Welcome to the Public Accounts Committee on Monday 1 December 2025. The Probation Service aims to protect the public and reduce reoffending through the effective rehabilitation of offenders. In 2023-2024, His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, which I will from now on call HMPPS, spent £1.45 billion on the Probation Service, representing 27% of its total net expenditure. In contrast, reoffending is costly to society, with the MOJ estimating that the economic and social cost of reoffending across adult offenders has risen to £20.9 billion a year in 2024-25 prices. The Probation Service is under significant strain, with continuing poor performance as well as difficulties in the recruitment and retention of staff. Today, we will be challenging HMPPS on its efforts to improve probation performance and address staffing shortages since 2021. We will also be examining HMPPS’s Our Future Probation Service—OFPS—programme, the risks that it faces, its plans to free up capacity to improve performance, and how it will monitor the impact on offender outcomes. With us we have Dr Jo Farrar, who is the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice. Would you introduce yourself, Dr Farrar, please? Then your team can introduce themselves.

I am Jo Farrar, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice.

Good afternoon. I am Adam Bailey. I am the director for probation and reoffending policy in the Ministry of Justice.

I am James McEwen, CEO of HMPPS.

I am Kim Thornden-Edwards, chief probation officer.

I am Jim Barton. I am the director who leads on capacity implementation in HMPPS.

Adam, I do not think that you have been before the Committee before.

No, it is my first time.

The rest of you have been. A very special to welcome to you, Adam. I hope that you will find the process interesting, if nothing else. To start us this afternoon is my excellent deputy, Clive Betts.

Permanent Secretary, all of us in the Committee read this report and were pretty horrified by some of its findings. As the Permanent Secretary—and you were previously Second Permanent Secretary with responsibility for probation—do you accept responsibility for this state of affairs?

Thank you for the question. I was previously the Second Permanent Secretary, but that was two years ago. There has been a gap of two years and, in those two years, there are a number of things in the report that are referred to. Coming back to the Ministry of Justice, in general, I have identified performance as an issue that we need to look at really closely. I have revamped our performance system and the way that we collect and use data. We have introduced ministerial oversight of performance. You will have heard the Deputy Prime Minister talking about his performance board, and we are starting to see improvements. Probation is a hugely difficult area. I should pay tribute, first of all, to our really hard-working staff in the frontline of MOJ, but particularly in probation, who deal with some very difficult individuals and circumstances on the frontline.

Permanent Secretary, that was an explanation about what may be being done, but the reality is that, in the past few years, things have got worse, haven’t they? Why?

When we brought the Probation Service back into the Ministry of Justice, we did inherit a problem. We were seeing staff shortages; the Report refers to that. There were not enough staff, and there was a high turnover of staff. Alongside that, as the report also acknowledges, the complexity of cases has increased. We are seeing high caseloads and more complex cases for our frontline staff. What we have been trying to do about that is to increase staffing numbers. We appointed an additional 1,000 staff last year. We are on track to recruit 1,300 this year in order to reduce those workloads and help staff performance.

I will come back to staff in a minute. The reality is that the performance has got worse. Is it something that you have just realised in the last few months? Before then, there did not seem to be any particular action to deal with the fact that, as we have had in the Report, which you have agreed, your hitting of targets has been consistently worsening. Why is that the case? You met only seven of your 27 performance targets in the last year. That is pretty shocking, isn’t it?

You refer to the last few months. I have been back for the last four months. In that time, I have been putting in place a new performance system. We have been seeing improvements in probation performance, and I am sure that Kim will want to talk about that. We have been seeing improvements in risk management, for example, in risk planning and risk assessment, and in enforcement. These are all areas that we really worry about because they are about how we manage high-risk offenders. We are starting to turn the corner, I believe, but staff numbers are critical to this. Therefore, appointing the 1,300 additional staff is really important. We are also investing up to £700 million in probation and related services by the end of the spending review, which, again, will help with performance.

I will come back to staff numbers again in a minute, although I might ask the question about why it took so long to realise that you had not got enough staff, which might be something fairly obvious. You talked about risk. What the public will no doubt be concerned about is that probation staff are adequately assessing risk of harm in only 28% of cases, compared with 60% in 2018-19. That is pretty shocking, isn’t it? Do you not think that the public would be quite shocked by that?

This is why we have such a focus on performance and why we have introduced programmes such as Reset and Impact.

These are figures now about what has happened. Nobody seems to have intervened before to address these particular problems, have they? I know that you have only just got into post, but somebody was there before. The Department has not addressed this situation satisfactorily, has it?

I would not accept that the Department has not been addressing this. The Department inherited a problem. It has been working really hard. It takes up to 27 months to—

Who did it inherit the problem from?

On unification, it inherited staff shortages and a high turnover of staff. It has been working ever since to address that staff shortfall. It has taken some very brave decisions, as we are seeing in the Sentencing Bill. It is investing up to £700 million by the end of the SR in probation and community services. All of these decisions were taken in order to strengthen the Probation Service. I am not saying that we do not recognise that there is an issue. I am saying that it has been recognised and that steps are being taken to improve it, and that is why we are introducing Our Future Probation Service, which I know you will want to pick up on later.

We will, but it just seems to someone looking from the outside that, when you did the unification several years ago, at that time, proper assessments might have been done about the staffing resources that you needed, and they were not, were they?

Staffing assessments were done. They have been adjusted more recently.

They were wrong, weren’t they?

I cannot comment on that.

Of course you can. You are the Permanent Secretary. You can comment on whether the Department got wrong the assessment of how many staff you needed when you unified the service.

When we unified the service, we brought staff in. There were assessments made about the number of staff needed. Since then, we have seen the case mix change. We constantly monitor the number of staff we need and the risk to the public. I am not saying that we do not recognise that we need greater staff numbers. That is why we committed to spending the £700 million on probation and community service.

When was it first recognised that you did not have enough staff there?

Throughout that period, staff shortages have been measured. We have worked every year since 2021 to recruit large numbers of staff. As I said, there were 1,057 last year, so it has always been recognised. What we are really getting to now is, “What is the gap and then how do we fill that through Our Future Probation Service?” This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, with the money that we have from the spending review and the legislation that we have in Parliament, to address some of our historic issues. It is a very exciting opportunity to address this, but you cannot do that instantly without the resources and without the commitment.

You talked about recruiting more staff, and that is happening, but your targets for recruitment were never going to be adequate to meet the needs of the service, were they?

Our targets for recruitment will be adequate to meet the needs of the service if they are taken alongside other measures, and that is what we are assessing.

Historically, they have not been, have they? For a number of years, you have knowingly not recruited enough staff to meet the needs of the service. That is the truth, isn’t it?

For a number of years, we have been recruiting large numbers of staff.

But not enough, have you? By your own assessments, it is not enough.

You are right. There is still a shortfall and that is why we are looking at Our Future Probation Service. Staff numbers are one thing, but other issues, such as digital innovations, also allow us to bridge that gap. That is what we are assessing through Our Future Probation Service and what we are discussing with the Deputy Prime Minister as part of our allocations process.

Can I come in here? The service was unified in 2021. Here we are in 2025. The Report, at paragraph 18, has the pretty damning phrase, “HMPPS acknowledges that the Probation Service is currently unsustainable”. You have had four years to get into that state. Every time you have made a reset or a change of plan, it has always not been enough or not been achieved. How can we be sure that this new plan that you have is radically going to alter that statement? That statement implies that the public are at risk and that not enough remediation of prisoners is being done. There is a whole range of issues, including the safety of prisoners themselves, and that is without all the issues of the short sentencing review and everything else. How can we be absolutely convinced as a Committee that you now understand what the situation is and that your current plan is going to put it right?

Things are different from 2021. If we go back to 2021, we were still in the covid pandemic and just coming out of that situation. Between 2021 and 2025, we have seen a 22% increase in the number of probation staff. That is really positive, so things were happening. Why it is different now is because we have legislation going through Parliament. We are investing £700 million. We have a commitment to extra staff. We have new digital innovations at our fingertips. All of these are going to make a difference. They are being brought together into the Our Future Probation Service programme, which is tightly monitored and has good governance around it. That is how we are seeing that it will make a difference, and we are already seeing a difference. As I say, performance is starting to stabilise. We are having positive feedback from staff on some of the new digital tools available, and we are recruiting to the numbers that we have said we will recruit to.

We will be coming back to all of that, I have no doubt.

Permanent Secretary, this is not my area of expertise, but I have done some research and have some friends who work for the Probation Service who I have spoken to over the weekend. In the NAO report, the one thing that came through to me was that tagging—

We are coming on to tagging.

—could be used much more effectively, and it has not been introduced. I looked at two reports—one in 2022 to 2024 for Rishi and another one for the MOJ in September 2025—where there were recommendations that more tagging could be used. I gather that it is incredibly powerful. You can use it to monitor alcohol. You can use it to monitor almost everything. However, when I looked at the figures, you are not rolling out tagging, and have not done, as quickly as you, arguably, should have done.

Can I suggest that we leave this until the end?

