The Probation Service is an essential part of our criminal justice system. Keeping our streets safe and cutting crime depends upon the vital work of probation officers and staff. Today, it supervises just over a quarter of a million offenders, from those on community sentences to those released from custody. That is not all. The Probation Service provides sentencing advice to judges and magistrates every day in our courts, oversees more than 4 million hours of community payback each year, monitors 9,000 offenders on tags at any given moment, provides a vital link to thousands of victims, through the victims contact and the victims notification schemes and works in close partnership with policing and the voluntary sector to keep our communities safe.
The pressure facing our Probation Service is considerable and I am grateful for everyone who works tirelessly across the system. It is only right to acknowledge the incredibly hard, and often hidden, work that probation officers do across England and Wales. These dedicated staff have been the single constant throughout the last decade of change. We need to ensure that the Probation Service can deliver the vital work that needs to be done to keep the public safe and reduce reoffending. However, the Probation Service this Government inherited was burdened with a workload that was, quite simply, impossible. We need to be honest and open about the state that the Probation Service was left in by the previous Government. The transforming rehabilitation strategy failed. The rhetoric was of a revolution in how we manage offenders, but the reality was far different. Workloads increased, as new offenders were brought under supervision for the first time, and scarce resources were stretched further than ever. We know that morale plummeted, and worrying numbers of staff voted with their feet, leaving the service altogether, leading the then inspector to declare a “national shortage” of probation professionals.
The new structures failed. The privately owned community rehabilitation companies set up to manage medium and low-risk offenders underperformed, and between 2017 and 2018, just five of 37 CRC audits carried out by HMPPS demonstrated that expected standards were being met. In 2019, eight out of the 10 CRCs inspected that year received the lowest possible rating—“inadequate”—for supervising offenders. The chief inspector of probation called them “irredeemably flawed”. The previous Administration reunified the Probation Service but wasted a decade and millions of pounds.
When we took office, we discovered that orders handed out by courts were not taking place. In the three years to March 2024, around 13,000 accredited programmes, a type of rehabilitative course, did not happen. This was not because an offender had failed to do what was expected of them, but instead because the Probation Service had been unable to deliver these courses in the required timeframe.
For that reason, I have asked the Probation Service to put in place a process of prioritisation. Accredited programmes handed down by the courts to those who are considered to have the higher risk of reoffending will be prioritised. This is not a decision I take lightly. But it is a decision to confront the reality of the challenges facing the Probation Service. Those who will not complete an accredited course will remain under the supervision of a probation officer. And all the requirements placed upon them will remain in place. Any breach of a community sentence could see them hauled back into court, and any breach of a licence condition could see them back behind bars.
In July, I committed to bringing on 1,000 trainee probation officers by March of this year—a commitment that we are making progress towards. Next financial year, we will onboard at least another 1,300. New probation officers are the lifeblood of the service, and they will guarantee its future. And I want to ensure that we are taking advantage of the latest technology, like AI. We must give probation staff access to modern digital services, drawing in data from across the justice system. Work is already ongoing that is improving the flow of information that is so critical to an accurate assessment of an offender’s risk, and new tools are beginning to strip away the administrative burden that gets between a probation officer and an offender.
However, given the challenges faced by the Probation Service, new staff and better processes are not sufficient on their own. Faced by a caseload of just over a quarter of a million we need to think about how we use the Probation Service most effectively. If the service is to fulfil its historic purpose—protecting the public by reducing reoffending—we need to look hard at what works, and where officers time is best spent. When it comes to the value of a probation officer’s time the evidence is clear that we must shift more of probation officers’ time towards the higher-risk offenders, spending more time on protecting the public, working with partners, and working with the offender to rehabilitate them and motivate them to change.
This Government will focus the Probation Service on the interventions that have the greatest impact. For lower-risk offenders, we will task probation officers with a swifter intervention. They will spend more time with an offender immediately after their sentencing or release from prison to assess the root causes of an offender’s crime. Then they will refer them to the services that will address that behaviour, which could be education, training, drug treatment or accommodation. Once they are following that direction, as long as the offender stays on the straight and narrow, we must then focus probation officer’s time more effectively. This means more time spent with the offenders who pose the higher risk of harm or reoffending and more time with offenders whose prolific offending causes so much social and economic damage to local communities.
[HCWS446]