Probation Annual Report
Today (18 March 2025) Chief Inspector of Probation Martin Jones has published his first Annual Report of Probation Services in England and Wales which covers the inspections undertaken between February 2024 and February 2025. Mr Jones makes it plain that the probation service remains chronically under-resourced:
“I continue to emphasise that the Probation Service currently has too few staff, with too little experience and training, managing too many cases.”
Key findings
- During the 13 month reporting period (February 2024 to February 2025), the Inspectorate completed inspections of three probation regions which were all rated ‘Requires improvement’.
- It also inspected 24 Probation Delivery Units (PDUs) – rating 10 as ‘Requires improvement’ and 14 as ‘Inadequate’.
- PDU inspections found work undertaken to protect actual or potential victims needed to improve considerably. Work to keep others safe has consistently been the least sufficient area of practice at all stages of sentence management.
- Inspections assess whether high-quality, personalised, and responsive services are delivered to promote desistance – inspectors rated all three regions as ‘Inadequate’ in supporting people on probation to change.
- Inspectors consistently found staffing problems across PDUs, reflecting national challenges, which impacted the quality of work to support people on probation and protect victims. Despite increased recruitment by HMPPS, all three inspected regions continued to face major staff shortages, particularly at the Probation Officer (PO) grade.
- Despite strong central direction from HMPPS, competing priorities and resource constraints have led to inconsistent support for women. Interventions tailored to women are available but not widely implemented, and there has been no systematic evaluation of their effectiveness.
The chart reproduced below shows the gap between the actual number of probation officers and target levels in the 24 PDUs inspected and the variation is clear to see with North Essex having only two out of five probation officers in post.
Public protection
Mr Jones says that his main area of concern is the work to manage risk of harm and keep others safe. Inspectors found this to be consistently insufficient across all their inspections last year. The bald inspection figures tell a damning story. The inspectorate looks at four key stages of all work: assessment, planning, implementation & delivery and reviewing. They assessed the public protection work undertaken by probation staff to be INSUFFICIENT in:
- 72% cases at the assessment stage
- 59% cases at the planning stage
- 74% at the implementation stage and
- 66% at the review stage.
There were particular concerns around monitoring relationships in cases where there were clear concerns about domestic abuse and/or the safeguarding of children.
Desistance
Inspectors also found that too many people on probation were not receiving sufficient support for problems linked to their offending. Even when practitioners understood what people on probation needed to reduce further reoffending, the services to provide this were not always available or used appropriately. In some cases, inspectors found that assessments generally focused on analysing factors related to offending, and that planning prioritised offending factors. However, this did not lead to the implementation and delivery of sentences. Accredited programmes were either affected by staff shortages or organised poorly. In some areas, waiting lists for primary mental health treatment requirements were lengthy.
Conclusion
Like many in the criminal justice system, the Chief Inspector is keen to find out the recommendations of the Sentencing Review. However, in Mr Jones’ case, there is concern that this will result in even more people for the over-stretched probation service to supervise. In his own words:
“I now await the outcome of the Sentencing Review, if it follows the evidence, must inevitably result in the redrawing of boundaries between prison and the community. Implemented carefully, this could ensure we have a more sustainable system with lower reoffending rates. However, to succeed, any reforms to sentencing must ensure the Probation Service is properly resourced to be able to deal with the cases it is required to manage. A service which is under-resourced and over-stretched will not be able to provide the effective service that the public and victims need.”
