Welcome to this afternoon’s session of the Justice Select Committee, which is the next session in our rehabilitation and resettlement inquiry. This session is devoted exclusively to the Probation Service; given the changes coming under the Sentencing Act and the recent public statements by the Prisons and Probation Minister, it could not be better timed. I will ask our witnesses to introduce themselves briefly after the members of the Committee have made their declarations of interest, beginning with Tony Vaughan KC.

Good afternoon. My name is Tony Vaughan. I am the Member of Parliament for Folkestone and Hythe. I have a practising certificate as a barrister. I am an associate tenant of Doughty Street Chambers, and I draw attention to my interests in the register. Mrs Russell: Hello. My name is Sarah Russell. I am the MP for Congleton. I am a solicitor with a current practising certificate. I am chair of the all-party parliamentary group on access to justice and a member of various trade unions. My interests are as on the register.

I am Andy Slaughter. I am the Chair of the Committee and the Member of Parliament for Hammersmith and Chiswick, in west London. I am a non-practising barrister. I am a member of the GMB and Unite trade unions, and a patron of two law-related charities: the Upper Room for ex-offenders and Hammersmith and Fulham Law Centre.

Good afternoon. I am Linsey Farnsworth, the Member of Parliament for Amber Valley and a former Crown prosecutor. My interests are as declared on the register, but of significance for today, I am the co-chair of the APPG on legal and constitutional affairs and a member of the APPG on access to justice. Warinder Juss: Good afternoon. I am Warinder Juss, the Member of Parliament in Wolverhampton West. I am a solicitor with a practising certificate, but I do not practise at the moment. I am a member of various APPGs, and I am an executive council member of the GMB trade union.

Good afternoon. My name is Tessa Munt. I am the Member of Parliament for Wells and Mendip Hills in Somerset. All my interests are on the register, but I would highlight the fact that I am the vice-chair for the all-party parliamentary group on penal affairs, and a director and vice-chair of WhistleblowersUK, which is a not-for-profit organisation.

Would our witnesses like to introduce themselves, beginning with Linda Neimantas?

Good afternoon, everyone. I am Linda Neimantas, and I am the regional probation director for Kent, Surrey and Sussex.

Our other two witnesses appear virtually today, but that makes no difference, I hope, as long as the technology does not let us down.

Good afternoon, everyone. I am Nicola Davies, and I am the regional probation director for Wales.

Good afternoon, everyone. I am Chris Edwards, the regional probation director for Greater Manchester. I appreciate the Committee allowing us to give evidence online; it is not ideal, but thank you.

I will kick off with a fairly general question: what is the role currently of probation practitioners in relation to promoting rehabilitation and resettlement? How much support and monitoring in the community is provided directly by the Probation Service, compared to what is commissioned?

In terms of the role of probation, we have a very clear purpose, which is to protect the public, reduce reoffending and deliver the sentence of the court. Before I go to the rest of the question, it is important to understand what we mean by public protection. When we talk about public protection within probation, we are talking about controls and monitoring. This may be through electronic monitoring, but also internal controls and rehabilitation. For everybody we work with in probation, it is about getting the appropriate blend of public protection controls and monitoring, but also the rehabilitation aspect; we cannot focus on one without the other. If we only focus on one—on monitoring, for example—and not on the underlying causes of why somebody has offended, once those controls are removed, you are likely to get reoffending. I just wanted to give that explanation first. Your next question was around how much monitoring there is and what services are provided by others. We obviously have a large proportion of people who are subject to electronic monitoring provided by others. In terms of rehabilitation, we work with lots of different services in the community. Nicola might want to come in at this point to talk about electronic monitoring.

I am the operational lead for electronic monitoring across England and Wales. We are engaged in a rather large programme of rolling out electronic monitoring across the system. There is heavy investment going into electronic monitoring in the near future, following the sentencing review and the introduction of the Sentencing Act. Electronic monitoring is a tool used by the Probation Service, alongside our police colleagues, and it must not be confused with the work we do with offenders to reduce reoffending. It is just part of monitoring their behaviour and indeed their presence in the community. It is a broad church, in that it covers several different types of electronic monitoring. We are particularly working with Serco on new projects such as proximity monitoring, which has great ability to ensure that offenders do not go into licence-conditioned areas and so on. Nationally, we are rolling out the domestic abuse electronic monitoring, DAPOL, where people who have either committed, or are suspected of committing, offences of domestic abuse may be subject to wearing a tag during licence. We have also engaged with the police for some time in an acquisitive crime programme, monitoring prolific burglars, robbers and thieves. That is rolling out across England and Wales shortly. We are building up a strong programme of electronic monitoring with our partners and looking to stabilise and transform electronic monitoring across the system. That will only happen with good data sharing, and we are piloting a really great tool to streamline the processes to ensure probation officers get access to information quickly when we need to act on any breach of compliance. Again, I must stress that this is a tool, not a panacea for monitoring offenders. It comes with good engagement early on in the licence or before prisoners are released from custody or are on community orders. It is about ensuring that we have those great, constructed conversations looking at the consequences of their crime, how to better their current situation through promotion of contracted services, and how we can work with them to reduce their reoffending in a pro-social way. So a combination of factors are involved in promoting rehabilitation, electronic monitoring being one of them.

I would answer your question in three parts. There will always be a core element, whereby activity is undertaken by frontline probation staff, but it will also be about working through and alongside others. The contemporary offer of rehabilitative support is probably as good as it has ever been, certainly in modern times in probation, with support around employment, training, accommodation, peer mentoring, health and so on. Of course, we want more, but I think there is currently quite a good, diverse offer there. And then we work alongside others in partnership—principally with police forces locally, for example. So there are three bits to it: direct staff, and then with and through others.

Nicola, I have a quick follow-up question regarding electronic monitoring. You did not mention anything about monitoring alcohol levels, which I know involves pretty new technology. Is any work going on in relation to that within the Probation Service?

Yes, apologies for that. As I mentioned, electronic monitoring is a broad church, and I did not mention alcohol monitoring. We continue to improve the system around monitoring. We know that when it works, it works really well. We have some great success stories of people who do not drink during the time they are wearing the tag and who make some significant changes, working with their service providers and probation officers to reduce alcohol intake in their lives in general. We have had a few problems with some of the tags on a physical basis, and there have been issues with offenders not being able to wear them, but those have been ironed out. We very much look forward to seeing the success of alcohol monitoring, because our offenders are reporting back to us and saying, “It’s the best thing that’s happened to us. It was a really good opportunity to just stop drinking and address my life and my issues.”

Thank you; that is very useful. Q466 Warinder Juss: Can I ask you about the Probation Service in general? It has gone through considerable resourcing pressures, which hopefully will be eased by the recent investment the Government have announced. But I was taken aback by a letter I read in The Guardian yesterday. A chap had spent five and a half years in custody. He came out of prison at the age of 56 and had lost all his assets. He said that the Probation Service was a monitoring service. He would have monthly meetings, but when it came to getting support for housing, employment or reintegration into society, there was no support at all. What is your response to that? How do you manage the balance between protecting the public and promoting rehabilitation and resettlement? You are absolutely right: the Probation Service is there to protect the public, but for me rehabilitation is a major aspect of the Probation Service, and I suspect we have not achieved what we should have in that sense.

I absolutely agree that, in the long term, rehabilitation is the best form of public protection, because people stop offending. But we know that it can take many years to desist from offending, and people often go around the cycle of change many times. To be a probation practitioner is to walk a tightrope; that is the only way I can describe it. In fact, I welcomed 55 new trainees into Kent, Surrey and Sussex just a couple of weeks ago, and I literally showed them a picture of somebody on a tightrope to say, “That is your job. That is how difficult it is.” For every single person you work with, you have to decide how much monitoring and control there is, and how much rehabilitation there is, and it is absolutely different for everybody you work with. All the training our probation officers and our Probation Service officers have is about getting that balance right. Some individuals are not motivated to stop offending, and the role of the probation officer is to help them to move along that cycle of change and recognise that their offending behaviour is a problem. But, again, that can take a long time to do. That is one of the main roles of the probation officer, as well as the risk assessment they do with the individual. Part of what a probation officer does is liaise with colleagues in custody. In Kent, Surrey and Sussex, we have resettlement panels before somebody comes out of custody, so that we can look at the plan we will put in place for them. It could be around education, training and employment, and it would be about accommodation as well. We have to take into account that many people we work with are incredibly complex and have an awful lot of needs. Some individuals are not job-ready or have not worked before. As I say, before somebody comes out of custody, we look at the options in relation to housing. As Chris said, it is not a perfect world, but the resource we have for accommodation now is much better than what we had previously. We now have CAS3 accommodation across the country. Within Kent, Surrey and Sussex we have 200 beds for accommodation, and people coming out of custody are able to get up to 80 nights. It is low-level support, but we have things in place for people. In answer to your question, it is a very difficult job being a probation officer and getting that balance right. We have resources available in the community. Do we need more? Absolutely, yes, we do. As I say, we work with some very complex people. You referred to the bit in the paper where the individual said it was a monitoring service. In Kent, Surrey and Sussex we are very focused on the quality of practice and what our practitioners do in the room with individuals. We are very focused on our managers observing practice, because we know that one of the factors associated with desisting from crime is the relationship between the offender—the person on probation—and the practitioner, and that is not something that can be measured as a target or a tick-box. That is why we are very focused on that as well.

