Our key publication in March was the race equality in probation report, our first inspection on this topic since 2004, so it was long overdue. We conducted fieldwork in five local areas; analysed 150 case files and court reports for black, Asian and minority ethnic service users and through our consultancy partner – Empowering People: Inspiring Change (EP:IC) – interviewed more than 80 people being supervised by the service. I was disappointed by what we found. There was little evidence that probation staff had spoken with service users about their ethnicity, culture, religion, and experiences of discrimination; too few service users were engaged with services to support their rehabilitation and the number of specialist services for black, Asian and minority ethnic service users has decreased since 2015.

We also asked black, Asian and minority ethnic staff for their views, through an online survey and via individual interviews and focus groups. These results were equally disappointing, with some distressing stories about inappropriate and unchallenged racist behaviour and talented staff being overlooked for promotion. Many staff we surveyed or spoke to lacked confidence in the ability or willingness of managers, across the NPS or CRCs, to respond appropriately to their concerns and said they had repeated experiences over many years of raising issues and having them downplayed, ignored or dismissed. I was also disturbed to hear of staff being expected to supervise offenders convicted of race hate crimes without consultation, support or training.

I was able to brief the Lord Chancellor and new Minister for Prisons and Probation the day before we published our findings and have held a number of roundtable sessions with senior national and regional probation leaders since then. Action is promised, building on the additional resources and debates held within the service since last summer, but real and rapid progress needs to be made. Given my concerns about this area, I plan a reinspection in two years’ time.

I also recognised that we, as the Inspectorate, needed to raise our game to attract a more diverse workforce. Last year, we launched a scheme specifically for black, Asian and minority ethnic probation staff offering the opportunity to shadow our inspectors. More than 30 people were successful in their applications and have observed our teams in action over recent weeks. We are hopeful that some of these colleagues will be interested in the next round of recruitment we have coming up this summer.

Looking forward to April, our key new initiative will be our independent quality assurance process for Serious Further Offence reviews, which was commissioned by the Lord Chancellor last June. We’ll be independently inspecting a random sample of 20 per cent of all SFO reviews (perhaps 100 per year) and rating them on a four-point quality scale (‘Inadequate’, ‘Poor’, ‘Good’ and  ‘Outstanding’) against a set of inspection standards for quality assuring serious further offence reviews, agreed in collaboration with HMPPS. These will include the quality of the review itself; of the learning derived from each review and how accessible they are to victims and their families. We’ll also be holding regular multi-agency learning panels to give police, probation, local councils and prisons the chance to share lessons from cases in which they may have been involved. And, we’ll be publishing an annual summary of our findings including ratings and key themes.

Also coming up in April is the restart of our local YOT inspection programme in Brighton and Hove on 19 April. We’ll also begin our thematic inspection of the support and supervision that black and mixed heritage boys are receiving from youth offending services. This will involve ‘visits’ (sadly virtual ones, given the ongoing Covid-19 restrictions) to nine YOTs – Lewisham, Oxfordshire, Hackney, Sheffield, Nottingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Haringey and Leeds, where we’ll interview staff, children and parents and inspect a large sample of at least 160 cases.

And finally, we’ll be saying goodbye to two key members of our senior team over the next couple of months – Helen Rinaldi, who has been one of our Heads of Probation Inspection since 2014 and Alan MacDonald, Head of our Youth Inspection team – both of whom are retiring this spring. My thanks to them for the huge contribution they’ve made to the life and work of the Inspectorate over the years, And so, a warm welcome to Linda Neimantas, who’ll be joining us from London CRC as a Head of Probation Inspection at the beginning of July and to Andrea Brazier, our new Head of Youth Inspection, who joins us in June from Wiltshire Council where she’s currently Service Manager for Young People. Many congratulations also to Simi Badachha, on her well-deserved promotion to the other Head of Probation Inspection role.