David Lammy didn’t cover himself in glory this week in Parliament. Our Lord Chancellor chortled and guffawed while his shadow Robert Jenrick tried to hold him to account for the release in error of a registered child sex offender from HMP Chelmsford whose crime sparked national protests. The shelf life of ‘but the Tories’ as a reflexive response to every ill is running out. It has kept Labour MPs well fed and with some justification, but voters are less easy to satisfy.
The latest security calamity comes, after all, a year and change after the arrival of the supposed changemakers. Hadush Kebatu was an illegal migrant who was turfed out of the prison on Friday morning a free man instead of being transferred for deportation. On both ends of the small boat spectrum, from mass arrival to minuscule removals, it is Labour’s core vote that is in danger of capsizing.
The news cycle fell voraciously upon this ludicrous and embarrassing blunder, and we now have the cooling carcass of yet another story almost designed to collapse public confidence in our justice system. But another scandalous revelation has dropped almost unremarked, and it is one that should give the Justice Secretary even less cause for mirth: the wreckage of our probation system.
His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) is an unloved shotgun marriage that started off with the best of intentions in 2004 in a previous Blairite construction called the National Offender Management Service. The view then was that the integration of offender treatment into one seamless service ‘through the prison gate’ would create efficiencies and deliver better outcomes for prisoners with better public protection for the community.
How’s that going? A bit pants, to tactfully paraphrase the spending watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO) which published its findings last week. After two decades of ludicrous and ruinous organisational vandalism – part privatisation, reunification, staff cuts, retention crises and overwhelming risk – the service is understaffed, unsustainable and ill-prepared for a looming increase in caseload, as the Government’s solution to the prisons capacity crisis leads to fewer offenders ending up behind bars.
The NAO’s report looked at probation performance since 2021, when the absurdity of a part-privatised service was finally buried after lining the pockets of multiple failing commercial providers for low-risk supervision. It found a severe decline in performance, with the organisation meeting only 26% of its targets in the last reporting year. Probation practitioners adequately assessed an offender’s risk in just 28% of cases – a public protection scandal hiding in plain sight.
The service has a gaping shortfall of 1,479 officers, despite emergency recruitment. Experience has evaporated. Meanwhile the report says bean counters at the Ministry of Justice have grossly underestimated the number of staff required to properly supervise sentence management of prisoners. Probation officers routinely manage 118% of their capacity, and even after countermeasures to reduce workloads, 10 out of 12 probation areas now say they are working at 100% capacity all the time. Burnout ensues, and the spiral of retention and recruitment crises intensifies.
The Government has gambled all on mass release of prisoners and the effective abolition of short sentences to reduce strain on overloaded prisons. Yet relying on the community punishment of offenders given the current state of the system will simply push the problem out onto the streets. It is clear that the probation service can’t even cope now, and little reason to hope it can expand to meet these new demands.
Rehabilitation programmes and supervision of offenders have already had to be slashed, to enable swamped probation officers to cope with the management of high-risk cases, which are increasing exponentially. That means there’s much less capacity to enforce unpaid work or offending behaviour programmes for lower and medium-risk offenders who will simply fall off the radar. Until they do something awful.
Ineffectiveness like this costs money and lives. Reoffending by prisoners who aren’t properly supervised or helped to change through and after custody is estimated to cost £20 billion a year. More to the point, understaffed and overwhelmed probation offices have directly contributed to some ghastly errors in risk management such as the brutal slaying of Zara Aleena in 2022 by a released prisoner supposedly under community supervision by an office with only 61% of its officer complement in post.
For years, the probation side of this besieged organisation has been starved and neglected of profile and funds. There are many good reasons to say that probation and prisons are philosophically and organisationally so different they should remain separate. Prisons are law enforcement, probation should be more like forensic social work with the emphasis on its founding principles, ‘befriend and advise’. I can still remember when these organisations were different but complementary entities. As the Governor of a prison with a lifer unit, I was inclined to keep most of the risk inside the walls and my colleague, the seconded senior probation officer, had the opposite perspective. That creative tension meant good risk-based decisions happened. It was certainly no worse than the algorithmic, push button approach that dominates today.
But there’s no time and no appetite for any more change in this much abused and misunderstood service. The Government has made its choice on sentencing, and that is to load even more risk onto an agency that can’t guarantee public protection and rehabilitation with existing workloads.
The moral injury of too few staff doing too little to manage the risks posed by too many will make their own headlines in due course. Despite the theatrics, I think David Lammy was genuinely infuriated by the failings at HMP Chelmsford. I fear for his blood pressure when he reads what’s being said about managing safety outside the prison gates.
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