A fork in the road: Probation unification in England and Wales two years on

Introduction

In June 2021 probation services in England and Wales were formally re-unified. The commencement of the unification programme marked a policy reversal of the dramatic part-privatization and marketisation of probation services from 2014, via the ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ (TR) reforms (see Annison et al., 2024). In time, the then Chief Inspector of Probation would describe the privatised model as ‘irredeemably flawed’ (HMIP, 2019: 3) and further criticism would follow from a series of reports from the National Audit Office (NAO) that highlighted fundamental flaws in the contractual arrangements for the private providers and concerns around systemic underfunding (Albertson and Fox, 2019). Combined with the momentum of a Justice Select Committee enquiry into TR that was highly critical of the impact the reforms had had on the experiences of staff and victims, the government took the unprecedented decision to end CRC contracts early and, by June 2021, renationalise probation service through the creation of 12 Probation regions of England and Wales (see Millings et al., 2023 for an overview).

Our research aims to capture the experiences and consequences of the reform programme, across a three-year period, for a variety of groups within and beyond probation, and working at local, regional, and national levels. ¹ In an earlier article (Millings et al., 2023) we drew on data from our case study region (one of the 12 newly formed regions in the unified service) to explore how probation managers and practitioners reflected on the decision to unify probation services and to capture how they adapted to the changed organisational arrangements during the initial phase of implementation between April 2022 and August 2022. This paper draws on our second sweep of research activity in our case study region that took place between February 2023 and August 2023 to report on staff experiences as post-unification organisational structures matured. The longitudinal nature of the research means we are able to capture the views of a mixed sample with some staff interviewed in both rounds of research (n = 34) in addition to the singular contributions of new voices (n = 29 in sweep 2).

In our first sweep of interviews, our analytical focus was drawn to capture continuity and change as experienced by probation staff in an attempt to understand how unification was being made tangible. We described the probation landscape as being unsettled, fractured and marked by ongoing staff shortages. However, amongst most participants there remained a high level of loyalty to the probation profession if, perhaps unsurprisingly, not necessarily to the organisational structures within which it was located. While many were optimistic regarding the longer-term prospects for the unified organisation, this was also overlaid with concerns about how unification would play out in the short to medium term.

In this article, two years on from unification, we capture the views of staff during what was considered to be the ‘Transformation’ phase within the timeline mapped out in the target operating model (TOM). ² A period that should be characterised by ‘benefits realisation and efficiencies’ (HMPPS, 2021: 35) the vision for the unified service written into the TOM – when published ahead of unification as a heuristic framing device to help guide the immediate future for the reformed organisation – was of a service employing operational practices that would enable the service to be more efficient, and where ‘a new digital dynamic and actionable assessment tool [would] be used across the probation journey’ (HMPPS, 2021: 37). Core to the successful delivery of the future operating model written into the TOM was the organisational mantra, having ‘considered the foundations of a strong probation service’ (HMPPS, 2021: 6), to Assess, Protect and Change.

In this article we return to our case study region to consider what moving to the next phased step of a unification process felt like, and how individuals judged what, in their experience, had changed since unification. We draw on the data from the questions we asked practitioners about their awareness of the guiding operating principles of Assess, Protect and Change, which were encapsulated within the TOM as the key purposes of probation, and of how reflective they felt these were of the probation role, and how these aims were being met in practice. What we find is that the Probation Service's journey towards a settled end state is far from complete, as the journey of organisational change has encountered unexpected delays, hazards, and at times clear forks in the road that make the process of change even more uncertain. What we find are levels of individual and collective operational vulnerability that are not only making it more challenging to deliver good probation practice, but that is unsettling the underpinning expectations regarding the trajectory of sequenced unification as envisaged within the TOM.

Methods

The Rehabilitating Probation Project is a three-year, ESRC-funded study, that explores the experiences and consequences for a range of groups within and beyond probation, of the unification of probation services. Data collection began in February 2022, having secured university ethical approval and an agreement from HMPPS to proceed. In this paper, we are focusing on data generated within our case study probation region work package. The case study division, typical of the 12 Probation Service regions in England and Wales, is geographically diverse with major and densely populated metropolitan areas, a series of smaller towns, and more rural and scarcely populated areas. Through presentations to staff teams and assurances of anonymity and confidentiality we have directly engaged with practitioners to secure engagement in the research and we have taken steps to ensure we have representative mixes of probation delivery units (PDUs) throughout the region.

