The Discussion Goes On 2

First off I want to mention another BBC Radio 4 programme I was listening to last night, Radical with Amol Rajan and this episode: Jamie Oliver: Obesity and Debt are Killing Britain

Jamie Oliver thinks diet-related illness and growing levels of debt are killing the country he loves. In this frank and open conversation, he tells Amol why we need to go further to help people understand the nutritional value of the food they eat. And although his campaign for the sugar tax brought significant change, Jamie says there is still more to do on school meals, breakfast clubs and food packaging. But Jamie’s mission doesn’t stop at food. He wants children to be taught how to manage their money and he also sets out a case for reforming education so it better serves children with diverse ways of learning. Reflecting on his own dyslexia, he emphasises the importance of giving every child the support they need to thrive.

Now, what's this got to do with Probation and our predicament I hear you ask? Well, firstly it's worth listening to because Jamie goes on to talk about how many children are neurodivergent and many end up in the criminal justice system. But imagine a similar programme featuring a knowlegable person who is able to outline a radical way of fixing just as big a problem that we have. I don't think the radical plan would take much effort to knock together, but I suppose finding the voice might be.

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Any plan has to deal with this:- 

“There were 11,041 licence recalls in a single quarter (April-June 2025), a 13% year-on-year increase. Most recalls are for non-compliance (74%), not new offences.”

This from Russell Webster back at the end of October:-

Indeed, the MoJ also published “Transparency Data” on the number of people released under the Standard Determinate Sentences 40% (SDS40) early release scheme yesterday which revealed that almost 40,000 (38,042) people were released from prison early in the 9 month period between 10 September 2024 and 30 June 2025 – all of whom, of course, were required to be subject to probation supervision. The accompanying data tables still exclude the one key piece of data that everyone wants to know – how many of people released early with minimal support are recalled.

However, we do know (from the OMSq) that 11,041 people were recalled on licence in this last quarter – an increase of 13% on the same quarter last year. There usually is more than one reason for recalling an offender on licence. Of recalls in April-June 2025, about 74% involved non-compliance, 36% involved failure to keep in touch, 23% involved failure to reside, and less than one quarter (22%) involved a charge of further offending.

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For the love of God get rid of PSS.

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PSS is one necessary fix, but it is the lowest-hanging fruit in a garden that has been left to rot. Scrapping it does not amount to reform. It simply removes one failing mechanism in a system that is failing everywhere. If those in power want to talk about a probation recovery plan, they must first confront why the service needs recovery at all.

This collapse was not an accident. It was the result of political decisions. The workforce is depleted because ministers refused to resource it. Moral injury is endemic because leadership rewarded defensibility over truth. Recall culture spiralled because political optics were valued above rehabilitation. Reset and Impact exist not because they support staff, but because the service became structurally unable to deliver its core duties.

A real recovery plan means rebuilding staffing, restoring autonomy and dismantling the surveillance-first culture that now treats people on probation as risks to be contained rather than humans to be supported. Nothing changes until those facts are admitted by the people who created them.

If ministers want to claim they are easing caseloads, then they must fund the workforce, reduce unnecessary licence conditions, stop offloading risk downward and stop treating probation like an extension of the prison estate. Anything else is denial dressed up as reform.

Removing PSS without rebuilding the foundations is not recovery. It is political damage control masquerading as progress.

Unless those with power stop protecting their reputations and start repairing the damage they created, probation will remain a collapsing structure that punishes the people inside it more than the people it claims to supervise.

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The service officially needs 3,150 more staff to deliver a “basic” standard, and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) itself underestimated the need by about 5,400 staff. Disgusting!!!

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Staff lose an average of 13.2 working days to illness annually (compared to a national average of 5.7), with nearly 60% of these absences due to mental ill health. Get the f**k out and leave. You don’t deserve this and you can do much better. I have applied for other jobs. Leaving soon as I can. It’s going g to get worse.

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You’re right that it’s going to get worse, because none of the pressures driving sickness, burnout and collapse are being fixed. The workforce is shrinking faster than it can be replaced, and whenever someone goes off sick their work just gets dumped on everyone else. No wonder so many are looking elsewhere now, myself included.

And the sentencing reforms won’t ease anything. A presumption against short custodial sentences sounds sensible, but in reality it means more people supervised in the community by a service that cannot safely manage the caseload it already holds. Organisations responding to the Bill have said openly that this will increase pressure on probation unless staffing and resources rise sharply, and the inspectorate has warned that expanding community sentences without capacity risks making things worse. Less prison time does not equal less probation work. It means more supervision, more admin, more risk and less time to do meaningful work.

Meanwhile, £700 million is being thrown at AI, tagging and “digital transformation” as if technology can substitute for a workforce that has been hollowed out. It is treated like a magic bullet, but it won’t build trust, it won’t support change and it won’t repair a service that has been systematically stripped of the basics required to function.

And through all this, the system still prioritises metrics and bureaucracy over listening, humanity and rehabilitation. Practitioners haven’t stopped caring. They’ve had the conditions for caring removed by people in power who treat connection as inefficiency.

It’s going to get worse because those with power refuse to confront the damage they created. Until they rebuild the foundations instead of managing the symptoms, the spiral will continue and probation will keep losing the very people it depends on to survive.

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What worries me more than anything is how numb we have all been forced to become. We are describing sickness, resignations, burnout, fear and moral injury as if they are just workplace inconveniences rather than signs that something fundamental has broken. Probation is not just strained. It is being hollowed out from the inside and everyone can feel it.

At its best, probation has always been a profession built on belief. Belief in change, belief in humanity, belief that dignity matters even when people are at their lowest. But belief does not survive in a system that exhausts its workforce, strips out time, piles on pressure and refuses to acknowledge its own part in causing harm. When the conditions for dignity are removed, the dignity itself disappears. When purpose is crushed, people walk.

And here is the truth that cuts deeper than caseloads or processes. A service that cannot protect the wellbeing of its own staff cannot pretend to be protecting the public. Exhausted, depleted, morally injured practitioners cannot sustain safe practice. Losing experienced staff is not just an operational problem. It is a public safety crisis unfolding in slow motion.

What makes this so hard to swallow is that the people with the power to intervene still talk in managerial language while the service bleeds. They talk about innovation, transformation, efficiency and resilience as if this is a technical issue rather than a human one. It is not technology that keeps people safe. It is not dashboards or metrics that support rehabilitation. It is people. Skilled, steady, supported people.

And yet those very people are now leaving faster than they can be replaced. Not because they do not care, but because caring has been turned into a liability. Not because they lack resilience, but because resilience has been misused as an excuse not to fix what is broken. The workforce has not failed. The leadership has.

If the country genuinely wants probation to function, for staff, for people on probation and for public safety, then the conversation has to change. Not how do we squeeze more out of what is left, but how do we rebuild something worthy of the people who rely on it. How do we restore dignity, purpose and stability. How do we make it possible for staff to do the job the public believes they are doing.

Because if we cannot value the people who hold up the justice system, then we cannot claim to value justice at all.

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My most important take from Rutger's lectures thus far:

"one hour of real human attention is not something you can easily automate."

I'd go further - one hour of real human attention is not something you can automate at all. Ever. Regardless of what ellenmusk or markysuckerbugs or peterevilthiel or any of the so-called 'techbros' say.

What so many people could do with - whether one-off, weekly, monthly - is one hour of real, face-to-face human interaction, where the attention is focused upon the client/patient/attendee, when people are listened to, are heard, are acknowledged as part of the conversation.

It boils my piss when, in so many interactions with others, people talk over, shout down, cut across, or otherwise make it clear all they want to hear is their own opinion, their own voice.

One of the skills I learned on my (yawn) social-work-based CQSW was listening. We had a (double yawn) 'counselling' unit to complete which involved an assessment of a recorded interview (with a student colleague, not a client) as part of the exam. For me, this was one of the most critical pieces of leaning I undertook - not just for the probation work, but for life.

As a university tutor I would simply go silent when students were more interested in themselves than in the subject at hand. On numerous occasions it took several minutes for them to realise I had stopped speaking & sat down. It only took a couple of sessions with each group before they started to listen & engage respectfully. Only then did the sessions come alive, with great questions from students who had listened & who appreciated those questions being heard & debated by their peers and the tutor.

