Three of out five staff in the National Probation Service are overworked leaving it unable to fulfil its role of monitoring serious offenders, government inspectors have warned.
The service, which has responsibility for supervising 106,000 high-risk offenders across England and Wales, is “not performing to its full capability”, according to HM Inspectorate of Probation. It also criticised widespread shortcomings in buildings maintenance.
The failings of the NPS were highlighted in November when Usman Khan, a convicted Jihadi subject to curfew restrictions, was allowed to travel to London where he went on a rampage with knives, killing two people before being shot dead by police.
The findings are part of the first review of the state-run NPS at the national level following a series of assessments of the seven regional divisions in England and Wales that highlighted recurring problems with understaffing and building maintenance.
Inspectors found that 60 per cent of staff had caseloads greater than their theoretical maximum, while almost a third had workloads running above 120 per cent of their capacity.
The NPS was hamstrung by high levels of vacancies — 653 of the 3,926 posts in the service were unfilled on September 30 last year. Justin Russell, chief inspector of probation, said the 2015 reforms had disrupted hiring at the NPS which led to a “tailing off” in recruitment and the service was now “paying the price” for it.
Plugging the recruitment gap was one of the report’s 24 recommendations, which also included a new strategy to address the issue of widespread, poor maintenance. This was so bad in some areas that inspectors found buildings infested with rats.
The NPS was given responsibility for supervising high-risk offenders under reforms introduced by Chris Grayling, then justice secretary, in 2015. Those changes led to low and medium-risk offenders being supervised by the private sector, which inspectors said functioned worse than the NPS.
The chaotic privatisation is due to be unwound this year, with all offender management returned to state control, after the reforms were found to cause “significant risks” for both offenders and the public.
The report was highly critical of the state of many of the NPS’s buildings. It found that only 43 per cent of maintenance jobs on buildings were carried out within a 10-day target period in 2019. The failure led to the closure of some facilities for handling newly-released inmates.
The Ministry of Justice said it recognised the need to fill vacancies. “We have around 800 new probation officers in training which will help to boost supervision and reduce reoffending.”
