Probation: Staff

(asked on 22nd January 2024) - View Source
Questioner
Ruth Cadbury Portrait
Ruth Cadbury
(Labour - Brentford and Isleworth)

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will publish the number of vacancies per region in the probation service at the end of 2023.

Answered by
Edward Argar Portrait
Edward Argar
Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
This question was answered on 25th January 2024

Table One: Vacancies across Probation Service Regions, September 2023, all Probation Service grades

Probation Service Region

Vacancies (FTE)

PS East Midlands

28

PS East of England

274

PS Greater Manchester

0

PS Kent, Surrey & Sussex

77

PS London

457

PS North East

32

PS North West

77

PS South Central

176

PS South West

74

PS Wales

0

PS West Midlands

32

PS Yorkshire & the Humber

59

Approved Premises

0

Data shows average resource across the month, adjusted for joiners and leavers within the month. Data shown as of September 2023, aligning with the most recent HMPPS Workforce Quarterly publication. More recent data cannot be provided due to potentially pre-empting future statistical publications.

Recruitment and retention remain a priority across the Probation Service. We have injected extra funding of more than £155 million a year to deliver more robust supervision, recruit thousands more staff and reduce caseloads to keep the public safer.

We continue to focus efforts on enhanced, centralised recruitment campaigns in priority regions alongside regional recruitment to help bolster the number of applications and improve time to hire for key operational roles. We have also accelerated recruitment of trainee Probation Officers (PQiPs) to increase staffing levels, particularly in Probation Delivery Units with the most significant staffing challenges. As a result, over 4,000 PQiPs joined the service between 2020/21 and 2022/23 which will increase Probation Officer staffing numbers.

The Probation Service is in its second year of a multi-year pay deal for staff. Salary values of all pay bands will increase each year, targeted at key operational grades to improve a challenging recruitment and retention position. The Probation Service has also introduced a Prioritisation Framework to provide clarity on prioritisation of tasks and what can be reduced/paused when capacity issues begin to impact on operational delivery.

Notes

  1. Vacancies have been calculated as Required Staffing (Full Time Equivalent - FTE) minus Staff in Post (FTE).
  2. Where the number of Staff in Post (FTE) in a region exceeds Required Staffing (FTE), the number of vacancies has been shown as 0 FTE. Summing the figures in the table will not give the overall number of vacancies across the Probation Service due the surpluses in some regions that haven’t been shown in the table.
  3. Vacancies have been netted off between grades and business units. As a result, the overall vacancy figures presented mask the presence of vacancies at both grade and business unit level.
  4. Data have been taken from the Workforce Planning Tool and are subject to inaccuracy as a result of the manual nature with which returns are completed. This approach differs from the published statistics, which uses data from the Single Operating Platform (our departmental HR system).
  5. Staff in Post (FTE) has not been adjusted for long-term absences (e.g. Trainee Probation Officer training time). In addition, we have not factored in loans / temporary cover / agency and sessional.The actual resourced position will therefore differ as a result of these.
  6. Trainee Probation Officers are included in the data. Trainees spend a proportion of their time training and the remainder of their time carrying out work at a Band 3 PSO level. Both training time and time spent delivering caseload are included in the Staff in Post (FTE) calculations, which means that number of vacancies is lower than the actual gap between Required Staffing and frontline delivery.

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