too high as a result, with a situation further exacerbated by staff absences. Staff spoke of feeling overwhelmed and uncertain about what to prioritise – which had a detrimental effect on risk management, inspectors said.

In Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, inspectors warned that “almost all the assessments we inspected were insufficient in relation to keeping people safe”, with senior supervising officers forced to handle cases themselves because of staff shortages and “very high” sickness rates, which further reduced capacity.

“The situation was unsustainable and counterproductive,” inspectors warned.
Inspectors in Hertfordshire warned that the probation unit’s staffing levels meant workloads too high across all grades. They said managers were signing off risk assessments which too often did not incorporate key information related to domestic abuse and child safeguarding.
The findings came as HM chief inspector Martin Jones reiterated the stark reality that 30 out of the 31 local probation units inspected across England and Wales in 2022-23 were judged to be either “inadequate” or “requiring improvement”.

While the government has pledged to have 1,000 extra trainee probation officers in place by next spring to help the service cope with the emergency prisoner early release scheme, Mr Jones warned it would take time for new recruits to “bed down” and gain the experience needed to supervise offenders.

Thousands of probation staff have left the service over the past two years, with almost two-thirds of the 359 officers who quit in the year to March 2023 taking with them five or more years of experience. As of March, 5,113 full-time probation officers were in post – 25 per cent below the required staffing level of 6,794.

One officer who joined the probation service as a “job for life” in 2018 told The Independent last year that she now reluctantly planned to quit, saying: “We are completely overwhelmed, morale is low, and we have multiple people in our offices on long-term sick leave – so six months or more – because it is so stressful.”

Responding to the four new inspection reports, Tania Bassett of the probation union Napo told The Independent: “The staffing crisis in probation is not going to go away anytime soon. Too few staff and dangerously high workloads lead to increased sickness of staff which only compounds the issue.”

Ms Bassett added: “As we enter the summer holidays, staffing will be at a critical state with many regions seeing their workforce reduce by 50 per cent as many people take annual leave.”

The timing of the government’s new prisoner early release scheme in September means that the pre-release work required for cases will need to be completed over this period – which “will only exacerbate already high workloads and cause additional stress to staff”, Ms Bassett warned.

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “The prison system is in crisis which is putting significant pressure on the whole justice system. We are gripping the situation and supporting our hardworking staff by improving training and recruiting 1,000 more probation officers nationally to deliver robust supervision and protect the public."

Time To Try Something Else

Many in probation would say OMiC or Offender Management in Custody has been a disaster and a clear sign of HM Prison Service having the whip hand in HMPPS. The Howard League is clear about what needs to happen:- 

What to do about Probation?

We have heard a lot about prison overcrowding over recent weeks, not least because of the Howard League’s own efforts, but there is overcrowding in probation too. And that matters, because the probation service is going to be asked to do more in the future.

Shabana Mahmood has made a welcome commitment to recruit 1,000 more trainee probation officers but as she acknowledged in Parliament, this is not new investment but a redeployment of resources. Probation will need that new investment and one place where the money could be found is in the budget currently earmarked to build new prisons. We shall see if the Ministry of Justice is able to follow the logic of its own announcements in the coming months.

In the meantime, what does probation reform look like? The Howard League is clear that the probation service should be delivered within a localised structure and with independence from the prison service. See, for example, the evidence we gave to the Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee inquiry into community sentencing.

Such a restructuring will take time, however. What could ministers do right now to address concerns around probation caseloads and ensure, as we have said, that probation is equipped to be the ‘ultimate guarantor of public safety’? Here is one idea.

The probation service currently seconds a significant number of qualified and experienced probation officers to prisons. At the time of the last joint inspection in 2022, it amounted to 135 senior probation officers and 626 probation officers (although the targets for recruitment amounted to 206 senior probation officers and 797 probation officers).

