Nearly 2,000 prisoners are being released. So why are probation officers working remotely?

Insiders warn ‘grassroots intelligence’ can be missed without in-person contact, leading to dangerous mistakes

During her two decades as a probation officer, home-working among staff was rare – a perk Belstaffie* was granted owing to ill health. But when she returned to the office to collect some files and headed to the tea room, she heard one officer telling another that a prisoner out on licence – one of her charges, who had been convicted for the rape and attempted murder of a nine-year-old boy – had been hired by a high street chain whose products included merchandise for children. “No one would have told me,” she says, knowing that had she had not come in that day, overheard the information and intervened, it could have resulted in the most horrific of consequences. “When you work from home, you don’t get all the ‘office gossip’… You don’t get the minutiae.”
Her experience is prescient in light of a string of job adverts for probation officers that offer remote working perks – despite the damning findings that have blamed blended working set-ups for “mistakes being missed”. With heavy caseloads and in-person appointments being squeezed into already compressed office days, the probation watchdog’s most recent annual report warned that criminals are posing a greater risk to the public, with only a third of offenders’ risk assessments being made accurately. 
Despite these dangers, the Ministry of Justice’s website still says that new trainees will “be working in an environment that supports a range of flexible working options, including the ability to use technology to work remotely, to enhance your work-life balance and support the needs of the business”.
The prospect has become all the more concerning in light of the Government’s decision to release almost 2,000 prisoners sentenced to five years or fewer in a single day on Sep 10. The figure is almost twice the number typically released in a week. The prisoners are being freed early to reduce overcrowding, in spite of warnings that victims of domestic violence are having “sleepless nights”, according to the domestic abuse commissioner, Nicole Jacobs, because they have not been warned about or supported to cope with their perpetrators’ release.
Three thousand more inmates will also walk free over the next month after serving 40 per cent of their sentences instead of half, handed over to a probation service that the watchdog last month cautioned may be unable to cope. For those who have already been failed by the crumbling justice system, there are fears that this influx of new cases, combined with low staffing levels, high burnout and home working, could again cause fatal oversights.
Between 2010 and 2022, there was an average of one murder a week committed by a criminal on probation. Failures in the service were blamed for the 2021 murders of Michaela Hall – whose partner Lee Kendall, a serial violent offender, had been wrongly classed as “medium risk” – and pregnant Terri Harris, her two children and one of their friends, all killed with a claw hammer by her “low risk” boyfriend Damien Bendall, who had previous convictions for GBH and armed robbery. Bendall also raped Lacey Bennett, her 11-year-old daughter.
The murder of 35-year-old law graduate Zara Aleena in 2022 also “could have been avoided,” her inquest heard in June, had her killer Jordan McSweeney – a career criminal with a history of misogynistic and racially motivated incidents – been correctly categorised by the probation service.
Instead, he was labelled low risk and not recalled to prison after missing in-person appointments, leaving him free to sexually assault and murder Aleena as she walked home. The inquest concluded that this was the result of “significant failures” by the probation service, along with “inadequate” information-sharing between prison services and supervision. “Homeworking was one factor among many other failings that led to the incorrect assessment and the delay in apprehension,” adds Aleena’s aunt, Farah Naz, who accused the service and the Government of having “blood on their hands”.
Had community probation officers “met with him face-to-face, then they would have been able to see that this man’s risk level had changed,” Naz says. “The outcome of homeworking on that day was that the communication that was needed was not made. And that was another hole that was created in the service that led to this man being in the community.” (An independent serious further offence review of Zara’s killer was ordered following her death, which did not cite homeworking, but outlined significant omissions and practice deficits in the management of his case, including inadequate follow-up when the killer missed in-person appointments.)
Working out of the office means that staff can’t pick up informal leads, causing a reduction “in grassroots intelligence,” says Belstaffie. Criminals “grass on each other all the time to different officers,” she explains. “A lot of intelligence is actually gathered not from the offender, but about the offender from other offenders and other probation officers.”With a staffing shortfall of 1,700 and workloads about to swell, it’s no wonder that safety concerns are rising, Naz says. “Of course it’s dangerous to the community if you’re letting out criminals [even if] they’re low-risk, but then you’re not managing them adequately.” 
Martin Jones, HM Chief Inspector of Probation, last month pushed for the service to make fundamental changes. “Where we see probation performance at its best is when, the majority of the time, people are in the office because probation practice is about human relationships and your judgment of how somebody’s doing,” he said. “Ultimately, the work of probation does require face-to-face contact in a pretty significant number of cases.”
He adds that “while in-person contact is important for building relationships and judging risk, the more pressing issue, which is raised regularly in our reports, is ongoing high vacancy and low retention rates for staff. This results in a lack of experienced officers who can act as mentors and provide peer support to new trainees.”
Recruitment problems have meant junior staff filling the gaps and finding themselves less able to pick up tips from more senior peers who work remotely. One ex-offender, who did not wish to be named, says that after her release two years ago, she was managed by “vastly inexperienced” officers – one of whom was 21 years old and spent more time talking about her nail colour than helping her find a new vocation.
Tania Bassett, a former probation officer and official at Napo, the probation officers’ union, says that “working from home can be very useful for people who may have very specific deadlines around parole reports, etc.” – but notes that, owing to partial privatisation under Chris Grayling, the former justice secretary, in 2014, “a lot of offices actually aren’t big enough for everybody to be in the office every single day, so we don’t actually have the space for the staff in some areas.”
The service was returned to full public ownership four years ago – when the pandemic led to an abrupt reconfiguration of work practices and flexible working was introduced – but recovery has been impossible. “Probation is doing really badly and it isn’t just because of remote working, it’s because it’s hugely under-resourced and has suffered significant cuts when it needed significant investment,” Bassett says. Bassett believes the early release plans are at least better than those rolled out under the last government, when probation officers “were getting sometimes as little as 24 hours’ notice prior to release”.
Hybrid working is seen as the last remaining carrot for officers amid a recruitment crisis – but with fatal errors having already been made as a result, and the probation service in a depleted state, the concern is that it could exacerbate other problems yet further.
Prisoner numbers almost doubled between 1990 and 2018, and the haemorrhaging of probation officers has left a yet bigger burden on those who stay. The service has consistently been working over capacity every month since January 2023, according to recent figures, with the equivalent of six days’ work being done in five.
Morale is “at a very, very low point,” says Bassett. “Not being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel has a really detrimental impact” – worsened by poor pay, which has not seen a significant increase “in 14 years”. (Rises of 4.6 to 6 per cent were “agreed in a pay deal prior to the cost of living crisis and as such were very quickly significantly below inflation”.) 
For Naz, she feels, “the service is already on its knees and there has to be some thought into how we make the service attractive enough to get people to work [there] in the first place,” adding: “Lives depend on probation officers and it just doesn’t feel like that is understood or emphasised enough.”
The service’s current poor health provides little reassurance ahead of prisoners being released en masse come Tuesday; Belstaffie says that, for probation officers, “it’s going be like tipping the rubbish out on their desk”. Naz says that there can be no excuses when it comes to keeping people safe, even if it’s too late for Zara. “The most powerful message [her killer] got from the justice system was do what you like, you can get away with it,” she says.  All the public can do is hope that this time, the same won’t be allowed to happen again.
*Belstaffie is a pseudonym