Public services need more investment across the board. Every day, another wretched story. Look at the Institute for Government’s (IFG) Public Services Performance Tracker for a plain assessment of A&E corridor care, councils struggling to meet the demands of social care and the Send system, the courts backlog, GP caseloads or families lost in temporary accommodation. A chancellor approaching a budget is besieged by need. It’s easy for us journalists to pick out shock stories and claim each one is an absolute priority, but how should a chancellor choose?
Today it’s the probation officers, whose conference in Newcastle is launching a ballot for industrial action. Their caseloads overflowed long ago, but now thousands of prisoners released early – 2,000 this month – have been thrust upon them. The responsibility is overwhelming, with officers blamed for crimes their clients commit.
The probation story is told in scores of reports: the National Audit Office found the service running on half the staff needed to cover released prisoners. It also reported failures in electronic tagging, echoed by the IFG reporting only 55% of tags were fitted in time. Napo, the probation officers’ union, blames the problems on awarding contracts to the lowest bidders at prices that mean the job isn’t done properly.
The number of offenders charged with serious further offences while on probation has increased, with the public accounts committee blaming staff shortages. Vacancies leave probation services 25%-30% below target levels. The government is training another 1,300, but that’s not enough, says Napo, considering the high dropout rate once recruits discover the abuse, threats and stress of the work, alongside the fact that the most common cause of staff sickness is mental ill health.
The sheer impossibility of their caseloads caused the government to abandon any attempt to say what their caseload should be, so the “workload measurement tool” was abruptly ditched in September just before the October raft of new prisoner releases. There is no point in stating an official workload standard that can’t be met.
Eleven hostels and seven halfway houses, places that help probation officers supervise released prisoners, have just closed for repairs and because of a lack of staff. Drug addiction and mental health problems untreated in prisons, coupled with cuts to education, training and rehabilitation, make prisoners even less prepared for release.
The probation system was broken by a disastrous privatisation when Chris Grayling (who banned the sending of books to prisoners) split it apart into 21 private companies, with the workforce organisationally divided in two. Private companies only handled offenders judged low to medium risk, while the most serious offenders remained under the control of the state. Companies under-invested, experienced staff left, and none of the innovation promised was delivered. After this ideological privatisation was abandoned in 2021, the probation service never recovered.
The lord chancellor is set to address the probation officer’s conference. “But please,” says Napo chair Ben Cockburn, “no bullshit. Don’t tell us how well we do an exceptionally difficult job. We know that.”. Napo rejected a 5% pay offer on the grounds it falls far behind equivalent offers to workers in local government, police and social work. Under planned industrial action, Cockburn says probation officers will work to contract and refuse unpaid overtime. That, he says, will cause collapse.
What probation officers need immediately is reduced workloads, pruned to the riskiest cases, leaving less serious cases unallocated. “Put the service into special measures,” Cockburn says. He also wants the courts to stop piling on more cases until there are enough staff to cope. “We are firefighting from one emergency to another,” he says – or called away to someone in a police cell, or to a paedophile found dating a woman with a child, or a domestic violence case.
Cutting workloads for probation officers is only a short-term solution, one that avoids the real question. Why is there an ever-rising prison population, despite the sustained, multi-decade fall in crime rates?
“We are addicted to prison,” Cockburn says. In his view, probation works when officers have time for long-term working relationships with offenders. “It’s the best job in the world,” he says, recalling the journey of one prisoner who had committed a terrible crime as a young man. “I saw him in prison, knew him for 15 years, with time for therapeutic work.” But, these days, that’s so rare. “Someone now might see eight different officers, retelling their story over and over, creating no trust.”
Why build more prison cells? An inspection of a brand new private prison, HMP Millsike in East Yorkshire, found it unsafe due to a lack of experienced staff, as well as chronic staff shortages. Even at its opening, it was “chaotic”, lacking basic processes for important things like locking doors and counting prisoners. Hundreds of cells are still empty because of a lack of officers.
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Public pressure to lock up more prisoners and supervise them when released will never be matched by a willingness to pay the taxes needed to cover the cost of attracting people to work in this sector. That’s the truth Cockburn wants politicians to be brave enough to tell. This country is not alone in wrongly believing crime is ever-rising when all across Europe it has fallen for decades. But no one believes it. A news and drama fixation on horrific crime stirs primal fears that belie these facts. Politicians everywhere score points with a frightened public by clamouring for more punishment.
When I last visited a hard-pressed prison, I asked the governor what she most needed, and was astonished when she said she wouldn’t invest here, but “right at the start, before the damage is done, in early years”.
Asking where every pound spent does most good is the kind of mega-question budgets don’t answer. But a brave chancellor would cut prison funding down to housing only the most dangerous, and spending better on what works, such as well-funded probation officers.
Keep telling this fact: all crime is horrible – sex crime is at last reported more often – but the overall drop in neighbourhood-level crime in England and Wales has been about 80% since its peak in 1995. Meanwhile, prison numbers have risen significantly. In his upcoming speech at the probation officer’s conference, it would take unprecedented political bravery for the lord chancellor to dare end the pretence that prison works.
