Written evidence submitted by Crest Advisory (RPS0003)
Crest Advisory is a purpose-driven organisation dedicated to improving justice, policing and public safety.
Crest Insights is our think-tank for the whole of the criminal justice system. Our mission is to do the hard thinking which drives policy reform, improves the operating environment for agencies and organisations which deliver policing, justice and public safety and so makes communities safer.
Crest Consulting is our consultancy practice which improves outcomes and performance by quantifying, explaining and solving complex problems for clients across policing, the wider criminal justice system, local and central government and their partners. Much of our learning is informed by our practice with partners who deliver for the public and for victims.
We welcome the opportunity to assist the Public Accounts Committee’s inquiry into the efficiency and resilience of the probation service by drawing on evidence and experience from both Insights and Consulting.
This document sets out Crest’s response to the inquiry’s call for evidence and will cover the following themes/ topics requested in the call for evidence:
1. Quality of service and workforce challenges
2. Staff workload
3. Impact of the prison capacity crisis, as reported on by the PAC in March 2025
In this submission we summarise previous, relevant Crest research. Links are included within the text, as well as a full list at the end of the document. We also in places draw on learnings from our (often unpublished) consultancy work. Please feel free to email us at contact@crestadvisory.com if you would like further information.
The probation service faces significant challenges across quality of service, workforce capacity and its critical role in managing prison pressures. These challenges are interconnected: workforce pressures undermine quality of service; quality issues undermine confidence in community sentences; declining use of community sentences increases prison demand; and rising prison populations increase probation workload through extended supervision requirements.
Addressing these challenges requires:
1. Strategic clarity about probation's purpose and role in the criminal justice system
2. Adequate resourcing to enable probation to manage current and projected caseloads effectively
3. Organisational reform to reduce target-driven culture and administrative burdens that detract from meaningful offender engagement
4. Improved communication between probation and courts to build confidence in community sentences
5. Investment in intensive, evidence-based alternatives to custody that can genuinely reduce reoffending
Recent reports by the HM Inspectorate of Probation have revealed grave underlying problems with the probation service, suggesting systemic inability to accurately assess and manage risk. The NAO reported on HMPPS data showed that the probation service’s performance has worsened since unification, meeting only 7 of its 27 (26%) performance targets in 2024-25, a decrease of 24 percentage points since July 2021 to March 2022. These failures need to be set against the backdrop of a workforce struggling with excessive workloads, staff sickness and unfilled vacancies.
Beyond resourcing challenges, Crest has previously highlighted a wider concern that the probation service lacks clarity as to its overriding purpose: caught between a traditional ‘social work’ model (which emphasises rehabilitation) and the growing panoply of public protection obligations (which emphasises risk management and enforcement). Crest argued that the way the probation service is currently structured arguably does not enable it to meet either purpose effectively. The policy levers which underpin rehabilitation — stable accommodation, employment, education, treatment — largely lie outside of the criminal justice system (mostly at local level). When it comes to public protection, the police may well be better trained and equipped to understand and manage risk than probation officers steeped in a more ‘social work’ tradition.
Crest's 2017 research into community sentences found evidence of long-term decline in the quality and depth of advice provided to courts to guide sentencing decisions through pre-sentence reports (PSRs). There has been a transition over the past decade from PSRs being detailed, written reports to speedy, short, written and oral reports. In the year ending June 2025, 95% of PSRs were ‘fast delivery’ written or oral, compared to 79% in the year ending June 2015.[1] Only 36% of the court work inspected by the HM Inspectorate of Probation nationally in 2025 was sufficiently analytical and personalised to the individual.
The changing nature of PSRs means they lack detail, which could mean that requirements being handed out as a result of report recommendations are not always appropriately tailored to the individual offender. Crest’s interviews with magistrates in 2017 highlighted a view that offenders are increasingly being handed community sentences that do not address the root causes of their behaviour as a result, leading to offenders returning to court. Whilst efficiency and speed are to be sought after in the delivery of justice, it is not evident that the appropriate balance with quality has been struck.
Magistrates’ confidence in probation has long been shaped by how visible and accessible the service is to the courts. Under Transforming Rehabilitation (TR), Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC) staff were not allowed in court, despite retaining responsibility for 70% of offenders serving community sentences. Evidence suggests this reduced levels of communication between sentencers and probation and reduced the quality of PSRs. Magistrates and probation staff interviewed by Crest felt the split between CRCs and the National Probation Service (NPS) had increased the distance between magistrates and probation staff, as they no longer had any direct interaction with the people that worked with offenders.
Crest's 2017 survey of 582 magistrates also revealed concerning levels of confidence in probation services:
● Two thirds (66%) were not confident that the CRC in their area can provide adequate support for offenders
● Nearly half (47%) said they do not have sufficient information about requirements available in the area
● Three quarters (76%) were not confident that community sentences protect the public
● Over a third of magistrates (37%) were not confident that community sentences are an effective alternative to custody
Magistrates expressed frustration with the lack of information from CRCs about the provision available in the area, with levels of awareness extremely low.
