THE probation service is in crisis and is failing staff, clients and the public, yet no-one seems to want to take responsibility or action. 

While the prison crisis is widely talked about, too little is being said about the probation service, its capacity and ability to carry out its primary functions of rehabilitation and public protection. 

It is easy to monitor when the prison service is at capacity — simply count the number of beds you have versus what you need, but it is much more difficult to measure the capacity of the probation service, yet you can’t solve the prison overcrowding problems without it. 

We have recently seen a shift from one early release scheme to another in a desperate attempt to free up cell space, all the while throwing more and more work at an overstretched probation service already at breaking point.

There is no quick fix for probation or the rest of the broken justice system as a result of 14 years of deliberate underfunding and at times, sheer political neglect, but urgent solutions are needed to ease the pressures that staff and clients are under. 

The only short-term answer to that is money. Labour must dig deep to provide an emergency funding package for the service, directed at the front line, to stem the flow of staff voting with their feet and leaving the service altogether.

Probation wages have stagnated for 14 years and Napo members have seen little or no real growth in their salary over the last decade, yet they are being asked to do more work with no sign of any let-up. 

Napo is calling on the new Labour government to take immediate action not just to ensure the safe supervision of clients in the community but also to ensure the survival of the probation service as a whole. 

One Napo member said: “Staff don’t feel protected. It feels like the service doesn’t care about us.” 

Another said: “I know why they have introduced the early release scheme in September, but it hasn’t been thought through properly and isn’t safe. I am being notified of clients being released just a week before their release date, which is simply too short notice to make the necessary arrangements.”

Ultimately we need a long-term solution to the years of neglect to properly stabilise the probation service, but that will take time. Napo’s key policy is to get probation out of the Civil Service. 

General secretary Ian Lawrence said: “Probation isn’t designed for the Civil Service. It is a local service that should be embedded in local communities. Local leaders need to be able to respond to the communities they service and have the autonomy to do that, but not bogged down in a centralised operational culture that is more interested in data than people. We call on Labour to sit down with us to have a grown up conversation about the future of probation.”

Napo is currently urging senior management and the Lord Chancellor to address the urgent issue of overworked staff who are leaving the service or going off sick with work-related stress (sickness has significantly increased in the probation service with mental health being the biggest cause of absence). 

The union maintains that HM Prison and Probation Service must review how it currently deals with these pressures. Handing absence warnings to staff off sick with work-related stress but doing nothing to alleviate the cause as well as the effect is just not sustainable.

Lawrence said: “Our members go above and beyond what can be reasonably expected of staff and yet when they inevitably go off sick due to burnout, the service punishes them but takes no responsibility for their role in that absence. Our members are treated appallingly and we call on senior leaders to review how they deal with sickness absence and work-related stress, and bring an end to the draconian approach that simply exacerbates the pressures on our members.”

Tania Bassett is Napo national official (Press, Parliamentary
& Campaigning).