PROBATION officers have voted overwhelmingly in favour of potential strike action in protest against the early release of prisoners.

Some 5,000 people are expected to be released early under sentencing changes. All will need to be managed in the community by probation staff.

Their union, Napo, said the system is already struggling to cope, and that a bigger workload will put public safety at risk.

About 90 per cent of its members backed potential industrial action.

Napo national chair Ben Cockburn said: “Probation staff make decisions every day with life-changing consequences for the people we work with, victims and the public. 

“If excessive workloads prevent those decisions being made properly, the consequences can be devastating.”

Mr Cockburn said the government “cannot keep treating probation as the place where the consequences of failures elsewhere in the criminal justice system are dumped.”

“If you overload probation, you increase risk,” he said. “It really is that simple.”

Ministers have said £700 million of investment in the Probation Service by 2028 will mean tens of thousands more offenders can be tagged and monitored in the community.

But Napo said the money must go towards improving conditions for probation staff, with Mr Cockburn saying promises of extra investment “are starting to sound like snake oil when we have heard them so many times before.”

“We have been told about hundreds, then thousands, of new recruits,” he said. 

“But how many qualified, stayed, or later left because workloads, pay and conditions became unbearable?

“You cannot recruit your way out of a retention crisis while leaving the underlying problems untouched.”

The Ministry of Justice said it was “disappointed” by the outcome of the indicative ballot, having agreed a pay increase earlier this year.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham paused the early release scheme last month in the face of a public outcry over the potential early release of the killers of Pc Andrew Harper.

Prisoners serving sentences for rape or child sex offences were exempted from the changes, and Mr Burnham pushed back the date when the first early releases would begin, from September to October, to give the Probation Service more time to prepare.

He has now ordered Justice Secretary Alex Norris to find a way to prevent the early release of Pc Harper’s killers.