Can I briefly pick you up on something you said? You referred to the cycle of change and a tightrope. Is it the staff who are on the tightrope or the offender?

It is probably both. I talk about staff walking a tightrope, because their role is about care and control. It is about protecting the public from harm, but also about rehabilitating the offender. Those things can sometimes feel as if they are in conflict. That is why I explain it as a tightrope.

In Kent, Surrey and Sussex, how much time do your probation officers spend in prison with each prisoner before they are released?

I am not able to answer that directly in terms of numbers.

You are very welcome to write to the Chair afterwards.

Yes, I can do that. Within each of our prisons, we have prison offender managers, who work with individuals when they are inside prison. The community offender manager then works with the prison offender manager, and that is when we have the resettlement panels.

Going back to the original question, resource pressures persist for the Probation Service, but we are making progress. For example, I have 48 more probation officers in Greater Manchester now than I had in 2021. But it is not neat, linear progress: it goes up and down a bit. Similar to Linda, I have 142 currently in training, but we still have a significant deficit. So there is progress, but pressures are still there. It is taking us all a bit longer to get to where we want to than we would perhaps have anticipated back when probation unified in 2020, but we are doing all we can to drive up those numbers. The scenario you outlined is regrettable; I am sure that it happens. But to go back to my point, there are plenty of examples of a good rehabilitative offer for the offenders we supervise. To Linda’s point about the accommodation offer post release from custody, I think it is the best we have had in probation. Those services are full, so we need more. None the less, we should not lose sight of the fact that it is a good offer in relative terms, compared to previous years in probation. In terms of balancing rehabilitation and control, that is the warp and weft of a probation officer’s job on a daily basis—trying to weigh up concerns about risk to others versus providing an opportunity to rehabilitate somebody. That is how it was when I trained, and that has not changed. There has been much change in probation, but that core balancing skill is still part of the daily job.

Going back to the original point regarding services to offenders released from custody, we all know we cannot do this alone. We work in collaboration with voluntary sector and other agencies to provide services through commission contracts. In Wales, we have a collaboration and commissioning forum that brings together a board of people to talk about where the gaps are, particularly for offenders in Wales, and how we can plug those gaps collaboratively. There is not always an easy solution; it is not always easy to find the money, but we do our very best because we believe that every single person who comes through our doors or who is outside the prison gates deserves to have those services in place. If nothing else, we can ensure that they pose more of a reduced risk of harm to the public and of reoffending. So it is really important that we work together. It is critical that we use the data we have in the community to put our resources where they are needed. We work hard to look at the OASys data in our organisation to ensure that we cover all areas where criminogenic needs are directly related to offending. The answer to the question is that a probation officer would be picking up that case on a Friday afternoon, trying to accommodate the prisoner and making sure he gets what he needs when he comes out of custody. In reality, this process should have started a little earlier in the custodial sentence. In Wales, we make sure that everybody is seen by a community offender manager at 8.5 months prior to release from custody, which is different to England. We have resettlement officers who ensure that these considerations are met prior to custody. Do people slip the net? Absolutely. We work in an imperfect system in an imperfect world, but we try our very best to have a bespoke service for people when they come out of our doors. There is a lot to learn and take away from that, but we are sure that the services we provide are the best we can offer under our current resourcing envelope. Q470 Warinder Juss: Can I ask a couple of very quick questions on caseloads? In your regions, what is the average caseload of a probation officer, and what should the target be?

It is quite a complex question to answer because different amounts of work are associated with each case. A caseload in Kent, Surrey and Sussex is somewhere around 30 cases for a probation officer, and probably around 45 for a Probation Service officer. But as I say, there is more work associated with a case depending on the risk. For example, where there is a very high risk of harm, the probation officer would see those cases weekly and liaise with our partners through multi-agency public protection arrangements. It is quite difficult to be specific about what a caseload number should look like, because it depends on the work associated with the case, which is different for every case we work with.

Could you briefly give your numbers, Nicola and Chris? Are your caseload numbers similar?

It is slightly higher in Manchester: about 35 for a probation officer. The average can be quite misleading though. The number can be higher or lower, but it is a bit higher in Greater Manchester.

In Wales, the average is 33 per probation officer, and up to 39 per Probation Service officer. But there are higher numbers of cases; in particular, those with cases involving a lower risk of harm would be expected to have higher numbers than those with cases involving a high or very high risk of harm.

I want to ask each of you the same question, but specifically in relation to your region. What do you believe is a key strength of your region in how it promotes rehabilitation?

To pinpoint one key strength would be quite difficult. I do not mean to sound boastful, but in Wales we have a group of managers and staff who want to do their very best for the people who come through their doors and for the victims in the community. To do so, they have had to become quite innovative. We have some really good examples of how we rehabilitate offenders in the community, but that cannot be done without other people helping us. First off, we have a great intelligence system in Wales called Reportable Incidents, where police force areas tell us on a daily basis if there has been any activity with regard to people on probation. So we have an exact measure of what is going on in the community if people have had police contact. Our offenders are aware of this and are therefore, I feel, more willing to co-operate and be honest around their activities. We have a great scheme called Grand Avenues going on at the moment in Cardiff, in Caerau and Ely, which is one of the areas of highest deprivation in Wales, and certainly in Cardiff. It is a supportive community, but it has its difficulties. The Grand Avenues hub encourages offenders in the area to report directly to it, and they can pick up community resources and get help while they are there. It is much more relaxed atmosphere for people to talk about significant issues in their lives, and we can transfer and refer them quickly into the services that sit in that hub waiting to help them. It has generated great results, particularly with regard to enforcement and compliance. I could go on with other things that we do, but they are the main ones in terms of us trying to reach out into communities, build people’s lives in their community and help them to be aspirational—not to the point of ridiculousness, but in terms of what they could do better in their life in that community—and use the resources available. I will stop there because I am sure my colleagues want to come in as well, but there are numerous other examples I am happy to share via email, Chair, if that is acceptable to you. Linda Neimantas: There are lots of strengths in relation to rehabilitation across KSS. As I said earlier, we are very much about the quality of practice and getting the balance between rehabilitation and public protection. Being in the south of the country, we are very stretched when it comes to resource, but we are a very innovative region. I will mention a couple of things. Within Guildford, in Surrey, we have a pilot social prescribing service run through the local authority and a charity called Voluntary Action. That project is all about improving access to health provision for people on probation, because we know there is a big gap between those who have committed offences and the general population in terms of health provision. That project was commended by the Department of Health and Social Care as something that it is really interested in expanding across the country. It is all about providing support and a gateway for health and wellbeing. It is co-located within the probation office in Guildford, so we have dedicated workers. Within Surrey, we also do lots of co-commissioning with the police and crime commissioner. We run a helpline for drugs and alcohol as well. I would like to give a couple of other examples. Again, we have a really fantastic, dedicated staff group across the region, with a particular focus on how we work with female offenders. Probation staff across the region run women’s hubs and very much look at them in a trauma-informed way. Often, they do one-to-one work around offending, but they also invite partners in for the people on probation to hear from—for example, to learn about sexual health and that kind of thing. If I could give one more example of where we are at as a region on rehabilitation, I would pull out Community Payback as a sentence. We have some fantastic projects across the region. While Community Payback is primarily there as a punishment, because it is paying back to the community, we have some absolutely fantastic projects. We are on the coast between Kent, Surrey and Sussex, and we have lots of visible projects such as people cleaning graffiti, but also painting and decorating. The people on probation are learning new skills, such as how to paint and decorate, or learning skills they did not realise they had. That can be a great form of rehabilitation, particularly when it is a visible project, and they get feedback from the public to say, “Thank you. That is a really great piece of work.” The impact of that is really significant, because we know that the final part of the desistance journey is being accepted by society and not being seen as an offender. I want to draw out the Community Payback projects we have in the region.