The unification of probation in 2021 was intended to repair some of this damage. Evidence to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee in 2023 suggests progress, with a stronger focus on liaison through the Judicial Engagement Charter and new local forums. Even so, distrust in community sentences appears to have persisted. Many magistrates still refer to the loss of professional expertise during the TR period, and this continues to colour their view of the service.
The combined evidence points to a clear conclusion: confidence is strongly linked to sustained, direct interaction between probation and the courts. When reforms disrupt those relationships, trust can erode quickly and take much longer to rebuild.
Crest’s research on community sentences conducted in 2017 showed that excessive caseloads limit probation’s ability to deliver effective supervision and rehabilitation. Practitioners interviewed for this work described a sustained decline in service quality and linked this directly to workload pressures that had intensified in recent years. Separate analysis conducted by Crest in 2021 showed that the criminal justice system was operating under significant strain and agencies across the system were struggling to meet rising demand.
Although workloads have been recognised as a priority issue since then, recent inspections, reports and independent analyses show that the problem persists, with the probation service operating at just 79% of its target staffing in 2025.
Several inspections have found that staffing initiatives were in many cases well designed, but had not yet translated into consistent improvements at local level. Leaders reported modest progress in recruitment and some early attempts to reduce workloads, yet many regions continued to face substantial shortages and management oversight remained uneven. High workloads also limited the ability of newly trained staff to consolidate their skills because there were too few experienced colleagues to support them.
Data from 2023 to 2024 showed the probation service working at around 120% capacity, meaning the average officer had 6 days’ of work to complete in a 5-day week. The National Audit Office reached a similar conclusion, noting that the number of staff required for sentence management tasks had been underestimated by roughly a third.
These pressures cannot be separated from broader reforms across the criminal justice system. Crest’s work has highlighted the risks of fragmented policy, where funding arrives in short, disconnected bursts that fail to recognise how demand in one part of the system flows into another. Modelling published by Crest in 2021 showed that assuming court performance stabilises, demand on probation is likely to rise sharply: suspended sentence orders were projected to increase by 24%, post-release supervision caseload would increase by 30% and community sentence orders would increase by 14%.
The NAO’s 2025 report on police productivity highlighted that criminal justice reforms often fail to adequately assess cross-system impacts. For example, the Ministry of Justice's 2025 Independent Sentencing Review acknowledged the potential impact of reforms such as early release schemes on the probation service, noting that everyone released or diverted from custody results in additional burdens on ‘already stretched’ probation services. However, the NAO noted that despite this acknowledgement, the Ministry of Justice’s impact assessment did not quantify the impact on demand.
Without sustained, system-wide investment, the probation service will struggle to absorb these increases. Unless probation is funded and staffed in line with predictable future demand, caseloads will remain unmanageable and the effectiveness of community supervision will continue to suffer.
Many probation staff who took part in interviews and focus groups facilitated by Crest in 2017 felt that the move to a more target-driven culture in probation (which began around 2004 following the establishment of the National Offender Management Service) had significant implications for the provision and delivery of community sentences. The combined impact of these changes has been to drive an emphasis on process rather than outcomes, leading to greater risk-aversion across the system and, crucially, reducing the amount of time officers spend with offenders.
Evidence suggests that a target-driven culture has persisted since unification. The NAO reported in 2025 that HMPPS has increased the number of metrics it monitors over time, and the HM Inspectorate of Probation’s 2025 report found that written reviews were often written to meet a target, meaning they lacked detail of work completed, progress made, or implications of an outstanding intervention.
One objective linked to the unification of probation was to improve productivity through increasing efficiencies in systems and processes, however funding constraints have reduced and delayed these ambitions. The NAO also reported that inefficiencies remain as HMPPS acknowledges that ‘the culture has been to respond to risk by adding processes on top of existing processes’.
The high volume of change experienced by the probation service has further affected the quality of service. Between 2023 and 2024, HMPPS introduced around 100 national proposals to alter probation processes, which followed numerous other organisational changes over the last decade, alongside the pressures arising from the COVID-19 pandemic and emergency measures to alleviate prison capacity issues. The rapid pace and sheer number of changes have detracted from probation staff’s capacity to focus on meaningful improvements in practice.
Taken together, these findings suggest that a combination of target-driven expectations, persistent administrative burdens, and frequent system changes continues to constrain the probation service’s ability to prioritise outcomes and maintain high-quality engagement with offenders. The cumulative impact of these pressures has been to reduce the time and focus that practitioners can devote to effective supervision, thereby undermining the quality of service the system is able to provide.
Over two in five (41%) adults released from custody go on to reoffend, with higher rates seen for those given short custodial sentences. The probation service plays a vital role in reducing demand on prisons through effective management of community sentences and rehabilitation of offenders. Evidence shows that non-custodial sentences, such as community or suspended sentences, reduce both the likelihood of reoffending and the number of repeat offences, compared to custodial sentences under 12 months. Research by Crest Advisory on the use of community sentences (2017) and out-of-court disposals and diversion (2022) in England and Wales has demonstrated the effectiveness and affordability of non-custodial sentences compared to imprisonment (though as shown above, this evidence does not translate into high levels of trust and confidence among magistrates).
