Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Conclusion 8
65th Report - Efficiency and resilience of the Probation Service
Published 4 Feb 2026
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Efficiency and resilience of the Probation Service All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
We pressed MoJ on why performance had worsened over the last few years. MoJ explained that workforce shortages, which it inherited upon unification, exacerbated by high staff turnover, were the main reason for poor performance.10 Written evidence from the Rehabilitating Probation Project Team and from Crest Advisory stressed that continuing workforce shortages and the resulting high workloads had undermined the quality of, and confidence in, the service.11 MoJ told us that the decline in performance is also linked to the increased complexity of cases.12 We challenged MoJ on why it had failed to address staff shortages sufficiently to date, given unification was almost five years ago. MoJ and HMPPS argued that they had been working hard to address the shortages by recruiting large numbers of staff. MoJ explained that overall staffing numbers had increased by 22% since 2021.13 However, despite this, the vacancy rate for probation officers had increased to 21% in March 2025, seven percentage points higher than in September 2021, when it was 14%.14
From: Public Accounts Committee, 65th Report - Efficiency and resilience of the Probation Service (HC 1235), 4 February 2026
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 7 April 2026 (deadline 4 April 2026).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government states that it "agrees with the Committee's recommendation" on each of the Committee's recommendations, and sets out timelines, a revised performance framework and reporting commitments.
- On performance, the government "expects the Probation Service to demonstrate measurable and sustained improvements" over the spending review period to March 2029, with a revised performance framework centred on "a smaller number of priority metrics" to be introduced in April 2026.
- On reoffending, it says it is "very challenging to attribute changes in the reoffending measure to individual initiatives", and that evaluation of 'Reset' "will be published by July 2026".
- On workloads, the Our Future Probation Service programme was launched with the "primary objective to reduce workloads by 25% by April 2027", and HMPPS plans to share more detail with staff during March and April 2026.
- It commits to write to the Committee on Serco's performance against its key performance indicators within six months of the report (target August 2026), and on third and private sector support and electronic monitoring capacity (target October 2026).