Geoffrey, this is quite important because it does not go just to a staffing issue that Clive was raising. You have missed an opportunity to use tagging far more extensively. We can go on to talk about Serco in a minute, but I would like to know why it is that there has been no progress on rolling out tagging.

I am going to stop you there, Rupert, because this is in the order paper under somebody else’s question at the end, so we will deal with it then. Hang on to that, Dr Farrar.

Yes, I will.

I have one question for James.

Do not tread on anybody else’s questions.

Can I ask James one question? Again, I looked at some public data on the website, and I find that a staggering 10% of probation offenders are foreign.

Chair, on a point of order, where are we in the agenda for these questions, just to be clear? We have an agenda. I would very much like to know where we are in the agenda.

Can we leave it until we get to your question, Rupert, please? Otherwise, you will be treading on somebody else’s toes. You are more than welcome to ask it when you come to your question, please.

As Permanent Secretary, of course I accept responsibility for these services.

Yes, of course. Shall I talk about recall? I might bring Kim in as well, if that is okay. There is no evidence to suggest that probation staff are recalling people inappropriately. Numbers have risen, but, because of the crisis in prisons, we have seen that more people have been released from prison and are on probation. It is very reassuring that we can see that probation officers are using these tools appropriately to make sure that people come back to prison if they break their licence conditions. By far the highest reason is non-compliance with licence conditions. If people are released from prison on a licence, they need to comply with that. Recall is a really important tool to help us make sure that we protect the public. If we have worries about an individual, they will be recalled to prison. There are a number of things that we are doing in terms of reducing reoffending. We know that, when people are released from prison, there are certain things that are important. One is a home. The reoffending rate almost doubles if somebody does not have a home to go to. Others include employment and treatment. In terms of housing, you will have seen our programme of accommodation to support prisoners at risk of homelessness on release. In terms of work, we now have Regional Employment Councils with the DWP and businesses to support offenders leaving prison into work. In fact, those offenders can access employment hubs and certain vocational courses while in prison. We are also very concerned about treatment. Our intensive supervision court pilots are being shown to make a difference when it comes to helping people address their addiction problems, so we are looking to expand that as well. Kim, I do not know whether you wanted to add anything to this.

Just to reinforce what the Permanent Secretary has said about the recall decisions that are being made by individual probation practitioners, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation did a thematic inspection on recall. This was in 2020. It found that the vast majority of individual decisions to recall that were made were the right decisions in the circumstances at the time. It also did an HMIP thematic inspection on recall decisions made for IPP sentences in 2023 and, again, found that recall decisions made by individual practitioners were sensible and proportionate, and were keeping the public safe. When we get into the individual practice and performance on those cases, we are finding that the recall decisions that are made are the correct ones. We are looking to the future to make sure that we put, as Jo says, all of those components into place that give people the best chance possible, when they are released from prison, to comply with the terms of their licence condition and to make those changes in their lives through accommodation, through employment, through proper support, and through our commissioned rehabilitative services and the probation practitioner who is engaged in the case.

I can say that we do not have evidence that the decisions in recall cases are the wrong ones made by individual probation practitioners, as evidenced by our own internal scrutiny and endorsed by HMIP external scrutiny.

They are proportionate and correct decisions on recall.

It is just worth noting that, at paragraph 1.7 on page 22, “The number of prisoners recalled to prison is at an all-time high”—

—at 13,583, or 15% of the total prison population. This is a 49% increase since June 2021. The reoffending rate for these cohorts has gone up by five percentage points, from 31% to 36%. “The number of offenders charged with a Serious Further Offence (SFO) while under probation supervision has increased” by 55% between 2020-21 and 2022-23. All the metrics are going in the wrong direction, are they not? I just find it hard to believe that, with all of those metrics going in the wrong direction, there is not a greater risk to public safety than there was a few years ago.

There are a number of reasons that have contributed to more recalls. As the Permanent Secretary mentioned, we have a more complex caseload in probation. We have a much higher-risk caseload, and this is referenced in the report.

With respect, that was not the question that Rachel was asking you. She was asking you about the number of recalls to prison and whether this was related to the number of people recommitting crimes. It is not to do with the complexity. It is to do with the number of people being recalled.

What we now have is a cohort of offenders who are engaged in riskier offending behaviour and riskier behaviours. We have higher substance misuse. We have higher mental health problems. We have higher complexity on the caseloads. The risk of them breaching their licence conditions or becoming unsafe in the community is higher and is likely to be a contributor towards increased recall rates.

The top two reasons for recall, by quite an amount, are non-compliance with licence conditions and failure to keep in touch. They are the top two reasons that people are recalled to prison. Quite rightly, people should be recalled for not complying with their licence, but it is not for further offences. That is lower down the list. The top two reasons are non-compliance and failure to keep in touch. Probation officers will look at the licence and intervene earlier if they start to see risky behaviour. That is what this tells us.

The final bullet point of those three says, “The number of offenders charged with a Serious Further Offence (SFO) while under probation supervision has increased” by 55%. That, surely, has to be a really serious metric, does it not?

Yes. It is something that we are very concerned with. That is why we have been introducing programmes such as Reset and Impact, which allow probation officers to focus on the high-risk offenders. More recently, we have seen appointments with our high-risk offenders increasing. Risk assessment to make sure that we are picking up our high-risk offenders and seeing them more regularly, and, therefore, that there is a lower risk of reoffending, is really important to us. That is why we introduced those programmes in 2024 and 2025.

Thank you for that. We have a lot to cover, so we may well come back to that.

We have already established that performance within the Probation Service is far away from where it ought to be. Permanent Secretary, could you very briefly outline just why it is that the MOJ so badly underestimated the number of staff required for sentence management prior to last year?

I am going to ask Jim to come in and expand on that, if that is okay.

Yes, of course. At the time that we unified the Probation Service in 2021, we made a commitment that we would refresh all of the probation workforce timings data that had not previously been looked at since 2008 or 2009. That data was quite aged. It is a complicated piece of work because we need to ensure that we are surveying a representative group of staff. Probation itself is a complicated organisation with many services that we deliver. As such, that is not a piece of work that we could complete overnight. We initiated that work in 2022, as soon as we could post unification, and we started to get the results through in 2023.

Regardless of the decision to unify the services, why was it allowed to get so bad? Given that particularly jarring conclusion in the NAO Report that the Probation Service has been operating with around half of the staff required to run sentence management, how did it get to the point that it was that poor before the MOJ decided to intervene in quite a radical way?

First of all, when we initiated that piece of work in 2022, it was not from a place of knowledge that the on-paper articulation of the resource that we needed was so out of kilter with the reality. We initiated that work because we felt uncomfortable with the fact that that data had not been refreshed in over a decade. It was a surprise to us that, when that work came through for sentence management—it is not true in the same way for other functions—the assessment of the time it took staff to complete every letter of every policy requirement in every case was so much higher than we had previously forecast.

Just to confirm, it was a surprise to the MOJ when we found out that there were half the staff required to run sentence management.

That is not quite what I am saying. I am saying that it was a surprise to us that our detailed piece of data analysis with our staff group demonstrated that the data that we had previously been working on from 2008 was inaccurate.

That sounds like the same as what I was saying, though, which is that it was a surprise.

I do not think that it is quite the same, because, if we, as an organisation, had been sat in a position with knowledge that our staff were under-resourced to that scale, then I deeply believe we would have taken further action earlier.

So the data and the information at the fingertips of the MOJ was so wildly inaccurate that it meant that there was a surprise factor when you, as a Department, found out that you were operating with around half the staff needed to run sentence management.

It was not up to date when we received that information, and we have taken action.

That is quite shocking.

It is not that we did not take action prior to that. Probation Reset, which we may talk about, came in in April 2024.

I am sure that you can understand the concern of the Committee, though. If a secondary school was operating with around half the staff required to operate, there would be so many stakeholders who would know about that. The parents, the school governors, the senior leadership at the school, the local authority and probably DfE would all probably know at quite an early stage if a secondary school had half the number of teachers it required to run day to day. How did it get so bad? How can you have sat on inaccurate information for years, as you have said, before you felt that there was a need to intervene so you could start to address this huge challenge of having only half the staff needed?

I reject the premise that we were not intervening in the period between unification and 2024 when the data arrived.

What about before then?

If we want to go back over the history of the Probation Service, there are some quite dynamic reasons why the primary focus of the organisation in the period 2015 to 2021 was on things additional to workload. We took the Probation Service through the transforming rehabilitation reforms under the policy of the Government at the time in 2014 to 2016. That consumed, from my perspective, practically every ounce of management effort that the organisation could put into the Probation Service. That model did not work. That led to the decision of Ministers to, essentially, reverse those reforms and reunify the service. Again, that was a hugely complex programme to transfer 7,000 staff from more than 50 legacy employers and to deal with, from memory, something like 25,000 IT devices that we needed to roll out and various IT systems that we needed to change. That was the priority during that period from 2019 to 2021. It is not that the organisation has been sat back, agnostic or not paying attention to the challenges of the Probation Service. Our priority previously had been on, first of all, delivering a previous Government’s ambition around transforming rehabilitation, and then, when it became evident that those contracts were flawed, renationalising the service.