The art of listening is an art; a dying art.

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Active listening, real human attention and the sense of being understood are at the heart of any rehabilitative relationship. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is that the system has made it almost impossible for practitioners to offer the very thing that makes probation meaningful. People on probation haven’t become harder to work with. The system has become harder to work within.

The quality of training used to prepare practitioners to work relationally, creatively and reflectively. Over time that has been eroded and replaced with training geared toward risk management, defensibility and procedural compliance. New staff are being trained into a model where listening is optional but box-ticking is mandatory. Experienced staff are burning out under the weight of moral injury because they remember what the job should be and cannot deliver it under current conditions.

The pressure to meet performance measures at a pace that bears no resemblance to the reality of current caseloads strips out the ability to slow down, to think, to understand and to listen properly. Every minute is accounted for. Every task is timed. Every action must produce a metric. Humanity has no measurable output, so the system quietly removes the space for it. Practitioners aren’t choosing not to listen. The structure has removed the oxygen that listening requires.

And this is where accountability sits. It is not the workforce who decided that surveillance matters more than understanding or that throughput matters more than trust. It is leadership and ministers who redesigned probation into a machine that values compliance over connection and defensibility over truth. They created an environment where the things that actually help people change are treated as inefficiencies to be eliminated.

Active listening is still essential. The tragedy is that the people with power treated it as expendable. Until they stop protecting their own narratives and start rebuilding the conditions that make real work possible, the system will continue silencing both practitioners and the people they supervise.

--oo00oo--

Then we have this just out from HM Probation Inspectorate:-

"It is of 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.

We have quality assured 90 SFO reviews this year, with 53 per cent of these rated as ‘Requires improvement’. In contrast, just 46 per cent were rated as ‘Good’, and one per cent as ‘Outstanding’. Disappointingly, these findings show no improvement from the previous year.

In last year’s SFO annual report we made 11 recommendations, seven of which were repeated from the previous year’s’ SFO annual report. It is discouraging to note that while HMPPS have taken forward some activity against most of these recommendations, the outcomes and their impact is still not clear."

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What Jones meant to write, but it got lost somewhere in Petty France:

"It is tedious to note that we have made eleven recommendations, seven of which were repeated from the previous year, yet despite HMPPS taking forward some activity against some of our recommendations, outcomes and their impact is still not clear. So unclear as to be invisible.

Thus it is of no surprise whatsoever that, in these tumultous times of new austerity, overflowing prisons & an overstretched probation service, there has been a sustained increase in the number of notifications of an arrest and charge for an SFO over the last two years.

We have quality assured 90 SFO reviews this year. One was okay. Inevitably, given the staffing crisis, the limited HMPPS response to previous recommendations & the general state of decaying morale within the probation service, these findings show no improvement from the previous year."

--oo00oo--

The government's answer published 9th December 2025:-

Prison building boom to make streets safer
A prison building boom is underway across the country as the Government presses ahead with the biggest jail expansion programme since the Victorian era.

The Discussion Goes On

Thanks to everyone for being part of it:-

I keep hearing despair from my colleagues. They don't think anyone who can make things better is either listening or bothered. It's like shouting in the wind they say. But I think the comments here are worse than that. They're actually reporting a collapse.

A workforce that’s carried the service through every crisis is now breaking. HMIP says the system is failing, staff are being injured, and leadership looks out of touch. Security gadgets won’t fix a service that’s haemorrhaging experience and hope. If ministers don’t rebuild probation :- retaining experience, real support for staff and real autonomy, then more violence, more burnout and more avoidable tragedies are inevitable. This is the warning — ignore it at your own risk.

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Senior Management need to stop dressing this up as strain, transition or reform. Probation is in visible systemic failure, and the continued silence from those with the power to intervene now amounts to state negligence.

This is not a blanket attack on all managers. Many are trapped in the same machinery of impossible demands, reputational risk management and political cowardice. But that reality does not excuse the fact that harm is being absorbed at the bottom while truth is filtered out before it ever reaches the top.

We now have a workforce showing every recognised marker of institutional collapse: widespread moral injury, extreme sickness absence, and accelerating loss of experienced staff. That is not a resilience issue. That is a system issuing a distress signal, and it is being deliberately ignored.

At the same time, practitioners are being loaded with rising legal exposure, personal risk and expanding security functions such as searches, enforcement and control, without corresponding pay, status, authority or protection. This is not professional development. It is unmanaged role expansion with catastrophic consequences.

The contradiction at the heart of probation is now openly acknowledged while being actively sustained. Rehabilitation is still invoked in language, but containment, optics and political defensibility dominate in practice. That tension is being paid for daily by the workforce and by those under supervision.

And above all of this sits a political class that simply rotates through office while doing nothing to stabilise probation, nothing to rebuild professional sustainability, and nothing to confront the consequences of keeping it permanently tethered to a failing prison system. When Justice Secretaries can preside over this level of deterioration without consequence, the dysfunction is no longer individual. It is structural.

Unions, too, must be challenged here. Representation that documents harm without forcing structural change becomes part of the containment strategy rather than a barrier to it. When only practitioners are making noise, one conclusion becomes unavoidable: the human cost is being treated as administratively acceptable. You cannot hollow out a workforce through sickness, burnout and attrition, load it with coercive power, and still pretend public protection is being strengthened. This is not reform. This is managed collapse.

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We have been pointed in the direction of the view from the other side of the table. This from Inside Time:-

Outside Voices: This system is broken

The National Probation Service is the government department responsible for ‘managing offenders’ in custody and the community, with an annual budget of £1.5 billion.

When I say ‘managing’ I use this term loosely, as effective management models are collaborative and subject to independent review. What I should say is, the government department responsible for dictating to offenders in custody and the community, an organisation which self-polices and often blames someone else when things go wrong. (Great model for prisoners, right?)

In over a decade of engagement with the Probation Service, I have seen the good, the bad, and the institutionally inept. There are, of course, good people within probation working hard in a broken system to make a difference. Here comes the ‘but’: in my experience, they are not the majority. I’ve had at least 14 probation officers, and I can honestly say that only three were genuinely there to make a difference. The rest were concerned with doing the bare minimum, with a pure indifference to the consequences of their actions. Hardly a surprise, when the system is so broken it will take anyone into its employ and call them a professional.

I’ve seen the 12 editions of my copy-and-pasted OASys reports produce over-inflated risk scores, affecting my chances of recategorisation, sentence progression, and parole, and resulting in excessively restrictive licence conditions. Probation officers change every year or two, so offenders have little consistency, and are constantly having to re-explain their lives. How is a professional and rehabilitative relationship supposed to be fostered and maintained under such circumstances?

As if to evidence my point, only last month, two weeks prior to my (cancelled) parole hearing, my most recent community offender manager (COM) told me “I think I’ve used out-of-date information and over-inflated your risk.” This same COM put in writing in my parole dossier that she wanted my (non-operational, civilian) prison offender manager (POM) to carry out “direct surveillance” on who I associate with, and “search my cell and my mail”, while accusing me of having “organised crime gang” links – all without any evidence to justify this. This resulted in my POM contacting my COM to say that what had been requested would be unlawful, and the prison would not do it.

This is the reality faced by many offenders in a broken system that is hidden from the public – underfunded, under-resourced, and understaffed. It helps no-one and is dangerous. It is not a mere topic of debate – it is our lives, our futures, our day-to-day. Probation needs investment, transparency, and collaboration – not lack of accountability, neglect, and political point-scoring.

V Lynch the Auditor is the pen name of a serving prisoner

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What is described here is exactly what system collapse looks like on the ground: churn, inflated risk, copy-paste OASys, unlawful requests, and life-changing decisions being taken on rotten data. There is no denying that poor practice and indifference exist, but what this testimony exposes is not just individual failure. It is institutional design failure. High turnover, defensive risk culture, political pressure and chronic understaffing manufacture the very behaviour described here.

This is also why Reset, Impact and the wider sentencing reforms being sold as “supporting staff to manage caseloads” are, frankly, a joke. They do not reduce demand. They redistribute risk. For staff, that means legal responsibility without the time or relational control to manage it safely. For people on probation, it means shrinking support under expanding surveillance and an ever-present threat of recall. That is not workload management. It is liability management.

