The Probation Service plays a vital role in public safety, supervising over 240,000 people in the community and supporting courts, prisons, and the police. And it serves as a striking case study of the wholesale renationalisation of a public service, its ‘unification’ happening in 2021. Our ESRC project, ‘Rehabilitating Probation’, has examined this significant period in probation’s history, drawing out insights from experiences by a range of people leading, working in, and affected by, probation.

As many readers of this blog will know, its renationalisation was intended to put the service on a firm footing. But it continues to face severe challenges. A recent National Audit Office report has brought these into sharp focus: it warns that performance has worsened since probation returned to public control in 2021. Staff shortages are significant, and the service’s staffing needs have proven to have been underestimated, making these pressures even more acute. The service continues to struggle consistently to meet performance targets, with many staff finding it difficult to provide the quality supervision in the context of their workloads. The government has pledged extra funding and recruitment, but the NAO concludes that reforms so far have insufficient.

The Enduring Impact of Past Reforms

Structural change leaves deep scars. Staff described the trauma of repeated upheavals: first the 2014 outsourcing, then the 2021 insourcing. These reforms disrupted professional identities and created a culture of uncertainty. Many practitioners still refer to “Trust days” or “pre-TR” as markers in their careers. The insourcing process was framed as a “merger, not a takeover,” but many felt it was the opposite (and the language itself was problematic). This history matters because it shapes morale and trust. When reforms pile up, staff experience what researchers have called “repetitive change injury”—stress and fatigue that undermine performance. The NAO’s findings on staff shortages and morale echo this reality: probation is a “post-traumatic organisation” struggling to recover.

The Timelines of Change

On paper, the 2021 unification looked like a success: staff were transferred, systems merged, and the new Probation Service launched. But our research shows that formal milestones often bear little relation to lived experience. For many, “Day 1” was not the end of change but the start of another intense period of adjustment. Regional leaders told us that timelines for stabilisation and transformation were unrealistic, especially amid COVID-19 and chronic understaffing. Practitioners spoke of “process overload” and feeling unable to focus on core work—supporting people on probation. There could be a significant disconnect between official narratives and frontline reality.

Structural Change and Legitimacy

Insourcing restored some moral legitimacy: many stakeholders welcomed the end of private sector delivery of core probation work. Courts and police valued having “one probation voice”, ‘The Probation Service’. But legitimacy also depends on delivering results. Here, probation faces serious challenges. Understaffing and bureaucratic systems have hampered its ability to provide timely interventions and meet partners’ expectations. The NAO warns that these pressures will worsen as sentencing reforms increase demand. Without investment in people and improvements in practice, probation risks losing the confidence of those it works with.

Why This Matters

Probation is under strain at a time when it is expected to do more, exacerbated by government measures to try to ease the ongoing prison capacity crisis. As the NAO report makes clear, the current trajectory is unsustainable. Our paper shows that structural reform alone is not the answer. Probation service leaders find themselves caught between the need to meet staff’s need for a period of considerable stability (to allow things to settle and for experience to be rebuilt), and the need to take radical action in order to try to safeguard the sustainable future of the service.  

Ultimately, we argue that those interested in public management reform need actively to resist thinking in terms of public management reform: to consider rather, what insights do we gain if we sit with the craft, the practice, at the core of a public service? What ‘ground-up’ sense of organizational mission emerges from this? With what implications for the strengths and limitations of particular governance structures and reforms therein?

As one national probation leader observed, looking back on this period of significant structural change, probation is ‘very defined by its sense of identity and sense of purpose. You cut into that, you hack at it, at your peril’.

For More Insights

The full paper is available here. It is free to download and read.

Further details about the project, and all published papers, are available here.

Thanks to ClaudioSchwarz for kind permission to use the header image in this post which was previously published on Unsplash.