Rehabilitation

Probation staff will be pleased to see Mr Gauke pin his colours to the mast in saying that rehabilitation via forming a constructive relationship with people on supervision is the key role of the probation service and the best way of reducing reoffending and the risk of harm to victims. He advocates that:

“practitioners must be empowered to use their own initiative, professional judgement and skills when delivering sentences and managing offenders in the community, rather than following onerous administrative processes.”

The review recommends increasing investment in both the probation service and the Third Sector, expanding collaboration beyond Commissioned Rehabilitative Services. The Review recommends that:

“The Government should therefore consider both how and where to increase the use of other organisations to help improve outcomes for individuals and manage increasing caseloads. This includes enabling the third sector to support the Probation Service better, through increasing funding, expanding local commissioning and improving data sharing, as well as scaling up local examples of good practice.”

The Review basically recommends that the Probation Service should target its resources on the highest risk offenders and those with complex needs (such as prolific offenders) while expanding the use of the Third Sector to support people service low and medium level community sentences.

While Out Of Court Disposals and general diversion work were outside the formal scope for the Review, Mr Gauke still recommends the improvement of earlier interventions services to address housing, employment and substance misuse needs before people become emmeshed in the criminal justice system.

The Review also recommends the use of the Third Sector, particularly mentoring and peer support services, to support offenders with complex needs on licence in order to reduce recall rates and improve outcomes. 

Technology

The Review acknowledges that even with the support of the third sector, the Probation Service is likely to be managing an increasing number of high-risk cases in the community as a result of its recommendations.

The Review highlights the disproportionate amount of time that probation staff spend on administration and risk assessment processes, which place a considerable burden on practitioners. Probation staff who engaged with the Review highlighted that there is too much paperwork and process, which takes officers away from direct offender engagement to the detriment of offenders’ rehabilitation. A view shared by the Probation Inspectorate who concluded last year that the Probation Service is far too focused on risk assessment and enforcement – at the expense of rehabilitation – as staff lacked the time and experience to build meaningful relationships with offenders.

Specifically, the Review notes that the MoJ is currently piloting a new digital platform which brings all necessary information about an offender together in one place as well as the deployment of AI tools to automate processes such as notetaking, to allow staff to focus on relationship building. More detail on the use of technology is set out in Chapter Eight of the Review – the subject of tomorrow’s post.

The Government’s response

In her speech to Parliament on the publication of the Review, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood pledged to “significantly increase” probation funding –  by around 45% by the final year of the spending review period. This means the annual budget of around £1.6 billion today will rise by up to £700m by 2028/29.

There are no details yet of what this investment will go on – how much to the recruitment of new probation staff and how much to the Third Sector. It is also understood that the substantial expansion of electronic tagging will also come out of this potential £700m.

The goal now is for the Probation Service to recruit thousand of new staff while hanging on to its experienced officers. The most recent HMPPS workforce figures (published on 20 February this year) show the scale of the challenge. The data below shows the probation workforce figures on 31 December 2024: 

• 5,283 FTE band 4 probation officers in post  – an increase of 334 FTE (6.8%) since 31 December 2023 but a decrease of 153 FTE (2.8%) compared to 30 September 2024. 
• 5,316 FTE band 3 probation services officers: a decrease of 988 FTE (15.7%) since 31 December 2023 and a decrease of 270 FTE (4.8%) since 30 September 2024, caused by a lower number of trainee probation officers this year.

Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the header image in this post. You can see Andy’s work here.