The data in this article is from a second sweep of 63 semi-structured interviews conducted by the research team between February and August 2023. Capitalising on the strength of the longitudinal design of the research project, 34 of the sample have taken part in two interviews, a year apart from one another, to help fully explore the contoured experience of organisational change. The 29 new interviewees in our second sweep have enabled us to build on the representative mix of PDUs from across the case study region to include staff involved in unpaid work and programme delivery. In light of issues raised in our first round of interviews regarding the support offered to those undertaking training on the Professional Qualification in Probation programme (PQiP) we were also keen to include some interviews from this cohort. In all we conducted 63 interviews during this period. In terms of organisational role(s), 11% were Senior Managers (SM), 23% were Senior Probation Officers (SPO), 11% were Probation Officers (PO), 22% Probation Service Officers (PSO), and 20% were employed in specialist roles. All interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, and thematically coded using NVivo.

The semi-structured interview schedules explored a series of themes related to Professional Probation Practice; Service User Experience; Identity and Belonging; External Voices; and Looking Ahead. In looking to connect the staff experiences of the process of unification and create a chronology of living through organisational change we focus specifically on participant's reflections of the official strapline Assess, Protect and Change, exploring their perceptions of its capacity to reflect the work they undertake as well as judgements respondents made about changes to practice whilst working within the post-unification setting. Using Braun and Clarke's (2013), six-phase approach to thematic analysis, four overarching themes were developed; (1) a continued sense of change trauma being experienced; (2) an enduring sense of individual and collective operational vulnerability; (3) a sense of opportunities being missed to pull through practice learning; and (4) uncertainty about the capacity of local level leaders to direct practice. We explore these themes in sequence in the paper. In the analysis that follows interview extracts have been attributed by role Senior Managers (SM); Senior Probation Officers (SPOs); Probation Officers (POs); Probation Service Officers (PSOs) and PQiP for those within our sample who are learners on the Professional Qualification in Probation programme, and pseudonyms have been used to protect the anonymity of participants.

A fork in the road

Two years on from the unification of probation services and with the distance travelled somewhat delayed from that originally envisaged within the TOM, and in light of the context outlined above, three key emergent challenges are evident from our interviews with staff, that could require at best a recalibration of the roadmap to follow, and at worst a more fundamental shift in direction. We think of these as representing a fork, if not a series of forks, in the road.

Firstly, it is evident that groups of staff within our sample feel that there have been opportunities lost to fully reflect upon and integrate the learning and experiences of the different constituent groups brought together through unification. In the extract below, Valerie a Senior Manager who had previously worked in a CRC reflects on a feeling that of the work of CRCs was devalued and an ensuing degree of organisational myopia:

The feeling of being bruised is that I feel that we were just stripped of all the practice that we’d [CRC] done, in terms of sentence management, being more flexible, going out to local communities, seeing people in the library, all that kind of stuff. That was completely stripped. On 26th June [there weren’t any policies of ours] they were policies that were within NPS, so you adopt this policy, because this is what has been agreed. There was no recognition that the CRC had this [other] policy, and it was much better, so let's use that one. (Valerie, SM)

Second, concerns were expressed about the capacity to empower more local level decision and investment-making to support service delivery. From PDU leads and Senior Managers especially – like Steve (Senior Manager) below – came the concern that the attention to assessment and process was skewing the operationalisation of practice goals and shifting focus away from desistence-focused work that is embedded within the communities’ people on probation are drawn from. That the need, in participant's view, to satisfy a matrix of measures and RAG ratings had ushered in a sense of individual and collective vulnerability that demanded attention to what staff felt were unrelenting bureaucratic demands, at the expense of committing time to the people being supervised. In ways reminiscent of Burke and Collett's (2010: 232) critique of the uncertainty and drift in focus from people that results ‘from a prolonged period of unremitting change, burdened by bureaucracy and over-zealous micro-management by the centre’, the effect is to focus on the means rather than the ends.

My main concern [is] that we can become good and our staff can become good at knowing what we need to do to satisfy a performance expectation in terms of timeliness, for example. So, you can undertake their initial sentence plan in 14 days, tick, and when you see your performance, it looks really, really good. Then, when someone looks at the quality, they say the quality is not there. (Steve, SM)

The feeling of ‘being part of a national organisation that doesn’t really understand the regional and local differences’ (Carol, PDU Lead) was seen as stifling individual innovation and ingenuity. For those with experience of working within CRCs, they fondly recalled the development of non-accredited structured programmes, specialist provision for women and nurturing partnerships with local third-sector social enterprises they’d with(in). The use of community hubs to dynamically engage service users in ‘a different environment’ (Jasmine, SPO) in their locality helped facilitate and commission more nuanced intervention activity. Likewise, those with longer service histories and able to recall working in a Probation Trust contrast the greater autonomy they felt managers then, and the stronger regional identities that endured, with a more hindered and centralised oversight of service delivery that they felt was compelling some to consider their future(s) in the service.