For those under supervision, this translates into control without consistency, restriction without stability, and liberty shaped by administrative fear rather than truth. For staff, it deepens moral injury, professional erosion and burnout. Both are being harmed by the same structural failures. This is not an outlier account. It is a warning about what this system now produces as standard.

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I've been listening to the Reith lectures and was struck by the following from number 3 repeated on Radio 4 last night. This from the transcript:-

Crises were central to Friedman's thinking. In the preface of his masterpiece Capitalism and Freedom from 1982, he wrote words that became a neoliberal mantra. I think it's worth quoting them in full. "Only a crisis," Friedman wrote, "actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function, to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."

And this from the questions section:-

IAIN WHYTE: I'm a Scottish Conservative councillor here in Edinburgh, so I'm probably one of your sceptics in the room, Rutger. I see a public sector that's spending all our money at the moment. We've got tax rates at the highest they've ever been in peacetime, as a share of GDP. We've got huge public spending. We've got a fifth of the working-age population in the UK not working. What is it that makes you feel that human nature won't get in the way of utopia?

RUTGER BREGMAN: Sure. Well, two things. One, yes, if you look at the whole share of GDP, the size of the public sector has grown. My point is that that is a good thing, and that is to be expected because of the Baumol effect. Because government is mostly responsible for things like education and healthcare, that are just much harder to make more efficient. Actually, if you make a doctor or a nurse more efficient, often you're destroying the very quality of — or the very point of, what they're doing. As I said, one hour of real human attention is not something you can easily automate. So that's one important thing. The second important thing is that, actually, the government is often doing the more meaningful work as well. So I talked about the phenomenon of BS jobs. It turns out that, according to a recent large-scale study, actually there are three times as many BS jobs in the private sector as in the public sector.

IAIN WHYTE: My concern is that I see a public sector here in Scotland where people are essentially working for themselves or within the system. And it's not really serving the public as the priority. Often, the way our trade unions and others work, they work for the workers in the system, or the middle managers work to ensure an easy life, your BS jobs, rather than making sure the front line is actually helping the public. 

RUTGER BREGMAN: So that is a concern that I share. What we've seen since the '70s, as tax rates for the rich have been going down, is that a lot of the most talented people have been going not to government or academia or NGOs, but instead to big tech companies, big finance, big pharma companies, where often they contribute much less to society. So I'm really interested in the allocation of talent. And I think we've got to find ways to make government great again, to make it the coolest place. Like the Fabian Society was one of the coolest places you could be, to really convince our best and brightest that to work for the public, for the public good, is the most prestigious and most meaningful thing you can do with your whole career.

My emphasis - it's absolutely what I felt in 1985 at the start of my probation career.

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This came in over night:-

A Plan for a Probation Service Recovery

So here’s my starter for ten. It's not perfect - but then I'm not paid to think:

1. Rebuild Purpose Before Performance
Probation has been pushed so far into metrics that the mission has blurred. The service needs a restated purpose — written with, not imposed on, frontline staff. A modern charter of practice. A commitment that professional judgement is not a nuisance but the core skill the public depends on. And a recognition that autonomy isn’t a luxury; it’s what keeps people safe.

2. Stabilise the Workforce
Nothing changes until caseloads change. That means enforceable caps, emergency relief teams, and a three-year recovery plan that focuses on retention, recruitment, protected training time and genuine psychological safety. If staff can’t speak up without fear, the system can’t learn.

3. End the Command-and-Control Reflex
The prison-service mindset has seeped deep: obey, don’t question, deliver the target at all costs. Flatten the hierarchy. Retrain leaders to coach rather than dictate. Protect whistleblowing. And start valuing managers who listen, not those who silence.

4. Stop Pretending Prison Expansion Is Progress
If building thousands of new cells is your headline achievement, you’ve admitted failure. Probation’s recovery depends on shifting investment away from incarceration and into community supports: women’s centres, young-adult interventions, housing partnerships, restorative options. More prison is not more safety — it’s more of the same mistakes.

5. Put Communities Back in the Frame
Recreate regional probation boards that involve courts, local authorities, voluntary organisations and people with lived experience. Give regions power to commission what their communities actually need, not what a template says they should want. Make probation visible again — not as a bureaucratic shadow, but as a neighbour, partner and problem-solver. I’m that desperate I’m even starting to think putting probation under the regional Mayors might be a good idea (accepting that some of them will likely be Reform).

6. Cut Bureaucracy Before It Cuts Us
Review every mandatory form, template and process. Scrap what doesn’t directly improve safety or rehabilitation. Fix the digital mess so staff aren’t duplicating work across systems. Free the time that has been swallowed by audits and command emails.

7. Put the Evidence Back in Charge
Create an independent evidence centre, insulated from political heat. Require proper research reviews before new policies land. Bring back research roles inside the service so staff can innovate and evaluate rather than firefight and hope.

8. Repair the Bond With the Courts
Courts need to see probation again — in person, not at the other end of a duty line. That means embedding staff in courtrooms, restoring time for proper pre-sentence reports, and rebuilding a shared sense of justice between judiciary and probation.

9. Real Accountability, Not Empty Praise
Inspections shouldn’t applaud leadership while delivery collapses. Create transparent oversight of senior leaders. Publish meaningful data on staffing, caseloads, reoffending and SFO learning. Stop blaming practitioners for structural failure.

10. Build a Long-Term Political Settlement
Probation cannot survive policy lurches driven by headlines. A cross-party Probation Futures Commission could secure a 10-year settlement — stable funding, evidenced direction, and annual parliamentary scrutiny. The public deserves a service built on safety, not soundbites.

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But 'Getafix makes a very valid point about dispensing with some of the pointless work completely:-

Probation provides a very damaging environment for those employed in the service. However, for many of those subjected to supervision it's just as painful and damaging. In many cases supervision become counter productive. I refer particularly to the 12mth and under cohort that were ensnared by TR. There is really nothing probation can do for this group, and since TR they have only found themselves on the merry go round of perpetual release and recall. For this group post sentence supervision is akin to a community based IPP sentence. They represent a significant proportion of the 3000 recalls every month, swelling the prison population, and creating perpetual churn for both prisons and probation, only to be released again a few weeks later, ofen homeless, but certainly to the same circumstances, with the added complexities have having to jump through the same hoops as they've previously tackled with regard to registering for housing, benefit claims etc, etc.

The reality is it's costing a lot of money and resource to create unnecessary problems. The 12mth and under group need to be removed from automatic post sentence supervision. It's the last part of TR that hasn't been reversed. I'm in total agreement with anon [above], but I do wonder if its only 'practitioners making noise' now? There has been two very serious assaults on staff with weapons very recently, and it's a sobering and very serious and concerning thought, but perhaps those being supervised are starting to make noise too?

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You’re absolutely right about the TR cohort. It became a recall factory and a community-based IPP in all but name, and everyone in power knew it. Yes, automatic post-sentence supervision is now being rolled back, but only after years of human churn, wasted millions and swelling prison numbers. And you’re also right that the noise is no longer only coming from practitioners. When people on probation start making it too, through crisis, resistance or violence, that is the system speaking through those it is failing.

What replaces post-sentence supervision is not less control. It is more community supervision, more licence conditions, more tagging and more enforcement under a different badge. If probation continues to operate as the soft arm of the prison service, these reforms will not ease caseload pressure, they will not restore morale, and they will not reduce harm for the people trapped inside the system.

Reset and Impact sit squarely inside this problem. They are being sold as intelligent prioritisation, but what they really represent is the formal withdrawal of meaningful supervision in response to workforce collapse. For staff, they become another performance demand layered onto exhaustion and moral injury. For people on probation, they mean being left under legal control with minimal support, then recalled when predictably things unravel. That is not rehabilitation. It is managed risk disposal.

Rolling back one failed mechanism while entrenching surveillance, enforcement and withdrawal of support simply redistributes the same damage across a wider population and calls it reform. All that changes now is the branding of the machinery that breaks both staff and those supervised.

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Everyone wants someone else to fix the problem. It's someone else's duty, responsibility for this shit but it isn't mine. I'm at the coalface and I'm suffering. You keep on wearing it, keep on accepting it, then frankly you deserve what you have. If you don't resist, you're complicit.

