Employment Relations and Working Conditions in Probation after Transforming Rehabilitation
In May 2013, amid much consternation and criticism from criminal justice academics among other commentators (including Napo national officers/officials and senior figures in some of the Probation Trusts), the then Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, publicly unveiled Transforming Rehabilitation – a programme of restructuring and outsourcing, which would split the probation service that had been in existence for over 100 years. Under TR, supervision and management of high-risk offenders were to remain in the public sector by way of a new National Probation Service within the Civil Service apparatus. Work with offenders described as low to medium risk (the latter amounting to an estimated 70% of the work carried out by 35 probation trusts across England and Wales) was to be outsourced to the private and third sectors.
In 2015, Napo commissioned Gill Kirton and Cécile Guillaume from the Centre for Research in Equality and Diversity School of Business and Management and Queen Mary University of London to carry out a piece of research on employment relations and working conditions in Probation after Transforming Rehabilitation with a special focus on gender and union effects. The findings of the research were published in a comprehensive report in September 2015. You can download a full copy of this report below.
The word cloud on the front cover of this report (above) captures the reactions of probation staff to the restructuring and outsourcing programmes.