Giving evidence at an inquest last week, England’s most senior probation officer admitted that inexperienced and unqualified staff had made a “fundamental error” by classing Damien Bendall as posing a “low risk of harm to partners and to children”.
When Bendall, who had a history of domestic violence, murdered his pregnant girlfriend and three children in September 2021, he was on probation after receiving a 24-month suspended sentence for arson. He is now serving a whole-life sentence for the murders.
Every probation officer worries that among their towering caseload will be the next Bendall, said Tania Bassett, a national official for Napo, the trade union for probation workers.
“We have to do our best to make sure that that doesn’t happen again. But in the current climate, I can’t see that it won’t,” she said. “When you put anybody under that level of continual stress and strain and pressure, mistakes will happen.”
The pressures on probation are only going to mount after a twin set of announcements made by the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, on Monday last week.
First, he announced immediate emergency measures to release some prisoners up to 18 days early. About 100 have been released under that mechanism since, the Guardian understands.
More radically, Chalk said the government would “legislate for a presumption that custodial sentences of less than 12 months in prison will be suspended”. Instead of being sent to jail, most low-level offenders “will be punished in the community instead, repaying their debt within communities, cleaning up our neighbourhoods and scrubbing graffiti off walls,” he said.
Chalk said 55% of those given such short sentences reoffended within a year of release, so prison clearly wasn’t working.
It was a big departure for a government that likes to appear tough on crime. In August it was reported that ministers planned to introduce mandatory jail sentences for repeat shoplifters. In May, new sentencing guidelines raised the maximum sentence for animal cruelty from six months to five years. Since 2015, any adult caught twice with a knife must receive at least six months in jail.
Harsher sentences have been a hallmark of successive Conservative governments over the past 13 years, with the inevitable result that between 2012 and 2021 the average jail term increased from 17 to 24.9 months. Meanwhile, the number of community sentences has dropped by nearly two-thirds, from 189,333 in 2010 to 68,994 in 2022.
This month the prison population reached an all-time high of 88,225, with two-thirds of jails in England and Wales officially overcrowded. At least 15,000 prisoners are on remand, awaiting trial, owing to court backlogs caused by the Covid pandemic plus the fact that the Tories have closed half of all magistrates courts since 2010.
Chalk’s announcements prompted panic in the already overstretched probation service, which last year was managing 240,431 cases in prison and in the community.
Last month the departing chief inspector of probation, Justin Russell, reported “chronic staffing shortages at every grade which have led to what staff perceive to be unmanageable workloads” and said he was particularly worried about “consistently weak” public protection.
At the inquest for Bendall’s victims, the chief probation officer, Kim Thornden-Edwards, said the probation service had invested significantly in staff since the murders.
Chalk told MPs that the government was already injecting £155m a year to recruit probation staff to bring down caseloads and deliver better supervision of offenders in the community.
But in March this year there were actually 76 fewer probation officers than a year previously (4,413, compared with 4,489), though there were 846 more lower-qualified probation service officers, nearly 200 more senior probation officers and almost 500 more trainees.
There are particular shortages in London and the south, where housing costs are greatest. In Dorset, half of all qualified probation posts were unfilled this summer, resulting in difficulties in delivering unpaid work.
“People are being promoted to a senior probation officer six to nine months after they qualify,” Bassett said. “They are delivering training on things like parole, having never written a parole report in their life.”
Inside many prisons there are not enough probation staff working in offender management units (OMUs), which are supposed to prepare prisoners for release. At HMP Lowdham Grange in Nottinghamshire, probation officers manage 100 prisoners each, a recent inspection found, and prisoners were frustrated that “they were not receiving the help they needed to achieve their sentence plan targets”.
When inspectors put Woodhill high-security prison in Milton Keynes into special measures in September, the OMU had only half of the probation-trained managers it needed.
Sickness levels are high because of stress, said Bassett. “We had a workload meeting with members a few weeks ago and there was a member there who went off sick when her work dropped to 200%, down from 320%. She finally said: ‘I can’t do this any more,’” she said.
Chalk’s reforms will also affect the judiciary, particularly magistrates, who impose more short sentences than crown court judges. The principle is good, said Mark Beattie, the chair of the Magistrates Association. “Magistrates don’t take any pleasure in sending people to custody,” he said. But he queried what the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) was doing to increase unpaid work placements and other programmes to tackle problems such as drug and alcohol abuse imposed as part of community sentences.
“What frustrates us probably most is: it takes a long time for people to get on to that unpaid work pattern,” said Beattie, a magistrate in London. “We know it’s a challenge for probation to find enough projects. Unpaid work has to be done [for] 12 months and we see probation coming back to court and asking us to extend community orders.”
Less than half of all unpaid work orders are completed within 12 months in most regions of England, according to MoJ figures, with timely completions at under 40% in Greater Manchester and Yorkshire.
The availability and quality of treatment programmes imposed as part of many community sentences is also patchy, said Beattie, with a “postcode lottery” of which schemes are available in each area.
For example, men convicted of domestic violence offences are often ordered to complete a course called Building Better Relationships, which has long waiting lists – 29% start the course more than six months after their referral date.
Though Napo has advocated for years for an end to short sentences for non-public order offences, Bassett does not believe Chalk’s announcement was rooted in ideology.
“I think they’ve just got to the point where they’ve got to be seen to do something because otherwise judges can’t sentence people,” she said. “I genuinely don’t think there’s a belief behind it, it’s not them thinking ‘we need to do some reform’. It’s their hand is being forced, it’s a sticking plaster over this gaping wound.”
