Napo have said since the early releases were first announced that there should be more exemptions to ensure public protection is achievable. As such the new exemptions are welcome but do not address the real issues of public protection and safe releases.
The Prime Minister and the Justice Secretary have failed to acknowledge the probation workloads crisis that has afflicted the service for over 2 years now. It is not clear if the prime minister or the Lord Chancellor have a clue about how ill-equipped the probation service is take on this additional work. For example, there are huge numbers of vacancies in Victim Liaison Roles, so we are not sure how the extra Victim Contact Scheme work will be done.
Plans to release thousands of domestic abuse perpetrators and stalkers early from prison does not boost victim protection. It means that more people, largely women, will be killed or harmed.
There’s no additional funding to retain probation staff, especially experienced ones, despite endemic staffing problems in many key roles across England and Wales.
Whilst it is welcome that the prime minister has intervened to review the policy, more now needs to be done to ensure the probation service can safely manage people in the community. This means addressing the workloads and staffing crisis, investing significant amounts of money to retain staff and improve working conditions for those that will be tasked to do this important additional work.
Ian Lawrence General Secretary said: “Everyone is talking about prisons, and yes it is bad, but the crisis in probation is far worse. But yet again, our members are being overlooked while all the attention is on prison. Without probation none of this can happen, so the service needs to be front and centre to this discussion”.
Napo is currently in a formal trade dispute with HMPPS over workloads and we are currently in an indicative ballot of our members due to close on Monday. We expect a strong response from our members indicating a wish to ballot for industrial action.
We urge the Prime Minister to look closely at the issues that our members are struggling with. There is such strength of feeling that Napo members passed a motion of no confidence in HMPPS to fix the crisis in June. We now need to see action on the probation crisis and not just knee jerk reaction to the ever-growing prison population.