Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people on the Probation Service’s trainee probation officer scheme in financial year 2021-2022 remain in the Service.

Recent trainee Probation Officer recruitment campaigns have delivered high volumes between 2020/21 and 2022/23 (4,039 hires against a target of 4,000). We have accelerated the recruitment of trainee Probation Officers recently, and this has resulted in the recruitment of 1,514 trainee Probation Officers in the 2022/23 financial year.

Across the 2021/22 financial year, there were 2,668 individuals on Trainee Probation Officer courses. Of these individuals, 2,165 individuals were still in the Probation Service, as of 30 September 2023. This represents 81% of individuals.

Notes

• Data have been taken from the Single Operating Platform HR database. As with all HR databases, extracts are taken at a fixed point in time to ensure consistency of reporting. However, the database itself is dynamic and where updates to the database are made late, subsequent to the taking of the extract, these updates will not be reflected in figures produced by the extract. For this reason, HR data are unlikely to be precisely accurate.

• Only staff recorded as working in Probation Service cost centres as of 30 September 2023 are included. A small number of staff who work in Probation Service grades in other parts of HMPPS have been excluded.

• The baseline for the 2021/22 financial year includes anyone who was recorded as being a PQiP at some point from 1 April 2021 to 31 March 2022. Data have been taken from a separate internal source, the quarterly Trainee Probation Officer Census.