Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 14
Seventy-Eighth Report - Resettlement support for prison leavers
Published 11 Nov 2023
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Improving resettlement support for prison leavers All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
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
From: Public Accounts Committee, Seventy-Eighth Report - Resettlement support for prison leavers (HC 1329), 11 November 2023
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 14 February 2024 (deadline 11 January 2024).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government says it agrees with each of the Committee's recommendations on resettlement support for prison leavers, giving target dates for several of them.
- On inequalities, HMPPS is planning a programme of work to understand disparities in resettlement outcomes, and says that "By April 2025" it will deliver this analysis across prioritised thematic areas.
- On an action plan, HMPPS will "respond to the Committee by the six-month deadline" and says its plan will aim for "an adequate and consistent resettlement service" for all prison leavers by April 2025.
- On substance misuse, MoJ and the Department of Health and Social Care will develop a proposal on metrics, and the government says it will publish these metrics routinely, with a target implementation date of summer 2024.
- On evaluation, impact evaluations are "expected to be complete" by summer 2024, though findings on impact for some initiatives will only be available beyond 2024.