That is great. I am old enough to remember the community justice initiative under the last Labour Government. That is all really interesting to me, so thank you for that. Chris, could you answer the same question?

In Greater Manchester, we have quite a unique co-commissioning, co-production relationship with the combined authority in relation to developing and delivering rehabilitative services. When I came into this role in 2020, I was given a mandate to do things a bit differently. We were allowed to rewrite the national specifications a bit and run bespoke market engagement procurement processes. Structurally, the combined authority is the legal entity that holds the rehabilitative contracts, which we in probation contract-manage. The money flows into regions slightly more flexibly via a grant, with less strings attached, and we can deploy that a bit differently. In terms of benefits, we have a greater reach into local voluntary sector networks and organisations. We are also able to align the services we commission with other funding streams in Greater Manchester, such as the adult education and violence reduction budgets, and with other drug and rehabilitation services that pre-existed. In terms of where we have got to in this journey, we have wellbeing hubs in each of the 10 local authorities in Greater Manchester. Those are one-stop shop-type arrangements, where offenders on probation can go and receive a variety of support, with a general theme of lower-level, non-treatment health and mental health-type support. We also have a criminal justice stake in a women’s centre run by the voluntary sector, again, in each of the 10 local authorities in Greater Manchester. That is a unique motif in terms of trying to rehabilitate offenders in the city region.

Thank you; that is really useful, Chris. The reason I came to you last was that I was going to ask you some follow-up questions about co-commissioning, but you have covered that, so thank you very much. Can I ask Nicola and Linda about the Justice Transcribe pilot? How successful has it been in your regions?

It has been one of the most successful things I have ever seen in probation; I have been in probation for 28 years and I have never seen anything go down as well with staff as Justice Transcribe. We, along with Wales, are the pilot region; we started in February last year. The tool transcribes and summarises sessions with people on probation. The feedback I have had from staff is that it is life-changing in terms of their work because of the amount of time they save. One practitioner told me that they might see 10 offenders in a day before, and would spend half the next day writing up all the notes. Now, they say, “I’m on duty. Everything is transcribed. I go home that day. Everything is written up and done. So I’ve actually gained half a day back.” The overwhelming feedback is that it saves time. People also feel less stressed because they do not have the anxiety of thinking, “I need to write up my notes.” The other factor is that when people are in an appointment with an offender, they can focus on the relationship and the conversation, as opposed to thinking, “I have to write up lots of notes.” Because we are part of the pilot, lots of staff are saying, “You’re not going to take this off us? Please don’t take this off us, because it has been absolutely groundbreaking.” Now it is being rolled out across the rest of the country. At the moment, it is just with our sentence management staff, but there are plans to roll it out wider across the service. So it is an overwhelmingly positive on that one.

I would echo that 100%. I am evangelical about the introduction of Justice Transcribe and all things AI into the organisation, due to the response I get from staff. To add to Linda’s point, they say they are quite surprised at times to read the record and see they have missed a couple of nuances during the interview that they now have to consider—a throwaway comment the offender may have made that now, in the context of the transcription, is quite a significant element in the risk management. Staff say it allows them the mental capacity to interrogate what went on during an interview, in a way they have never been able to do before. The time they have got back in terms of the recording is critical for thinking, planning and assessing. In recent years, staff have talked about not having the time to set up good, sound supervision plans and ensure that they are bespoke to the person in front of them. Now they are able to do that because they have a record of what is needed in front of them, time to reflect and time to plan properly. In my 32 years of working in the Probation Service, this is without a shadow of a doubt the best thing that has happened to the service. Even luddites like myself, at my age, are reporting back to say, “Please don’t take this off us. It’s absolutely groundbreaking.” It is a great success to be able to use AI in this way in the service.

Do offenders know it is being used? How has that been welcomed, or otherwise, by those your probation officers work with?

Yes, they do know they are being recorded, and they are very happy with that. Quite a few of them say it plays into their favour, as they feel a transcription of what they have been saying is more accurate. We live in a world where people are recorded and use this type of equipment quite a lot. A lot of the younger generation do not mind at all. Some offenders report back to us that it feels safer. As an example, we had complaints go through the system that conversations with probation officers were misconstrued and put in their OASys risk assessment and needs plan in a way that they did not agree to. Those complaints can now be ironed out quickly because the transcription will say, “You talked about this and you agreed to do that.” It is really quite good. In Wales and, I am sure, in England, there is a good forum where we speak to people on probation and ask for their feedback, and they are absolutely glowing about it—there is not one complaint.

Do you have anything to add, Linda?

No, it is the same. We have had very little pushback because it is exactly the same as taking notes. That is how it is explained to people at the beginning, and they have been very accepting of it.

We had better press on.

I do not really want to move off such positivity, but I have to ask each of you another question, but in a different order. What are the biggest challenges in your specific region, perhaps beyond the budget, money, and resource? What prevents the service from focusing on promoting rehabilitation the most? Could we go to Chris first this time?

I will try not to go to those points you said to avoid, but part of building up our resourcing is that, proportionally, we have a higher number of people at the start rather than later on in their careers. There is certainly something about becoming a fully skilled probation officer that is about time served and building on experience. We do have those challenges, and we are working through them. You cannot do anything about that, other than get on with things, and then increasingly experience will bed in. Linked to that is the challenge we have with the huge amount of change coming through the system. For about 18 months to two years, we have been reacting to prison capacity pressures. That means a bit of a rearguard action in probation, responding to the next urgent priority to try to assist on that front. Now, we are moving into rebalancing legislation, but that is another significant piece of change for us in 2026. Positively, it allows us to get on to the front foot, but none the less we have to work through the changes. That is part of the challenge. It would be nice to reach a point where that steadies and we can get on with stabilising and embedding; that would help us with rehabilitation.

I would echo Chris’s points here. Change fatigue is a huge challenge in the organisation at the moment, although I have to say that doing my own roadshows with staff and talking about the potential for change under the new Sentencing Act has risen the spirit. In this instance, it feels as if these changes are for the staff, for probation and for ensuring that communities are as safe as possible. Change has not always about those things, so staff welcome it, but they are very real in understanding that to get to that point of change, we have an awful lot of work to do to steady the service, which will take time and planning. In Wales, we have an operational readiness board to look at what we need to do to operate those changes. Communication with staff is so important; you cannot have enough of it at this point to make sure people understand which direction they are going in. We have a less experienced workforce, which can be good or bad for us in some ways. We need experience in the system, but with good learning and development opportunities, staff can quickly pick up what is needed. At a prime time in probation, they will be able to learn how to do things in a new way, which will be their way, and it will be an exciting opportunity for them. We absolutely want mass recruitment, but we must manage it by having the correct infrastructure to support it, and that can put a demand on the time of senior probation officers and our teams. They are willing to do that, because they see what the future will hold, but it is my job—and Chris’s and Linda’s job—to ensure that they feel safe and well doing when they are doing that. So it is a balance of ensuring that we keep staff hopeful for the future, while supporting them on a day-to-day basis, because things will get tougher before they get better.

For the rest of the session, I ask you to do something impossible, which is give all this excellent information but in less time, because I am very much up against it.

We have exactly the same challenges as Chris and Nicola. In terms of an inexperienced workforce, 42% of probation officers in Kent, Surrey and Sussex are within their first two years. That is a real challenge for us, as is the cost of living with our close proximity to London. I will mention two other challenges very briefly. One is around move-on accommodation for people on probation. They have temporary accommodation when they come out of custody into the community, but where is the longer-term accommodation? Another challenge that has not been mentioned yet in terms of focusing on rehabilitation is that for some of our staff, particularly because they are newer, there is a fear of blame if something goes wrong with a case and there is a serious further offence. That is why, within our region, we are doing a series of pieces of work with all our practitioners to make it clear that—I know you will speak to Martin Jones afterwards—when people are in the community, we cannot eliminate risks, but we must take all defensible decisions and do everything that is reasonable. It is a challenge for us in the service to ensure that people feel psychologically safe in their work.

Chris mentioned the impact of prison capacity issues. We could probably talk about this question for a long time, so maybe limit your answers, but is the court backlog and the fact that a large proportion of the prison population are people who have been remanded into custody, and who may have served their sentence at the point of sentencing and walk out of the front door of the court, an additional challenge you would like to see the back of?

