Risk of the ailing Probation Service being 'set up to fail'

Warning over biggest justice system reforms in a generation

- AMY-CLARE MARTIN CRIME CORRESPONDENT

With Britain’s crisis-hit prisons overflowing, ministers are pushing through plans for tens of thousands more criminals to be electronically tagged and punished in the community.

But with the Probation Service in a state of perpetual crisis – with too few staff handling too many cases and units missing 74 per cent of targets - fears are growing it is being “set up to fail”.

Martin Jones, the chief inspector of probation, said the reforms – currently progressing through parliament under the Sentencing Bill – are an “opportunity to transform our justice system”.

But he warned they risk “collapsing public confidence in probation” if they are implemented wrongly, adding that tagging will not stop criminals from reoffending unless they have enough trained staff to help them turn their life around.

“I think there is a danger that unless the government thinks very, very carefully about how it deploys probation resources... we will set up the Probation Service to fail, and that is clearly unacceptable,” he told The Independent.

Unions representing beleaguered probation officers also fear a promised £700m cash injection to meet the extra demand will be swallowed up by expensive contracts with private tagging firms, rather than used to bolster frontline staff.

It comes after the government spending watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO), found the service faces a shortfall of 3,150 full-time staff next year – even if it meets ambitious recruitment targets.

Meanwhile police chiefs are preparing for a 6 per cent spike in reported crime in the first year of the reforms, as they demand £400m in additional funding to cope.

'Inadequate' funding to turn around service in crisis