Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment her Department has made of the potential impact of real-terms pay reductions on the recruitment and retention of probation staff since 2010.

We are committed to supporting probation staff and value their hard work, commitment and dedication. As part of our approach to annual award proposals we will review our pay position and priorities for the award to get the best outcome for staff. As part of this process, we consider several factors including cost of living, business priorities and our position in terms of comparable workforces. Our pay proposals need to strike a balance between affordability and providing investment to address our pay priorities and support attraction and retention.

In recent years we have made investments to pay through a multi-year pay deal covering the period 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2025.

We are currently engaging with the recognised Probation Service Trade Unions to agree a good outcome for this year’s pay award in line with our prioritises and the parameters of the civil service pay guidance.

We are committed to providing manageable workloads for staff. Recruitment and retention, along with our long-term plans for a sustainable Probation Service through targeting resources towards our most vital work. We are investing in probation - onboarding 1,300 trainee probation officers by March 2026 in addition to the 1,057 already on-boarded last year. We have extended centralised recruitment campaigns for key grades.

There is a comprehensive approach by HMPPS to improve recruitment and retention across the Probation Service and since unification in June 2021 there has been an overall increase to probation staffing by 20%. In the last 12 months, from 30 June 2024 to 30 June 2025 we have increased our number of Probation Officers by 7% (359 FTE) from 5,160 to 5,519 FTE.

Leaving rates to June 2025 can be found in table 10a, table 10b and table 11 of our published statistics. The overall Probation Service leaving rate of 9.0% (taken from T10a) in the year to the end of June 2025 was 1.7 percentage points lower than it was in March 2024. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/689f34791fedc616bb133a86/hmpps-workforce-statistics-tables-jun-2025_final.ods.