Grayling’s glittering career

Justice secretary blames predecessor for probation’s lost decade

In a speech yesterday about the probation service, the justice secretary Shabana Mahmood spoke sarcastically about the “glittering government career” of Lord Grayling, who was Conservative justice secretary from September 2012 to May 2015.

While there had been bright moments in the probation service’s past, she said on a visit to the London probation service headquarters, there had been dark days too.

Shabana Mahmood speaking yesterday

Mahmood continued:

In 2010, the axe of austerity swung. Ideology trumped evidence and probation suffered the consequences.

The most devastating blow was dealt in 2014, when the service was split.

Part remained in the public sector, managing the highest-risk offenders. The rest was hived off, to be run by the private sector who would supervise those of low and medium risk.

Like all bad ideas, the approach was deceptively simple and wrong. So-called community rehabilitation companies would bring the ingenuity of the private sector to solve the problem of reoffending.

The rhetoric was of a revolution in how we manage offenders. The reality was far different. Workloads increased as new offenders were brought under supervision for the first time. The number of people on probation increased between December 2014 and December 2016, with almost 50,000 offenders newly under its remit.

Scarce resources were stretched further than ever. Morale plummeted and worrying numbers voted with their feet, leaving the service altogether — with the inspector of probation declaring a “national shortage” of probation professionals in 2019.

The new companies woefully underperformed. Between 2017 and 2018, just five of 37 audits carried out by HM Prison and Probation Service demonstrated that expected standards were being met.

In 2019, eight out of 10 companies inspected received the lowest possible rating — “inadequate” — for supervising offenders. The chief inspector called them "irredeemably flawed".

In Chris Grayling’s glittering government career, this was surely the high-water mark. For the probation service, what followed was a lost decade. Hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money was wasted and the service was labelled “inadequate”.

In 2021, it was finally, rightly, re-unified and re-nationalised.

Every day, across the country, probation staff make this country safer. This was clearly evident in the service’s response to the prison capacity crisis.

With prisons just days from collapse, this government was forced to introduce an emergency release programme which saw some offenders leave prison a few weeks or months early.

The alternative, as I said at the time, did not bear thinking about. We would have been forced to shut the front door of our prisons, an act that would have sent dominoes tumbling through our justice system — courts unable to hold trials, police forced to halt arrests and the eventual path to a total breakdown of law and order.

In making that decision, I knew the probation service would have to carry an even heavier load. They would have to put in place plans for the safe release of prisoners in just a few weeks.

I tried to give them as much time as I possibly could to prepare. Unlike the previous government’s emergency release measure — the end-of-custody supervised licence, which released 10,000 offenders with little warning —ours had an eight-week implementation period.

It wasn’t long to prepare, but the probation service used it with great skill.

But now is also a moment to be honest about the challenges the service faces. The service this government inherited was burdened with a workload that was, quite simply, impossible. There was a fundamental dishonesty at play, a confidence trick — a pretence that offenders would receive supervision which was, in fact, impossible to deliver.

When we took office, we discovered that orders handed out by courts were not taking place. In the three years to March 2024, around 13,000 accredited programmes — a type of rehabilitative course — did not happen. They did not happen and the previous government always knew that they could not happen.

This wasn’t because an offender had failed to do what was expected of them but instead because the probation service had been unable to deliver these courses.

And this problem wasn’t new. It had been years in the making. It had been obvious to my predecessors. And yet, just as we found in our prisons, the last government chose to dodge the difficult decision. They chose instead to sustain a convenient fiction.

As I have shown already in this job, I believe in confronting problems — not pretending they are not there. And so we will end the last government’s pretence that these courses were ever going to be delivered. And we will ensure those offenders who pose a higher risk, and who need to receive these courses, will do so.

Offenders who failed to complete an accredited programme, Mahmood explained, would remain under the supervision of a probation officer. Any breach of their licence conditions could out them back behind bars.

On taking office, Mahmood had committed to bringing on 1,000 trainee probation officers by next month. A further 1,300 would be recruited within the next year, she announced. Records would be digitised and risk assessment would be made more straightforward.

Mahmood wanted to make better use of probation officers’ limited time. When dealing with lower-risk offenders, they would spend time with the offender immediately after release and then refer that client to a service such as education, training, drug treatment or accommodation.

That would leave probation officers with more time to spend with offenders who posed a risk of committing a serious and violent further offence.

As a result of David Gauke’s sentencing review, said Mahmood, courts would impose more drug, alcohol and mental health treatment requirements — so judges needed to be confident that the probation service could deliver them. And we could expect to see fewer people serving prison sentences — or, as she chose to put it, more sentences were likely to be served in the community.

• I have quoted at length from Mahmood’s lecture because government officials now routinely remove what they regard as “political” content from ministerial speeches before they appear several hours later on departmental websites. That may be appropriate when ministers speak at party conferences and other purely political events. But if a minister speaks as a minister on a ministerial visit I believe the public should have access to an uncensored account of what that minister actually said — especially if the speech is open to broadcasters.

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