Would you accept that, in that move away from unification and then back towards unification, the MOJ took its eye off the ball and allowed inaccurate and out-of-date information to inform its thinking and, therefore, allow us to get to a situation where you have half the staff required to run sentence management?

I would not agree with the statement “eye off the ball”, because our eyes have been on the probation ball all the way through this process. I would agree with the statement, “Would we have benefited from having this up-to-date information earlier?” Yes, but we initiated this work as soon as we could post-unification and have taken action as soon as that information was available to us.

Permanent Secretary, having heard those remarks from Jim Barton but just taking a step back, would it be safe to assume that, if you have a severely understaffed Probation Service, coupled with a severely understaffed prisons estate, we are in a really quite dangerous and worrying situation when it comes to the future of criminal justice in this country and the ability for either the prisons estate or the Probation Service to do their job effectively?

We know that the prison estate has been under a huge amount of pressure. We know that it has been operating at a very full level, and that is why we are taking steps through the Sentencing Bill to make changes to that. Through that Bill, we are also making changes to probation. I take your point that, when we reunified the service, we inherited a workforce shortage. It took us longer than we would have wanted to identify the full extent of that, but the data and digital tools that we have available to us now mean that we can act on much more accurate information. Introducing Our Future Probation Service now is designed to tackle the root causes of these problems so that we can make sure that we have a robust probation and prison service moving forward. Adam, did you want to just come in on that other point?

I was just going to make a point that, of course, you needed the unification to happen before you could look at probation services in the round, so there is a timing point about activity data and when that is available to us from the privatised companies.

That aside, do you share the concern I have that, if we have a severely understaffed Probation Service, which is what this report states, and a severely understaffed prison estate, we are in quite a worrying and dangerous pattern, where both are under great pressure and each is perhaps unable to rely on the other to support it? Does that therefore spell disaster for the wider criminal justice system?

That is why we are undertaking the programme that we are undertaking now.

So you agree. That is why you are undertaking it.

I agree that there have been severe problems in both prisons and probation, particularly in workforce for probation, and that is why we are now looking at the system as a whole. We are taking some very brave decisions. We have legislation going through Parliament. Some of the changes that we are making in prison and probation are ones that we have not seen for a generation. We are looking to tackle the root causes so that we have the right number of staff, the right processes, the right policy and the right digital tools at our fingertips, and we can manage this very complex system. As Kim said, we are seeing more complex individuals in the system, with a range of issues. In order to deal with that, we need to make the radical changes that we now have under way.

Looking more to the future, how confident are you that the MOJ now understands the true extent of the staffing shortfalls in probation? Do you foresee that estimate changing again? It has been revised, so do you see there being further revision in the future, or do you now have a grip on what the true extent of the staffing shortfall is?

Yes, we do have a grip. As you said earlier, we need to make sure that we keep on top of the data and keep looking at the situation, but we believe that we know the extent of the problem. We are now shaping the Our Future Probation Service programme, along with a number of other reform programmes, to make sure that we can address workforce shortages and, where we have workforce shortages, bring in other tools, such as digital tools, to fill the gap. I will bring James in.

To add to that, we have had some of our non-executive directors and people from outside the service look at the modelling work that we did, which led to the estimates that are in the Report, so it has had some external assurance. I hope that these numbers change, because, if they do, that will show that we are paying attention over time. As Jim has explained, these numbers sat in aspic for too long. We are going to be doing lots of work with our probation teams over the next few years, introducing new digital tools, new ways of working and new learning and development opportunities, which means that some of the activity times should change. That is important. I know that you have picked out of the Report the fact that we have half of the staff necessary for sentence management. That was a point in time. As figure 13 of the Report sets out, we already have plans to reduce that from a gap of around 5,400, which was estimated in 2024, to a little under 2,000. We are doing further work ourselves in the service and with Ministers to bridge that gap. To your point about whether the future is one of doom, gloom and crisis, no, it is one where we are demonstrating that we are getting a grip of the probation system and the prison system. That is what is necessary in order to build a sustainable criminal justice system.

My concern, though, is that the estimates in the example that I gave are so inaccurate, and the staffing shortfall so significant within the Probation Service. Do you not share my concern that, if you have a retention crisis in the Probation Service, you are part of causing that crisis because you do not know how many staff and how much capacity are required to do some of the basic functions of the Probation Service? Does the MOJ risk being part of the problem and not part of the solution?

That is where we are now. I share your concern that the old, out-of-date methodologies were so—

If you put yourself in the position of a probation officer, you would think, “Why am I going to stick around in this job for a long time if those at the top do not even know how many staff are required to get the job done effectively?”

What we have been doing—and we made this point earlier—is recruiting. Our foot has been on the floor for recruitment for a number of years now. I have been talking to probation staff in London and in the midlands. It takes some time from starting on your qualification as a trainee probation officer to being a fully qualified probation officer. The flow of new probation officers is starting to make a difference, coupled with Reset and Impact. People feel like workloads are starting to become more manageable. In areas such as London, they are still far from manageable, and we are working really hard with those areas. We are rolling out digital tools that are going to significantly reduce the administrative work that probation officers have to do, which gets in the way of the high-quality relationships that they want to have. We will talk about this some more, but the one that is up in lights for us at the moment is a system called Justice Transcribe. That is being already rolled out in three probation regions. It is being rolled out in London as we speak. That is making a material difference to probation officers and easing their workload. We have to demonstrate to our staff that we are not going to take our foot off the gas, and that this is one tool among many. We have a big, committed digital team looking at this, and there are more tools such as that coming. That is the conversation that we are having with staff. I want to say a huge thank you to staff who, through their discretionary effort, are making a significant difference for us at the moment, but we are listening to their concerns and we are acting.

I appreciate that there have been some innovations that are, hopefully, going to bring down those caseloads, but we are starting at a consistently high point. Do you not share the concern that, because of that, we are still just working through a retention crisis and are going to see more and more people in the Probation Service just leave?

On our leaving rates, we published some stats last week. The overall leaving rate for probation as a whole is 8.5%. That is down one percentage point from the end of the last financial year. For probation officers, it is down 1.2 percentage points, at 6%. For our senior probation officers, it is down 0.7 percentage points. Those metrics are going in the right direction. I absolutely share your concern. It would be completely futile for us to hugely recruit just to see people leaving. In truth, we are tackling both. Kim and Jim can talk to this, but we are making a lot of effort, not just on recruitment, but also on retention, and those efforts are having an impact. We are not complacent about that. That is hard yards for managers and teams across the country, but it is going in the right direction. You are right to share your concern, but the data is demonstrating that we are in a better place than we were, looking back even to March.

As I said, we have recruited 22% more staff between 2021 and 2025. We also actively do things such as reviewing the workloads of each probation officer to make sure that they are a fair and manageable spread. We constantly look at risk, workload and staffing challenges to support, as James said, our really hard-working frontline staff. To your earlier point, I am convinced that, having reunified the service, we now understand the full picture. We understand where we need to put our efforts and what we need to do to make a difference. I am sure that you will want to get on to Our Future Probation Service, but that is one of the answers to making sure that we have a Probation Service that is fit for the future.

My other serious concern is that we have major capacity challenges facing the entire prisons estate. That is drawing probation officers away from their day-to-day work into supporting a struggling prisons estate. Where does that take us? You have a Probation Service that cannot do its job properly because it is having to, essentially, prop up a prisons estate that also is not able to do its job properly. You get into quite a vicious cycle where each service, essentially, spends as much time keeping the other service running as it spends focusing on its day-to-day work. How do you get to a point where the two can stand up quite independently and consistently, and complete their essential work within the criminal justice system?

That is why the Government have taken decisions to re-look at the way that both prisons and probation work. We have a Sentencing Bill going through Parliament at the moment that will help us address some of the challenges in prisons. It also has measures in for probation. We are investing £700 million in reshaping our probation services to make sure that they are fit for dealing with future issues. We also have had a review by Sir Brian Leveson, which Ministers are considering, to look at how we reduce court backlogs. We are looking at the whole criminal justice system together. We recognise that there are some long-standing, deep-rooted issues that we need to tackle. That is why we are making some of the decisions that we are at the moment through sentencing, through courts, through investment and through digital, so that we have a system that works together, where one part of the system is not overburdened by others, but the whole system is working together to support people on probation and in prison, and, most importantly, victims and the public.

Just to conclude, that is such a serious and repeated issue. When I speak with prison officers and probation officers in my constituency, a regular concern that they raise from the bottom up is, “We spend so much of our time having to compensate and, essentially, manage another part of the criminal justice system that we are unable to get on with our own caseload and our own day-to-day work”. There is this constant propping up of one another and they are unable to operate effectively. I cannot help but feel that, if you do not deal with that problem, you are never going to deal with the recruitment and retention challenges that plague both probation and the prisons estate.

