The Probation Service is "In Meltdown", Say Staff
9 min read
Every probation service in the UK is failing to meet minimum standards as the service buckles under the weight of record staff shortages and huge caseloads, an investigation by The House magazine has revealed.
Staff describe dealing with unsafe numbers of cases and a “s**t show” system “in meltdown” even before this month’s early release of thousands of prisoners to alleviate a jails crisis.
Some probation services are operating with less than half the number of required staff prompting grave internal doubts about their ability to cope with the increased demand.
And with the consequences for those subject to domestic abuse a particular concern prompted by the early release programme, The House has found every probation service in the UK has been criticised for failures – either protecting others from released detainees or ensuring those released are not abused themselves.
The probation service manages the cases of a quarter of million people, largely those who have been released from prison into the community or have been sentenced to community service.
That is three times the number of those actually in prison, and yet it is one of the lowest-profile parts of the criminal justice system.
“It's a really difficult, complicated job,” says Martin Jones, the government’s chief inspector of probation. “I think it’s also under-appreciated because it’s such an invisible job.”
But while out of sight and out of mind, pressures have nevertheless been building relentlessly alongside those elsewhere.
An analysis of the last 33 reports into every probation service inspected by the government watchdog – HM Inspectorate of Probation – over the last two and a half years reveals the extent of the crisis.
It shows every service has received a failing grade in that period – either ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’. Two got the lowest score possible. (Typically services are rated from 1 to either 21 or 27, two received a score or 1, a further five of just 2.)
Inspectors repeatedly identified understaffing and "unmanageable" workloads across the country, which had left services failing to do basic jobs like ensuring domestic abusers weren't contacting or threatening former victims, failing to safeguard children and systemically failing to assess the risk posed by former detainees to the public.
Every report found some sort of failure in regards to domestic violence – either failing to support those released from prison who could be victims to it or failing to risk assess those who previously were or could be potential perpetrators of abuse themselves.
Sometimes that wasn’t the direct fault of services themselves – at one unit in Liverpool inspectors found they had a backlog of 1,350 domestic abuse inquiries with the Merseyside Police that had gone unanswered.
At one failing probation service in Peterborough, “nowhere near enough attention” was being paid to monitoring the potential risks posed to the public by released offenders, with officers in 72 per cent of cases failing to properly protect the victims of released offenders.
When you see a colleague crying at a desk, that's not at all unusual in a probation office
Sickness and absence rates are so high in some services senior managers were having to handle the casework they were supposed to be overseeing – a situation inspectors called “unsustainable”.
“It’s clear if you read the reports that the probation service is under huge strain,” Jones tells The House. “Having worked in the criminal justice system for over 30 years, the pressures on the probation service are equally as bad as those on prisons by my assessment.”
“It's something that requires urgent attention from the government,” he adds.
At one service he reviewed in Essex, Jones says 55 per cent of the posts for probation officers were vacant, meaning the few staff actually still working there could be dealing with around twice their usual workload. Those kinds of massive staff vacancy rates were common across the country, particularly in big cities like London.
As staff shortages worsen caseloads increase leading in turn to worse staff retention. Some staff are said to be doing up to 200 per cent of their normal caseload as the system struggles to manage 250,000 people.
The personal toll on probation officers can be devastating. “When you see a colleague crying at a desk, that's not at all unusual in a probation office,” says John, who also tells us about another colleague who developed PTSD and attempted suicide from the scale and intensity of the work before being forced to take ill-health early retirement.
John is a near two decade veteran of the probation service who has spent most of his career in the North of England. We changed John’s name to allow him to speak freely and protect him from professional repercussions.
“Everything we do is superficial and last minute. If you've got way more work than you should do, you haven't got the time to sit and spend more than an hour with somebody,” he says.
“If you're always going at 100 miles an hour, you're not doing a considered piece of work when you write up their risk assessment, you’re doing a rush job because you know that you've got another three cases due by a certain time.”
