Probation Service standards have declined, says watchdog

Standards in the Probation Service have declined since it was brought back into public control in 2021, according to a hard-hitting report from a government watchdog.

The National Audit Office (NAO), which oversees public spending, said that in 2024-25 the Probation Service met only just over one-quarter of its targets – a drop of 24 percentage points from the success rate in the previous 12 months. The targets include delivering services, ensuring appointments are kept, and unpaid work placements.

In its report, titled ‘Building an effective and resilient Probation Service’, the NAO said that probation had moved its focus from rehabilitation to public protection in 2022, but the workload has not decreased as anticipated. The watchdog said that whilst the service had been recruiting more staff, it had underestimated the number required to undertake sentence management tasks by around a third, or 5,400 staff.

According to the NAO, there have been too many changes in policies and practices since renationalisation, leading to inconsistency in service delivery and confusion for staff. The probation ‘Reset’ programme, introduced in 2024, where monitoring was ceased in the final one-third of the licence period for most offenders, was intended to allow probation officers to give more time to those deemed high-risk. However, the NAO found that it had not significantly freed up staff time, although there were still insufficient records to calculate the full impact. 

Adequate assessment of risk of harm from offenders is properly recorded in only 28 per cent of cases, whereas back in 2018/19 it was achieved in 60 per cent. According to the NAO, the Probation Service estimates that it needs to address a capacity gap of 3,150 staff in 2026/27, even if it achieves its recruitment aims. It is therefore relying on further transformation of the service. 

However, the NAO says that probation has not fully assessed the potential consequences of its ‘Our Future Probation Service’ programme, which aims to reduce workload by 25 per cent. In particular, the service has misjudged the threshold of risk that it can tolerate, and the NAO is concerned that it may be hard to identify risks that become too high to manage in a timely way.

The NAO recommends that the Probation Service begins to understand risk more efficiently, ensures capacity is freed up, takes steps to minimise the impact of change on probation staff, and monitors and evaluates the impact of change on the depth of probation supervision and support.

Gareth Davies, head of the National Audit Office, warned that since 2021 probation had suffered with staffing shortfalls and high workloads. He said: “A well-functioning Probation Service can ease the financial burden that reoffending imposes on society, which currently costs an estimated £21 billion a year.”

A letter sent by Probation Service chiefs to the organisation’s staff, seen by Inside Time, says they are pleased that the report recognises the important work the department does. However it accepts that the content is “largely negative”, and says the service is under pressure and confirms that “workloads are too high”. 

Despite the NAO saying that the ‘Our Future Probation Service’ programme has misjudged the impact on reduction of workload, the letter cites programme as an example of changes that are being made. It also refers to the recruitment programme, even though the NAO specifies that the numbers being taken on are inadequate to ease the pressure. The letter says that AI and digital solutions are being looked at to reduce the pressure on staff, with pilot schemes up and running, and points to the increased funding that will come. The chiefs also tell their staff that the Sentencing Bill passing through Parliament will include “simplifying sentence management”. The NAO report warns that constant reorganisations hamper efficiency.

Faith Geary, Chief Operating Officer of HM Inspectorate of Probation, commented: “On our inspections we meet dedicated staff who are committed to transforming the lives of people on probation and keeping communities safe. However, the pressure they are under cannot be underestimated. Many of the findings in the NAO report come as no surprise and echo what we have been saying in recent years. We recognise that the rate of change probation practitioners face adds an extra layer of uncertainty, and welcome the NAO’s recommendation that HMPPS and the MoJ minimise the impact for staff.”

Ian Lawrence, General Secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, called the NAO report “one of the most damning that I have seen in my long career”. He said: “It totally vindicates everything that Napo has been saying about the current state of the Probation Service and the systemic failings by HMPPS leadership over a number of years, and the dereliction of duty shown by the previous government and, to some extent, the current administration in failing to get to grips with the myriad issues that are highlighted in the report.

“It’s also clear that the senior management within HMPPS has been an abject failure, and hopefully the Public Accounts Committee will be asking serious questions about how a shortfall of several thousand staff in sentence management could go under the radar. We also expect to see this Government deliver on its manifesto commitment to review the future governance structure of the service with a view to retuning probation back to the communities it serves and out of the prison-centric HMPPS.

“More immediately, staff need to see a pay offer. The unacceptable delay after several weeks of negotiations last summer smacks of disrespect and a continual assumption that the goodwill of staff can be relied upon yet again. Small wonder that Napo are making plans to again ballot our members for industrial action.

“We also want to see an enquiry into the perennial failures of Serco to deliver value to the taxpayer through its flawed electronic monitoring regime, which has produced one failure after another.”

The Ministry of Justice told Inside Time: “This Government inherited a Probation Service under immense pressure, and this has placed too great a burden on our hardworking staff. We are fixing it, with 1,000 trainee probation officers recruited last year and plans to recruit at least 1,300 more by April.

“We are also increasing the probation budget by an extra £700 million over the next three years and investing in new technology to reduce admin so staff can focus on work that reduces reoffending, helping to protect the public as part of our Plan for Change.” 

The report shows that in March 2025, the Probation Service supervised 241,540 people in England and Wales, and had 5,636 probation officer grade full-time equivalent staff.