Probation Service: Chief Inspector’s Reviews into Serious Further Offences

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman is right to identify the particularly serious findings on London probation services and his particular service in Hammersmith and Fulham. We published at the start of this month a comprehensive plan for addressing those issues. We had already been implementing a number of initiatives and programmes. A lot of it is to do with ensuring that we get the staffing up to where it needs to be. At the time of the London inspections, quite a large number of individuals had not been allocated to named officers and were instead coming through a central facility. All those cases are now allocated, ensuring that the multi-agency public protection arrangements are properly in place. There is an ongoing programme of surveilling progress in London to make sure we are delivering against the really important improvements that we know need to be made. Although we do not have the numbers yet, I expect that in the next set of statistics on recruitment, we will see an improvement in the London area.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I rise as the co-chair of the justice unions parliamentary group. The first recommendation of the chief inspector of probation’s review into the case of Damien Bendall states that His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service should

“ensure that domestic abuse enquiries are carried out on everyone sentenced so that accurate risk assessments can be made and safe proposals are made in court reports”.

The Minister has told us that domestic abuse inquiries are now being made in cases where electronically monitored curfews have been recommended, but the Government’s action plan reveals that that first recommendation may never be extended to everyone who is sentenced if the Government decide that it is too expensive or key partner agencies do not want to do it. How does that reveal that domestic abuse and violence against women and girls is a top priority for this Government?

[Damian Hinds]

The probation service needs to look at everything about the individual in terms of their risk. The specific thing I was talking about earlier is that, before putting somebody in a domestic situation with an intimate partner with children, or saying that they can be in that situation, a series of mandatory additional checks need to be done around intelligence and their record on domestic abuse, safeguarding issues and the consent of the partner. That does not take away from the overall risk assessment of the individual, which should take into account all factors.