Serious further offences
Last week, the Probation Inspectorate published its fourth annual report on serious further offences. Serious further offences (SFO) are specific violent and sexual offences committed by people who are, or were very recently, under probation supervision at the time of the offence. The SFO review process begins when a person on probation has been charged and appears in court for an SFO qualifying offence. This alleged offence must have been committed while the person was under probation supervision or within 28 working days of their supervision period ending. Following the initial court appearance, a notification is completed and the SFO review is commissioned.
The Inspectorate shares its concern that there has been a sustained increase in the number of notifications of an arrest and charge for an SFO over the last two years. In the period 2023/2024 the figure increased from 478 to 770, and in 2024/2025 it increased further by 13 per cent to 872.
Although SFOs account for less than 0.5 per cent of the total probation caseload, their impact cannot be understated. As such, all SFOs much be reviewed
“to provide assurance that there has been rigorous and transparent scrutiny of an individual case, and to identify where learning and improvements are needed to effect change at an individual, local, regional and national level where applicable.”
Families
When someone on probation has been convicted of an SFO, the victim or their family members are formally informed that the case was being managed by the probation service when the offence was committed and has met the SFO criteria. The victim or their family member can ask to see the SFO review at any point after the conviction.
In this year’s report, the Inspectorate focused on the needs of victims and their families by gathering feedback from the families of victims through a survey distributed via support charities, as well as from families who reached out to the inspectorate directly.
The findings from this feedback are concerning with a number of consistent themes of poor practice including:
“poor communication, and a lack of transparency, with families consistently reporting that engagement with the Probation Service was characterised by delays, showed limited compassion, and was delivered as a formality that neither supported the process nor acknowledged the gravity of their loss.”
This section of the report is distressing to read. Many families found the process retraumatising and found that many probation staff treated meetings as an administrative process and did not acknowledge the impact on people of deeply hurtful events. Some families’ experiences are reproduced below:
“We as a family have felt unheard and misunderstood through the whole process – we are not trying to make the Probation Service feel defensive, just to acknowledge the huge, devastating consequences of their failures and genuine commitment to certain improvements so that no other family has to experience what we have been through because of the Probation Service’s failings.”
“Indifference to the driving offences was appalling, and the final sentence referred to the death of my precious daughter as an ‘incident’. It did not even mention her name, the indifference and dehumanisation of the review devastated me and made me feel like I had lost her all over again.”
“We were given a brown envelope by a senior manager and told to take it home to read and contact our local offices with any questions!”
Less than half of reviews are good enough
The inspectorate examined the quality of 90 SFO reviews in the last year and rated more than half (53%) as “requirements improvement” – 46% were rated as “good” and 1% “outstanding”.
Recommendations
The inspectorate made eleven recommendations in last year’s report and comments that although some progress has been made on 10 of these, more improvements are needed. It makes seven further recommendations in the current report; advising that His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service should:
- devise and implement an approach to engaging with victims and their families following an SFO, which is directly informed throughout by victims, their families and relevant interested parties
- devise and implement a clear mechanism by which feedback from victims and their families can be collected, understood and acted on, following sharing of an SFO review
- carry out a review of the support and training provided to staff that deliver SFO findings to victims and their family members, and act on the findings of that review
- ensure that the process for countersigning of all SFO reviews is sufficiently robust to meet the required standard and that regional senior leaders are held to account for the quality and timeliness of SFO reviews
- gather evidence that action plans are always being implemented, that recurring and thematic learning is identified to make improvements to practice, and that updates to action plans sufficiently reflect the progress and impact made
- implement changes to ensure that all SFO reviews are timely and completed to a sufficient standard
- monitor and publish information on completion of overdue SFO reviews, including the size of the backlog, progress made, the quality of reviews completed against the standards, and the impact of the process.
