Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps he is taking to encourage probation agency staff to take up permanent positions within the National Probation Service.

The National Probation Service (NPS) is currently exploring a number of initiatives in relation to staffing. We have already introduced minimum hours contracts, guaranteeing individuals a certain amount of hours per month with the flexible option to work more (if individuals and the organisation wish to do so).

We are also recruiting colleagues who have left the service within the past five years with the option to join on various contract terms or even request reinstatement on their previous terms. Whilst these initiatives are not limited only to the agency workers, we anticipate a specific interest from agency workers as such initiatives offer greater flexibility.

In addition to this, in line with Civil Service Recruitment principles, NPS managers encourage agency workers to apply for any relevant external recruitment vacancies.

On July 30 we published the Probation Workforce Strategy which sets out our collective ambition for a more positive, inclusive, and diverse probation workforce, and the steps we are committed to taking to achieve this over the three years from 2020 to 2023. It includes firm commitments to increasing our recruitment and supporting our staff, and can be found via the following link; https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/probation-workforce-strategy

The attached table shows figures for contingent labour between July 2019 and June this year. It has been broken down by NPS region, post, per month. It should be noted that the figures have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.