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The idea that probation is collapsing because frontline staff “don’t resist enough” is a comforting fiction. It lets the people with real power off the hook. This system is not failing because practitioners lack courage, it is failing because those with the authority to change direction have chosen, repeatedly, not to. The architecture crushes dissent, absorbs challenge and punishes anyone who dares to stick their head above the parapet. Calling that “complicity” is not analysis. It is victim-blaming dressed up as toughness.

And yes, Napo’s inaction deserves anger. But the real question isn’t where the union’s spine went, it’s why a government department can preside over a decade of workforce collapse, moral injury, violence, burnout, recalls, unlawful practice and public-safety risk without being forced to answer for any of it. That isn’t a “spine” problem. That’s a power problem.

Meanwhile, Reset, Impact and the sentencing reforms are being sold as relief for staff, but they exist for one reason, which is to compensate for a government that has gutted the service to the point where it can no longer deliver its own mandate. They don’t reduce caseloads; they ration supervision. They don’t support people on probation; they strip away the little support that remains. They don’t help practitioners; they expose them.

So if we’re going to talk about who “deserves what they get,” let’s be honest. It isn’t the frontline workforce. It’s the political leadership and senior machinery that built, defended and doubled-down on a model that everyone can now see collapsing in real time. If blame is going to land anywhere, it should land where the power sits and not on the people already carrying the consequences.

Some Reactions

After reading Guest Blog 107: Probation - An Extension of the Prison?  I had the same immediate reaction: how many times do we have to say the same thing before anyone pays attention?

Lord Ramsbotham said it best: “people are not things.” Yet the system keeps treating not only those on probation, but probation practitioners themselves, as if interchangeable parts in a failing machine, expected to absorb endless pressure with no regard for the human cost.

Probation cannot function when those doing the work are stretched, silenced, and sidelined. It cannot deliver safety or rehabilitation when leadership treats frontline expertise as optional noise. And it certainly cannot claim to value people while burning out the very professionals holding the system together.

We know what probation should be, we’ve said it enough times. They don’t. Our probation leaders refuse to step away from the narrow, risk-management, “public protection above all else”, “do what we say” mantra because it keeps their political masters satisfied.

Napo, Unison, the Probation Institute, the Probation Service, none of them truly hear us, and none of them amplify our voices or our calls for change. These issues have been raised repeatedly. So the real question isn’t “Do they know?” They do know. The question is: When will they finally act instead of pretending not to hear us?

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Reading this, I felt the weight of every line — and also a need to widen the frame. Because the cultural shift you describe hasn’t just hollowed out frontline practice; it has reshaped the entire organisation, managers included. The expectation that instructions will be followed without dissent — a blend of prison-service command culture and civil-service compliance — has seeped into every layer. And once that takes root, genuine dialogue becomes almost impossible.

I don’t believe most senior leaders are uncaring or cynical. Many of them entered probation with the same values we did. I think they genuinely feel they are doing the best they can within the constraints they’re given. The trouble is they no longer see a viable path to steer a different course. Whether it’s fear of repercussions, lack of psychological safety, misplaced loyalty to authority above them, or simply exhaustion of their own — they feel as trapped as we do, just in a different room of the same burning building.

But that doesn’t make the consequences any less damaging. When leadership absorbs the culture of obedience rather than advocacy, the service loses its voice. When dissent becomes career-limiting, purpose becomes optional. And when leaders feel unable to challenge the direction of travel, the rest of us are left absorbing the fallout of decisions nobody truly believes in.

That is how a service with a soul becomes a service with a script.

You’re right: something fundamental has to change. But that change won’t happen through equipment, slogans or ever-tighter instructions. It will only happen when leaders — at every level — rediscover the courage to disagree, to push back, to name what is happening instead of managing around it. Probation didn’t decline because its values were wrong; it declined because its values were slowly silenced.

And until those who still hold those values — whether on the frontline or in management — can speak together rather than in parallel, the service will continue to drift, defended but not directed.

We don’t need heroes. We need honesty. We need leadership that listens, and leadership that dares. And we need a culture where protecting the ethos of probation is seen not as dissent, but as the most loyal act of all.

*******
I agree. As a probation officer I am used to thinking in terms of culpability and the need for people to accept responsibility for their actions (or lack of action) but I don’t find that blame gets us very far. A lot of the comments on this blog tend to want to focus on blame. Whether that’s managers, unions, HQ, the Government or whatever. But pointing fingers won’t pull probation out of the nosedive it’s in. The real issue isn’t really who’s to blame - it’s that probation culture has drifted so far from rehabilitation that everyone feels boxed in, just in different corners.

In my experience most leaders didn’t come into this work to parrot a script. They mostly came with the same hope for a constructive, fair, humane and effective service. But a system built on compliance, fear and crisis-management squeezes the voice out of all of us. And while blame might feel satisfying, it only widens the cracks at the very moment the prison population is exploding, and community supervision is buckling under the strain.

We need something bigger than “who’s at fault.” We need a shared, evidence-led commitment to rehabilitation as the centre of gravity. Because sidelining rehabilitation while doubling down on control in the community isn’t a strategy — it’s a panic reaction. You can’t stabilise a collapsing system by tightening the screws on the only part designed to reduce harm.

Probation must stand for something clearer and braver: that change is possible, and public safety is built on enabling it. That requires honesty up and down the organisation, not silence. It requires leaders who listen and staff who feel safe to speak. It requires consensus, not camps.

*******
The Wall

So, Chris is 45 years old, on ~£65k a year with civil-service terms & conditions, a decent pension lined up & looking to move up a tier. S/he joined probation in the mid-2000's, was fast-tracked into temp SPO when their manager popped his clogs, appointed SPO & kept moving up during the TR kerfuffle. S/he has therefore enabled TR as directed, expedited all hmpps recent commands & is regarded as suitable material for a significant promotion. S/he has suspended all past belief in the historical ethos to achieve personal career goals.

Its been a rough old journey for the past couple of decades, a lot has passed under the bridge, some relationships have suffered/ended & there are many commitments to fulfill, not least being the mortgage & the car loan & the bills.

How does s/he change their trajectory? They risk losing their career, their pension, any future references... but hey, they might discover a scintilla of loyalty. To what? To who?

*THIS* is but one example (a hybrid of several people I know) of the obstructions that have to be overcome; layers of people who are embedded in the current structure, who are wedded to the current culture, who burned their boats years back & now feel they have no means of escape beyond completing their pre-ordained journey to retirement via the HMPPS script.

As they rose through the ranks they have been followed & underpinned by the new recruits, all schooled in the new reality, the way of hmpps.

The architects of the current structure have been planning & preparing the ground for this over decades; from 1980 onwards, if not before. Its been a political triumph to have finally unravelled those woolly jumpers, debagged those grubby do-gooders; to have grasped the probation nettle, uprooted it & burned it on the bonfire of inanities.

How proud they are that they've finally introduced a sense of decency & decorum, ambition & compliance; law & order, if you please.

A very experienced & highly regarded colleague from many moons past told me she had attended her university interview for social work-based training in a bit of a blur. Some kind of delay meant she had landed from her holidays shortly before the interview, so drove straight there in her jolly-holibobs kit (and explained this to the panel). She said there was a grim-faced "man from the ministry" in a very severe dark suit, starched shirt, mirror-shiny shoes sitting next the course tutor. At the end of what she felt was a good interview the man in the suit said words to the effect of "Thank you but if you can't be bothered to make the effort, we don't want your sort on this course. Goodbye."

She *was* offered a place, qualified with flying colours & went on to enjoy a highly regarded career. (I expect Martin is still lurking around in Petty France in a suit pocketing a handsome civil service salary).

Open Letter

To those in leadership, 

I want you to hear this honestly. Reading pieces like this brings up a sadness and an anger that has become far too familiar. Many of us joined probation when it still had a soul. When the work was hard but meaningful. When relationships mattered. When professional judgement was respected. When the service still recognised itself.

What we are living through now feels like standing inside the ruins of something that once meant a great deal. The culture has shifted so far from what probation used to be that some days it barely resembles the service we committed our careers to. You talk about public protection, about risk, about operational needs, but you never seem to acknowledge the depth of what has been lost along the way.

