One of my key priorities when I became Chief Inspector in 2019 was to increase the voice of people on probation, and children supervised by youth offending services, within our inspection methodology. So, I’m delighted to announce that from this month we have entered into a three-year contract with the organisation User Voice, to work with them on our local probation inspections; to gather more evidence from people on probation in every area we visit and work with our full time Participation Lead, Karen Kendall.

User Voice are an organisation led by, and employing, people who have been in prison or on probation themselves in the past. In every local area we inspect, their staff will interview people currently on probation, on our behalf, to capture their views on the quality of supervision and support they are getting and what’s working well – but also what might need improving, to help inform our local inspection reports. We’ll be asking questions like ‘are you getting treated fairly?’; ‘do you have the right amount of contact with your probation officer?’; and ‘have you been able to access the services needed to make positive changes in your life?’

This builds on the very successful approach we’ve also adopted over the past couple of years on our national thematic inspections, which all now involve interviews, with a sample of people on probation, by independent external organisations that employ people with lived experience of prison and probation. As well as User Voice, this has included, EP:IC (Empowering People: Inspiring Change), KeyRing Living Support Networks, and Penal Reform Solutions. Over the past two years they’ve interviewed more than 500 people about their experiences on probation for seven of our thematic inspections. We have heard stories of people forced to live on the streets after release from prison and constantly recalled to custody as a result. In addition, there is the emotional trauma caused by police or prison custody to those with mental health or neurodiversity needs, and those dependent on drugs, who have been missing out on the services they so badly need. Separate reports on this feedback are now published alongside each of our main thematic inspection reports, all of which can be found on our website, which also now includes a page specifically for people on probation.

Elsewhere in the Inspectorate, we’ve had a busy start to the year with the publication of our thematic inspection of the use of electronic monitoring by the Probation Service and of the first of our new-style inspections of local Probation Delivery Units, which started in south Wales. We found major impacts from the pandemic, with significant backlogs of unpaid work and accredited programmes yet to commence and some disappointing scores for the quality of case management, particularly of medium risk and community order cases. Our local probation inspection programme now moves on to England, with Kent, Surrey and Sussex and East of England regions under the spotlight next.