Criminal activity and ‘grassroots intelligence’ are being missed by probation officers in Britain because so many are working from home, an insider claimed today.
Probation officers are allowed to log in from the living room on two days each week under a hybrid model brought in by the Ministry of Justice during the pandemic.
But concerns are mounting over ‘mistakes being missed’ because of a lack of in-person meetings and discussions between staff in an office environment.
It comes as a watchdog warned it was ‘inevitable’ some of the 1,700 prisoners being released yesterday from UK jails would reoffend and end up back behind bars.
Groups of inmates have been celebrating as they walked out of prisons across England and Wales, with around 400 prisoners freed from jails in London alone.
The latest releases were in addition to about 1,000 inmates normally freed each week and form part of the Labour government’s plan to ease jail overcrowding.
But there are concerns that the overstretched probation service could be missing problem criminals, especially given many workers are on a hybrid working model.
As inmates near the end of their time behind bars, they are meant to be given help to prepare for life outside prison which includes advice on finding somewhere to live, getting a job and looking after money.
They are meant to be offered extra support if they have drug or alcohol addictions, are sex workers or victims of domestic violence.
Prisoners are given a release grant as they leave which is intended to help them pay for essentials and transport.
The payment of £89.52 was previously known as the discharge grant and now called the subsistence payment.
But at less than £100, many charities consider this sum insufficient.
Depending on their circumstances, they may also be offered other benefits and state financial support.
The terms of their licence may specify where they can and cannot live. It will also set out how regularly they need to check in with probation supervisors or support workers.
Some will be required to live in bail hostels and other approved community accommodation first, or in the absence of secure, approved private residences if they do not have a home to go to.
Charities and watchdogs have warned how some released prisoners often end up homeless and this can increase the risk of them reoffending.
The Justice Secretary said homeless prisoners released early could temporarily be put up in budget hotels at taxpayers’ expense.
One probation officer told the Daily Telegraph that working from home can result in staff missing informal leads and ‘grassroots intelligence’.
She said criminals ‘grass on each other all the time to different officers’, adding: ‘A lot of intelligence is actually gathered not from the offender, but about the offender from other offenders and other probation officers.’
The woman cited how she found out that one of her charges, a prisoner out on licence who had raped a nine-year-old boy, had been given a job in a high street chain which sold merchandise for children – but only when she overheard a discussion in the office.
She added: ‘No one would have told me. When you work from home, you don’t get all the ‘office gossip’… You don’t get the minutiae.’
But the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) continues to offer working from a home as a perk to recruit new workers – with the probation service currently short of 1,700 staff.
Its website 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’.
This is despite findings blaming hybrid working for ‘mistakes being missed’.
Tania Bassett, a former probation officer and official at Napo, the probation officers’ union, told the Telegraph that ‘working from home can be very useful for people who may have very specific deadlines around parole reports, etc.’
But she also claimed that partial privatisation in 2014 under then-justice secretary Chris Grayling means ‘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.’
Ms Bassett added: ‘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.’
Martin Jones, HM Chief Inspector of Probation, said probation performance is ‘at its best 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 added: ‘Ultimately, the work of probation does require face-to-face contact in a pretty significant number of cases.’
But Mr Jones also pointed out that while in-person contact is important for judging risk, the ‘more pressing issue’ is high vacancy levels and low staff retention rates.
Also this week, a probation officer in the Midlands told the Spectator: ‘Staff don’t feel protected. They don’t feel like the service cares about them.’
The probation service requires that a minimum of 60 per cent of probation staff time should be spent working from their office base to allow them to meet with offenders in-person.
However, this does not automatically mean that the other 40 per cent is spent solely working at home, because staff may also have to work at a partner agency or local police station.
Some probation staff are also based full-time in prisons and in courts.
Asked about probation officers working from home, an MoJ spokesman told today: ‘Our hard-working probation staff play a vital role keeping the public safe, through face-to-face supervision meetings with offenders and desk-based risk assessments, safeguarding checks and conversations with partners like councils and charities.’
Probation officers are given to a post-graduate-level training programme over at least 15 months, and the MoJ is recruiting 1,000 new probation officers in the UK to combat staff shortages and reduce workloads.
But in September last year, then-Chief Inspector of Probation Justin Russell warned shortly before he stepped down from the role that probation officers are potentially putting the public at risk by continuing to work from home.
He pin-pointed remote working as a key factor in poor performance and warned it had led to face-to-face rushed assessments of criminals.
Mr Russell said the Probation Service’s policy at the time which required staff to come into work only three days a week was contributing to ‘very disappointing’ performance.
The study found management oversight of probation officers’ work was ‘insufficient’ in 72 per cent of cases, meaning ‘mistakes are being missed’.
The risk posed to the public by offenders was only assessed accurately in a third of cases, with the service showing ‘consistently poor’ performance, it said.
And the issue of working from home has been highlighted again this week after hundreds of prisoners were freed early yesterday to cut overcrowding in jails.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood told the Commons that inmates who are homeless on release could be temporarily placed in taxpayer-funded budget hotels if there is not enough space in bail hostels and other community accommodation typically used for offenders.
Ms Mahmood announced plans in July to temporarily cut the proportion of sentences which inmates must serve behind bars from 50 per cent to 40 per cent as the MoJ said overcrowding had pushed jails to the ‘point of collapse’.
Downing Street said the policy had to be brought in to avoid ‘unchecked criminality’ where the police and courts are unable to lock anyone up because there are no free cells.
MoJ figures showed the prison population hit a record high of 88,521 on Friday, having risen by more than 1,000 inmates over the past four weeks.
Chief inspector of prisons Charlie Taylor said the Government ‘had no choice but to do something’ about overcrowding because ‘the bath was in danger of overflowing, and they either had to turn the taps off or they had to let some water out’.
But he warned it was ‘inevitable that some of these prisoners will get recalled to custody’ and that some will be homeless on release – increasing the risk that they could go on to commit more crimes.
On Monday, it emerged some victims were not prepared in the wake of their perpetrators being freed early, with The Times reporting hundreds had not been informed.
The Victims’ Commissioner of England and Wales, Baroness Newlove, branded it ‘regrettable’ that some had still not been told this was happening on the eve of the policy coming into force.
Hundreds more prisoners are due to be freed early next month in the second stage of the scheme.
But the Government is under pressure to find longer-term solutions to the problem, with prison figures warning without further measures the same problem could be faced in about a year’s time.