The Probation Service Is It Working?
Probation service to be removed
UNISON has renewed its calls for the probation service to be removed form civil service control after a new report from the Public Accounts Committee warns that the probation service in England and Wales is being placed under “significant strain, seriously impeding its ability to protect the public and reduce reoffending rates.”
UNISON national officer for probation Ben Priestly said,”we are campaigning for probation to be removed from civil service control and re-localised under local democratic control with local management again.
“Successive independent reports in the last 12 months by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation, the National Audit Office and now the Public Accounts Committee lay bare the failings of the probation service under civil service control.
“It was the Tories who first centralised control of probation under the Ministry of Justice in 2014.
“Like all the other Tory probation reforms, centralisation has been an abject failure. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has had 12 years to get to grips with running probation and instead of improving over this time, probation has just got worse.”
Probation was reunified in 2021 after the collapse of Tory privatisation.
The Public Accounts Committee found that:
- Since 2021 the Probation Service has failed to meet most of its performance targets
- Neither the MoJ nor His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) know how probation performance affects performance such as rates of reoffending
- Longstanding staff shortages have left probation staff with excessive and unmanageable workloads
- The MoJ and HMPPS rescue plan ‘Our Future Probation Service’ risks destabilising the workforce and may not free up capacity to improve performance
- Resourcing for rehabilitative services is in doubt.
Ben added: “Labour promised to review the governance of probation in its 2024 manifesto. UNISON calls on the government to make good on this promise without further delay.”
Research
Research shows that a well-functioning probation service can reduce the significant cost of reoffending to society, estimated by MoJ at £20.9 billion a year across adult offenders, in 2024-25 prices.
However, available data show that, since unification of the Probation Service in June 2021, performance has worsened, with significant staffing shortfalls and high workloads, particularly for the Probation Officer grade.
HMPPS increased its recruitment of probation staff in line with its plans, but in 2024 its internal analysis indicated that it had significantly underestimated the time needed for sentence management tasks. This analysis is undergoing external review but indicates that the service had been operating with around half the staff needed for sentence management.
HMPPS acknowledges that the Probation Service is currently unsustainable, requiring significant corrective action. It has made pragmatic decisions to deal with staffing shortfalls by reducing rehabilitative activity and supervision, but these have not sufficiently reduced PO workloads.
Further, to avoid running out of prison places, MoJ plans to implement legislative changes that will significantly increase demands on the Probation Service.
HMPPS’s ‘Our Future Probation Programme’ is a bold and innovative approach to increase resilience. However, the significant gap between actual and required capacity and slow progress in improving productivity means the challenge it faces is huge.
Furthermore, the pace of change required and nature of the changes HMPPS plans to make pose risks to the probation service’s aims of public protection, rehabilitation, and the government’s wider ‘Safer Streets’ mission, which will need to be actively managed.
HMPPS, MoJ and the government more widely must urgently consider how to manage these risks and how to ensure that reducing the scope of Probation Service activity does not negatively impact on offender outcomes or increase pressure on the wider justice system.
Who is the Probation?
When people leave prison or receive community sentences, the Probation Service (part of HMPPS) aims to protect the public by managing any risks offenders pose, and to reduce the chance of them reoffending by supporting their rehabilitation in the community. MoJ estimates the social and economic cost of reoffending across adult offenders to be around £20.9 billion a year in 2024-25 prices.
MoJ and HMPPS have implemented two major reorganisations of the Probation Service in the last 11 years. In 2014, MoJ divided the service into private sector-led Community Rehabilitation Companies and the National Probation Service through its Transforming Rehabilitation reforms. In June 2021, HMPPS’s Probation Reform Programme unified the service, bringing probation back under full public control.
Since unification, the Probation Service has remained under significant strain, with staffing shortfalls, increasing pressures and continuing poor performance. The Independent Sentencing Review (published in May 2025) – which recommends that MoJ makes greater use of alternatives to prison to avoid running out of prison places – will likely increase pressures on probation further. To enable it to cope with increased demand and improve performance, HMPPS has set up a programme to further transform the service.
This report examines why HMPPS has not been able to improve performance of the service to date. It also assesses MoJ and HMPPS’s progress in transforming the service and sets out what more it needs to do to achieve its future aims. The report examines:
- Probation Service performance and HMPPS’s understanding of this
- why HMPPS has not been successful at improving the performance and resilience of the service post-unification
- how effectively MoJ and HMPPS are now working to improve the long-term resilience of the Probation Service
The report does not assess HMPPS’s implementation of its Probation Reform Programme in 2021 or its ‘One HMPPS’ restructuring programme, which concluded in September 2024.
The report focuses on probation supervision in the community, which largely consists of sentence management, the end-to-end process of supervision of offenders released from prison or serving a community order or suspended sentence order. It does not assess probation activity in courts or in prisons in detail.
‘Inadequate’ funding to turn around service in crisis
Mr Jones said all 30 probation delivery units he has inspected since he was appointed as the probation watchdog in January last year have been rated as “inadequate” or “requires improvement”.
Moreover, performance has worsened since the Probation Service was brought back under public control in 2021, according to a damning NAO report published last month.
The service is currently only meeting 26 per cent of targets set by His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) and overworked staff are still reeling from repeated early release schemes, which have put them under immense strain.
Tania Bassett, national official at NAPO, which represents thousands of probation officers, warned members have “no faith” that the £700m of extra funding promised by 2028 will reach frontline services.
“We fear that it will go – pretty much all of it – to private tagging companies and private IT firms for this push on AI,” she told The Independent.
“There’s been absolutely no promises in terms of that being invested in frontline staff or premises – a number of which are barely fit for purpose.
“I don’t think any of that money is going to go where it’s critically needed. I think it’s going to be tying a bow around what’s already falling apart.”
Peers from the House of Lords’ Justice and Home Affairs Committee have branded the government’s funding plans “inadequate” as they raised questions over how staff will monitor up to 22,000 extra offenders expected to be tagged in the community.
