Recommendation 14

MoJ explained that people join the prison and probation services to make a difference but HMPPS told us that staff who are leaving “consistently” blame workload pressures which leave them feeling unable to do a good job.30 HMPPS’s audit of 98 cases and feedback from 15 service managers confirmed many of their probation staff were managing more than 70 prison leaver cases at a time, against a suggested case load of 30 to 60.31 MoJ told us that caseloads are directly related to stress levels and the difficulty of the job, which it says makes recruitment a “really important driver for retention”.32 HMPPS told us it has recruited 4,000 probation officers over the last three years, which it described as “a record number”, and that HMPPS now has an extra 2,000 staff in post across the service compared to the previous year. However, HMPPS explained it takes 15 to 21 months to train new probation recruits and, even after they have completed training, it will take them a little while to get completely up to speed.33 HMPPS told us that working with such a different mix of new and experienced staff is creating some “real challenges” for managing the probation caseload.34