We are watching probation become more hollow, more defensive, more enforcement-led, more afraid. And the burden of that shift always falls on the front line. We are the ones absorbing the fallout from collapsing services, rising crises, unrealistic expectations and decisions made far above us that bear no resemblance to the reality we work in. Each time the system fails, it is practitioners who are left to carry the consequences.

What makes it harder is the feeling that leadership either cannot see this or has chosen not to. You respond to tragedy with equipment. You respond to pressure with instructions. You respond to risk by telling us to be more resilient. But you do not respond to the truth. The service is unsafe because the structure around us has been stripped back to the point where staff themselves are the last line of protection.

That is not resilience. It is exhaustion disguised as professionalism.

I am angry because probation did not need to become this. And I am sad because the ethos that once defined us is slipping away in full view. The people who still believe in it are doing everything they can to keep it alive, but goodwill is not an infinite resource, and it should never have been the foundation the entire service rested on.

If leadership genuinely wants probation to recover, then listen to the people doing the work. We are telling you what is wrong every single day. Listen to the sadness in our voices when we say this is not the probation we joined. Listen to the anger when we say we are being asked to carry risks we cannot manage safely. Listen to the quiet honesty when we tell you that the service is losing its purpose, and that we feel we are losing ours with it.

Probation deserves more than equipment and slogans. The public deserves a service rooted in purpose, skill and support. And the staff holding this together deserve leadership that finally accepts what we already know. Something fundamental has to change.

And so let me say this plainly. Probation is not being held together by strategy, policy or leadership. It is being held together by exhausted practitioners who still care enough to keep turning up. We are the safety net, the scaffolding and the shock absorbers of a system that has forgotten its own purpose. If leadership continues to look away, if nothing meaningful changes, it will not be staff who have failed. It will be those who were trusted to protect this service and instead presided over its slow, avoidable decline. We deserve better. The people we supervise deserve better. And the truth is no longer quiet.

Anon

Guest Blog 107

Probation: An Extension of the Prison?

Against the backdrop of the recent attacks on Probation Officers in Oxford and Preston, we expected credible and meaningful safety measures to finally be put in place, like visible security personnel in every probation office, the kind used by virtually every other public-facing organisation. Instead we’re told:

“Probation officers will be given self-defence training, bleed kits, body-worn cameras, knife arches and metal-detecting wands.” 

If HMPPS applied the same principles to itself that it routinely applies in Serious Further Offence investigations, security measures would have been implemented across England and Wales the moment the Preston incident occurred. Instead, the consequences of systemic inaction and leadership failure are being handed back to us to manage. We are already responsible for supervising, rehabilitating and supporting people with nowhere near enough resources; now we are apparently expected to search, scan and physically protect ourselves as well. Probation is being dragged in two fundamentally incompatible directions at the same time.

Let’s not pretend otherwise: this service has been reshaped into a top-down bureaucracy obsessed with enforcement, metrics, referrals and compliance. That is the inevitable product of an increasingly authoritarian leadership culture within HMPPS, one reinforced by a workforce that lacks diversity in age, race, gender, thought, and credible professional experience. This is hardly surprising when probation remains a chronically underfunded and underpaid profession, if we can still call it a profession at all.

But the latest expectation, that probation practitioners will function as security guards or de facto prison officers, is a profound and dangerous misstep. Yes, some staff thrive in the current enforcement-heavy culture because it aligns with their preferred approach. But suggesting this represents the whole profession is fiction. Many probation officers did not join to search, scan or restrain people. They did not sign up to be enforcers, monitors or “risk managers” in the narrowest sense. They entered this work to help, support, and guide, and many are still offering thoughtful, trauma-informed, principled support every single day. That reality simply doesn’t fit the image being imposed from HMPPS, endorsed by the Chief Probation Officer, the Justice Minister, & Co.

We also need honesty about the wider context of poverty, violence, drug markets, knife crime, housing insecurity, racial divisions and acute mental health crises, which now permeate every corner of the UK. Probation offices are not insulated from this landscape, nor should we pretend that turning practitioners into quasi-security staff has anything to do with addressing it. The reality is simpler: the country is in crisis, the justice system is fractured, and probation is being forced to absorb the fallout with inadequate staffing, unmanageable workloads, poor leadership, and no professional security support.

It is devastating to imagine that the colleagues attacked in Oxford and Preston were almost certainly offering support at the very moment they were harmed. Every serious threat I have faced in this job has emerged during attempts to help, not confront. No knife arch or body-worn camera would have prevented those moments. Many of the people we supervise are in crisis, traumatised, or navigating health, justice and community services, that have already failed them. When people are imprisoned without meaningful rehabilitation or support, or pushed through courts without regard to their needs or humanity, the outcomes are predictable. The probation officer becomes the one who absorbs the consequences.

To be absolutely clear: nothing justifies the attacks on probation practitioners, but the government’s response is the wrong one. Probation offices need actual security: properly trained personnel, clear protocols and modern safety systems. That is not controversial, it is common sense. We also need access to functioning support services: mental health care, housing pathways, addiction treatment, crisis provision, employment support. Without these, probation becomes the default service for everything the rest of the system is unable, or unwilling, to deal with. Ironically, I recently read this perspective in a quietly published 2025 MAPPA report outlining the “Voice of the Practitioner” 

Every day, people enter probation offices seeking help we do not have the means to offer, others expecting decisions that may be devastating. Probation offices and probation practioners are not perfect, but transforming them into an extension of the prison, with metal detectors and practitioners trained to physically intervene, is dangerous and completely out of step with “what works”. There is no shortage of insight, research and professional expertise pointing toward a better model. Much of it has been shared, published and lived. Much of it has been ignored.

Despite the dire findings of the HM Inspectorate of Probation over the past decade, there is evidence of probation working as it should, although I’d rarely describe it as “magic”: This from the Probation Institute. But this is not universal. It is clear that the public and political narrative about probation urgently needs to change. This from Revolving Doors charity.

And we have been repeatedly told that our once world-renowned probation service is now an international “outlier”, and it’s identity drastically needs to be shaped and changed. 'Outlier England' published in July on this blog. 

Fixing this is not complicated. We could upgrade probation qualifications to the standard of social work tomorrow, restore professional status, and pay salaries that reflect the responsibility of the role as referenced by 'Important Read - Part Four' of an article by Prof Rob Canton re-published on this blog. 

We could even restore the ethos of probation’s past, because that worked too and we could actually listen to those with lived experience; there are credible voices who know what support, supervision and reform look like when they work. 

Responsibility for fixing this crisis lies squarely with senior probation leadership, HMPPS and the Justice Minister. For starters, they could easily divert a chunk of that £700 million hoarded for tagging and AI that won’t improve frontline outcomes. Secondly, our unions should be collectively demanding urgent safety measures, the immediate separation from HMPPS, and not quietly accepting the further conversion of probation into a poorly paid, deprofessionalised service that is being dragged into being a low-status enforcement arm of the justice system dressed up as “public protection” and “risk management”.

As we continue to process the shocking attacks in Oxford and Preston, we have to accept they may not be the last. We have waited years for meaningful action to keep staff safe and to recognise the real value of our work. What we are being offered is superficial, performative and dangerously misguided. Some will relish the opportunity to wield search wands; others will walk away. The rest of us will carry on doing what we always do: absorbing the consequences of decisions made far above us, quietly working, quietly worrying, quietly waiting… for safety, for change, for pay, for leadership, for a way out… just waiting.

Probation Officer

Taking Stock

I've been trying to get my head around exactly what's been going on over the last few weeks and to be honest my head has been spinning. Looking back, it began to feel like we were on a roll heading towards the end of November with a series of themes around morality, encouraged by the on-going BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures. I guess it was the dreadful news of a further attack on a PO in Oxfordshire, following on from the summer Preston stabbing. 

For me it crystalised my generally perceived way in which probation must be being viewed by the clientele - we're the enemy, in no way being part of any solution, just an uncaring route to recall, and that must surely put everyone working in this field in danger. Knife arches, body cameras, security guards are clearly not any kind of answer if we're seen as the problem. Why on earth can't intelligent, sensible people in authority see that abandoning our core aim of assisting rehabilitation by endlessly focussing on 'risk' puts us all in danger and does nothing to reduce the prison population?

