Of all the lifestyle factors that probation staff look for when they first assess a new case, I doubt there are any that are more predictive of further offending than addiction to street heroin or crack cocaine. So, the results of our recent inspection of drug treatment services for people on probation were particularly disappointing. We found a huge gap between the number of people on probation whose drug use may be driving their offending (potentially almost 75,000) and the declining number of people being referred by probation services to specialist drugs services (less than 3,000 on the most recent data).

This appears to have been driven both by a failure to get people into ongoing treatment after they leave prison (only a third were linked up to the treatment they needed), and by a failure to integrate treatment into community sentences. As someone who was closely involved in the development of Drug Testing and Treatment Orders (DTTOs) in the late 1990s, I found it distressing to see the huge fall in the use of Drug Rehabilitation Requirement (DRRs) as a court order – down by 75 per cent since their peak in 2008. Even where DRRs are still being given by the courts we found that very few included the regular drug tests or in-person court reviews that are a key (I would say essential) part of their effective use.

Just as distressing to me was our finding that wider investment in specialist criminal justice treatment pathways, to get people into treatment from every part of the CJS, had withered on the vine since the Drug Intervention Programme (DIP) ended in 2013. Except in Wales, almost every commissioner of drug services we surveyed reported cuts to their budgets since 2015 – often of at least 25 per cent.

Recent additional investment of £80m in drug treatment by DHSC is welcome, as is the money going into the Operation Adder programme. But this needs to be sustained into the future and is still well short of the additional ringfenced government funding for drug misuse treatment, rising from £119 million in year one to £552 million by year, that Dame Carol Black, the government’s own independent adviser, estimates will be needed in five years’ time to make good the treatment gap. With each £1 spent leading to £4 of savings to the public purse it’s an investment well worth making.

Elsewhere at the Inspectorate, we’ve now completed work on our national thematic inspection of the support and supervision offered to black and mixed heritage boys on youth offending service caseloads, and an ambitious joint inspection with colleagues – from all the other criminal justice inspectorates and CQC – of the support people with a mental illness get, as they progress through the justice system. Powerful findings from each review and both reports will be out this autumn.

Meanwhile, our local youth offending team inspections continue apace and, from the end of July, now include two new standards – on the quality of resettlement work done with children leaving (or preparing to leave) custody and on out-of-court disposal policy and provision. We have also published more information on our new methodology for inspecting the unified Probation Service – including the evidence we will be gathering at regional and Probation Delivery Unit level. Information about our standards and ratings can be found on our website. We’ll be applying these for the first time in Wales, where fieldwork for our first post-unification local probation inspections will start in October.