Readers might be questioning why there are hundreds of probation officers working in prisons. They would not be wrong. The joint inspection into the reasons why, the Offender Management in Custody’ (OMiC) model, found that it was “simply not working”. Inspectors found shortfalls in public protection work, information sharing, and relationship building between prison staff, probation workers and prisoners. They went on to remark:

Despite transfer of almost 800 probation officers to POM [‘prison offender manager’] roles in prisons, we found very little added value from these posts. They had little direct contact with prisoners and were not clear about their roles and responsibilities under the OMiC model. Handovers to COMs [‘community offender managers’] were often of poor quality and little work was completed to prepare prisoners to work with COMs for their resettlement. We found little contact by POMs with prisoners, to work with and complete sentence planning with them.

When something is simply not working, it is time to try something else. The government should redeploy those probation officers working in prisons within the community. Work to prepare people for release from prison can be done just as effectively, if not more so, beyond the prison gates.

There may be resistance from within HMPPS and from those probation officers seconded to working in prisons. It is, as one former chief probation officer has remarked, a simple case of “the pressures in the prison probation officer role not matching those of the community probation officers. There is absolutely no chance of a ‘prison offender manager’ being caught up as the responsible supervising officer in a Serious Further Offence review.”

That shouldn’t stop the Ministry of Justice grasping the nettle, to reiterate our current mantra, and making the change. To deploy so many probation officers in prison when community workloads are so high is just irresponsible.

Andrew Neilson, Director of Campaigns

Comments

This is an interesting take. As an OMiC Senior Probation Officer, I can hardly be distinguished as being impartial to the above, however, I can certainly provide a ‘front-of-house’ view. The concerns I have with this proposal:

1. Many COM’s are overstretched to such an extent that they are unable to prioritise their custodial cases. Therefore, many POM’s go above and beyond the OMiC model to make up for the shortfalls from community teams. If OMiC is dissolved, there will be tens of thousands of prisoners who may feel neglected.

2. OMiC staff retention is generally healthy – transfer POM’s into the community against their will, then they will simply leave the service. Alas, we will have staffing issues in both the community and custody.

3. Due to community staffing levels, OMiC has never had the opportunity to launch as intended. The sensible thing to do would be to wait for the conclusion of the acute recruitment drive and then assess the shortfalls of OMiC.

In contrast, my view is that OMiC has the capacity to work effectively with the following proposals:

1. POM/COM handover date is pushed from 8.5 months prior to release, to 3 months before release. This will allow the COM more breathing space to prioritise community cases, and will put the onus on OMiC/resettlement teams to complete Approved Premises referrals/ generic accommodation referrals.

2. Parole reports, in my view, are the wrong way round. As drawn on above, POM’s generally spend more time with cases as they are more accessible – so they know them best. Parole reports should be led by the POM, with the COM providing an RMP to effectively manage said prisoner should they be released.

--oo00oo--

Andrew. I agree and would suggest a further clarification of the role of OMU, POM and COM as experience suggests that there is much confusion over who does what and particularly when it comes to the continuum of sentence planning – preparation for release – post-release supervision. OMU and POM can be the same person but have limited planning/discussion/hand-off with COM. COM personnel changes are frequent. So yes, leave the OMU to focus on sentence planning and pull the POM and COM roles together outside the prison to prep the individual for what comes next and then support them through it. That’s a much simpler system. And the continuity of an individual POM/COM probation officer building a relationship through planning for release whilst an individual is inside and supporting that same individual post-release could provide enormous benefits to all. Even if there is a handoff to a specialist community PO a month after release, having the continuity from the POM/COM ensures a simpler and, logic would suggest, more effective transition.

Time For Probation Reform

With the new government getting to grips with the many problems left by the previous administration, this recent article in the Times highlights the head of steam that's building for urgent probation reform:-   

Plans to re-professionalise probation service are urgently needed

Staff spend a disproportionate amount of time in front of computers instead of engaging with offenders, writes Ian Fox

Any analysis of the complex arrangements and relationships that form our justice system should include a debate on how to deploy, manage, resource and support the probation service.

This issue has never been more necessary — the service is in a parlous condition as a consequence of the last government’s mismanagement and neglect. The increase in the size of the prison population and its apparent imperviousness to attempts by successive justice and home secretaries to reverse the trend is the elephant in the justice system’s waiting room.