I think it was the blog post 'What Probation Has Become' at the end of November that cemented the upward trajectory both in site visits and contributions, rising to 1,500 and things have been steadily climbing ever since, despite festive activity providing distractions. Recent contributions have been stunning and I sense returning to some of the heady days of the TR fight when I know the MoJ got quite worried about the traction the blog was getting. But that's the problem now, it doesn't get the same traction for a whole host of reasons. It's quite clear that this site goes completely unnoticed by newer colleagues and especially PQiP students. This is not a particularly hopeful message on the private Facebook PQiP Training page boasting 2,800 members:-

"This group is to support PQUIP’s as such we need to ensure the group remains positive, supportive and helpful at all times. In order to do so posts may not be allowed if they are aimed at organisation change or policy, specific workload issues, specific colleague or caseload issues."

Academics at the three training Universities take no interest in it, but then we know all are contractually bound by the MoJ/HMPPS to say nothing publicly that might question probation policy or practice! It still surprises me though at the lack of 'professional curiosity' because any google search of 'probation' brings up this blog almost as quickly as HMPPS itself and there's some very good stuff on here.

Of course we've sadly lost key supporters, particularly in Parliament and both the PI and Napo voices are simply not strong enough. Although it's pretty clear to many of us what any sustainable solution might be, despite the appalling performance of the top HMPPS/MoJ team at last week's PAC hearing, appart from a couple of notable exceptions, committee members seem pretty clueless to me. I loved the input from one particularly useless member who 'had done some research at the weekend' and was effectively slapped down by the Chair. Like most people, parliamentarians including my MP haven't a clue or interest in probation and we still lack any kind of authoritative voice. But I don't want to sound down-hearted because I still  believe it could all come right - remember the immortal words of Harold Macmillan "events dear boy, events".  

Seeing as we know how keen Lord Timpson is on AI being able to sort much of probation's staffing problems by freeing up a day a week for more cases, I've finally understood why the blog viewing figures rocketed by several millions last year. It seems 'bots' based in Vietnam were trawling all over it, operated by poorly-paid humans, scooping up all the fine words in order to inform 'Large Language Models' that all AI platforms require. So, it seems we've all unwittingly helped enormously with the AI revolution.

I'll end this bit of reflecting with a word of extremely grateful thanks to all the many faithful readers, supportes and contributors who on a daily basis help keep my faith in probation returning to being a noble and worthwhile endeavour and prevent me from feeling it's time to pack it all in. If you are up for the ride, then so am I. So, on that note and back to the fray, this from overnight:-

We’re Normalising Failure

Let’s stop pretending. Those of us inside probation can see what’s happening every day. The reality is we’re normalising a level of failure that would once have triggered emergency action.

Most cases are now managed at the bare minimum. Real rehabilitative work is rationed. Risk management has become thinner, more administrative, and more about covering organisational exposure than actually keeping people safe. And this didn’t start with Covid.

TR didn’t just reorganise probation – it broke its professional spine. It stripped out experience, fragmented delivery, replaced values with contracts, and taught a generation of staff that survival mattered more than craft. Covid just accelerated the damage.

Yes, the pandemic disrupted face-to-face work. But what we’re dealing with now isn’t a temporary hangover. It’s structural: unsafe workloads, chronic vacancies, constant churn of inexperienced staff, and a system that quietly depends on goodwill and moral injury to keep functioning.

Unification was meant to be the reset. It wasn’t. We didn’t get a stable, well-resourced public service. We got a bigger version of the same fragility – with better branding. You can see it in the gaps: 

– Programmes that exist in theory but not in practice
– RARs that quietly translate into “telephone check-ins”
– Commissioned services that are commissioned but not really available
– Risk management done fast, not well
– Public protection framed as compliance, not craft

We’ve shifted from professional judgement to defensive practice. From “What does this person need to change?” to “What do I need to record so I don’t get blamed?” That’s not what any of this was meant to be. Staff aren’t the problem. They’re holding up a broken system with skill and integrity that goes largely unrecognised. The danger is that we start to accept this as normal. Because once failure becomes normal, recovery stops being possible.

Probation needs honesty, investment, and the return of trust in professional practice. And those of us inside the system know exactly how far away that is.

--oo00oo--

"Sometimes people ask me what's it like being a probation officer. I say : part social worker, part security guard, part clairvoyant — basically the Avengers, but with worse pay. Still you'd be amazed at what you can achieve when you replace experience with optimism and a mandatory e-learning module."

******
"I tell them it's basically a factory job with a human conveyor belt, transporting people from prison, to court, to the community then back to prison. We wrap them up nicely and label them High, Med, Low to ensure correct delivery and obviously we have to hit daily targets and also check for any damaged goods. So basically the criminal justice version of Amazon as we always accept returns and constantly introduce new ways to trap people into thinking we're offering a decent service."

Follow the Blueprint?

This response is in two parts1/2

Thank you for this vital and clear-eyed analysis. You’ve perfectly framed the collision of ideology, profit, and political convenience that has hollowed out probation’s soul. Your question—‘unintended consequences or quiet conspiracy?”, pushes beyond the ‘how’ to the more profound ‘why.’

Reading your words, I was struck by a chilling thought: what if we are not witnessing a unique policy failure, but the latest activation of a very old blueprint? Your observations about the shift from care to control, the bureaucratisation of indifference, and the political theatre of punishment echo across centuries of systems designed to subjugate.

I’ve tried to trace these echoes below, not to contradict your excellent summary, but to place it in a darker, historical context. You ask if we’re willing to reverse the trajectory. I believe the first step is to recognise the ancient pattern we are up against.

The Blueprint of Control: What Probation's Decline Teaches Us About Systems of Subjugation

The story of probation’s slow transformation—from a service of social work to an arm of enforcement—feels like a modern, bureaucratic tragedy. But to view it only through a contemporary lens is to miss its deeper, more unsettling resonance. What we are witnessing is not an anomaly; it is the latest iteration of a historical blueprint for the subjugation of marginalised populations.

You asked if this damage was “unintended or ideological,” pointing to a pattern that repeats across centuries. The mechanisms may differ—no shackles or explicit pogroms—but the functional architecture of control remains recognisable.

The outsourcing of probation and prisons to corporate contractors mirrors a foundational tool of oppression: the commodification of human beings and their destinies.

The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Plantation System. Human beings were literally converted into capital assets, their value measured in labor output and market price. Their well-being was secondary to profit margins and contractual obligations between traders and owners.

Today, the “offender” becomes a revenue-generating unit within a Ministry of Justice contract. Success is measured by cost-per-case and contract compliance, not by healed lives or restored communities. The profit motive, when applied to human correction, inherently creates a perverse incentive to manage rather than solve, to process rather than liberate. It is the enclosure of the social realm, turning public duty into a private revenue stream.

The obsession with KPIs, dashboards, and audit trails is not neutral efficiency; it is the bureaucratisation of indifference.

The meticulous ledgers of colonial administrations and the cold, procedural efficiency of certain authoritarian regimes. These systems perfected the art of reducing complex human communities to data points—taxable units, resource quotas, census numbers—to be administered from a distance. South Africa apartheid was an example, propelled not just by hate, but by terrifyingly meticulous bureaucracy that turned ethnic control into a logistics problem.

The professional judgement of a probation officer, rooted in a relationship, is replaced by a drop-down menu of risk factors. The complex, messy human story is flattened into a “case file” for throughput. This illusion of scientific control strips away context, empathy, and humanity. It is a system designed to be blind to the individual, making oppressive outcomes feel like administrative inevitabilities rather than moral choices.

2/2

Politicians choosing “tough on crime” rhetoric over evidence-based rehabilitation are playing a very old game: consolidating power by defining and punishing an “other.”

The Roman practice of bread and circuses included the spectacle of brutal punishment in the Colosseum, pacifying and uniting the populace through the violent subjugation of a designated group (slaves, criminals, enemies). For centuries, rulers have used public punishment—stocks, pillories, executions—as theatre to reinforce social boundaries and state power.