Part of the fear with that kind of overwork is that it means officers are missing chances to stop people from committing serious crimes. Some 578 ‘serious further offences’ were recorded last year, a 10 per cent increase on the year before, though still lower than the record figures set during the system’s privatisation. While those are a small percentage of the total number of people released, each can have an untold, and preventable, impact on the victim or their families.
While the media narrative often focuses on that potential risk to the public, it often ignores the wider impact these failures have on the lives of those newly released from prison. Just under one in seven people are released from prison homeless in 2023-2024, an increase of a third on the year before.
“If probation officers do not have adequate time to address those sorts of issues, then inevitably there's a risk that it just becomes a revolving door,” says Jones. “And the reoffending rates in England and Wales are astonishingly high.”
Part of the reason for that huge increase in cases goes back to former Justice Secretary Chris Grayling’s “disastrous” partial privatisation of the service, which was overturned in 2019 after the number of serious offences like murder and rape by those on probation skyrocketed to record highs. As part of the privatisation deal, companies were forced to take on managing the wellbeing of previously unmonitored low level offenders on very short sentences. When it was renationalised, that new obligation was taken on by the public sector.
The problems in the probation service are heavily worsened by the problems across the rest of the justice system – from record court backlogs to prison overcrowding – which make managing cases a nightmare.
“The whole of the criminal justice system is in meltdown and we’re an important component of that,” says Ian Lawrence, general secretary of NAPO, the trade union for probation workers. He said the union has been repeatedly pushing for a Royal Commission into the failures across the justice system. “It’s a s**t show, basically,” he concludes.
When Labour first announced its plans to authorise the early release of prisoners, insiders say they had had a grim sense of deja vu.
Just two months earlier, the last government had (more quietly) expanded its own early prisoner release scheme, called ECSL, to mean countless more prisoners would be released early. Probation staff had little warning or time to prepare for releases and few criteria were applied on what type of prisoner might be released. It was labelled by NAPO at the time as an “unmitigated failure” and a trigger for potential strike action.
Lawrence says under that scheme probation staff felt “under pressure to sanction someone's release when they knew for a fact they were a high risk” to the public.
“The new scheme couldn’t be worse than ECSL,” John recalls. “But what they've done again is prioritise prison at the expense of probation.”
Under Labour’s programme which begins this month, prisoners will be eligible for early release after serving 40 per cent rather than 50 per cent of their sentences. In theory, certain serious offences, like those with domestic violence convictions would not be covered, but this month the government confirmed that was not always the case. If someone had a history of, say, serious sexual offences, but was currently serving a sentence for something else, they would be eligible.
We cannot keep doing this. The early release plans may make a difference to overcrowding in the short term, but it’s... not a long term cure
Some 40,000 prisoners are estimated to benefit from the scheme, meaning the probation service’s caseload could eventually shoot up by as much as a fifth. Some 5,500 prisoners are expected to be released in the next two months alone.
The new scheme came with a promise to recruit 1,000 new probation officers by March 2025 to help deal with the new caseload and address staffing shortfalls in the service, though given it takes 18 months for an officer to qualify, it could be years before the service feels any benefit.
“I'm concerned about the potential impact that this will have, particularly in the short term,” says Jones. “Extra officers in a year or 18 months is great but you've got to through the next 18 months first.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson stressed that the government “inherited a prison system in crisis” that was “putting pressure on the wider justice system particularly probation staff”. They added they had been “forced into taking difficult but necessary action so it can keep locking up dangerous criminals and protect the public”.
All of those working in probation who spoke The House spoke said the scale of the crisis had made them rethink the entire structure and future of the probation service.
Jones says the “chronic” issues in the service meant the government needed to consider pruning the numbers or types of ex-detainees the service oversees as “it's probably better to do 70 per cent of the job really well than do 100 per cent of the job poorly”.
NAPO also calls on the government to end or phase out short-term prison sentencing.
“There are too many people in prison for offences that realistically, you should put them on a community order or some other form of reparation,” says NAPO general secretary Lawrence.
"We cannot keep doing this. The early release plans may make a difference to overcrowding in the short term, but it’s a palliative not a long-term cure.”
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