Courts in England and Wales proportionately send more adults to custody than other western European countries, yet few commentators have included the role of the probation service in their analyses of this crisis, or rehabilitation per se.

In his in-tray as a new justice minister, James Timpson has to consider both a strategic review of probation governance and the opportunities offered by devolving both youth justice and probation to the Welsh government. Any terms of reference for the former should take into account the learning from both the disastrous merger of prisons and probation and the privatisation debacle that has left the service with only a vestige of its former professional reputation, visibility, respect and experience base.

The traditional top-down command and control structure in prisons has gradually built virtual walls around a service whose social justice and rehabilitation ethos is all but lost in a blizzard of processes and algorithms, reducing critical judgments to paper exercises. Consequently, staff spend a disproportionate amount of time in front of computers and in offices instead of engaging in valuable face-to-face contact with offenders and their families.

Plans to re-professionalise probation are urgently needed to separate it organisationally from the prison service in England, with its own director-general and governance arrangements that are geographically coterminous with police force areas, with a strategic focus on locally commissioned and delivered services. Relationships with the magistrates’ and crown courts also need to be reset.

Given that the Welsh government already has responsibility for employment, housing, education, and drugs and alcohol services, devolving probation and youth justice heralds the prospect of a structurally joined-up approach to crime reduction services in the principality.

With more than 100 years of history and once described as “the jewel in the crown” of the justice system, UK probation expertise was until a decade ago exported to many countries in the form of community programmes, services to courts and victims, and local partnerships. For the service to regain its rightful place at the heart of our justice system, the role of probation in delivering social justice and rehabilitation must be incorporated into the terms of reference of forthcoming reviews.

Ian Fox is a visiting fellow at the University of South Wales and a retired chief officer and regional manager of probation

Old School PO's - A long Shot

Using the blog search facility reveals that Medomsley Detention Centre has only warranted one mention over the years and that was in March 2019 in response to a BBC InsideOut investigation that revealed the MoJ had expended £3.6million settling 237 claims of sexual abuse by a former officer at the youth detention centre.

Sadly the piece generated little response, partly because the other big news story was the risk of CRC's being expanded and Interserve going bust. It was also a long time ago, the unit closing in 1988. Certainly knowledge of it in County Durham never came to my attention and I only have the vaguest recollection of Detention Centres.

Time moves on and I must admit I was completely unaware of an ongoing investigation by the Prison and Probation Ombudsman and that they are actively seeking people, probation, teachers, social workers, clergy etc., who had dealings and hence knowledge of the regime at Medomsley. So, retired colleagues, and given the passage of time it is most likely to be this group with knowledge going back so far, are you able to help?

Medomsley special investigation: Operation Deerness

Operation Deerness is the special investigation into abuse at Medomsley Detention Centre. The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman (PPO) was commissioned by the Secretary of State of Justice to carry out this special investigation. The final report will be published on this website.

About Medomsley

This facility was open from 1961 to 1987, holding boys and young men aged 17-21. Many of these young men suffered widespread and serious abuse. Police investigations have since led to the conviction of 7 former members of staff.

About Operation Deerness

The PPO investigation will look into:
what the authorities knew about the abuse over this period
if there were opportunities for them to take action or intervene
what action they took, if any

This is not a criminal investigation. The PPO will not re-investigate the facts of the abuse or individual incidents.

View the investigation’s complete terms of reference.

So, What Made You Leave?

With both prison and probation in the limelight and a new government trying to get to grips with the dire situation they've inherited from the Tory government, I noticed this from HM Probation Inspectorate on Linkedin. It would be a shame if it didn't get widespread attention:-

Have you left probation in the last few years?

We are conducting a thematic inspection of the recruitment, retention, and training of frontline probation practitioners. As part of this work, we would like to speak to staff who have recently left these roles to understand their experiences. This is an essential element of this inspection and will help inform our findings and recommendations for improvement.

If you have left a frontline practice role since June 2021 and are willing to talk about your experiences in confidence, please get in touch with Senior Research Officer Kevin.Ball@hmiprobation.gov.uk to arrange a convenient time for a telephone or online interview.

Interviews will take place throughout August, September, and October.