Probation officers are launching a ballot for industrial action at their conference in Newcastle, as the service struggles under overflowing caseloads and thousands of early prisoner releases. The National Audit Office found the service running on half the staff needed to cover released prisoners, with failures in electronic tagging and only 55% of tags fitted in time, according to the Institute for Government (IFG).
Staff shortages and rising serious offences
The number of offenders charged with serious further offences while on probation has increased, with the public accounts committee blaming staff shortages. Vacancies leave probation services 25%-30% below target levels. The government is training another 1,300 officers, but Napo, the probation officers' union, says that's not enough, citing a high dropout rate once recruits discover the abuse, threats and stress of the work, alongside the fact that the most common cause of staff sickness is mental ill health.
The impossibility of caseloads led the government to abandon any attempt to state what caseloads should be, with the "workload measurement tool" abruptly ditched in September, just before the October raft of new prisoner releases. Eleven hostels and seven halfway houses, places that help probation officers supervise released prisoners, have closed for repairs and due to a lack of staff.
Legacy of privatisation
The probation system was broken by a disastrous privatisation under Chris Grayling, who split it into 21 private companies, with the workforce organisationally divided in two. Private companies only handled offenders judged low to medium risk, while the most serious offenders remained under state control. Companies under-invested, experienced staff left, and none of the promised innovation was delivered. After this ideological privatisation was abandoned in 2021, the probation service never recovered.
Napo has rejected a 5% pay offer on the grounds it falls far behind equivalent offers to workers in local government, police and social work. Under planned industrial action, probation officers will work to contract and refuse unpaid overtime, which Napo chair Ben Cockburn says will cause collapse.
Immediate needs and long-term questions
What probation officers need immediately is reduced workloads, pruned to the riskiest cases, leaving less serious cases unallocated. "Put the service into special measures," Cockburn says. He also wants the courts to stop piling on more cases until there are enough staff to cope. "We are firefighting from one emergency to another," he says.
Cutting workloads is only a short-term solution, avoiding the real question: why is there an ever-rising prison population, despite the sustained, multi-decade fall in crime rates? "We are addicted to prison," Cockburn says. In his view, probation works when officers have time for long-term working relationships with offenders. "It's the best job in the world," he says, recalling the journey of one prisoner who had committed a terrible crime as a young man. "I saw him in prison, knew him for 15 years, with time for therapeutic work." But these days, that's so rare. "Someone now might see eight different officers, retelling their story over and over, creating no trust."
An inspection of a brand new private prison, HMP Millsike in East Yorkshire, found it unsafe due to a lack of experienced staff, as well as chronic staff shortages. Even at its opening, it was "chaotic", lacking basic processes for important things like locking doors and counting prisoners. Hundreds of cells are still empty because of a lack of officers.
Public pressure to lock up more prisoners and supervise them when released will never be matched by a willingness to pay the taxes needed to cover the cost of attracting people to work in this sector. That's the truth Cockburn wants politicians to be brave enough to tell. The overall drop in neighbourhood-level crime in England and Wales has been about 80% since its peak in 1995, while prison numbers have risen significantly. A brave chancellor would cut prison funding down to housing only the most dangerous, and spend better on what works, such as well-funded probation officers.