Yes, is my very succinct answer.

That is a good answer. Q479 Mrs Russell: It has been fascinating to hear from you. In terms of my concerns, you that mentioned 42% of your staff are within their first year or two, and you are recruiting another large tranche of staff behind them. First, do you have enough managers within that structure to bring on these people, both the brand-new and the slightly less new? Secondly, do you have the right training to help people become effective managers? Finally, I have looked at the adverts for probation officers at the moment. As we know, there was a problem when prison officers were recruited with an expectation of doing very socially focused work but ended up not being able to do that socially focused work in prison. They became very disillusioned and unhappy, and therefore had very high rates of attrition. Is there a gap between the current advertising strategy and what you as a director will be able to deliver in the day-to-day of the job?

I do not have time to take everyone on that, so who would like to go? Any volunteers?

There is so much in that question that we could take a long time to answer it, but here are some quick reflections. We have certainly stretched the elastic in terms of oversight when bringing such high numbers of trainees into the newly qualified officer space. We are probably at the edge of our tolerance, but it is the right thing to do to build up the numbers. There are similar experience issues with first-line management, because it is a knock-on, so we have to expedite experience at that level as well. There has always been a bit of a jump between qualifying and then what the job requires. What that really needs is a skillset around managing multiple things at the same time. We emphasise that back to the trainers, to make sure that that is known and understood. Of course, people come into the service to change lives; that is a key part of it. But there are also quite a lot of mechanical and important tasks to do to manage the public protection agenda. We need to emphasise consistently that that fills up quite a lot of the day job; it is not all about seeing people and changing lives. Of course, that is important, but checking information with other agencies and so on is very much part of the job, and we need to emphasise that.

Nicola, do you want to come in briefly?

It is incumbent on us as directors under the new Sentencing Act to change the way we approach the work of the Probation Service and move from being a transactional service to being a transformational service, and put out there what we intend to be and what the purpose of the organisation is. With good digital solutions to some of the problems with bureaucracy that we talked about, and with AI coming in and the ability to work differently under new supervision packages, we are probably the closest we have been in the last 20 years to achieving what we state in the advert.

Thank you. We will move on, if that is all right.

Thank you, all of you, for your evidence so far. I want to ask about commissioned rehabilitative services. Aside from in Greater Manchester, these are commissioned centrally. The overarching theme of these questions is whether you feel you have been allocated the resource you need in order to meet the needs of your service users. You have addressed that to a degree—the answer being yes, so far—but Nicola and Linda specifically, could you give further comment on that theme? What co-location of services is there? How do they work with other statutory services or third sector organisations?

We have CRS, which are nationally commissioned rehabilitative services, but also something called the regional innovation fund, which enables us to locally commission services. We get the benefit of having a consistent national service, so what provision you might get is not a postcode lottery. We have personal wellbeing, and we have an accommodation service that advocates for individuals. Many of our providers are located within our probation offices—not all, but where they can be, they are. I think that that national element works quite well, but it is also really important that we have that local funding pot, as I described before, to support the social prescribing service. There are other locally commissioned pieces of work—for example, a project on neurodiversity that we have just co-commissioned.

Can you tell us a little more about that? Quite a lot of people in the criminal justice system have neurodiversity, and the failure to deal with that has often led to the problems.

Indeed. We have only recently commissioned that service, so it will be a pilot. It is for the people on probation, but also for the staff, to help them understand how you best work with people who are neurodiverse. It is also about working to support people on probation in terms of how you attend appointments successfully to get into work. So it is two-pronged.

In Wales, we are a non-devolved organisation working in a devolved landscape, which requires good co-operation and collaboration with colleagues and officials in the Welsh Government to look at issues that are incumbent on the people who live on Welsh soil. We have very good working relationships with our police crime commissioners, who invest in services with us. The ONE Wales women’s service is a great example of a co-commissioned service between the Welsh Government and the Gwent and South Wales PCCs. It takes a holistic approach to working with women, and it was born out of the Welsh Government and HMPPS blueprint for women in Wales and is an example of collaboration across the country. Like Linda, we work with many organisations with regard to substance abuse, accommodation, employment and so on. We cannot do it alone, and we have great examples of co-location and working collaboratively.

Chris, the challenge in Greater Manchester is slightly different. Could you say something generally about resources, but also about joint working and information sharing between probation and other organisations, and whether that can be more effective?

We have made good progress around information sharing, but certainly more can be done. It remains a tricky area, but we have learned that when there is a will to do it, there is a way through that. We set up a unit within Greater Manchester probation to concentrate our expertise and build links with local authorities and police in that space. We are making good progress, but there is probably more to do. We are very pleased with where we are with the rehabilitative services, but we want to think about what comes next, how we build on them and how we progress, and also keep that in context with the Sentencing Act, which in some ways changes the mandate for probation and puts a greater focus on how we link with other services within Greater Manchester. Importantly, where do offenders move on to from our wellbeing hubs or women’s centres for more sustainable change? We have not done it all, but we have made decent progress. Q484 Warinder Juss: I would like to ask you some questions on recall now. Most recall takes place because of relatively minor or technical breaches, such as non-compliance with licence conditions, rather than actual reoffending. In your experience, does the current recall framework have a negative impact on your efforts towards achieving rehabilitation for offenders?

In Kent, Surrey and Sussex, we have done a lot of work looking at the reasons behind recall. We are confident that the majority of our recalls happen when the risk is not manageable in the community, so recall is taken as a public protection measure. When we do a recall, there are a number of checks and balances. It has to go through a senior probation officer, and then through their boss. There is a national tool called Consider a Recall, which asks you, “What alternatives are there to keep the person within the community? Is there an alternative?” From our work, I am confident that, in the majority of cases, it is because the risk is not manageable in the community. I welcome the coming recall changes, because when somebody was recalled for 14 or 28 days, that absolutely did get in the way of rehabilitation, as it was such a short turnaround. Just yesterday, practitioners said to me, “Actually, Linda, we think that it increases the risk of reoffending.” The change to the 56-day recall, which will come in as part of the sentencing review, means that if somebody is recalled, it is time to put a resettlement plan in place, which feels important. As I say, I am confident that change is being done for the right reasons. Importantly, our practitioners explain the reasons, so that, for a person on probation, it feels procedurally just and they have an understanding of why they have been recalled.

I agree wholeheartedly with Linda. A recall is often seen as a failed outcome; personally I see it as quite the contrary. It is in fact a good, managed response to risk. No one undertakes a recall lightly. I have signed off recalls in the past; you are signing away somebody’s liberty, and it is not a decision you take lightly. If somebody is not compliant in a community, it is for various reasons. We do a lot of work to get people back into the office when they are not compliant. Sometimes it is just impossible, particularly with regard to short-term sentences. The new legislation, and the change to 56-day recall, as Linda said, is the way forward for us. During that time we will be able to get into custody, do the resettlement work and get people out properly into the services they need. In my experience, recall is accepted by the offender more often than not. They know they have not come in. They know it is a privilege for them to be on licence, which is a continuation of a custodial sentence and not to be taken lightly. I do feel that we do this proportionately. In Wales, a recall board reviews all recall decisions after the event. We also have the reportable incidents every day from the police force areas, and we cannot unknow what we know, which adds weight when considering whether somebody should be recalled. We have good, robust audit trails in place to ensure recalls are proportionate and necessary. So I do have confidence in the recall system.

Chris, I am perhaps wrongly anticipating that you might agree that recall happens in appropriate cases, but how do you account for the fact that rates have gone up 100% in the last 15 years, and 40% in the last four years?

Prior to the implications of recall linking into the prison pressures and that becoming a point we had to deal with, we had, on the back of some regrettable, serious further offences, often played out at inquests, driven the staff group not to miss recalls. The direction of travel was not the one we have now. For several years, we said, “You really have to make sure you do not miss recalls.” As I say, this played out publicly in inquests and there was a real fear around the implications of that and Probation Service being held to account. We have moved into a different space now, where we have to change that messaging. That may account for some of what you indicate in terms of trend.

Were the higher or the lower levels right?

That is really difficult to answer. Certainly, in the high-profile cases I talked about, to have done the recall would, with hindsight, have been the right thing to do—of course it would have been. It is really tricky to come down on either side, because higher recall numbers have had implications for the prison population, and we have to do something about that. As my colleagues say, everyone is doing their due diligence on recall; there are no obvious gaps, so I struggle to answer that question—it is tricky. Q487 Warinder Juss: I remember visiting a prison, and a couple of the prisoners told me they were recalled because they missed the train and then their probation appointment. In your experience, have such things been happening?

