Polly Toynbee: Britain releases 2000 prisoners into a probation service staffed at half its need, union opens strike ballot as tags go unfitted and hostels close

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A former inmate leaves HM Prison Liverpool on 13 October 2026. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images theguardian.com

Polly Toynbee theguardian.com

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Around 2,000 prisoners will be released early in Britain this month, into a probation service that the National Audit Office says is running on half the staff it needs to supervise them. The officers' union Napo opened a strike ballot at its Newcastle conference this week, rejecting a 5 percent pay offer that trails what local government, police and social workers receive. "Please, no bullshit," said Napo chair Ben Cockburn, anticipating the lord chancellor's address. "Don't tell us how well we do an exceptionally difficult job. We know that."

The numbers Polly Toynbee assembles in the Guardian describe a system priced below its function. Staffing sits 25 to 30 percent below target; the most common cause of sick leave is mental ill health; the government scrapped its workload measurement tool in September, the month before the latest release round. The Institute for Government found only 55 percent of electronic tags fitted on time. Eleven hostels and seven halfway houses that helped supervise released prisoners have just closed — for repairs, and for lack of staff. Offenders charged with serious further crimes while on probation have increased, and the public accounts committee put the rise down to staff shortages. The state's answer is to train another 1,300 probation officers, a number Napo calls inadequate given how many recruits quit once they meet the abuse, threats and stress of the job.

The backdrop is instructive. Chris Grayling split the probation service into 21 private companies in 2012, handing low and medium-risk offenders to contractors while keeping the serious cases in-house. The companies under-invested, experienced staff left, none of the promised innovation arrived, and the whole arrangement was abandoned in 2021 — by which time the workforce had been divided twice over and the experienced officers were gone. Napo blames the current tagging failures on the same instinct: contracts awarded to the lowest bidder at prices that guarantee the job is not done properly.

Under the planned industrial action, probation officers will work strictly to contract and refuse unpaid overtime — a fitting arrangement for a service that has itself been worked strictly to contract for a decade. Britain keeps sentencing people to supervision it has not funded, then expresses surprise at what walks out of the prison gates.