Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the potential effect of the size of the probation workforce on that service's ability to meet its caseload effectively.

The Probation Staffing Model identifies the staffing required to deliver the Probation Target Operating Model with acceptable caseloads.

The Probation Service has unified into a single organisation which spans England and Wales. This has ended the fragmentation which existed under the previous system and improved how the service functions.

The unified Target Operating Model seeks to achieve consistency and quality delivery as well as new ways of measuring and managing workload. The unified Probation Service has received extra funding of more than £155 million a year to deliver more robust supervision, reduce caseloads and recruit more staff to keep the public safer. We have recruited a record-breaking 2,500 trainee probation officers over the last two years, and we plan to recruit a further 1,500 by March 2023.

The Probation Service has introduced a Prioritisation Framework to provide clarity for probation practitioners on prioritisation of tasks and what can be reduced/paused when capacity issues begin to impact on operational delivery. It has also introduced a case allocation tool to support best practice case allocation decisions and actions. The tool will ensure quicker allocation of cases and improved accuracy and consistency.