The political theatre of announcing longer sentences, tougher conditions, and more surveillance serves the same purpose. It defines the “law-abiding” public against the “dangerous offender,” offering a narrative of safety through control rather than through complex social investment. It is a short-term political strategy that sacrifices long-term human and social well-being, exploiting fear for gain.

The move from care to control is the story of institutional mission drift, where systems designed for one purpose are warped into instruments of oppression.

The transformation of some religious missions, orphanages, and “schools for assimilation” (e.g., for Indigenous children). Founded under banners of salvation or education, they often became systems of cultural erasure, emotional abuse, and control, their original ethos corrupted by the unchecked power dynamics and punitive logic embedded within their operation.

Probation’s original mission—“advise, assist, and befriend”—has been corroded. The relational, social-work heart has been replaced by a surveillance-and-enforcement mechanism. The system no longer exists primarily to elevate the individual, but to manage the risk they are presumed to pose. The helper has been recast as the guard.

The retired officer is correct. You don’t need a conspiracy when ideology, profit, and political convenience align. History shows us this alignment is how oppressive systems are built: not always with a grand plan, but step-by-step, through the rational language of efficiency, safety, and order.

So where is the humanity? In this historical light, humanity is the first casualty of the blueprint. It is deliberately designed out of the system because it is inefficient, unpredictable, and resistant to metrication.

To fight for a humane justice system, then, is to do more than argue policy. It is to recognise and name these historical patterns of subjugation when they reappear in managerial dress. It is to insist that a system processing human beings must be built on a foundation of dignity, redemption, and relational trust—principles that have always been the antithesis of control and the bedrock of true liberation.

The question for us now is: having seen the blueprint, will we have the courage to stop building by it?”

ANARCHIST PO

--oo00oo--

What you describe as the “blueprint of control” is exactly what frontline probation staff are trapped inside. The hardest part isn’t recognising the problem—it’s acting against it when your job security is tied to the very bureaucracy you’re trying to resist.

Practitioners are told to use their professional judgement, but the moment that judgement conflicts with targets or risk narratives, it gets shut down. You can’t easily challenge a system when the system controls your workload, your appraisal, and your future employment. That dependency keeps people compliant, even when they can see the damage it does.

If power is going to shift back to professionals, it has to start with three things:

(1) collective voice rather than isolated dissent, (cue the NAPO complaints)
(2) structures that genuinely trust practitioner judgement, and
(3) protections that make humane practice safe, not risky.

Probation can’t rebuild its humanity unless the people doing the work are free to act like humans—and right now, the bureaucracy holds too much of the power for that to happen.

Personally I'm not very optimistic about this getting any better anytime soon. I've had a lifetime of doing my best in difficult circumstances, but I can't wait for this to all end for me personally and I hope that there is life outside of probation where I can do something useful.

********

Thank you for this. You’ve put your finger on the exact tension: seeing the blueprint isn’t enough if we feel powerless to redraw it.

I hear you about NAPO—it’s a common feeling that the official machinery of change moves slowly, if at all. But maybe hope doesn't live there right now. Maybe it lives in the spaces between us—in the conversations like this one, and in the small, stubborn ways practitioners keep humanity alive despite the system.

When you say collective voice is needed, you’re absolutely right. And perhaps that voice begins long before it reaches a union podium. It starts when officers:

• Share their moral dilemmas openly, not just as complaints, but as evidence of a broken system.
• Document quietly, not just for cases, but for the record—noting when policies harm rather than help.
• Support each other’s judgement in team meetings, backing colleagues who advocate for a person over a procedure.
• Connect across offices, informally at first, building a network of the disillusioned but determined.

So when we talk about collective voice, maybe step one is exactly this: using spaces like this to name what’s happening, to mourn what’s been lost, and to imagine what could be. Every time someone shares a story like ours, it becomes harder for the system to pretend everything is working. We are building a living archive of frontline truth.

These aren’t dramatic revolts. They’re the daily, quiet work of keeping the professional conscience alive. And that conscience is like a seed—it can look dormant for a long time until conditions change.

You also mentioned making humane practice safe. That might begin with us deliberately protecting each other’s humanity—covering for one another, validating difficult choices, refusing to internalise the system’s contempt for our own values.

I don’t know if the big structures will change in time for those of us nearing the end of our careers. But I do know this: every time someone like you speaks plainly about what’s happening, we make it easier for the next person to do the same. We’re not just waiting for the end—we are passing on the clarity that will be essential whenever the cracks in the system finally widen.

Hope doesn’t have to mean believing the system will transform tomorrow. It can mean believing that what we protect now—our ethics, our empathy, our solidarity—will be the foundation for whatever comes next. We are already building that foundation, even on the days it feels like we are just surviving.

Thank you for staying in the conversation. It matters.

ANARCHIST PO

********

This guest blog hits hard because it calls out what many inside probation already feel in their bones: we didn’t stumble into this mess — we were steered into it. Bit by bit, the service drifted from rehabilitation to risk-orthodoxy, from social work to surveillance. And now, in an era of rising authoritarianism and populist “law-and-order” swagger — not just in England but across the world — probation risks becoming nothing more than a political prop.

But this doesn't need to be the end of the story. Staff still have agency, and there are ways to take back control and recover the rehabilitation mission before it is lost to the slogans and spreadsheet

Here's my top five suggestions for action.

1. Reclaim professional judgement like a tool left rusting in the shed.
For too long, discretion has been treated as a risk rather than a strength. It’s time to insist that time spent with people — not time feeding data into hungry dashboards — is what actually changes lives. Rehabilitation isn’t an algorithm; it’s a relationship.

2. Build alliances across the social landscape.
If probation waits for ministers to rediscover humanity, it’ll be waiting a long time. But local partnerships — with community groups, housing leads, mental-health teams, addiction workers — can rebuild what central government keeps stripping away. When probation becomes a bridge rather than a border checkpoint, rehabilitation breathes again.

3. Speak truth to power, loudly and consistently.
Document the reality on the ground. Not only what is failing, but what still works when staff have the space to practise properly. Counter the tabloid myth that “punishment equals safety.” Make the case — publicly, relentlessly — that rehabilitation is the only strategy proven to reduce reoffending.

4. Protect relationships from the rising tide of tagging and surveillance.
The more we outsource public safety to devices and recall culture, the more we amputate the core of probation: trust, hope and skilled human engagement. Tagging can track someone’s ankle; it cannot steer their life.

5. Tell the story of probation as it was meant to be.
The public is bombarded with political theatre — “toughness,” “crackdowns,” “zero tolerance.” But probation was built as the quiet counter-narrative: the lighthouse, not the searchlight. Staff, ex-staff and supporters need to say clearly what’s at stake. When rehabilitation is sidelined, communities don’t get safer — they get more fractured, more chaotic, more fearful.

We are living through a global moment when authoritarian instincts are growing louder and more confident. If probation doesn’t assert its purpose now, it risks being swept into that current, transformed from a service of hope into one more cog in the machinery of control.

This is the moment to grab the wheel.

Rehabilitation was never meant to be a footnote — it was the headline. And if staff stand together, insist on evidence over rhetoric, and keep practising the craft of change even in small daily acts, the rehabilitation initiative can be reclaimed.

Probation doesn’t need to wait for permission to rediscover its purpose. It only needs the courage to remember it.

Guest Blog 106

Unintended Consequences or Quiet Conspiracy?

I'm retired a few years now but I spent nearly 40 years of my career in and around probation. Like Jim I'm old school CQSW trained probation - and I would be the first to admit that I'm distant from modern day probation practice. But that doesn't stop me from caring about what is happening to probation or trying to work out how we ended up in such a mess. So I jotted the following thoughts down. I thought I would share them here. I'm sorry they got too long so I'll have to do it in parts.

When you look at what has happened to probation and prisons over the past decades, you can approach it in two ways. Either it’s a story of unintended consequences—well-meaning reforms that spiralled into dysfunction—or it’s the product of a subtle, persistent ideological project driven by right-wing political and commercial interests. In truth, you don’t need to believe in conspiracy to see how powerful interests lined up behind the same direction of travel: marketisation, managerialism, and a performative toughness on crime. The outcomes, planned or not, have been the same.

