I joined the probation service as a job for life. But after five years, I’ve had enough

When Mary joined the probation service in 2018, she believed she had found a job for life in helping offenders to rehabilitate back into society and protecting the public.

But just five years later, she has decided to follow more than 2,000 of her colleagues who quit the service in the year to March – a tenth of the full-time workforce.

Following a failed privatisation drive and several high-profile murders in which the probation service had wrongly labelled the killers “medium-risk”, the system is in crisis. Morale is low among staff, two thirds of whom say they are struggling under unmanageable workloads, as last-ditch government plans to free up space in overcrowded prisons threaten to heap an influx of new offenders into their care.

Mary, who is one of around a dozen probation services officers (PSO) in her office, told The Independent of having to personally handle 65 low and medium-risk cases – with inspectors judging that 50 is the limit at which officers can effectively deliver on rehabilitation and public protection.

“That’s 65 different individuals whose risk needs to be managed, most of them being in the community,” she said. “It’s very anxiety-provoking working in these conditions because you just don’t know what’s going to happen, and unfortunately with a lot of practitioners things do get missed.

“Even when they’re in custody, you’re still attending the panels, doing paperwork, reports ... it’s never-ending. I don’t think there’s enough hours in the day to do this job.”

When people under the supervision of probation are charged with committing serious further offences, the official reviews of these cases are circulated among all staff. There were more than 400 reviews in the year to April. When 86 of these cases were analysed by inspectors, 30 involved murder and 20 rape, and in nearly half, the ‘risk of harm’ assessments were found to be inaccurate or incomplete.

“The first thing [the reviews] will say is: ‘caseloads are too high, the practitioner couldn’t manage, this was missed because the practitioner is overworked and had to remember 101 other things’,” Mary said, adding: “It just feels like it’s falling on deaf ears.”

“We are completely overwhelmed, morale is low, and we have multiple people in our offices on long-term sick leave – so six months or more – because it is so stressful,” she continued. Across the service, more than half of sick days last year were related to mental health, which probation inspectors also say is “a reflection of the stress that many staff feel themselves under”.

“The main thing is the lack of staff,” said Mary. “People leave the service because it’s too stressful, but the fact that nobody else is there to share the load – it’s a lot harder.”

But there is strain across the system. “A lot of the work we do, we take on from other services,” said Mary, who received six weeks of training prior to starting as a PSO in 2018.

“It took me two days last week to work on a housing referral because it had 10 pages. That’s not my job, I don’t work for housing, but I know that this person cannot be on the streets of London, because that could make them susceptible to reoffending and put the public in danger.

“We don’t want that, so now I’m doing everybody else’s job plus my own. It becomes very, very frustrating and you have no work-life balance. I left the office at 10pm last night. I have a key for my office, because I stay there so late that I have to lock up. As soon as I get home I’m in my bed because I’m so tired, so drained. I wake up at 6 o’clock again to do it all again. No trainee would see that and think it’s a life they want.”

While a national recruitment drive means there were 2,600 people training to become probation officers as of 31 March, the most recent data showed nearly one in six of trainees were giving up.

“They are thrown in headfirst a lot of the time, which I think is what scares them off,” said Mary, who is in her 30s. “They’re supposed to be protected with the amount of work they have and cases they have, but what I find is that, when the office is in need, then that’s scrapped.”

Mary said she had seen trainees leave with just two months left to complete of their 21-month probation officer training, after hearing their colleagues with 20 or 30 years experience warn they have never “seen the service in the state that it’s in” – and that “it’s not sustainable”.

While Mary believes her older colleagues “are only here because they feel they can’t go anywhere else” and are “just waiting for retirement age”, younger recruits are using their experience in probation “as a stepping stone” into other government departments, companies and charities.

“A lot are moving into the charity sector to do what they had intended to do in probation,” said Mary. “It’s very hard to do the therapies and rehabilitative work when you’ve got 65 people to do risk assessments, processes, you’re constantly in meetings with other professionals.”

Warning that “we are doing a disservice to people who really need rehabilitation”, she said: “We really are their first port of call to lead a positive life and get back on track. But because we can’t dedicate that time with them and have that one-to-one rapport building kind of relationship, they don’t get what they truly need. And then what happens? They end up back in the service, and the service is again under pressure. So it’s a revolving door.

“And in the meantime we have really big crimes ... and lives are lost unfortunately – we are responsible for a lot and not being able to do what we truly want to do has an impact, it has an impact on everybody.”

Meanwhile, the service is bracing itself to deal with more offenders in the community. In eleventh-hour plans to free up space in prisons, justice secretary Alex Chalk announced last month – with immediate effect – that inmates can now be released up to 18 days early, and is also seeking to ensure that many offenders with sentences of up to 12 months are spared jail.

But Mary plans to have left the probation service by the time the latter change comes into effect.

“I have given it everything I can and I don’t have anything more left for it. I never wanted it to come to this. This was a job for life. It was a service that I definitely believed in and purposely studied to be involved with – and I’ve been in it for less than 10 years, and I’m ready to leave it.”