Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps he is taking to improve probation services.

A package of measures has been announced to continue rebuilding the Probation Service, reflecting the Government’s commitment to strengthening probation services and improving public protection. By the final year of the spending review period, funding for probation and community services will increase by up to £700 million, an increase of around 45%.

Recruitment and training of staff remain high priorities, to ensure we have a sufficient workforce to safely supervise and manage people in the community. And we are recruiting more probation officers. The Probation Service exceeded our 2024-25 trainee target of 1,000, successfully onboarding 1,057 trainees and we have committed to onboarding a further 1,300 trainees in 2025/26.

Through the Our Future Probation Service (OFPS) Programme we will address the imbalance between capacity and workload, by reducing probation workloads by 25% by April 2027. We will achieve this by streamlining processes, reducing administrative tasks, and ensuring staff time is focused where it can have the greatest impact.

We are developing better digital tools to reduce the administrative burden at multiple stages of the probation journey, allowing probation practitioners to focus on public protection and rehabilitation. For example, we have developed Justice Transcribe, an AI-powered tool that takes meeting audio and turns into an accurate summary. This is done in minutes, and it cuts the time spent on writing up notes by more than 70%. Practitioners have reported reduced stress, increased confidence and more time to focus on people on probation, public safety and decision-making rather than administration.

Probation will prioritise supervision in the critical period after release – when offenders are most likely to reoffend – and focus resources on those who pose the highest risk. The Sentencing Act 2026 introduces several measures to streamline processes and enable probation to focus their efforts where they matter most to protect the public. The Government is also investing in expanded monitoring and introducing new restrictive licence conditions to further strengthen probation’s ability to monitor and manage serious offenders in the community.

Commissioned Rehabilitative Services (CRS) are specialist interventions delivered in partnership with private, voluntary and community organisations to support individuals under probation supervision, or on license following release from custody. They address key rehabilitative needs that, if unmet, increase the risk of reoffending and are designed to complement and improve access to mainstream services such as housing, healthcare, and local authority support. New contracts will go live in summer 2027 (Men) and Autumn 2028 (Women) which will further enhance the service offering including person-centred, strengths-based services with enhanced community links to connect offenders to new opportunities and social networks; enhanced custodial delivery; and greater focus on outcomes including distance-travelled.