You are absolutely right, and that is why we are taking this holistic approach, so that we can make sure that we are managing the criminal justice system in a more holistic way. That is why we are taking some of the decisions that we are taking at the moment to do things differently than we have done in the past. As I say, Ministers have taken decisions that will change the way that these services work in a more fundamental way than we have seen in many years.

Just to build on one of Lloyd’s earlier questions relating to workloads, James, you said that the situation in London was particularly unacceptable, with excessive workloads. I can take you to paragraph 2.7 on page 35, where HMPPS’s workload measurement tool shows that average POs were working at 118% of capacity, where 100% is the maximum capacity. Shockingly, it was even worse in London, where it was 126%. These are figures for up to April 2024. In relation to those poor people who are having to work those workloads, when do we expect to see those figures go back to more normal working arrangements?

As Jo said, our target for recruitment this year is 1,300 additional probation officers.

This is what we keep hearing this morning. On the one hand, we talk about more people being recruited. On the other hand, we talk about more complex cases. I simply want to know when the workloads of the people involved are going to become sustainable.

There are three massive factors in that. First, recruitment is on track. We have set ourselves a target of 1,300 additional probation officers this year, and we expect to meet that. Secondly, there are wider tools, such as the Justice Transcribe service that I just described, which are going to allow those probation officers we have to be more productive. Thirdly, the reforms that are coming through the Sentencing Bill are going to help us rebalance workloads across the system. All those things need to come together. Over the remainder of this year and across the course of next year, we will be implementing the Sentencing Bill changes, getting more people online and bringing digital improvements online. We will, at the back end of next year, start to operationalise Assess Risks, Needs and Strengths, which is our new risk management tool for probation officers. All these things together, plus work that we are doing to help improve retention and reduce sickness absences, should get us into a virtuous cycle where we start to see performance improve and people come back to work from where they have had absence—a high proportion of colleagues are off with mental health absences because of the impacts of these workloads and other contextual factors—rather than the difficult places we have been in. To Members’ comments earlier, we have been in a negative cycle, with impacts of people leaving the service and all the rest of it.

That was a long answer. It is all on the record. We will have you back someday to see whether it worked and took place. Could you, or whichever one of you wants to, tell me when you will evaluate the impact of prioritisation schemes such as Reset and Impact on rehabilitation outcomes?

Impact is from April 2025, so it is still early to look at it, and we need to consider whether the changes to the progression model in the Sentencing Bill, and other probation measures, mean that an evaluation of that is feasible and will enable us to tell anything. On Reset, there is an evaluation under way. As I am sure you are aware, it is hard to attribute changes in the reoffending measure to particular schemes, because all the different schemes coalesced together, but we are doing an evaluation that will look at how it has been implemented, what the difference perceived by staff has been, the impact on criminal justice services, and some quantitative data on contact time and recall rates. I would imagine that that will be through and ready for publication at some point next year. It is very hard to be precise. The research is under way. We will take any lessons that come out from that into the implementation of the current reforms.

I have concerns about this, because those who have a lower likelihood of reoffending and serious recidivism benefit from less support. However, we know that they have a 49% chance of reoffending and that some are assessed as posing medium risk of serious harm, so you are reducing support for some people who are going to cause serious harm. This morning, we have examined a lot of what has happened in the past, but our predecessors did have a few things to tell us. In evidence to this Committee, the Prison Reform Trust says, “This reality was acknowledged in the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014, which introduced mandatory supervision for people leaving prison after short sentences”. Why did Parliament introduce that Act if you are now going to reduce the support to those very same people?

We are changing support. It is true that we always assess risk. Protecting the public is our number one priority. Reset and Impact were designed to make sure that we were absolutely seeing our highest-risk offenders, and we have seen an increase in appointments for higher-risk people as a result of that, so that is a positive thing. As Adam says, we need to re-evaluate the whole programme. If you look at Impact, it gives people with shorter sentences or lower risk some supervision right at the start of their probation period.

I get that you are frontloading it at the start, but reducing it at the end.

That is good, because then we can introduce them to the right community services. What we are seeing is more spaced-out appointments. We need to see how much of a difference having that more intense intervention at the beginning makes, where you are introduced to the right service. It is not true to say that, with Impact, we are not supervising lower-risk offenders. We are doing things in a different way.

As you will know, there are also exclusion criteria within those schemes. Anyone with a very high risk of serious harm or subject to the high levels of multi-agency public protection arrangements is excluded from Reset. Impact is for only those assessed as lower risk of reoffending and harm. I would draw the link back to the conversation that we just had. If you are trying to focus your probation capacity, where should you focus it? We have taken the decision to go for individuals who pose the highest risk of harm publicly and to focus probation’s work on things that are assessed to make a real difference—there are measures in the Bill around, for example, post-sentence supervision—rather than things that HMI probation, for example, has said make no appreciable difference.

I am just wondering whether we have got our priorities right here. Consider the figure that I gave in my opening remarks: the economic and social cost of reoffending across adult offenders has risen to £20.9 billion a year in 2024-25. We are not going to need to see an awful lot of increase in recidivism before we would have more than paid for a few more extra probation staff.

When we look at what reduces reoffending, it is not just supervision by probation staff. As I said earlier, it is access to a home. It is treatment for addiction. It is employment. That is where we are really trying to focus a lot of our effort. We have a cross-government board overseeing our progress on reducing reoffending. We have introduced a number of measures recently. The pre-release plans in the Sentencing Bill for prisoners are, again, focusing on making sure that people get the right support, so that they are not coming into the community without a support package. That, therefore, reduces the burden on probation, because it means that people already know their plan, and that will help us reduce reoffending. You are right that reoffending is a huge cost to the public. That is why we are so focused on it, why we are introducing those plans, and why we are prioritising higher-risk offenders for supervision.

I was not going to ask another question, but you have prodded me into asking another one.

I am sorry.

A person being released from prison knowing their plan is one thing. That is a totally different thing from making sure that they stick to the plan.

Yes, exactly.

In the old days, there would have been somebody out there who would have gone to these people’s homes and made sure that they were reporting to the police, or whatever the conditions of their bail were.

That is why we introduced things such as electronic monitoring, which I know you want to get on to later. We have doubled that in recent years. We also make sure that we have the right type of supervision for people and work with community services to make sure that people have the right level of support. It is that comprehensive picture for people that will reduce reoffending, and that is where we are focusing our effort.

We will leave it for now.

Could I bring Jim and Kim in on this one?

I am the SRO for the Our Future Probation Service programme. The report rightly highlights the fact that we have defined our risk appetite within OFPS as open. That is a term drawn from the Government’s orange book. We absolutely believe that that is the right risk appetite to set at this point in the programme, because the scale of the challenge that we face here means that we need to be open to more radical solutions as to how we address the workload challenge that the Committee has been exploring with us. Perhaps to put it into context, if we were to have taken the step below that on that Orange Book scale, that would be defined as cautious, and would mean that we would be limiting our scope to measures that had only limited potential for benefit. That is not the space that we are in within the Probation Service.

We need to be thinking more boldly. I would perhaps make a distinction, though, because we are very clear on this within the service, and the Permanent Secretary is rightly clear on this. Being open to thinking about different ways of doing things is very different from saying that we would then casually just make those things happen out in the real world without teasing through our understanding of the impact of those measures on probation staff. Just to loop back to Justice Transcribe as an example of that, the development of that tool has been at pace but incremental, with digital colleagues sat physically in probation offices, building that tool alongside probation officers who would use it, taking on board their feedback and ensuring that we iterated on the functionality of that tool such that it not only works but genuinely sings in their hands. It is only after that early testing that we have made the decision that we are sufficiently comfortable with moving to national roll-out of that model. That is the kind of approach that we plan to take on a lot of the measures within OFPS. We are thinking openly about options to address the challenge. That is right, because of the scale of the capacity pressures we have. That is very different from saying that we would be casual around deploying measures into the service without being really across the risk profile that those measures might introduce.

“Open” is the definition in the Orange Book. When we follow Government guidelines and standards, we have to choose one of the definitions that they give. Open risk is defined as willing to consider all options.

No, it is willing to consider all options. It is open. We are working at pace, particularly on our digital solutions, and working in a dynamic and different way than we have worked before with our probation officers. That allows us to consider all the options. In terms of making sure that they are properly governed, which would be really important to me as Permanent Secretary, we follow government standards. We have an executive director who owns and is required to monitor each risk and to escalate if they have concerns. We have really good programme governance. We have a national operations stability panel, which Kim chairs, that looks at the stability of the service to make sure that we are not taking inappropriate risks. We put all those controls around Our Future Probation Service, but the open risk appetite is the definition in the Orange Book, which we use to manage risk, and it allows us to dynamically assess these new tools and to make sure that we are introducing the right ones. I know that everyone has given a plug for Justice Transcribe, but I met probation officers in Chatham a few months ago and their biggest concern was that I was going to take away this digital tool that was transforming their life. They were talking anecdotally about it saving them up to a day a week in not having to physically write up all their interviews, and in being able to keep proper eye contact and engagement with offenders, because there was a tool helping them do the administration of their job. Without this appetite that allows us to look at things dynamically, we would be in a different place.