I could not say no. It is quite difficult to understand the fuller context. One missed appointment for somebody who is very high risk to the public may be sufficient for a recall, but for somebody who is not, you could not justify it in the same way. You would need to understand who that person was, what his or her criminality was and who was at risk. Potentially, that could be a legitimate public protection strategy if there is super-high risk to others. Q488 Warinder Juss: You have all said that the change in law, where the recall period will be 56 days, is a step in the right direction. Would you like any further support to stop the number of recalls?

In terms of the intelligence gathering with the police and other safeguarding agencies, we could work harder to ensure that the quality of information coming through is better for us in terms of some of the decisions we need to make around safeguarding. We always come down on the cautious side of a decision; we will never take one lightly—as I keep saying, this is taking somebody’s liberty away from them. During the next weeks and months, with the introduction of the 56-day recall, we will need to ensure—we will monitor this, of course—that there are enough services to meet the demands of the offenders coming out of custody. We need to press on that hard and quickly when this change comes in; otherwise, we will be writing plans without any outcomes. We will probably have a story around that once those changes are made. With regard to risk assessment and risk of harm, I think we make the right decisions most of the time, and it is very rarely for a missed appointment. In my experience, there will be more to the story than that, but I accept that people do fall through the cracks.

Many reforms in the Sentencing Act will come in from today and towards the end of March. What work is under way within your regions to support those changes? What contingency planning is in place to ensure that the Probation Service’s increased workload can be delivered safely and that the work towards reducing reoffending is still prioritised? There is not a lot in that, is there?

As I said, KSS is one of the most challenged regions in terms of resources and workload. For the last 18 months, our focus has been on the quality of practice, but also on capacity, innovation and doing everything we can to free up time, so that our practitioners can focus on the things that they started the job to do and also the things that enable public protection and rehabilitation. We mentioned things like Justice Transcribe freeing up time. We have also done an awful lot of work on the tasks we can strip away from practitioners, so that they are not doing bureaucratic processes and can focus on the job. That is a big thing we have been doing in the region. As Nicola and Chris said, the workforce are change-weary because they have been through a lot of changes. My approach is to be honest with staff about that and to communicate, communicate, communicate what we are doing. We also get clear communication from our central colleagues. There is a programme called Our Future Probation Service, which is about freeing up capacity, exactly as we have been doing in Kent, Surrey and Sussex. They send us communications as regional probation directors, and we share them with managers and practitioners in our region. We put at least half a day a month aside to train people for what is coming, so that they are as ready as possible, and we make sure we have a two-way conversation with staff around the changes that are coming. Exactly as you say, these changes are coming. They are in law, and they will come at a certain time. In our contingency planning, we focus on the key things we must do in terms of rehabilitation and public protection, and we make sure we put resources into those, because we obviously cannot do everything. We also utilise management information, which tells us if anything has been missed, so we can pick up things that way as well.

Nicola and Chris, is there anything you would say differently or want to point out that is different in your regions?

There are just two things. We get a lot of support from our central colleagues around operational readiness. They are providing us with the information and statistics we need in order to move forward with operational delivery. Wales has an operational readiness board that looks at the activity that needs to be undertaken. It is linked to our targeting board, which helps us review the demand coming through the courts as well. The big point I want to make that has not been made—I am sure this is the case with Linda—is that we are also engaging with our stakeholders with regard to the consequences of the Sentencing Act. We are talking to them, for example, about health provision—with more community orders, there might be more need for health provision, and it might be needed more quickly than expected. They work with accommodation providers and the Welsh Government to ensure that we know what demands will come into Wales when there are less custodial and more community sentences. We have been doing that for some time with our partners, with other changes, so we are really keen to engage and move with them on this.

I would just be repeating what my colleagues have said. They both covered it off, so I will not add anything.

As I say, time has beaten us on this. I just want to say thank you very much for attending, virtually or in person—we cope with both. The Prisons Minister told us about the new resources that are going in, as well as the changes being made to the service. We also know about the legislative changes. Is there anything any of you would like to say finally about the challenge ahead? The service is struggling in many respects, despite the best efforts of those who work in it. Is there any final comment you want to make? Otherwise, I will close this part of the session.

Very quickly, Nicola touched on this, but this rebalancing legislation and change could allow probation to operate on the front foot, with a clearer mandate and understanding of what is expected of it going forwards. We have been in a more volatile space for the last two years, so that is to be welcomed. It is a deep breath to get through this change, but we are optimistic beyond as to greater stability.

That is a very good note to end on. I will take that as Chris speaking on behalf of all three of you, in case you dissent.

I concur.

Thank you very much for attending. Excuse my manners, but I should have thanked you, Chris, for hosting members of the Committee when we visited you in Manchester. I will suspend the meeting for two minutes while we change over panels. Thank you very much to our guests for today. Examination of witness Witness: Martin Jones CBE.

Welcome back to this afternoon’s session of the Justice Select Committee. We are looking at the Probation Service today as part of our rehabilitation and resettlement inquiry, and I am delighted that we are joined by Martin Jones, the chief inspector of probation. We are going to have a series of questions from different members of the Committee but we will begin with one from Tessa Munt.

Martin, my question is on what the inspectorate measures. What are the criteria for probation regions in regard to rehabilitation and resettlement? How well is the Probation Service performing in relation to those criteria, and which regions are performing better than others?

I am really happy to explain the broader context within which we inspect. His Majesty’s inspectorate of probation looks at both probation and youth justice services—that needs to be added to the job title at some point because it is an important part of what we do. In terms of probation, we look at three separate areas of probation practice when we are undertaking our usual inspection regimes. We look at engagement: how effective the Probation Service is at engaging with the person on probation to understand their life and the challenges they face. We also look at public protection: how well you understand the risk that the offender could pose to the community and what needs to be done to ensure that you mitigate and manage that risk. Finally, we look at desistance: how well the Probation Service works with the offender to help them turn their life around and turn them away from the cycles of crime in which they find themselves. So, primarily, it is in that desistance area where we are looking at the work that takes place. Separately, we also look at resettlement activity in relation to the work that takes place preparing people for release from prison. There are 87,000 people in prison, and the Probation Service deals with a caseload of 246,000. A large proportion of those people are being prepared for release back into the community. Releases have increased significantly in recent years as a result of the early release scheme, which results in real pressure. As far as the inspectorate is concerned, early preparation for release—knowing where that offender is going to be landing, where they are going to be living and how they are going to get the right landing in the community—is absolutely crucial. That relationship between a community offender manager and a prison offender manager, and ensuring information flows, is essential. In terms of where we see good outcomes, we have completed six probation regions so far. The strongest regions in terms of desistance have probably been north-east England and Wales so far. We have seen some pretty good results in relation to their desistance and engagement scores. One thing I would say—I think I have said this before—is that, generally speaking on our inspections, public protection scores tend to be the thing that holds back probation performance. Across all the regions, the desistance and engagement scores tend to be better than public protection scores. Since my appointment as chief inspector two years ago, one of the things I have been very anxious about is to understand the reasons for that, although the regional probation directors you heard from earlier pointed to some of the reasons why public protection work is perhaps lagging behind desistance.

My next question was about how well the Probation Service balances the role of public protection with promoting rehabilitation and resettlement. You have identified tensions within that. Why did you point out the north-east and Wales?

I can answer that question relatively simply. Certainly, the early inspection findings in the first region we inspected—Kent, Surrey and Sussex, where Linda is from—revealed acute staffing difficulties. What you started to see when you went to the north-east of England and Wales was a more stable picture; the staffing position was not perfect, but it was far better. The other thing we observed from those two regions was that they had much closer links to community services. In Wales in particular, we saw devolved links taking place, which enabled probation officers to get a much closer fix on offenders’ needs. We certainly think there is a link between performance, the level of staffing gap and the experience of staff. [Interruption.]

I am going to suspend the session for a minimum of 10 minutes if we have one vote, and 20 minutes if we have two. I am going to start again as soon as we have a quorum, so could everyone hurry back once they have voted? Sitting suspended for a Division in the House. On resuming--

We hope the voting is done for today, so we will resume our questioning of Martin Jones, the chief inspector for probation, as part of our rehabilitation and resettlement Inquiry. Tessa, had you finished your question?

