Probation officers are voting on industrial action having rejected a 5% pay offer as they have been asked to take on responsibility for ‘tens of thousands of prisoners’ sent into communities under early release schemes.
Napo rejected the offer on the basis that it failed to catch up with lost earnings since 2010 and was out of line with comparable sectors, including local government, NHS prisons, and the police. ‘Last week saw the latest in a long line of early release schemes where probation has been asked to take on huge amounts of additional work in the tens of thousands of prisoners released early from prisons since 2022,’ the union said. ‘This offer does not reflect the value of probation staff to our communities.’
According to the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee writing on Friday, probation workers ‘caseloads overflowed long ago’. ‘[But] now thousands of prisoners released early – 2,000 this month – have been thrust upon them. The responsibility is overwhelming, with officers blamed for crimes their clients commit.’
The probation service is still suffering from its disastrous part privatisation in 2014 under Chris Grayling as justice secretary which had to be reversed in 2021. A recent report by the spending watchdog the National Audit Office concluded that since unification ‘performance has worsened, with significant staffing shortfalls and high workloads.’
Whilst the probation service, part of HMPPS, increased its recruitment of probation workers, in 2024 its own internal analysis indicated that it had ‘significantly underestimated’ the time needed for sentence management tasks suffesting, according to the NAO, it was operating with ‘around half the staff needed for sentence management’.
Napo chair Ben Cockburn told Toynbee that the service need ‘reduced workloads, pruned to the riskiest cases, leaving less serious cases unallocated’ and an end to the courts ‘piling on more cases’ until there are enough probation workers. ‘Put the service into special measures,’ he said. ‘We are firefighting from one emergency to another. We are addicted to prison.’