1. Privatisation: When Ideology Meets Profit

The probation and prison services became testing grounds for the idea that the private sector can always deliver public services more efficiently. It didn’t matter that evidence was thin or that services relied on professional relationships rather than widgets on a production line—privatisation fitted a political worldview and appealed to commercial providers keen for long-term government contracts.

The result? Large outsourcing firms took over supervision, tagging, and entire prisons. Success was measured in contract compliance rather than human outcomes. Inevitably, quality gave way to cost-cutting. Staff were stretched. Services became fragmented. And when things went wrong, the response wasn’t to question the model but to double down on it.

2. Managerialism: The Belief That Targets Fix Everything

A deep belief in managerialism crept across the justice system. It told ministers that if you create the right KPIs, dashboards, and compliance regimes, services would magically improve. But probation and prisons aren’t factory floors. They’re complex, relational environments where trust and time matter.

The managerial turn shifted culture from professional judgement to box-ticking, from human contact to case throughput. Officers increasingly spent more time recording their work than doing it. Decisions became less about what helps an individual change and more about what satisfies the audit trail. In the process, creativity, discretion and empathy were squeezed out.

3. Appealing to the Public’s Punitive Instincts

Politically, there’s always been an easier sell in punishment than rehabilitation. Saying you're “tough on offenders” gets headlines and applause lines; saying you want to invest in rehabilitation gets you accusations of being soft.

So the political incentives tilted decisively toward enforcement: more tagging, more conditions, more surveillance, more breaches, more recall. “Help” became “compliance.” Probation’s identity shifted from a service that supported people into one that monitored them.

It is cheaper and more electorally convenient to promise punishment than to engage the public in the harder truth that rehabilitation is messy, individual, and long-term—and far more effective in reducing crime.

4. The Cultural Shift: From Care to Control

Probation once lived in the space between social work and criminal justice. It was a service that believed people could change and worked with them to make it happen.

But over time, the system moved steadily from care toward control. The pressure to enforce, the contractualisation of services, and the politicisation of crime all pushed probation to become an arm of enforcement rather than an agent of rehabilitation.

Prisons, too, became less about resettlement and more about containment. Overcrowding, underfunding and constant crisis management left little room for anything resembling rehabilitation.

5. So Was It a Conspiracy or a Collision of Interests?

You don’t need backroom plots or dark networks pulling strings. Right-wing political ideology, commercial interests, and managerialist thinking simply aligned. They didn’t have to coordinate—they shared assumptions:

the market is efficient
the private sector can do it better
punishment is popular
professionals need tighter control
rehabilitation is too complicated to sell

These beliefs produced structural change that hollowed out probation, overcrowded prisons, failed communities, and ultimately made society less safe.

What we’re living with now may not have been intended, but it certainly wasn’t accidental. When ideology, profit and political convenience march in the same direction, you don’t need a conspiracy. You just need a government willing to ignore the warnings.

6. And Now?

We’re left with a probation service recovering from fragmentation, a prison system bursting at the seams, and a political climate that still reaches for punitive solutions first. The road back to a system rooted in rehabilitation, professional expertise and humane purpose will be long.

But admitting the truth is a start: the damage didn’t happen by chance. It happened because the incentives favoured control over care, punishment over change, measurement over meaning, and ideology over evidence.

The question now is whether we’re willing to reverse that trajectory—or whether the unintended consequences will continue to play out exactly as some interests always expected they would.

Anon

Serious Tagging Concerns

With so much going on in the probation world recently, the following article from Civil Service World about tagging has slipped down the agenda. The subject only got a brief mention on Monday at the Public Accounts Committee car crash session and the oft-quoted '£700 million':-

Probation Service ‘being set up to fail’ with tagging expansion, committee says

Peers warn resourcing for planned surge in electronic monitoring is "almost certain” to be not enough

A House of Lords committee has warned that the Probation Service is in danger of “being set up to fail” as part of the Ministry of Justice’s planned expansion of electronic monitoring (EM) to help ease the prison capacity crisis.

Under proposals set out in the Sentencing Bill, which was introduced to parliament in September, the number of people required to undergo tagging as part of the terms of their release is set to increase significantly.

However, a letter from members of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee to MoJ ministers raises serious concerns about the resourcing for the expansion being offered to the Probation Service. Peers also question the capacity of private sector providers to cope with a near doubling of the number of offenders and defendants required to wear EM devices as a condition of their release into the community.

The committee says the government’s plans envisage 22,000 more people being subject to tagging each year – a significant hike on the 26,647 people being electronically monitored at the end of September. However, it says an extra £100m earmarked for investment into EM only represents an uplift of 30%.

The peers’ 28-page letter notes the MoJ’s “much trailed” pledge to invest £700m in the Probation Service over the next four years, but says the share that will go into staff hiring, development and retention is “almost certain to be insufficient”.

It also directly challenges the MoJ’s reliance on suppliers previously found to have massively overcharged the ministry for EM services.

“We find it extraordinary that contracts were awarded to both Serco and AUEM despite being found by the Serious Fraud Office to have been dishonestly misleading the government while providing EM services,” the letter states. Allied Universal Electronic Monitoring – or AUEM for short – is the new name for G4S Monitoring Technologies.

Serco and G4S wrongly billed the MoJ for tens of millions of pounds for tagging services under EM contracts first awarded in 2005. G4S eventually repaid the department £100m, and Serco repaid £70.5m. Investigations by the SRO resulted in Serco being fined £19.2m plus £3.7m costs and G4S being fined £38.5m plus £5.9m costs over the scandal.

The committee’s letter goes on to say: “Continued failures in service provision from Serco in particular lead us to conclude that without major changes in contract management, including flexing to additional providers where necessary, EM service provision will continue to be woefully inadequate.”

Committee chair Lord Don Foster said the government needed to reassess its approach to electronic monitoring.

“The Probation Service needs more funding, and many more well-trained staff if there is to be a successful EM expansion,” he said. “Without this, the Probation Service is being set up to fail. It is startling that the government is promoting the biggest expansion of EM in a generation at a time of great technological advancement yet does not see fit to accompany this with a new strategy.”

Foster said the rise of new technologies, including non-fitted devices and AI, further highlighted the importance of a new strategy that clearly defines the purpose of EM to both the judiciary and the public.

He added that a new presumption that all prison leavers will be subject to EM on their release from custody had the potential to hinder the Probation Service in its work.

“This blanket approach to tagging, regardless of crime and circumstances, diminishes the role of effective, targeted probation interventions, and risks creating an unethical system that is overly punitive and disproportionate,” Foster said.

Proper resourcing and training for the Probation Service is front and centre of the committee’s recommendations to ministers.

Additionally, peers are also calling on ministers to prioritise the publication of a new EM strategy that “comprehensively covers” the rollout, scaling, and implementation of the government’s new approach. The letter says the strategy should also address ethical issues, and the “intersection” between EM and AI.

Further demands include more longitudinal studies of the long-term efficacy of EM – both pre- and post-tag removal – in terms of reducing reoffending, supporting victims, and detecting crime.

Peers are also calling on ministers to “immediately begin” a tendering process to expand the number of EM service providers available to the MoJ.

An MoJ spokesperson said: “Tagging is a critical tool in our efforts to punish offenders and evidence shows it’s increasingly proving its effectiveness in cutting reoffending and keeping the public safe. That’s why we are increasing the probation budget by around 45% over the next three years and investing an extra £100m into electronic monitoring so we can tag tens of thousands more offenders under our upcoming reforms. We will carefully consider the committee’s findings and respond in due course.”

The ministry added that Serco has improved its performance and backlogs from last year had been cleared, with the number of outstanding visits back to normal levels. It said a “series of measures” had been introduced to toughen up scrutiny of Serco, including direct access to its systems.

The MoJ said it was “very confident” that its tagging service could meet the additional demand of the proposed reforms and said it is “working with suppliers to ensure change is implemented effectively”.

A Serco spokesperson said the company’s performance on the MoJ electronic-monitoring contract had “improved significantly” and that it is now “successfully tagging record numbers of offenders”.

“We disagree entirely with the committee’s suggestion that we lack the ability to cope with an increase to the volume of people tagged,” they said. “This is not based on recent evidence. We have already successfully dealt with a number of early release schemes and are well placed to deal with the forecast expansion in people being tagged.”