UK: ‘In probation, we’re poorly paid and the caseloads are unmanageable’

Steve Brown has just completed three months on home detention curfew, having left prison at the end of November. Things are looking up. He has had his electronic tag removed and last week moved into new supported accommodation. “I’m in a good place,” he says, “but no thanks to the probation service.”

Earlier this month, the government’s spending watchdog issued a damning critique of former justice secretary Chris Grayling’s 2013 probation reforms, which, in its assessment, had been “set up to fail”. According to the National Audit Office (NAO), the number of offenders returned to prison has “skyrocketed” and taxpayers face paying at least £467m more than anticipated.

Under Grayling’s transforming rehabilitation programme, the Ministry of Justice dismantled 35 probation trusts and in their place created 21 community rehabilitation companies (CRCs) to manage low- or medium-risk offenders, while the National Probation Service looked after those posing higher risks. The proposals were rolled out in 2013 without being piloted and were foisted on a sector united in opposition to the part-privatisation of a public service. In 2017, HM Inspectorate of Probation found that CRCs were failing to properly assess risk of harm in half of cases and, last month, Working Links, the CRC responsible for probation in Wales and the south-west, went bust.

Brown is well placed to express a view on the success or otherwise of Grayling’s self-styled “rehabilitation revolution”. “I’ve been on and off licence since I was 18 and I’m now 39,” he says. He reckons he has been in prison 12 to 15 times. “I was on probation in 2015 just as the changeover started,” he says. “It was horrendous. The arse didn’t know what the elbow was doing.”

Last week, Brown moved into his new flat in the Midlands, without help from probation services. He was worried at the level of drug use in the supposed dry house he moved into on release: he says much of his offending was caused by a drug habit that he hopes he has finally kicked. “There were kids who were relapsing. I couldn’t be around them,” he says. To make contact with his officer, he says he would have to ring the freephone number to arrange an appointment through a call centre. “You end up being stuck on the phone for 20 minutes and you’re never put through to an officer. It’s pointless and frustrating. In the old days, I’d have my officer’s number on my phone and I’d just ring them.”

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