The inquest into the deaths of Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones in the Fishmongers’ Hall terror attack by Usman Khan – and the jury’s finding of “unacceptable” failings by the state agencies involved in his monitoring and supervision – were a very sobering reminder of how central the management of risk has now become to the work of the probation service.

Contrary to some reports, HM Inspectorate of Probation was not involved in the Serious Further Offence (SFO) review of this incident and was not asked to quality assure it. But the issues identified during the inquest felt familiar from other serious cases we have been asked to look at. Two in particular resonated with the findings from our independent review of the Joseph McCann case (PDF, 637 kB), which the Lord Chancellor asked us to undertake last year.

Firstly, the issue of ‘false compliance’ – of people under probation supervision, who on the face of it seem to be completing all the right programmes and complying with all of the conditions of their supervision, but who in reality remain highly dangerous. In our McCann review we said that: ‘the assessment and management of [high risk] individuals requires resilient staff who are trained and able to analyse, interpret and challenge difficult behaviour. They need the ability to seek out and synthesise information from different sources and use professional curiosity to question superficial compliance.’

But effective work to rehabilitate people on probation also requires practitioners and services themselves to believe in their capacity to change. So, at the same time as we ask probation staff and the organisations they work for to “believe in” the people they supervise, we simultaneously say “but don’t believe everything; stay alert to risk; probe what’s really going on in the background”. That’s a tricky balance to ask probation officers to hold in their head and demonstrate in their practice and that balance sometimes slips

Over the past few years and looking at thousands of individual cases, our inspections have consistently shown that while probation practitioners are good at engaging with the people they supervise and at identifying underlying needs, the assessment and management of risk of harm to the public is the weakest area of performance – with less than half the cases we inspect being satisfactory on this aspect of supervision. Whilst that figure is higher for the highest risk of harm cases, it’s still some way short of 100 per cent. For example, our inspectors judge that less than two-thirds of case reviews of high risk of serious harm cases by probation practitioners focused sufficiently on keeping other people safe.

In our review of the McCann case, we recommended that the probation service should improve professional training and review supervision and contact arrangements for managing the most complex and manipulative high risk of harm arrangements. I’m pleased that, in the light of Fishmongers’ Hall and other events, the National Probation Service (NPS) has now established a specialist National Security Division to manage Terrorism Act or connected offenders from five regional hubs to do just that.

A second key lesson from the inquest findings and from our McCann review, is the critical importance of agencies sharing information and intelligence on high risk individuals that they have a joint interest in. As became clear during the Fishmongers’ Hall inquest, MI5 did not tell the MAPPA panel about their ongoing probe into Usman Khan or share their scepticism about his compliance. In the McCann case we pointed to a critical failure by prison service security teams to share their concerns about his behaviour with probation staff  preparing parole reports and post release plans. In both cases, the result of this critical failure to share information across organisational boundaries was a collective blind spot, with dangerous consequences for public protection.

When high risk offenders are involved it’s inevitable that multiple agencies will have contact with them and essential that they share relevant information and learn the lessons when things go wrong. That’s why we place a heavy emphasis on the effectiveness of partnership working around risk in all our inspections and why we recommended in our inspection of SFO review processes that where other agencies have been involved in a probation case and that person has gone on to commit a serious offence like murder, those agencies should also be involved in the SFO review. A recommendation I was disappointed that HM Prison and Probation Service did not feel able to accept.

I know that everyone working in probation will want to ensure that the right lessons are learnt from the terrible events at Fishmongers’ Hall and new safeguards and structures like the NPS National Security Division are now in place. As an Inspectorate, we want to ensure that the lessons have been learnt too – so the new Joint Inspection Business Plan for 2021 to 2023, to be published this month and agreed with the other criminal justice Inspectorates, will include commitments to two new joint thematics – on the supervision of extremist offenders in the community and on the effectiveness of MAPPA arrangements, which we last reviewed in 2015.