Yes, I have. We have covered everything really. Q494 Warinder Juss: I want to follow up on getting the balance right between public protection and rehabilitation and resettlement. If you get rehabilitation and resettlement right, lessening the risk of reoffending then follows. You were in the room when I spoke about the letter in yesterday’s Guardian, and Linda said in the previous session that some offenders are just not ready for employment. The person who wrote in had two degrees and other qualifications, but they found that there was no support for employment. It is a worry when the Probation Service is seen as a monitoring service focusing on public protection, which obviously needs to be there, but not providing the support for people to get into employment, get housing and be reintegrated into society. If you have been in prison for a number of years, or even a couple of years, you lose everything; that is so important. Is the statement correct that rehabilitation is not there, and are you optimistic that the Probation Service will be able to do more to achieve that rehabilitation in the future?

As I said in answer to the previous question, when we look at the work taking place within the Probation Service around desistance, we are much more likely to find good work taking place, but it is really important that you take a step back. If you look at the people in prison, why they are there, and what their characteristics are, it is really clear why they are in prison. Previously, I was chief executive of the Parole Board, seeing people who had committed really serious offences, and you could see why those individuals were in prison. Some 47% of people currently in prison have no qualifications, 68% were unemployed before they went to prison, 15% were homeless, 64% were previously class A drug users, and 22% had drunk alcohol every day. Those are the characteristics of the people who are then released back into the community. The lifeblood of the Probation Service should be getting to the heart of the reasons why people are offending. You need to be able to engage with that person, understand their needs and the reasons why they are caught in problematic cycles of behaviour, and assist them in turning their lives around. If you can do that, there are significant, massive benefits. As chief inspector of probation, I say that if you can succeed in that mission, you prevent countless future victims, you have safer communities and you give people a chance to turn their lives around. I have heard about a good number of people who were previously offenders who are now doing all sorts of fantastic work. The chance of a second opportunity is important, so it has to be part of the mission going forward. With the most recent reforms, we have the opportunity to reposition our Probation Service in terms of turning lives around. We know that short custodial sentences have higher reoffending rates than community sentences, so how can we do things better to ensure that we make a difference? We did an inspection last year on unpaid work, and we looked at the quality of that. We found really impressive accounts from people on probation who talked about how they had never really ever done anything useful for their community, and they had spent 200 hours tidying up gardens, doing work in the local church and tidying up canals. They were proud of the work they did, and many of them saw that as an avenue into future employment. We all know that if you do get into employment, the chances of reoffending significantly drop. We know that if somebody is housed following their release from custody, their chances of reoffending halve. Those have to be the things that we try to sort out. To get it in balance of course you need to understand the public protection risk. You need to understand, if it were all to go wrong, what the risk to the public would be? Is the risk that somebody may commit acquisitive crime? Is the risk that they may commit domestic abuse or seriously harm others? It needs to be understood. In all my experience, the secret is to understand who that individual is and what work you need to do to ensure they have a safe place to live, support in the community and help with mental health and drug problems, so they can be successful, law-abiding members of the community. Experience shows that if you do that, you can release life sentence prisoners back into the community safely. There has to be that support, because the journey will not always be smooth, and there will be bumps in the path, but the evidence shows that that can be successful, and people can have a second chance.

Can I just check something? My understanding in my local area is that Community Payback is never done in somebody’s own community, which always struck me as slightly weird. It is something to do with not embarrassing people—I can see somebody behind you vigorously shaking their head. Is there anything in the Community Payback scheme that says you cannot contribute to your own community?

I do not see that in any of the policy statements. Of course, you need to look at this on a case-by-case basis, depending on the needs of that offender. A few months ago, I went to Cardiff on inspection and saw a really impressive piece of work taking place at a local community centre. All the work that had been done to clean up a community garden that had been a complete mess of brambles and everything else had been done by people in the local community who had been punished by the court, and they had created a wonderful community space. Having met the men, my view was that they were incredibly proud of their work, and that is what we need. It would be much better if you could show your children the positive things you have done for the community, rather than the damage you have caused to the community.

I am very glad to hear that. I live in a very rural area—possibly not as nice as parts of Wales, which are very different—but the business of having to transport people from A to B to do Community Payback is expensive.

One issue that may come in is the opportunities to do Community Payback. A lot of work goes on within the Probation Service to ensure there are suitable placements—getting an employer that wants to work with people. The Canal & River Trust has done a fantastic piece of work; my understanding is that more than £1 million of work is being undertaken by people punished by the courts, which otherwise would not be done, to make our canals and rivers nicer places to spend time. What a success story!

Thank you very much. That is helpful.

Martin, you mentioned, almost in passing, the youth justice service—the arm of the Probation Service that supports young people. I think it performs far better than its adult counterpart. Could you give us your insight into why that might be?

I am very happy to talk about our findings in youth justice. We changed our framework about a year ago and launched the new justice inspection framework. Prior to that framework, we rated 75% of youth justice services as good or outstanding, so it was routine to see really fantastic practice. We launched the framework, made it tougher, and looked at different things. Under our new framework, we are specifically looking at how youth justice services meet the needs of victims, which is something we perhaps paid inadequate attention to. I expected the results to dip, but since we launched the programme, two thirds of youth justice services are coming through as good or outstanding, despite the fact that we are rating a different set of things. The reasons for that are manifold, but there are lessons for the adult probation system. One is that there are sustainable caseloads in the youth justice system. There is a balance between how many people are managing and have time to spend with a child to ensure we understand their lives, the potential reasons why they are offending and what we might need to do to ensure that we can work with them to turn their lives around. The story in the youth justice system is a real hidden success story: there is a 90% reduction in the number of children in custody. Many people would not believe that, given what has happened to the adult system. The other lesson is that the youth justice system is built around local partnerships underpinned by statute that requires partners—the police, education and the Probation Service—to be around the table. At its best, the Probation Service should know why this child is in front of it and what their needs are. We know that school exclusion is an absolute fast track into the justice system; we know that abuse and childhood trauma lead to children going into the justice system. The more we can get a Probation Service that is focused on the reason why this person is committing offences, the more likely we are to be able to turn those lives around. So the investment that is taking place in probation to ensure that we have more probation officers able to do the job they want to do is a positive step. Within the world of youth justice, the one risk you have is that we take our eye off the ball in terms of why it has been a success. From what I have seen in youth justice, we have all the building blocks of success, and we need to ensure that we carry that across into the adult system and that we have a very clear mission and very clear statement of what the purposes of the system are.

From what I have heard today, that certainly seems to be the direction of travel with the changes that have been brought in and with the work that you and your directors are doing. You mentioned a sustainable caseload. If we switch that to probation officers, what would that look like for the adult probation teams?

I said earlier that the Probation Service is currently managing 246,000 cases, which is nearly three times the number of people in our prisons. If you look at the Public Accounts Committee report that was recently published, it highlights a staffing gap of about 25%. I am a realist: I am a passionate believer that the Probation Service can do fantastic things, but if you overstretch it, it will systemically underachieve. On inspection, we have found that the Justice Transcribe is genuinely manna from heaven; it has the capacity to transform the service, but you need lots of that to ensure that you are freeing up probation officers to be able to do the job as well as we would want them to do. Recruitment is of course really important. We are recruiting massive numbers of probation officers, although that creates an experience problem in relation to whether there is the experience to sustain things. The other thing we need to ensure is that we shore up the service. Of course, we are recruiting more, but I think about 9% of probation officers left the service last year. How do you slow that down? There have been signs that it has slowed over the last year or so, and I think that that is because there is a very clear message that we are trying to get to a sustainable place. The challenge is probably going to be over the next 18 months, as the Government start to implement the sentencing reforms and bring in massive change. They need to manage that very carefully to ensure that we come through that period, so that at the end of this we have a Probation Service that is back to its best. At its best, the Probation Service will deliver safer communities.

You heard me asking the directors earlier about what they felt they were doing well in their regions to promote rehabilitation and resettlement and reduce offending. We heard from each of those three areas, but with your oversight of the whole of England and Wales, do you have any themes in terms of what you think the service is doing well in that regard?