Yes, absolutely. Protecting the public is our absolute top concern. That is why we think carefully about risk assessment. That is why we have introduced programmes such as Impact and Reset. We want to make sure that people are having the right supervision and that we are protecting the public. Kim might want to say a bit more on managing probation officers in your area, for example.

As Jo says, public protection, particularly of vulnerable people in local communities, is at the top of our list. In relation to performance, we do see improvements at the moment in relation to our risk assessment and risk management. Over the course of the last year, we have seen six of our 12 probation regions improve their performance on risk assessment and planning, and 10 improve their performance on risk management, so we are on an improving trajectory in relation to public protection. In terms of the things that have helped to move that along and will continue to drive that trajectory forward, we have a new public protection strategy that we have been implementing for the last almost 12 months. This is accompanied by a public protection taskforce, which is cross-grade and cross-function. It also includes some frontline practitioners to help us understand what makes a difference in terms of the practice that they do. That has a particular focus on assessment and planning, and we are starting to see some of that bear some fruit now. We are also working on the capability of our staff group. We have directed our training at public protection, at safeguarding and at risk management procedures, so we are homing in on those areas of our practice that we know are really important to local communities. We will also look at refining our performance metrics so that we do not reduce our ambition, but concentrate our strategic focus on a core number of those public protection measures that matter most. We are really getting ourselves focused and in line, and really driving forward. We are seeing some improvements. There is more to do and further to go, but we are on that trajectory that is seeing some fruit now.

I do not think that we can ever eliminate risk in the Probation Service. It would be really clear that we are open and transparent about that. What I can say is that we are working very hard to mitigate the public protection risks and to improve our probation performance, and that we are seeing some movement in the right direction on that. We will continue to give our full commitment to driving that forward further. We will utilise Our Future Probation Service, which will help us provide our practitioners with the space and the tools to do that job better.

I am going to take a break in a second. I just have a question for you, Kim, please. The thing that worries the public more than anything else is when a serious offender is, apparently, let out on probation early without proper explanation of why your service has recommended that they could be let out early. In these cases, which cause great public angst—not often, but in small number—is there more that you could do to explain why these serious offenders have been allowed to leave prison early?

With the Sentencing Bill and with the Victims and Courts Bill, victims will have more transparency over releases. There will be a probation helpline that will be operating. That will be available for all victims of crime, should they choose to use it, to ask questions about the sentence and release of people who have been sentenced to prison. This is over and above the service that we already provide to those qualifying victims who qualify for the Victim Contact Scheme. That has certain eligibility criteria to it. It restricts information to those people who have been sentenced to over 12 months for violence or sexual-related crime. The helpline will now be available to all victims of crime to be able to request greater information. This will bring real transparency to the system.

Victims are one thing; reassurance of the public is another. Is there more that you can do to communicate why some of these very dangerous criminals have been released from prison and the steps you have taken in individual cases? I know there is privacy and everything else involved in this, but this is one of the things that cause the public the most angst of all.

There is more publicity that we can do as the Probation Service to reassure generally how the system works. That is definitely what would be wanted in terms of a criminal justice system that is more transparent for people, so that they can understand how decisions are made in particular circumstances. It is very difficult for us to be able to brief generally on individuals. We will do that, if we need to, but we need to balance a number of competing data requirements around that. We are concerned to ensure that the victims, the people who have the most investment in particular cases, will have the best information.

The Sentencing Bill will simplify sentences, so it will be clearer to the public at what point people are being released. Without talking about individuals, it is hard to know what exactly you are referring to, Sir Geoffrey. In order to reassure the public, we absolutely put all our effort into making sure that high-risk offenders are supervised when they are released from prison and in the community, and putting the right support around them in order to keep the public safe. Protecting the public is our number one priority. That is why we are here as a service.

For the most serious offenders in prison, the Parole Board is the organisation that would make the decision on whether to release.

Of course, yes, but you send recommendations to the Parole Board.

Of course, probation sends something in and those experts decide based on that.

I accept that you can only make a recommendation and sometimes it is overruled. I am going to take a break now. Sitting suspended. On resuming—

To start us off with our post-break questioning is Tris Osborne, please.

Thank you, Geoffrey. My questions will focus on the OFPS programme and, first of all, on staff. We have already spoken, at this Committee, about some of the challenges around headcount. Ten out of 12 regions already exceed 100% workload for staff. Depending on the figures for recruitment, 21% of staff are below target level. We have a 10% increase in staff who have limited experience of working in this space. We have a capacity gap of around 3,100 to 3,900, depending on what part of the Report that you have cited. I know you have said that public protection is extremely important and is a top concern. Conclusion 19 says that the pace of change required and the nature of the changes that you plan to make pose a risk to the Probation Service’s aim of public protection. Is the programme itself a risk to public protection?

The programme itself is set up to tackle the root causes and so improve the protection of the public. It is looking at a range of different issues. You have mentioned staffing. I really enjoyed visiting your constituency in Chatham. The Probation Service staff in that area are a great team. Our Future Probation Service includes a mix of measures. Staffing is one. We have huge recruitment under way. We also have policy changes through the Sentencing Bill, for example. We are looking at process changes, such as the new case management tools to reduce the burden on our hard-working probation staff, and digital tools. All this together, working across all areas of the MOJ—so policy, operations, HR, finance and digital—is designed to tackle the root causes and protect the public. Jim is the SRO, so he probably wants to say a little bit more.

We are really conscious of that risk that the Probation Service has been through a decade now of successive structural changes. In a context where staff are stretched in terms of workload, you have to be even more careful than usual around the approach that you take to rolling out changes. Our thinking around Our Future Probation Service is very much not that it is a big-bang type programme, where on a given day next year we will unleash a series of changes on all staff everywhere and expect them to accommodate that change. Instead, we see this as a series of incremental changes that will take place over the course of about the next 18 months. We have in draft form, not yet agreed, a timeline for how we best sequence those measures. To the questions from before, that timeline is really cognisant of the need to balance prison capacity measures with probation capacity measures. We have a plan that brings all of that together. Something that we have introduced over the course of the last year in HMPPS is what we term a gateway management system. One of the concerns that our staff group have had previously is that we were not able to articulate all the change that was happening. There was change coming from the centre, whether that was ministerially driven, change that we as an organisation decided that we needed to make, or change coming from the regions. The gateway management system essentially forces all change requests through that process and gives us an ability to say, “No, we are not going to do those things because we need staff to focus on other aspects”. We deployed that when we were introducing the move to SDS40, so the move forward of the automatic release point this time last year. We froze all other change activity for a month to allow staff to focus on that change. It is that kind of measure that we will use through OFPS to mitigate the risk that you describe.

From a capacity perspective, we currently have staff running at 118% with peaks of 126% in four regions. You have just said, “We are going to be delivering this over 18 months”. With respect, over a period of six months we have not seen recruitment at sufficient levels, although we have seen improvements. Can I ask the question again? With such a tight timeframe of 18 months and with all the change that is proposed—I will come on to that as my next question—conclusion 19 raises the point that the pace of change might pose a risk to the Probation Service’s aim of public protection. You would contend that that point is not correct.

That is not quite what I am saying. Without getting all technocratic around programme management disciplines, the definition of a risk is something that could happen and that, from a programme perspective, we want to avoid happening through various mitigations that we would deploy. There is a hypothetical risk that, if we manage change badly, it could impact upon the performance of the Probation Service. My job, our collective job, is not to let that happen.

I will put the question back to you. With the volume of change that you are expecting over 18 months, the deflection of service personnel on to change initiatives—I think that is what is being suggested in the Report—might mean that their time is being utilised on change when they are at capacity with flow, if that makes sense. I am asking the same question again. With relation to the flow of cases, if staff are diverted on to huge volumes of change over 18 months, you are saying that you have sufficient capacity not to have a risk situation evolve. You have already managed that and you have looked at that.

We are absolutely managing that. We absolutely have looked at that. Equally, as the Report says on every single page, we have a capacity issue in probation. We recognise that. We are trying to strike the right balance between the steps we are taking to mitigate that presenting capacity challenge without adding to it in the short term because staff are struggling to balance change with the caseload. That is the conversation that Kim and I have probably every single day of our working lives around how we strike that balance, with Kim rightly focused on the realities of the Probation Service today and my focus being slightly more on how we deliver those reforms through OFPS.

At 2.11 in the Report, it says that “staff we spoke to felt that a high number of system changes, coupled with staff shortages, has made it difficult to create the space to make meaningful improvements”. It continues, “In 2023-24, HMPPS estimated there were around 100 new national proposals to change probation processes—84% of which were business-as-usual changes, such as those required to meet ministerial commitments, and not linked to major change programmes. It estimated that it would take probation practitioners a week to read the associated guides”. They are saying that even in the current situation—that is before we go through the 18 months of forward reforms—they are under strain. You are saying that with the next 18 months’ worth of programme and additional changes they are not going to be. Is that correct?