Although the use of community sentences has increased slightly since 2021, it remains considerably lower than a decade ago, with only half as many issued in 2024 as in 2012. At the same time, the number of custodial sentences has steadily risen between 2020 and 2024, and according to Ministry of Justice projections, the number of prisoners in England and Wales will increase by around 18,000 to around 105,200 by March 2029.
This represents a significant challenge for a probation service already grappling with high workloads, which will need to manage increased numbers of offenders both pre and post-release from custody. As Crest argued in our 2021 research on how the different parts of the criminal justice system responded to the challenges posed by Covid-19, the government should learn the lesson of past failures, ensuring probation is sufficiently funded to meet rising demand and preventing caseloads from becoming dangerously unmanageable.
To genuinely reduce pressure on prisons, probation services need the capacity to deliver robust, intensive alternatives to custody that can command the confidence of sentencers and the public. Crest's research on intensive community orders in Greater Manchester demonstrated that properly resourced and intensive community sentences can be effective (see below).
However, the current financial constraints on probation make it difficult for probation services to invest in and deliver such intensive programmes at scale. This reduced funding, combined with high caseloads, has limited probation services' ability to commission innovative provision.
Case study: Intensive Community Orders
The Intensive Community Order was designed as an alternative option for the court to issue to 18-25 year olds instead of short custodial sentences. The order is more onerous than the standard sentence, and must include three to five requirements, typically: ● Offender management supervision for at least nine months ● Unpaid work (community payback) ● Electronic tagging (curfew) ● Input from a range of partner organisations. ● It may also include a requirement to go to an Attendance Centre at the weekend
The results of an evaluation for the first cohort completed by Manchester University were positive; the 2014/15 programme led to 27% of offenders involved gaining employment, and a more than 50% reduction in the severity and frequency of offending. It was also found that rolling out the programme could save around £58 million per year by 2020 principally from lower costs of criminal justice and policing. |
The potential of the probation system to reduce reoffending — and ultimately reduce demand on the criminal justice system on the whole — can only be realised if probation services have the resources, capacity and operational framework to deliver high-quality supervision and rehabilitation.
But the problems facing the probation system are deep-rooted and cannot be resolved quickly. Addressing this issue will require a coordinated, whole-system strategy that provides widespread and sustained investment to increase capacity across the entire CJS to ensure the system can manage its caseload effectively — which will take time to implement. Crest’s report, which summarised nine months of qualitative and quantitative research into the impact of Covid-19 on the criminal justice system, outlined a framework for the system’s future. It proposed three key phases:
1. Survive (short-term): Invest to increase capacity and address immediate pressures.
2. Recover (medium-term): Stem the increasing demand in the system.
3. Rebuild (long-term): Adopt a whole-system approach to improve efficiency and effectiveness, to achieve long-term stability and reduce demand.
Based on Crest's extensive research, we recommend:
● Ensure probation staffing and funding aligns with predictable future demand projections
● Reduce administrative burden by streamlining processes rather than layering new requirements on existing systems
● Limit the pace and volume of organisational change to allow staff to consolidate improvements
● Invest in improving PSR quality and analytical depth
● Strengthen sustained engagement between probation and courts through the Judicial Engagement Charter
● Publish transparent data on community sentence outcomes to demonstrate effectiveness
● Expand intensive community order programmes that have demonstrated effectiveness
● Adopt a whole-system approach to funding that recognises how demand flows between agencies
● Ensure probation has capacity to deliver swift, intensive supervision that can prevent drift into custody
For more information please contact Crest Advisory at contact@crestadvisory.com.
For a full list of Crest resources used in this call for evidence please see below. To see an exhaustive list of Crest’s reports and insights, visit https://www.crestadvisory.com/our-work.
● Davis, S. (2025). Spending Review 2025: Does it match the scale of the Government's ambition on crime and justice? Crest Advisory.
● Redgrave, H. (2023). Three questions on criminal justice. Crest Advisory.
● Shaw, D., Stott, J., Kirk, E., and Adams, D. (2022). Making the criminal justice system work better: how to improve out-of-court disposals and diversion schemes. Crest Advisory.
● Desroches, C., Caluori, J., Stott, J., and Rolfe, M. (2021). Survive. Recover. Rebuild. Justice post Covid-19. Crest Advisory.
● du Mont, S., and Redgrave, H. (2017). Community sentences: where did it all go wrong? A study into the use of community sentences in England and Wales. Crest Advisory.
November 2025
8
[1] Sources: Offender management statistics quarterly: April to June 2025, “Probation: April to June 2025”, Tab 6.11 Court Reports; and Offender management statistics quarterly: April to June 2015, “Probation: April to June 2015”, Table 4.12.