Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many vacancies in the probation service there were in each region on 1 January 2024.

The workforce position, at 31 December 2023, was 20,806 full-time equivalent (FTE) Staff in Post working in Probation Service grades (including those working in Approved Premises). This is an increase of 1,856 FTE (9.8%) since 31 December 2022.

Recruitment and retention remain a priority across the Probation Service and we have injected extra funding of more than £155 million a year since 2021 to deliver more robust supervision, recruit more staff and reduce caseloads to keep the public safer.

We have recruited a record 4,039 trainee Probation Officers between 2020/21 and 2022/23 and we expect these intakes to qualify by the end of 2024 and begin to take on Probation Officer caseloads.

Trainee Probation Officers are onboarded twice annually (including this March which will not be counted in the figures below), and this can lead to fluctuations in staffing levels across the year.

We will continue to run centralised recruitment campaigns in priority regions to help bolster the number of applications.

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

Notes

1. Data shows average resource across the month, adjusted for joiners and leavers within the month. Data shown as of December 2023, aligning with the most recent HMPPS Workforce Quarterly publication. More recent data cannot be provided due to potentially pre-empting future statistical publications.
2. Vacancies have been calculated as Required Staffing (FTE) minus Staff in Post (FTE).
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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).
6. 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.
7. 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.