It’s been a year of significant achievement but ongoing challenges too, for both probation and youth justice services. The transition to a unified public sector probation service at the end of June was managed well and broadly welcomed by staff working in the service, but as I said at the time, structural change by itself was never going to be a magic bullet. Ongoing Covid-19 restrictions and staffing shortages mean that probation remains in recovery mode with significant backlogs of unpaid work and accredited programmes to work through. A return to business-as-usual operating models and performance still feels some way off.

On the plus side, there has been real progress on the reducing re-offending agenda, with welcome new investment in accommodation for people leaving custody and in drug abuse treatment services – though much still to be done in both areas – see my recent statement on the Government’s announcement on drug treatment services. It was good to see a decent Spending Review settlement for the service, with this year’s additional £155 million resourcing for core functions now incorporated into the baseline for the next three years and an additional £550 million over the spending review period for reducing re-offending work – as well as further investment in electronic monitoring.

The Omicron variant adds uncertainty to the timetable for Covid-19 recovery for both probation and youth offending services – though face-to-face contact has been increasing over the past year and is significantly greater than it was at the beginning of the year. As an Inspectorate, we have also been returning to face-to-face working and on-site visits – where services are able to accommodate us – and I’m looking forward to visiting Camden YOT this week as part of our thematic inspection of education and training provision for children on youth justice caseloads. To reduce the impact of our inspections we’ve been trying a blended approach of on-site and off-site inspection staff, which seems to be working well and is likely to become part of our standard methodology in the future.

In spite of the ongoing impact of the pandemic, we have managed to publish 29 inspection reports so far this year – including important thematic inspections on race equality in the probation service; the management of the transition to the unified Probation Service and supervision and support for black and mixed heritage boys in the youth justice system. And last month we published the results of a major inspection by all four criminal justice inspectorates, the Care Quality Commission and Health Inspectorate Wales into the criminal justice journey of people with mental health needs – the first joint review on this topic in over ten years, involving interviews with over 550 staff and the analysis of over 300 case files from every stage of the criminal justice system. Although we found some progress at the front end of the system, including the national roll out of liaison and diversion schemes in police custody suites to all police force areas and an end to the use of police cells to hold people in mental health crisis while they wait for assessment, significant problems remained. In particular, we found patchy identification of people with mental health problems and a failure to share information about people’s mental ill-health between different parts of the system, worsened by a misunderstanding of data protection legislation. And even where mental health problems were identified and referrals for support made, a shortage of mental health beds means long delays in transferring acutely unwell people out of prison into more appropriate setting and wholly inappropriate use of custody to hold people awaiting trial, particularly women, while psychiatric assessments were undertaken.

On the youth justice side, we had published 21 local YOT inspection reports this year by last week – which, encouragingly, show that performance seems to be holding up, despite the challenges of the pandemic. We rated 16 out of the 21 as ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ – including a significant improvement in the performance of Blackpool YOT, previously rated as ‘Inadequate’.

Looking ahead to 2022, I’m looking forward to our core probation inspection programme returning to normal as we embark on a three-year cycle of inspections of every local probation delivery unit. We’ll be publishing the first of these reports in the New Year and will be aiming to have inspected a third of all PDUs by the end of 2022. And we have important thematic inspections coming up of the supervision of the high-risk MAPPA caseload and of Offender Management in Custody. We’ll also be publishing the results of our recent inspection of electronic monitoring arrangements and welcoming a new cohort of Inspectors to the Inspectorate. We always welcome enquiries from colleagues from probation or youth justice interested in joining us on secondment and advertise opportunities on a regular basis on our careers page.