There are a number of areas that I have highlighted, and I am very happy to write to the Committee if it would be helpful to pick out some specific examples. One thing I am really clear about as chief inspector is that I need to shine a light on what is not working, to ensure that action is taken where there are areas for improvement, but I also want to highlight the strengths. To give you one strength, in particular, which the service should be very proud of, the SDS40 changes—involving the release of a very significant tranche of people—were announced shortly after my appointment. I was really worried about whether the Probation Service would cope, but it performed heroics to ensure that that went about as well as could be reasonably expected. There were people absolutely burning the night oil to ensure that people had a place to live when they left custody and that that could be accommodated. It was a huge success story; there has been a huge amount of goodwill and hard work at the probation frontline to ensure that they could deliver the best results possible. When the inspectorate now does an inspection, we publish an effective practice guide, which, as well as highlighting the faults and the areas for improvement, highlights the superheroes of probation who are doing a fantastic job despite those challenges. We should hold them up in lights and say, “We want more probation officers to do that.” We have now published five or six of those effective practice guides—I can send you the links—where we have highlighted really crunchy examples of how a probation officer has managed a really difficult case to ensure that the person gets the support they need in the community. The other thing we have seen that I would highlight as a success story is around the sharing of information between different agencies. Certainly, in Greater Manchester, we have seen the ability to work at a more local level to ensure that those partnerships work much more effectively. If I look at it through a national lens, I am not sure whether enough has been done to ensure that they are working across every region. There are some really good examples in Greater Manchester of what we need to build on nationally to ensure that the probation officer managing a case has all the information they need to ensure they manage the risk and the needs of individuals in the community.

Flipping it over into the opposite, what, beyond resourcing, do you think the challenges are that prevent the service from focusing on promoting rehabilitation? You will have heard me ask earlier about the court backlog, the remand population, and people being released straight away on sentencing. Is that also a challenge? And what are the challenges generally?

I heard the evidence from earlier witnesses, and I would agree that just an element of stability is needed. The Probation Service has faced constant change for 10 years, and there is change fatigue—“There is another scheme coming in, and another scheme coming in.” It needs to settle down; that would be of considerable assistance to the Probation Service. An important point on the court backlog is that because of the backlogs in the system, there are people being remanded in custody who, at the end of that, are given a custodial sentence equivalent to the period they have spent in custody. In an ideal world, if somebody is serving a custodial sentence, planning for their release will take place over many months. But if somebody is being released directly from prison, that person is almost passing directly into the supervision of the Probation Service. Looking at where they are going to be living and getting a handle on what the licence conditions are places a significant additional challenge on the Probation Service. Once the system can get to a more normal place, it will certainly be in a better place to recover. Q501 Warinder Juss: As I said earlier, it is my firm belief that if we get rehabilitation and resettlement right, we reduce the risk of reoffending. You gave some statistics earlier about the characteristics of people who end up in prison. Do you feel that your job may be made more difficult because the education services, for example, that you might get in prison are not what they should be? If what is available in prison for prisoners was perhaps made better in terms of achieving rehabilitation and resettlement, would that help your job?

It would be fair to say that almost everybody in prison is going to be released at some point, so it is important that the work takes place in prisons to ensure that people are properly prepared. Drug treatment is a classic: if you go to prison with a drug problem, particularly if you are there for a short time, there is a limited amount you can do in that period, and you will land back in the community quite quickly thereafter. I would say that success around ensuring that people are built into employment would be a good thing. The problem is that there are quite a lot of positive aspirations in relation to what we would want to take place in our prisons, but the level of overcrowding means that in reality people spend far too long behind bars to even access education, employment opportunities or retraining. Ideally, we need room so that we can properly rehabilitate people in our prisons. Certainly, education is still an area that needs to be improved on.

Is Greater Manchester good with information sharing only because of the co-commissioning model, or could that be replicated elsewhere?

It is simpler because they are dealing with a single authority. Some regions are dealing with multiple local authorities and multiple police forces. The fact that Greater Manchester has co-terminosity is of considerable assistance, as are some of the reforms to ensure that people are much closer. Some probation delivery units are dealing with two or three local authorities, so if you are seeking to get adult safeguarding care, for example, you are almost working with three different systems. Certainly, the co-commissioning of services in Greater Manchester gives a real building block for better working together, but also sharing of problems. If you look at the problems of employment and housing, it is not the Probation Service’s job to provide housing; that is a matter for local authorities. Of course, some fantastic work has taken place in relation to the CAS accommodation service to provide people with short-term respite, but ultimately the answer has to lie in communities. Similarly, you can give people skills and avenues into employment, but again there are opportunities to pick up. By building it at a local authority level, you have better opportunities to provide those links. Q503 Mrs Russell: You have said in written evidence to the Committee previously that the Probation Service does not have sufficient capacity to support effective resettlement pre and post release. The Government has announced that it will increase probation funding by up to £700 million in 2028-29. Is that sufficient?

It is a reasonable starting point, but it still needs to be kept under review. The question for me as chief inspector is, how are you splitting the money within that £700 million? Clearly, a portion of that money is to be spent on employing additional staff, which is a good move. We know from the Public Accounts Committee report the level of staffing deficit in the service. The other area for me is what the needs of the offenders are. Better drug treatment and better links with the third sector are important. There are gaps in the current commissioning arrangements that mean that those arrangements may look good on paper, but if I am working in rural Lincolnshire, do I have the services I need in order to meet the needs of the person living up the road who has a serious drug problem? It is much more difficult in some of those more remote places. Finally of course, there is technology. There will be greater use of tagging; there are benefits to that if it is used properly and intelligently to assist probation officers in doing their jobs. But, of course, that is also reliant on housing, because how can you tag somebody if they are going to be living homeless? There have been improvements in housing following release from custody, but if you look at the numbers, 20% of people still do not have settled accommodation three months after leaving custody, and that comes with challenges. How we spread the money is something we are going to have to keep a very close eye on. If you look at the cost of recall, for example, which I know is something that has interested the Committee, we are probably spending the equivalent of about £600 million a year keeping those people in custody. Is there a way of trying to better support people on release to ensure that they can stay in the community for longer? I would not criticise probation officers for recalling people if their risk is escalated, but my question is, could that risk potentially have been anticipated if the probation officer had had a bit more time or if there were better support services in the community?

You said 9% of staff left last year, which is a really high proportion. I appreciate you may not know the answer to this off the top of your head, but do you know roughly what the recruitment cost will be just to replace that 9%?

I would not know that off the top of my head, but I am sure it must be a published number that the Ministry can provide; I am more than happy to make inquiries. My depiction is that we are running the taps really fast to recruit people, which is great, but there is a bit of a hole at the bottom of the bucket where we are losing people, and we need to slow that or maybe find the reason why. I fear that part of the reason is that we are recruiting people, but two, three or four years down the line they are burnt out by the caseload. That is why we need to be realistic in relation to what we ask the Probation Service to do for the next couple of years, on the basis that we then enable it to grow and be in a much healthier place in five years. This overstretch means that people are placed under huge pressure; you see it, for example, in high levels of sick absence across probation units.

Have you told us what you think the target caseload for probation officers should be? We have had the figures on what the actuals are, and I recognise there is a variance because these are averages, but what do you think the target caseload should be? There were two numbers given to us—those who are seniors and those who are not.

I completely understand the point that was made by the people who are actually managing the business on the ground in relation to the difference between high-risk offenders and lower-risk offenders. If you look at the work that takes place in the national security division of the Probation Service, it is dealing with the most complex cases. We inspect those cases and see a much higher quality of work, and they are managing a significantly smaller caseload. If we can get closer to 30 or maybe 25, I think you would see a better quality of work. If you look at the workload management tools that are there, it would suggest that our probation officers are massively overstretched. Having said that, the Justice Transcribe tool we talked about earlier is freeing up thousands and thousands of hours of probation officer time, which frees up the equivalent of a significant number. So there is a benefit to being able to use your time better, and you need to get to a point where a probation officer is able to spend quality time with an offender to understand their needs. Of course, if somebody commits a crime, they need to be punished for it, and some people probably need to go to prison for a lengthy period. But the reason people change is quite often about the person who takes time to understand what their needs are and who tries to fix their issues. It is not a transactional service; it is about understanding what is going on in your life, and we seek to work with you to reduce the risk you pose to the community in the future.

We will move on to the Sentencing Act. In your 2024 annual report, you implied that for the sentencing reforms to succeed, the Government had to ensure the Probation Service was—I think the words you used were—“properly resourced”, otherwise it would not be able to provide the effective service the public and victims need. Do you believe that that will be achieved, that we are anywhere near that and that the service has the capacity to implement the changes to the Sentencing Act safely?

