Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of the measures taken by his Department to reduce the workload pressures of Probation Service staff in the last 12 months.

We have unified the Probation Service and injected extra funding of more than £155 million a year to deliver more robust supervision, reduce caseloads and recruit thousands more staff to keep the public safer. We exceeded our target to recruit 1,500 trainee probation offers in 2021/22 and we have committed to recruit a further 1,500 in 2022/23.

We continue to address workload pressures through recruitment and retention of staff. The first Probation Service Recruitment and Retention Strategy was published in April 2021. An update is due to be published in May 2023 and includes specific initiatives to deliver against our commitment to ensure manageable workloads for staff.

Recruitment of key operational roles has been centralised to accelerate recruitment in 6 priority regions, including London. There are schemes available to provide financial support to incentivise new and existing staff to move permanently to areas with the most significant staffing challenges.