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

Debate between Steve Reed and Damian Hinds

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement and for accepting what Labour proposed a year ago on compelling offenders to attend court for sentencing. That is quite right, and he will have our support.

Today, our hearts go out once more to the families and friends of Zara Aleena, and of Terri Harris, her children John Paul and Lacey, and their friend Connie Gent. The long-standing failings in the probation service threaten public safety because dangerous offenders are not being properly supervised on release from prison. As a result, too many go on to commit serious further offences. High-risk offenders on probation commit on average six serious further offences every week.

The probation service is in freefall, and the failures stem from the Government’s severe mismanagement of it. Their botched privatisation was described by researchers as an “unmitigated disaster”, and their rushed renational-isation failed to correct the problems that they caused. The independent review details the severe failings that remain uncorrected in the probation service—failings for which this Government are responsible. The chief inspector notes:

“All the evidence shows that McSweeney should have been assessed, on release from prison, as high risk of serious harm”,

but that he was wrongly assessed as a medium risk because information about his behaviour was not shared across services. Planning for his release and supervision was catastrophically mismanaged as a result.

McSweeney’s repeated failure to attend probation appointments should have triggered swift action. He was recalled to prison two days before he attacked Zara, but he was never arrested and brought in. If he had been, Zara would still be alive. The chief inspector of probation points to excessive workloads and high levels of staff vacancies in the probation services as an underlying cause. One probation officer told researchers:

“I do not consider that we are in a position to protect the public, but we will be the scapegoats when tragedies happen.”

The fact is that the Government knew about all these problems but failed to act on them with urgency, so they must shoulder their share of responsibility. It is right that the chief probation officer has apologised, and although I appreciate what the Minister has said, will he accept responsibility and apologise not just for service’s failure, but for the Government’s failure to tackle the severe staff shortages and excessive caseloads that contributed to what went so tragically wrong? Will he give us a date by which the vacancies will be filled?

Information sharing across services would dramatically improve if data about any individual offender were held in one place, allowing for better-informed risk assessment and supervision. Why have the Government still not introduced that? Probation caseloads remain dangerously high, and are made worse by the high number of staff vacancies, so what assurance can the Minister offer the public that offenders on probation—who are on streets across Britain right now—are being safely supervised and monitored in a way that McSweeney and Bendall so tragically were not?

[Damian Hinds]

I thank the shadow Minister for what he says and the questions he has put. Everyone who has heard the horror of these brutal crimes has been deeply affected, and I know that the hon. Members for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) and for Ilford South (Sam Tarry) and my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) have been closely involved. Their whole communities have been deeply shaken and our country shocked. It is right that the shadow Minister asks the most exacting questions, and he is right to identify staffing challenges.

I absolutely acknowledge the fact that there have been staff vacancies in the service and case load matters. We are recruiting at pace, with extra funding of £155 million a year. We have boosted our staff complement over the past couple of years to a historic high, with 2,500 people having come into post and another 1,500 coming into post over the course of this planning year. To be clear, in any scenario and any staffing situation, these were unacceptable failings that I have outlined. I want the shadow Minister to know that the increase in resource and staffing is happening right now. Specifically to London, we have put some particular measures in place for London area probation around prioritising staff. Given the particularly high rates of vacancy in London, those measures are important.

The chief inspector does not link the failings that we have been talking about today in outlining these two awful cases with the transforming rehabilitation programme that the shadow Minister mentions. We think it is right to unify the service. Over many years, the probation service has gone through a number of different structures and forms. The voluntary and independent sector is still involved in aspects of service delivery, and we think that is right, but that is not really connected with the failings we are talking about in this case.

The shadow Minister mentioned the number of serious further offences, and every serious further offence is a serious matter. Mostly they are not of this order, of course, but they are still serious matters. I am afraid, given the cohorts of people we are talking about, that these serious further offences happen every year, regardless of who is in Government. It is incumbent on us to do everything we can to bear down on that number and to stop these terrible crimes happening. I take a moment to pay tribute to the thousands of dedicated staff working in probation offices up and down the country for whom that is their daily mission. We owe it to them, too, to make sure we make every possible effort to support them, and to make sure that systems and procedures are in place so that these terrible crimes cannot happen again. They are senseless killings that will be forever fixed in our minds, and I know that this House is united in our determination to protect women and girls and to stop these appalling crimes being repeated.