I am not saying they are not going to be under strain. The Report makes clear that our staff are under huge strain. Paragraph 2.12, the next in the Report, goes on to talk about what we are doing to manage that flow of change. It references the gateway management system that I talked to earlier. We now have controls in place that mean we have total visibility of the change load for staff and can make active decisions about which of those things we choose to stop or delay because they are not the priority right now.

That is about staggering the programme, not introducing everything together, and bringing in some of the digital changes early, which reduces some of the burden on staff so they can cope with other change. That is all really important. I have been really impressed with the governance of this programme and the way that Jim, Kim and James are managing it to make sure that we can roll out the change without overburdening probation staff.

We are actively collaborating with our frontline practitioners, our operational staff, in order to create the whole change programme with them. We are looking at the sequencing with them. We are trying to take account of what they are telling us about what makes sense in terms of what goes where and what will mitigate some of that activity. We are consulting the frontline practitioners, the operational business.

Just on those two points, figure 14 gives what looks like a programme design and delivery plan for OFPS. It was mentioned earlier that this was a draft. If we look at the first two lines of that, we have process optimisation options and policy changes. Is that draft correct? Are we still on course for the scope? Have we done the scope refinement from May to July 2025? Have we looked at the solution design phase? Is it still correct that it was completed in August 2025? Are we now on to testing or has that timetable slipped in any way?

There has been a little bit of movement because we have had some uncertainty to manage as an agency and a Department. Some but not all of these measures are dependent upon allocation decisions coming through the financial process. That process has not yet concluded. We do not have the certainty that we perhaps hoped we would have by this point in the year when this plan was pulled together over summer. We still do plan for the first set of OFPS measures to be fully rolled out by the end of this financial year, including Justice Transcribe.

Permanent Secretary, given the uncertainty over this timing of implementation, could we have a note when it does become more certain? It is so critical to your future replanning.

Yes, absolutely. It is hard for us to answer everything at the moment because we are going through the allocation process.

Yes, that is understood.

When that is finished, I am happy to let you have a note. We are working really hard to keep things moving. We are implementing some measures already that are not reliant on allocations. We are very conscious of the timescale, as is the Deputy Prime Minister. We are working through that process very quickly.

Given the importance that you attach to this new programme, we are very keen to see when it is going to be fully implemented. I am sorry to have interrupted, Tris.

You are absolutely correct. If things have changed and timetables have slipped, that possibly has an interaction with us as a Committee in terms of our audit. Lastly, I appreciate you visited the Chatham probation service. That is a neighbouring seat to mine. It is nominally in the name of my seat, but my colleague Lauren Edwards MP was on site when you visited.

Yes.

It was a very positive visit, as I understand it. Thank you for coming down and listening to the staff. I appreciate that they have indicated that Justice Transcribe is one of the services that they like. Looking at other digital improvements, in the Report there are concerns raised in paragraph 3.16 around digital change. This comes back to my previous highlighting on figure 14. Have we found that digital change in and of itself has proven more difficult? Is that why there has perhaps been some slippage in timetables?

Not specifically within OFPS, no. If your question was across a longer time horizon and applying across MOJ, we would all recognise that that has happened on some previous digital change programmes within the Ministry. From where I am sat, the crucial thing to focus on is to see those projects not as digital projects but as business change initiatives. Apologies if that sounds a little jargon-heavy, but by that I mean that success is not coders building something that is beautiful and meets the original scope description. Success is that staff ultimately have a tool in their hands that they are comfortable with, that they understand, and that they see the value in, and therefore they rush towards it rather than resisting the introduction of the change. That is definitely the approach that we are taking on Justice Transcribe, on ARNS—Assess Risks, Needs and Strengths—which is the replacement for OASys, our primary risk assessment tool, and on a system called Manage People on Probation, which will become the primary interface that our staff have with all the data that currently sits in nDelius, our case management system. They are big IT projects, but what is really important is that we think of them as business change activities rather than simply delivering a digital tool that the service then struggles to come to terms with or does not embrace because the frustration factor around the interface is too great.

Building these digital tools with probation officers is making a real difference. You are right about Justice Transcribe, but some of the e-supervision changes that we are introducing to make sure that we can do online check-in will be really helpful to probation officers. We have 30-plus initiatives under way. A number of the AI ones in particular are being designed with frontline staff to make sure that they do exactly what they need them to do, and they are tailored as we work through the programme so that, by the time we come to roll‑out, everybody will really appreciate them.

I have two further points. First of all, you mentioned staff, and staff communications. Indeed, that is important. There has been positive feedback on some elements of Justice Transcribe. I have heard that myself. Overall, we have quite a high turnover. There is a lot of pressure and high workloads. What has the staff feedback been via union representatives on this piece of work and this change programme?

Perhaps I will start, if that is okay. Jo and Kim may want to come in. First of all, there has been a huge welcome for the headline of Our Future Probation Service, which is an organisational commitment to reduce a workload pressure that is about 25% at the moment—as you say, we can pick different numbers depending upon exactly how you count it—and get that as close to zero by March 2027. That is the strapline of OFPS. That is what we are committed to do. There is also huge appreciation for the fact that this is not structural reform. The Probation Service has had a lot of moving the deckchairs, with people feeling like the focus is on having to reapply for their job, and feeling worry and angst about the nature of their future role. This is about focusing on the service that people joined to deliver and giving them the tools to do that as well as possible. On digital tools, as you have referenced, the feedback for those who have them in their hands is very positive. We would acknowledge, as probably any organisation would now, that there is a bit of chatter in the background around what artificial intelligence will mean for the Probation Service in the future. We have made some very clear commitments to our trade unions around what it will and will not mean for us. We are going to have to appreciate that and take staff through the process of not fearing AI but instead welcoming it. That is very important. On measures such as Reset—this predated OFPS, but it is perhaps an indication of the kind of thing that we may need to continue to do in the future—we get mixed views. There is undoubtedly an appreciation for taking a big and bold decision to draw some clearer lines and materially address workload rather than fiddle at the edges, but what staff really value is professional judgment. One of the perpetual debates within the Probation Service is, “What is the right balance between very clear nationally drawn policies and procedures, and giving individual probation staff more flexibility about where they choose to spend their time?” On Reset we chose to be prescriptive because we think it is important that the organisation holds the risk of that decision rather than it sitting with individual practitioners. We have had extensive engagement with the probation trade unions all the way through this. We continue to do that. We meet with them on a really regular basis. We have fortnightly meetings dedicated to this, but it is a conversation that comes up at least weekly.

Thank you for that answer. That was very comprehensive. Lastly, this programme relies on the three elements that you mentioned earlier, James. Recruitment is one of them, which I will not touch on, but the other two are process optimisation, which I have just discussed, and policy changes. I have referenced figure 14 previously. You have done modelling on this, presumably. It is quite clear that the Sentencing Bill will reduce out-of-court disposals. It will introduce—we will discuss this later—tagging and reducing suspension for those on community and suspended sentences. It seems like the Sentencing Bill is reducing your workloads because people are coming out of probation due to some of those measures. In terms of the modelling, what proportion of this is going to be process optimisation versus the reduction in demand as a result of the Sentencing Bill, if that makes sense?

First of all, on the net impact of the Sentencing Bill on probation, figure 13 on page 48 sets that out perhaps more clearly than we have managed previously. The net impact of the Sentencing Bill for probation is additive; it increases workload. An increase of about 1,250 FTE is offset by about a reduction of about 750. There will be a net 500 FTE increase for probation. That is all in our modelling. That is not a new pressure, but the Sentencing Bill itself does not fix this problem for probation. On the second part of your question, we started from the position—this is still broadly speaking where we are—that we saw the reduction we needed coming roughly one third from digital measures, one third from process optimisation, so lean-type approaches to stripping out process steps, and one third from policy measures. That includes revisiting the scope of Reset. Have we drawn that in the right way? Are there options to gain further workload reduction through a measure such as Reset? We are also looking at the Offender Management in Custody. There was a question previously around the balance between probation resource—this was not quite the question, sorry—in the community and in custody. Together with all our trade unions, we are reviewing whether the OMiC model as it stands today is right or whether there is an opportunity for some probation officer resource to come out of prison and go back into the community. It is roughly one third, one third and one third. We are still working through those decisions with Ministers. We hope in the not-too-distant future to have that plan locked and loaded. Subject to the timing of the introduction of the Sentencing Bill, we will be able to deliver on the request from the Chair to set out a comprehensive plan and timeline for 2026-27.

A lot hangs around Our Future Probation Service and the changes you are going to make. At least there is a recognition that things do need to change and to change in a positive way with the agreement of the staff, which we can all see is welcome. How can you be certain that the Our Future Probation Service programme will free up sufficient capacity to improve performance?

As I referenced earlier, our strapline objective for the programme is to reduce workload by 25% by April 2027. That is our estimate of the workload reduction needed to bring this service back into balance. If we have the staff that all of our data shows we need to deliver a high-quality service, we believe it stands to reason that performance can and should improve at that point in time.

“Improve” is one thing; “be sufficient” is another. That is the bit that you did not answer.

Sufficient resourcing creates the conditions for sufficient performance, alongside all the work that Kim and her team are doing to address staff capability, experience and confidence in the way that they deploy themselves.