There doesn’t seem to be any space for local creativity and innovation. Yes, it's like, ‘The computer says “no”.’ I think that's always going to be a weakness. I think if you start squashing people's creativity, then they’ll go and find a creative place to do their creativity elsewhere. (Sean, SPO)

Built into probation unification was the role of Regional Probation Directors to help develop and deliver – in conjunction with local criminal justice partners – regional reducing reoffending plans. This role, it was hoped (HMPPS, 2021), would help stimulate co-commissioning arrangements and help refine service delivery to meet local needs. The perception, rightly or wrongly, of the bulk of staff in our sample is that local regional probation managers and leaders feel unable to exercise autonomy, don’t have the capacity to (re)commission services, and preside over too large a jurisdiction to fully appreciate what local need looks like. The sense of a need to reinvigorate the power base of local leaders to help deliver a local service was brought into even sharper focus as speculation emerged through the sweep of research of the introduction of a newer management tier – Area Executive Directors – that redrew even larger divisional areas to cover (Barton, 2022).

The third fork in the road evident in the analysis of the data from this second sweep, is the extent to which, at the level of the individual, the probation service has the capacity to create the conditions that see practitioners connect their working with wider organisational prerogatives. A recent House of Lords enquiry into community sentences concluded that ‘Government and senior management seems to have lost sight of low-level offenders and to be preoccupied with the size of the prison population and post-release supervision, perhaps because of recent institutional reorganisations’ (2023: 76). This sentiment was continually evident in the research where people like PSO Craig voiced their concern that ‘we are treating everything at the same level and it's very much based on that management of risk, rather than enabling people to make positive changes’ (Craig, PSO).

The introduction nationally, during the round of interviews, of a range of approved toolkits – designed to be delivered one-to-one by probation practitioners in the form of booklets, with accompanying videos and written exercises (HMIP, 2024a: 10) – did little to allay the worries of those concerned that probation work was becoming too standardised. There were many, like Kate (PSO), who considered that the toolkits make supervision ‘too robotic’ and felt that people on probation are noticing their increased use in ways that run the risk of infantilizing practitioner's engagement with those they supervise.

Diametrically opposed to those groups who saw value in the consistency of practice and capacity to support self-directed learning made tangible in the toolkits were those who believed that case management needs to retain great discretion in helping deliver change. Where, as Esme (Senior Manager) observes, ‘probation is a role where you have to hold your share of risk and let people prove themselves in changing their lives’. Though the two need not be mutually exclusive, it is evident within the research that the language of toolkits is viewed by some as impinging on their professional judgement as a practitioner and echoes the kerbs on creative practice that Sean (SPO) identified earlier as contributing to people leaving the service. The perceived ‘thinning’ of supervisory practices, to use Dominey’s (2019) framing, appears not just to impinge on people on probation's experience(s) of being supported, but also on the stimulation and satisfaction practitioners derive from their job.

In ways that revive the perpetual balance faced by probation practitioners between care and control, what we can see in the research is that practitioners, two years on from unification, are making sense of not just the meaning of official straplines, but of what delivering them means for the type of work they undertake and probation service they choose to remain loyal to. There is a tension between on the one hand, prioritising the delivery and related monitoring of standardised working practices, or of prioritising the difficult task of creating the conditions (and assurances) practitioners feel are necessary to enable them to prioritise ‘Change’ and work with individuals to support their rehabilitation journeys.

Conclusion

In two sweeps of research activity in one case study area, we have captured the considerable challenges that many working within probation services in England and Wales are having to contend with on a daily basis. That the current and former Chief Inspectors of Probation have acknowledged the inter-locking and entrenched complexities faced by probation practitioners, whilst validating for many of those taking part in the research, demonstrates how widely the issues facing the coherent delivery of rehabilitation services have become.

In this article, we have examined how it feels for staff two years into the TOM unification programme timeline – designed by senior national probation leaders as a heuristic device to guide organisational and practice reform – that seeks to bolster a unified service. Whilst our problematising of where progress is on the roadmap of the TOM set out prior to unification could be seen as an inevitable outworking of a roadmap meeting reality, the fact that something so robustly planned out and paced as the TOM is experiencing delays and has been somewhat derailed by a sequence of early release schemes administered by two different governments shows how volatile and uncertain the sector has become. The announcement towards the end of this cycle of research activity of a ‘probation reset’ ⁴ once again highlights how widely acknowledged the need to do something about unwaveringly high demands on the service requires drastic action.

What we find in our research data is that climates of uncertainty impact on the well-being and capacity of individuals to deliver good practice here. The consequences of staff shortages and an overwhelming sense of constant scrutiny, that has the scope to isolate individuals for blame, are layers of individual and collective operational vulnerability that managers and practitioners report here. Our longitudinal research is capturing how challenging it is to maintain faith in a direction of travel and to believe an end state is possible. What it also shows us is that others make their judgements about what probation is and should be, there remains real merit in engaging with the lived experiences of probation professionals whose continued loyalty to remain and deliver service, and capacity to think critically about what can and does not work in helping probation fulfil its duties to Assess, Protect and Change need to be heard before – at the fork in the road – they and their institutional memoires leave.