Government must actively manage plan to boost weak Probation Service performance, says National Audit Office report

• In 2024-25, HMPPS met only 26% of its targets, a drop of 24 percentage points since 2021-22. 
• HMPPS has been recruiting more probation staff, but in 2024 found it had underestimated the number of staff required to provide sentence management tasks by around a third (5,400 staff). 
• To mitigate the impact on offender outcomes and public protection, HMPPS and MoJ must actively manage the risks associated with its innovative programme to reduce Probation Service workloads. 

Risks in the government's plans to ease workload pressure on the Probation Service must be fully understood and actively managed to ensure it can achieve its aims of rehabilitating offenders and protecting the public, amid worsening performance in the service due to inexperienced staff and gaps in critical roles.^1,2

The Probation Service aims to protect the public by managing any risks offenders pose when they leave prison or receive community sentences, and by reducing the chance of them reoffending through supporting rehabilitation in the community.

But a new National Audit Office (NAO) report has found that the service has remained under significant strain since it returned to full public ownership in June 2021 following a major reorganisation. In 2024-25, performance dropped by 24 percentage points compared with 2021-22 levels.³ And some areas of performance are worse than others: in 2024, probation practitioners adequately assessed risk of harm from offenders in just 28% of cases, compared with 60% in 2018-19.⁴

Staff shortages and skills gaps are major contributing factors to poor performance.⁵  HM Prison & Probation Service (HMPPS) was slow to introduce major changes to address staffing shortfalls and reduce high workloads, and its efforts have not been sufficient.^6,7,8

In 2024, HMPPS found it had significantly underestimated the number of staff required to provide sentence management tasks by approximately 34% (5,400 staff) and was operating with around only half the number of sentence management staff it needed.

HMPPS estimates that it needs to address a capacity gap of around 3,150 staff in 2026-27, even after its recruitment aims. It is therefore relying on further transformation of the Probation Service.

In February 2025, HMPPS established its innovative ‘Our Future Probation Service' (OFPS) programme to reduce workloads by 25% across the service through improving existing processes and changing the scope of probation supervision. It has adopted a high risk appetite for the programme, with the aim of increasing capacity in response to policy changes that are likely to put further pressures on the service.⁹  

But HMPPS and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) have not fully assessed the potential consequences of OFPS assuming a high level of risk, nor have they set clear thresholds for how much risk the Probation Service can tolerate, which means it may be hard to spot risks that become too high to manage.

The NAO's report identifies two principal risks to the long-term resilience of the Probation Service: uncertainty over whether HMPPS proposals will free up sufficient capacity to improve performance, and the possible adverse impact of changes on public protection, rehabilitation and wider government objectives such as its ‘safer streets' mission, if they are not actively managed.

The NAO recommends that MoJ and HMPPS:

• take a robust approach to understanding and managing risks associated with its OFPS programme;
• take steps to minimise the impact of change on probation staff;
• ensure that sufficient capacity is freed up to improve the quality of probation supervision; and
• implement robust monitoring and evaluation to assess and react to the impact of changes on the level and depth of probation supervision and support.
  
  

Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said:

“A well-functioning Probation Service can ease the financial burden that reoffending imposes on society, which currently costs an estimated £21 billion a year.

“Since the service was brought back under full public control in June 2021, performance has declined, with significant staffing shortfalls and high workloads.

“‘Our Future Probation Service' is a bold and innovative approach to increase resilience. The government must manage the risks associated with the programme to mitigate the impact on offenders' chances of successfully rehabilitating in the community.”

ENDS

Notes to editors

1. The report will be available on the NAO website via the following link from 00:01 Friday 24 October: https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/building-an-effective-and-resilient-probation-service/ 
2. The Probation Service forms part of HMPPS, which is responsible for carrying out custodial and community sentences given by the courts in England and Wales, and for rehabilitating people in its care.
3. As measured against HMPPS targets.
4. According to HM Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP) data. HMIP carries out inspections of the Probation Service.
5. In March 2025, there were 5,636 full-time equivalent Probation Officers (POs) in the Probation Service, some 79% of its target staffing level, leaving a shortfall of 1,479 POs. The proportion of inexperienced staff (with less than or equal to four years' experience) has increased by 10 percentage points since the Probation Service was brought back under full public control, from 28% in March 2021 to 38% in March 2025. HMPPS acknowledges that these factors have contributed to high staff workloads and in turn to poor service delivery.
6. HMPPS sought to increase staff through its 2021-2024 recruitment and retention strategy, and to improve retention. HMPPS met its targets for trainee probation officer recruitment up to 2024-25 and implemented several initiatives to improve retention such as its 2022 multi-year pay deal. However, staff turnover has increased, and workloads remain high. NAO analysis shows that HMPPS's plans were insufficient to fill the PO capacity gap in the years up to March 2025, as training takes up to 27 months and the number of trainees was constrained by affordability and organisational capacity to support increased numbers of trainees.
7. In response to unmanageable workloads, HMPPS introduced a temporary prioritisation measure from 2022 which prioritised public protection over rehabilitation, but workloads remained high for POs, who deal with higher-risk offenders (at 118% of capacity on average).
8. HMPPS has implemented policy changes for probation to offset the increase in probation demand arising from emergency measures to alleviate prison capacity pressures. In April 2024, it launched its ‘Reset' programme, under which probation staff contact is generally suspended in the last third of an offender's licence period (although some categories of offender are excluded from this arrangement). HMPPS's data show workloads reduced following ‘Reset' and allowed staff to increase contact with very high-risk cases. However, it did not sufficiently reduce workloads for POs: in 10 out of 12 probation regions, POs were still working on average at above 100% capacity.
9. The Independent Sentencing Review (ISR), published in May 2025, recommends that the MoJ makes greater use of alternatives to prison to avoid running out of prison places, including an increased emphasis on probation. The Sentencing Bill, which will operationalise ISR recommendations once passed into legislation, was introduced to the House of Commons in September 2025.