A lot of analysis has gone into designing Our Future Probation Service so that it is sufficient. We will continue to evaluate it to make sure that it is doing the things that we set out to do. If needed, we will adjust. It is such a comprehensive programme, which looks at tackling root causes, that by the end of it we should see a very different level of support to our probation staff.

That is okay, but the report also says that at this stage you are not sure what the optimal caseloads are. Is that true?

It is because of the interaction of all these things. At a point in time when we have deployed Justice Transcribe and the e‑supervision tool that the Permanent Secretary referenced earlier, and made refinements to the processes that are currently gumming up staff time, it is arguable that probation staff could manage a higher caseload than we would say they could safely and effectively manage today. It is the interaction of all those things that makes it difficult right here, right now, to give a number. We do not yet have the full set of measures that we are going to deploy to address that 25% capacity gap. It is the interaction between how we are redefining the role and what an optimal workload is then.

That is why we need to keep evaluating the programme. We have £700 million to invest in probation and community services by the end of the Parliament. We need to make sure that we are introducing the right measures that will therefore be sufficient. As we introduce digital tools, we learn more about how much that frees up probation time to do more of the quality work that they want to do. We will keep evaluating as we move through this programme.

With all the measures in place, do you know what the optimal caseloads will be?

Yes, because the output of OFPS is essentially a rearticulation of our operating model for probation. We do not have that today because we are still in the process of finalising that set of measures.

We will have, as we roll out the programme.

You are still working out what the optimal measures are to determine what the optimal caseloads are. Therefore, you do not really know whether you have sufficient resources in your programme to deliver the capacity necessary to provide the service that you are trying to achieve.

We know what the optimal caseloads are at this point in time, given the way that probation operates. Therefore, we know how many staff we need to recruit to bring those—

I get that, but the aim is to get to a better service.

Therefore, as we introduce digital tools, we can assess the impact that these have on the probation officer workload and we can readjust as we move through the programme. At the moment, we know the optimum number of cases that probation officers should have. We think that will be different in the future as we introduce different ways of working.

You do not really know what level of staffing you are trying to aim for, then.

We absolutely do. That is what figure 13 in the Report points to. It puts a precise figure on the FTE gap that we know we need to close to get this service back into balance.

We take a different view of the conclusion of that report, which is that we need to get to a situation where staff have the space and the time to be able to take the number of training days that we already allow for in our workload modelling.

The NAO is referencing an internal review.

We agree with the broad conclusion of that review: we need our staff to be spending more time undertaking training than they are today. That is different, in our view, from saying that we do not make enough allowance in our modelling for staff to be able to undertake training. They just cannot do it at the moment because they are too busy.

From my perspective—colleagues may want to come in—we commission reviews to hold a mirror up to the organisation and to force us to ask hard questions of ourselves around whether we are doing the right things in the right way. We agree with 95% of the conclusions of that review. We just take a different stance around whether that requires us to increase further the on-paper assumption about how much time staff should be spending training. We totally agree that staff are not spending enough time training today because they do not have the capacity to do that.

Reviews have a certain amount of independence. We triangulate that and then work out how we are going to change the service moving forward. That review has proved really helpful and is shaping the way that we work. In terms of Our Future Probation Service, as we said earlier, we have identified the number of staff we need. We are now assessing. We know we still have a gap, and we are assessing how big that gap is and how we use digital tools and other mechanisms to fill that gap. That is the bit that we are still—

Yes, we agree with that. That is why we are undertaking this work.

When will we know, definitely, what your staff requirement is to deliver the service that we all want to see?

We have the staff numbers.

We do know.

We are trying to work out what other processes and tools we will put alongside the staff to make sure that we can optimise the way that people work.

I am still struggling with how you know what the staff numbers are when you are not quite sure what your optimal caseloads are.

We know where we are at the moment. What we are seeing is that the digital tools are giving us more of a positive picture than we had hoped. We want to evaluate that and make sure that we have the right numbers of staff and that the digital tools are indeed—

Wait a minute. You want to evaluate and ensure you have the right numbers of staff, but that does not imply that you know what the right numbers of staff are, does it?

No, because we are still developing our digital tools.

So you do not know what the right numbers of staff are.

The Report has written through it all the stats and the evidence, so that we absolutely understand the staffing requirement to deliver the Probation Service as it stands today. What we are trying to highlight is that we are redefining the nature of the ask of probation staff, and therefore there are several moving parts. We accept—that is why we set up OFPS—that we need to close that capacity gap of 3,700 or 3,150, depending upon how you count it, to close to zero by March 2027. That will get us to a sufficient service.

Sorry, I am still confused. You are still doing the assessment about the impact of these measures on the capability of staff to do the work. Therefore, how do you know how many staff are needed to do the work?

We know how many staff are needed today to deliver the Probation Service as it is spec’d today. We are looking to change that specification in a variety of different ways that get us to a position where those numbers balance.

What impact does that have on the number of staff who are needed? Do you know that?

The Report has, throughout it, statements around the staffing gap that we need to fill.

Do you know absolutely now how many staff you need at the end of this programme to deliver the service you want to see?

If OFPS delivers on its objective, we know we have to close a residual staffing gap of 1,950 through the various measures that we are still considering.

That takes you to having sufficient staff to deliver the service that you want.

Yes.

Yes. We agree with the figures.

It would have been helpful if that had just been said.

I think I did. The confusion was trying to turn it into a conversation about caseload, which is a slightly different way to frame the number.

Surely caseload affects the number of staff you need, doesn’t it?

Not necessarily, no. You may be able to have a slightly higher caseload if you are using digital tools effectively. That is what we were trying to say. Sorry that it has been a bit convoluted.

I want to come in here. Rachel quoted from paragraph 3.16. If you go further down into that paragraph—this is throughout the Report—it seems to me that HMPPS, almost at every stage, has been behind the curve. One reason why it has been behind the curve is that it thinks it knows how much time it takes to do a job, but, if you actually ask the staff doing the job, they will tell you it takes longer. That paragraph is telling us that, if you ask the staff how many people they need and how long it takes to do things, there is still, even presumably after the 1,900, a shortage of 1,500 staff. That is at the bottom of the paragraph. As a Committee, how can we have any confidence that you really do know how many staff you need to implement this plan?

We have surveyed record numbers of staff about the time they are taking to complete a number of key activities. Some of that has revealed that staff are doing more than they need to do to fulfil the operational policy. That is interesting. It is like, “Oh, you are doing it like that. Actually, the way the process is meant to work is like that. There are two steps there that are additional to the process that we think you are delivering”. That is an interesting learning. We have adjusted the timing accordingly and given staff new guidance about how they can do that task. There are other areas where, with additional learning and development, we think staff can go from N minutes on a task to N-minus-X minutes on the task. In some areas of the country, the practice means it might take 20 minutes to do a task; in other areas it is 15. We have had to calibrate all that down. If you take the staff view, it leads to a gap of around 6,900. The work that we have done after that brings that number down to 5,400. These stats are peppered through the Report. Going out to 2026-27, we then have the new trainee probation starters, other critical frontline staff coming on board and the impact of Reset and Impact. That gets us down to this magic number of 3,150, which is the starting point for figure 13. That is what is going on. It is not that we are not trusting our staff. Of course we are. We have had amazing engagement from our staff. In good faith, they have come and told us, “This is how much time we are spending on these activities”. What we have been able to do is say, “That is really interesting. If we work like this, we would not need as many people”.

Let us start, if we could, with a question to James McEwen. Having done some work over the weekend, I would just like to clear this up. I looked at the latest probation figures. A staggering 10% are foreign, but probably more concerning is that 8% are defined as “not recorded”. The note for “not recorded” in the dataset reads as follows: “Includes nationalities recorded as ‘unknown’, ‘refused’, ‘stateless’ or missing”. If you add the 10% to the 8%, we are looking at 18%. Some 10% are foreign and 8%, as I call them, of no fixed nation. I then looked at the Prison Service. The prison population statistics are completely different. The prison population statistics show foreign nationals at 12.33% and “not recorded” as 0.44%. Can you explain to me how you have got these people who are not recorded? Who are they and why are they not recorded?

We will know who the individuals are, but nationality, if there are no papers, is self-reported. There are 17,158 people being managed by probation in the community who are declared as foreign nationals. There are others where we know who they are and they are under supervision, on licence or being managed, but where, as you say, there are question marks about their nationality. What I cannot explain to you today is the differential between the prison numbers and in the community. I would have to look into that, and I am very happy to come back to you.

There does not seem to be any joined-up thinking between the two, which is illogical. That is why I asked you the question. Would you agree that, if these foreign criminals were deported in a timely way, it would actually take a lot of pressure off the—

What does that have to with—

You are getting into policy.

We are trying to get at how we sort out the Probation Service for the British taxpayer.

I would just like this question answered, if I can.

Mr Chair, on a point of order, this is going into the direction of policy.

Would it take pressure off the Probation Service?

That is a policy question for Ministers.

Well, I will leave that on the record, then.

