Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Conclusion 16
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)
MoJ and HMPPS stated that they were focussing on improving staff retention as well as recruiting more staff. In the year ending March 2025, the leaving rate for probation staff was 9.3%, up from 6.2% in 2021, and sickness rate was 13.2 working days, up from 8.9 in 2021. Poor mental ill health accounted for the largest proportion of working days lost, 41% for all HMPPS staff and 58% for probation officers.31 HMPPS agreed that “it would be futile” to “hugely recruit just to see people leaving”. It told us that the most recent statistics suggest that there has been an improvement in retention rates, for example, the overall leaving rate for probation went down to 8.5% for the 12 months to the end of September 2025, one percentage point lower than for the year to March 2025.32 30 RPS002; RPS003; RPS004 31 C&AG’s Report, para 2.6; HM Prison & Probation Service, HM Prison and Probation Service workforce quarterly: March 2025 32 Qq 38,42; HM Prison and Probation Service workforce quarterly: March 2025 13 2 Future of probation services HMPPS’s Our Future Probation Service (OFPS)
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).