I need to be slightly careful because I will be inspecting to find out what the actual impact on the ground will be in some months’ time. I have obviously had a good line of sight in relation to the implementation plans within the Ministry to prepare this. An enormous amount of effort has gone on within the Prison Service and the Probation Service to plan for these changes. But we will need the system to take incredible care over the next 18 months, given the pace of change, because there is a huge amount of stretch in this. The one thing that I welcomed—this was last year—was the announcement of the sentencing packages, which are intended to try to reduce the overall workload by about 25%. There are different ways you could reach that figure, but it needs to be ambitious. At the moment, there is a huge amount of desirable work I would like the Probation Service to do, if it were resourced to do that. At present, we simply do not have the probation officers to do these things. Focusing on the highest-risk, highest-need people should be the priority in the short term. As you bring those probation officers up to speed, in a couple of years’ time you can then stretch into a place where they can do some of that work that has the potential to do much more good in the long term. In the short term, you need some focus, and the Justice Transcribe stuff may provide some room for that. If that means that it gives you a chance to increase your retention of probation officers, that is a good thing, because the only way you can build up that experience that has been lost over the last 10 years is to keep people for longer and ensure that they love the job. One thing I like about visiting probation officers is that they might be dreadfully busy, but they love the job. We want to ensure that we breed more of those people, rather than people who are just burnt out by the pressures.

I will go back to recall, which you were talking about a little while ago. About three quarters of recalls are due to non-compliance with licensing conditions. You probably heard the figures I quoted earlier, which were that over the last 15 years recall has more than doubled, and over the last four or five years it has gone up by 40%. If that had not happened, the prison overcrowding crisis would be virtually resolved. I am not sure that I have heard a convincing explanation yet as to why it has gone up. Either it was too low previously or it is too high now, or something else has happened. Can you explain that, Martin?

I will give you my take on it, although we are planning to do a thematic inspection on recall later this year, after the latest changes have bedded down, to ensure that we understand what the latest information is. When I became chief executive of the Parole Board in 2015, the recall population was around 5,500. Last summer it peaked at 13,829. That is a startling increase over that period. There are a range of factors. First, when we inspect cases, the recall can be justified in the majority of cases on the basis that there has been a breach of the licence conditions. My question is always whether it is necessary for the protection of the public to recall the individual, which is a different question. Could that recall have been prevented through better preparation for release? When I looked at the latest published statistics, I found it troubling that, in the very latest quarter, the number of people recalled was double the volume recalled to custody three years ago. We changed the system to relieve some pressure on recall, and what we have seen is almost that the revolving door is increasing in speed: people are coming back faster and faster and faster. We need to look at the reasons why people are failing. If somebody commits an offence because they have a drug addiction and you send them to prison, but there is not the time and resources to turn their lives around, when they leave prison, they will still have a drug addiction and still be homeless, so it is inevitable that they will fail.

That was true five years ago, was it not?

I completely agree with the earlier evidence: there is a link across to the fear of serious further offences. If you are a probation officer and managing cases, there is a fear that somebody on your caseload will do something dreadful. If you look at the headline numbers of serious further offences, a tiny fraction of people commit a serious further offence under the supervision of the Probation Service. Risk can never be eliminated in our system in which the Probation Service is managing and holding risk in the community—

Is there also an element of getting people off the books? If you have a very high caseload and people are recalled, they are somebody else’s problem for a while. Martin Jones: Certainly if you are uncertain about what is going on, the easiest thing is to take the decision to recall that individual. When we do our thematic inspection, we will hopefully shine a light on what is happening beneath that. I am certain from the work we have done already that there is work that could take place to ensure that people are better supported upon release so they have a chance of succeeding. My other question, which links back to our public protection work is, if the Probation Service improves the quality of the work on public protection to understand the difference between somebody who is a high-risk domestic abuse perpetrator, for whom you have a very limited capacity for risk, and somebody who is a lower-risk offender, you would perhaps be more confident in holding that risk in the community.

But none of those matters have changed. What I am trying to get at is why there has been such a significant change. The best answer you have given so far is the risk aversion.

There are two things: The Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014 significantly increased the number of people being supervised on licence, so that is certainly part of it. The other thing is that if you look at the trend line, it is absolutely true that at the point at which policies were tightened up following serious further offences, the recall population significantly spiked thereafter. To some extent, the recall population is reflective of policy decisions made around tightening up recall, which has led to part of this. But I also think that the overload on probation means that, ultimately, there is perhaps more failure upon release.

There have been suggestions of taking part of the decision out of the hands of probation officers—that there is some other judicial process or Parole Board process—so that they are not the person left carrying the can if something goes wrong. Do you think we need to do that?

I have spoken to the Parole Board in Scotland, where the final decision on recall rests with the Parole Board. It would be worth looking at that. Under our current system, the Probation Service recalls some cases, which is an executive decision and essentially the equivalent of a four-month custodial sentence. That then goes to the Parole Board to review. Why can you not have a fast decision by the Parole Board? That might also provide some defence for probation officers who are worried about serious offences, because it will rest on the shoulders of the Parole Board. In New Zealand and Australia, a recall decision is generally speaking a matter for the courts; it is a judicial decision, not a matter for the executive.

What we are doing in 56 days is a sort of fudge, isn’t it? We are saying that we are going to carry on with the current process, but we will have a cut-off point, which might allow enough time for some rehabilitative or reconstructive work to go on in prison.

It will stop some problems in the current system with 14 days, which I think is highly problematic. But I would encourage the Department to look very hard at whether there is more work to do to understand what exactly is happening under that recall. If you look at the evidence and the graph, it worries me enormously that there has been such a sharp increase over the last 10 years. Q513 Warinder Juss: Martin, do you think the recall framework is too risk-averse? It is very easy just to say, “You have broken a licence condition. Back into prison you go for public protection.”

There is certainly scope to look at that framework really hard and ask whether you could reposition it, on the basis that there will be some offenders for whom immediate recall to custody would be justified, but I absolutely think that the current numbers look too high. You could manage those by better supporting officers to say, “Actually it is part of your job to manage that risk in the community.” Some of that requires some courage; it also requires the chief inspector to provide support to the frontline so that whenever there has been a mistake, you cannot simply say that you hold the probation officer accountable. It is about defensible decision making: if you recall everybody the second they put a foot wrong, you would end up with our prisons completely clogged up with recalls. Is that really what we want? We want people to succeed upon release, and that should be the focus.

I was quite concerned about something you said: after previous changes increased the workload of probation officers, recalls increased very rapidly. Obviously the aim of the Government’s newly changed plan is to have fewer people in prison so that those in prison can have more effective sentences and rehabilitation, but what that is actually going to do is result in a significant uplift for in Probation Service. Do you think there is a risk that as those caseloads increase, the recall numbers do the same thing again, which would be bad? Do you have any evaluation of the likely level of risk?

It is something I am wary about, and it is important that we keep a close eye on it. Certainly, when the SDS40 changes were implemented, my big fear was that you would release people and very quickly a significant number of people would be recalled to custody. Unfortunately, I was right about that. We saw a significant spike in the recall population following the SDS40 scheme. It would be important that we monitor those numbers going forward so that we understand what lies behind this. From a probation officer’s point of view, if you are making a recall decision three or four times, you have repeated cycles of failure, and that is extra work for the Probation Service in the short term, and then you are preparing again for that release. It is something we need to be cautious about. At the moment, until we see the evidence, I would not like to predict success or failure, but I am wary that there are risks that the behaviour may change within the system.

One more question, then we will let you go. I do not know whether he wrote to you as well, but the Prisons Minister wrote to us last week about the changes in probation, reminding us of all the extra resources, extra posts that are being recruited and all that, which is all very good news. He also said between 2023 and 2025, 31% of target probation appointments did not take place due to unmanageable workloads. That is a very high number, which shows a system that is not coping. Given there are extra resources, but also very significant extra responsibilities, will the system cope going forward?

The reason why I support the changes that were announced last week is that they are based on realism. On an ordinary inspection, we observe that people are meant to be seeing their probation officer frequently but they are not doing that because the Probation Service is so overstretched. Under the new system, there is a chance of meeting that, but it is about ensuring that implementation is carefully monitored and planned. The other thing that I am content with is that the implementation has been staged to ensure that it comes in phases and that there is time to prepare people. If it had all come in very quickly this spring, it would have been much more problematic. We need to keep an eye on it, and from the autumn we will be inspecting to see what the impact of some of the changes is and reporting publicly on those findings.

Thank you very much, as always, for your frankness, clarity and competence in answering our questions, Mr Jones. That is all the business we have this afternoon. I will therefore close the meeting.