It would not be right for us to answer.

I started to ask about tagging. As I said, I have spoken to various people I know within the Probation Service, who say there are some extremely skilled staff working in the Probation Service. There are some highly skilled people. Again, I go back to these two reports that I mentioned earlier, one in 2022 to ’24 for Rishi and another one for the MOJ in 2025, which I had a quick look at over the weekend. It seems to me—people working within the service confirmed this—that very often the tagging is not being done effectively by Serco, which has the contract to do the tagging. I am told that it is taking up to two months for some people to be tagged, which again is extraordinary. If you read those two reports, arguably your service has been slow to adopt this technology and could have adopted tagging and made it much more efficient. One person can now monitor a lot of people through a call centre. It is incredibly powerful now. Why has tagging not taken off? That is my first question. I have a second question. Through my questions to the Home Office, I found out that contracts for asylum seekers have been completely deficient. That is some with Serco, some with Mears and some with various other contractors. There are usually about five of them. I think I am right in saying that tagging moved from Capita to Serco about 18 months ago, or something like that. Is the contract that you have with Serco fit for purpose? It is clearly not performing. What are the penalties for it not performing? How competent are the staff who are signing these contracts?

That is a very big question, Rupert.

It is quite important, Geoffrey.

It is, but let the Permanent Secretary answer one or two at a time. Is tagging working? One of our witnesses says that electronic monitoring is likely to double under the Sentencing Bill. If it is working, how are you going to cope with that extra workload?

The electronic monitoring service now monitors over 26,000 people. In fact, it was monitoring 26,600 people in September 2025. That is double the rate in 2020, which was around 10,000 people. We have been growing electronic monitoring. As you referenced earlier, we use it for things such as alcohol use as well as leaving prison. You mentioned Serco. I am going to bring Jim in on this in a minute, but Serco’s performance since May 2024—you are right—has not met expectations. There was a backload, but that was cleared by November 2024. We are now working with Serco on its key performance indicators. It has a plan to reach service levels by February of next year. We are in active discussions with it to make sure that we are absolutely ready and aligned with the Sentencing Bill. Serco took over from Capita in May 2024.

What is the penalty for not performing under the contract?

As the Permanent Secretary said, performance has dramatically improved. I absolutely recognise that, if we had been in front of you a year ago, it would have been a different story. The contract has various levers within it. We have deployed every single one of those levers around financial penalties and other steps that we can take to hold Serco to task.

Is the contract fit for purpose?

Yes.

I am told that there is still up to a two-month wait for people to be tagged. Is that not right?

I see, as do James and the Permanent Secretary, data on a weekly basis around Serco’s performance. I do not recognise that other than in a very small number of outlier cases where there are factors outwith Serco’s control that mean it cannot fit that tag.

The monitoring of the Serco contract is based on facts. As Jim said, we have seen huge improvements since November 2024.

I would just add two things, if I may. First, under this contract we have direct access to Serco systems, which was not true under previous contracts. I have a team that can interrogate that data live. Secondly, anecdotal information is helpful to understand the picture here. Kim has a senior probation officer in every one of our regions whose sole job is to focus on how EM is performing and how Serco is delivering for probation staff in those regions. Those individuals meet with my team every couple of weeks to feed back what they are hearing as well as what the data is showing. We are absolutely data-driven, as the Permanent Secretary says, but it is a big, complicated system, so we have to listen to what people are saying and feeling. I met with a senior police officer from one of the forces recently for exactly that reason. They were getting feedback from their frontline that things were not as they would want. We were able to present data that rebutted that. It does not mean there is not some truth in the fact that there are individual cases where we would want performance to be stronger.

Given that you are, from reading the documents, keen to increase the amount of community sentences through tagging to take the pressure off the prisons, you have to get this tagging right and the contracts need to be fit for purpose. Has that been addressed? The next time you come here, will it all be running on rails?

The contract is fit for purpose. The contract gives us the framework, the levers and the mechanisms we need to have a high-performing EM service. As the Permanent Secretary recognised, as of today Serco is not hitting all of the performance standards in that contract that we want it to. It has a plan to get to a position where it is hitting those service standards consistently by February of next year. It is above trajectory to achieve that plan.

Why are you not tagging the prisoners when they leave prison, which you are not doing?

We are.

I do not think you are doing that.

We have started to test that as a model in six prisons.

If you have started to test it, you have not been doing it, have you?

It has not been our normal practice.

Why not?

In most cases you still need to visit them at home. We would still ordinarily want to link a GPS tag to what we call a home monitoring unit because it improves the robustness and accuracy of our detection. Previously, our view had been that tagging at prison and then tagging at the home as well was an inefficient way of operating.

We are testing this in six prisons at the moment. Something like 250 prisoners have been fitted with a tag before they walked out the gate of the prison. That is something that we are going to evaluate with the aim of making a decision about whether that should become more of a default way of working ahead of the expansion that we will see under the Sentencing Bill.

Finally, as we have heard today, they want more money and more staff. I do not think that is the case. They need better organisation and better use of what is available now digitally. The digital revolution has changed things completely. I learned about this alcohol monitoring. That is incredible. There is a huge change taking place and I question whether you are embracing it.

In the world, we are leading that.

We are. That is why we are spending money on digital improvements. As James said, our digital improvements are world-leading. They are really impressive. They will make a tangible difference to every probation officer in this country.

In defence of our witnesses, I have a long corporate memory on this subject and there was a time when it was not working at all well. It is working a lot better than it was. Jim, can I ask you about one specific category of people who are released from prisons—those with no fixed abode? How will you deal with those?

There are perhaps two parts to that, and Adam may want to come in. Around tagging, that is a challenge for us. We typically encourage offenders to charge a GPS tag every day. The battery itself lasts for longer than that.

If they are living in a tent or something, they might not be able to.

Our starting point is that it is not usually appropriate to tag somebody who has been released with no fixed abode because we are setting that individual up to fail. We are trying to mitigate that circumstance through the means by which we utilise what we call CAS3, so accommodation in the community.

That is the transitional accommodation. If you are at risk of leaving prison homeless, it offers 84 nights of temporary accommodation. We find that not only does that give you a place to be and potentially be tagged, as Jim says, but we also see good move-on rates from that temporary accommodation into settled accommodation, which allows the tag to be provided as and when. In terms of positive outcomes and investment in the community to help with risk management, that is one of our key levers.

That is exactly right. It goes back to your question earlier about how we reassure your constituents. We know that having stable accommodation, a job and a coherent treatment pathway all really matter. On all those metrics, we are doing much better than we have before. On employment and housing, it is a massive public service success story.

I have one last question. It is something that we have not discussed at all today. It is this. If you go to the second bullet point in paragraph 17 on page 14, it says, “Some scope changes will rely on lighter probation supervision”—we have discussed that at length—“and greater community support for some offenders and will require sufficient funding for CRS and third-sector organisations to ensure there is sufficient capacity to meet demand”. Can you tell us whether there is sufficient capacity in the third sector to fill this gap? Are you funding it properly?

There are perhaps two parts to this, if I may, Chair. We currently have a set of contracts that we call commissioned rehabilitative services. There are just north of 100 contracts across the country. About two-thirds of those are delivered by not-for-profit organisations for us. From my perspective, that demonstrates that there is capacity in the sector to provide some of the specialist skillset that is just not at the core of probation, if you will. We are in the process of re-procuring those contracts. We have taken on a lot of feedback from probation staff, from the NAO in both a previous Report and this one, and from the market, around how we define those contracts differently to make them more resilient. It remains our objective that the not-for-profit sector is a significant provider of CRS services, subject to a fair and open procurement process. Beyond that, there is further policy thinking going on—I will defer to Adam in a second—around whether there are options for the voluntary sector to play a greater role. The Committee will remember that David Gauke’s review pointed to the question at least as to whether there is a cohort that might be better diverted from probation rather than coming into statutory support. That is not currently in the Bill, but it is something we are keen to explore subject to funding.

There is early-stage thinking on whether there are particular groups or individuals who might benefit from perhaps shorter probation and more support from third-sector providers, particularly if they have a high number of needs. One of the things around CRS is to be that navigator to help bring together different services. We are keen to look at that.

Out of interest, why have you not put it in the Bill? Even if you are not necessarily going to use it, it could at least give you the power to do a pilot and then you could see whether it works well. We know that in some cases it works. Why have you not put it in the Bill?

We do not think, on the options that we are thinking about or the consideration that we have got to, we would need further legislative enablement. The Secretary of State has a wide appreciation on spending for probation services. I will not quote the Act because I will probably get it wrong, but we do not think we will need primary powers to be able to spend on the third sector. We think we can do that already.

We have covered a lot of ground, Permanent Secretary and witnesses. This is a service that we really need to work on behalf of our constituents. I have to say I am not entirely sure from all the answers, but we will be looking very carefully at what you have said to us. We will be producing a report in the coming days, no doubt with recommendations, which we hope you will take seriously. An uncorrected version of the transcript will be available in the coming days. Thank you again very much for spending time with us. We appreciate it.