Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Conclusion 14
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)
Persistent staff shortages mean that probation staff have been working at a level that is unsustainable for years.26 At March 2025, there were 5,636 full-time equivalent probation officers in post, 79% of HMPPS’s target staffing level - a shortfall of 1,479 probation officers. HMPPS’s data shows that probation officers, at a national level, have been working on average at 118% capacity from January 2022 to April 2024. In some regions, for example, London and East of England, probation officers had to deal with even higher workloads - working on average at 126% capacity.27 In 2024, HMPPS found that it had significantly underestimated the number of staff it needed for its Probation Service and had been operating with around only half of the staff needed to run sentence management as intended. This means that HMPPS’s data on staff capacity will have been a significant underestimate of the actual pressure practitioners have been under.28
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).