Oral Answers to Questions

Chris Evans Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2023 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[Chris Evans (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op)]

1. What recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the probation service.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Damian Hinds)]

Probation professionals perform a critical and invaluable role for our society. We are injecting an additional £155 million a year to recruit more staff, reduce case loads and continue to deliver better community supervision of offenders. We are seeing improvements in performance as that investment beds in, but there is more to do and I continue to monitor things closely.

[Chris Evans]

I thank the Minister for that answer, but he will know that Napo, GMB and Unison all say that the probation service is facing soaring workloads. Employees are battling under the pressure and sickness rates are high. With many workers off sick, the impact on public safety will be massive. Something must be done. Stepping outside the politics of this, will he commit to working constructively with unions and other agencies to bring about a strategy that will address this critical area of probation?

[Damian Hinds]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman who I know takes a very close interest in these matters, and rightly so. I commit to working in partnership with unions and other representative bodies and others to make sure that we have the right support for this service. Let me reassure him that recruitment to the probation service has been very encouraging over the past three years and we have managed to exceed our stretching recruitment targets.