Background to the report

HM Prison & Probation Service (HMPPS) is an executive agency of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) in England and Wales. It is responsible for carrying out sentences given by the courts, in custody and the community, and for rehabilitating people in its care.

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When people leave prison or receive community sentences, the Probation Service (part of HMPPS) aims to protect the public by managing any risks offenders pose, and to reduce the chance of them reoffending by supporting their rehabilitation in the community. MoJ estimates the social and economic cost of reoffending across adult offenders to be around £20.9 billion a year in 2024-25 prices.

MoJ and HMPPS have implemented two major reorganisations of the Probation Service in the last 11 years. In 2014, MoJ divided the service into private sector-led Community Rehabilitation Companies and the National Probation Service through its Transforming Rehabilitation reforms. In June 2021, HMPPS’s Probation Reform Programme unified the service, bringing probation back under full public control.

Since unification, the Probation Service has remained under significant strain, with staffing shortfalls, increasing pressures and continuing poor performance. The Independent Sentencing Review (published in May 2025) – which recommends that MoJ makes greater use of alternatives to prison to avoid running out of prison places – will likely increase pressures on probation further. To enable it to cope with increased demand and improve performance, HMPPS has set up a programme to further transform the service.

Scope of the report

This report examines why HMPPS has not been able to improve performance of the service to date. It also assesses MoJ and HMPPS’s progress in transforming the service and sets out what more it needs to do to achieve its future aims. The report examines:

  • Probation Service performance and HMPPS’s understanding of this
  • why HMPPS has not been successful at improving the performance and resilience of the service post-unification
  • how effectively MoJ and HMPPS are now working to improve the long-term resilience of the Probation Service

The report does not assess HMPPS’s implementation of its Probation Reform Programme in 2021 or its ‘One HMPPS’ restructuring programme, which concluded in September 2024.

The report focuses on probation supervision in the community, which largely consists of sentence management, the end-to-end process of supervision of offenders released from prison or serving a community order or suspended sentence order. It does not assess probation activity in courts or in prisons in detail.

Video summary

Jenny George, the report’s director, summarises our findings.

Conclusions

Research shows that a well-functioning probation service can reduce the significant cost of reoffending to society, estimated by MoJ at £20.9 billion a year across adult offenders, in 2024-25 prices.

However, available data show that, since unification of the Probation Service in June 2021, performance has worsened, with significant staffing shortfalls and high workloads, particularly for the Probation Officer grade.

HMPPS increased its recruitment of probation staff in line with its plans, but in 2024 its internal analysis indicated that it had significantly underestimated the time needed for sentence management tasks. This analysis is undergoing external review but indicates that the service had been operating with around half the staff needed for sentence management.

HMPPS acknowledges that the Probation Service is currently unsustainable, requiring significant corrective action. It has made pragmatic decisions to deal with staffing shortfalls by reducing rehabilitative activity and supervision, but these have not sufficiently reduced PO workloads.

Further, to avoid running out of prison places, MoJ plans to implement legislative changes that will significantly increase demands on the Probation Service.

HMPPS’s ‘Our Future Probation Programme’ is a bold and innovative approach to increase resilience. However, the significant gap between actual and required capacity and slow progress in improving productivity means the challenge it faces is huge.

Furthermore, the pace of change required and nature of the changes HMPPS plans to make pose risks to the probation service’s aims of public protection, rehabilitation, and the government’s wider ‘Safer Streets’ mission, which will need to be actively managed.

HMPPS, MoJ and the government more widely must urgently consider how to manage these risks and how to ensure that reducing the scope of Probation Service activity does not negatively impact on offender outcomes or increase pressure on the wider justice system.

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Publication details

Press release

View press release (24 Oct 2025)

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