Last year 8,600 probation staff were outsourced. Now, with job insecurity and high workloads, many are questioning their professional identity

In February 2015, 8,600 professional, highly-skilled public sector jobs were privatised. But despite strike action and fierce lobbying, the privatisation of more than half of the probation service in England and Wales has gone largely unnoticed.

According to Gill Kirton, professor of employment relations at Queen Mary University of London, privatisation on this scale has slipped through under the radar because it’s not glamorous and most of the public have little contact with probation services. “It’s not like the junior doctors,” she says. “These people are not commonly seen as heroes. It doesn’t have that feeling of working for the public good in quite the same way.”

Under the government’s transforming rehabilitation agenda, supervision of low- to medium-risk offenders was outsourced last year to 21 community rehabilitation companies (CRCs), run by private companies with payment-by-results contracts. Cases involving high-risk offenders remain within the National Probation Service (NPS), which is now part of the civil service.

Probation service split: ‘staff are staring into the abyss’ Read more

Kirton’s report on working conditions in both sides of the service, published on 23 February, reveals a fractured workforce feeling the strain of increased workload, less autonomy, job insecurity and narrowing opportunities for training and progression.

‘The deprofessionalisation was almost immediate’

Staff outsourced to the private companies in particular felt that their role had been dumbed down, with no opportunity to deal with more dangerous offenders and complex cases. One told the researchers:

The deskilling and the deprofessionalisation for me were almost immediate. You need to hand your lifers over and I was really angry about that because one in particular I’d had for about 11 years. He’s in a special hospital and the only outside contact this man has is with his probation officer … I spent quite a long time working on having a productive relationship with this man, who’s got some fairly significant illnesses, just to have that removed … Nobody actually said ‘you’re no longer qualified’ but that’s how it feels.

Probation officers are well used to change. Once a specialism within social work, probation has become more and more aligned with the criminal justice system since the early 1990s.

In 2004 probation was relocated to the National Offender Management Service and combined with prisons. This move brought a hardening of attitudes and a change in language from that of rehabilitation to that of public safety, but most probation officers still prefer the term clients to offenders.

Sarah Friday, Napo’s national official for health and safety, says she often hears longer-serving staff at trade union meetings talking about the need to return to probation’s social work roots.

As a probation officer, I have to believe that people can change Read more

For many, the latest moves have been a change too far. Kirton spoke to many workers who wanted out: older staff counting down their days to retirement and younger ones who don’t see a future for themselves in the service.

“The introduction of the profit motive is something that most find deeply offensive as public sector professionals,” says Kirton. There is a sense that privatising IT and cleaning services is one thing, but folding welfare activities into payment-by-results contracts is quite another.

According to one Napo branch officer:

The whole thing about professional identity I feel has gone and you can’t measure that, can you? You can’t quantify what that means to you as a practitioner.

‘I feel that Sodexo have lied to me’

Staff have also expressed concerns about new working practices and believe their safety is more at risk. Since the split, there has been more lone working and open-plan offices have been introduced, forcing probation officers to carry out often sensitive interviews with offenders in earshot of the rest of the office.

Because some services are run by private companies, there is a new barrier – commercial confidentiality – that makes it harder for staff to get information about their clients. One woman, quoted in the research, did not find out that her client had stabbed his partner until well into a group session.

Privatisation has also brought job cuts. Sodexo, which runs six of the 21 new rehabilitation companies, last year warned its staff to expect 30% job cuts as it sought to replace probation officers with cash machine-style kiosks that allow offenders to check-in electronically.

One respondent to Kirton’s survey said:

I feel that Sodexo have lied to me, have tried to cheat myself and colleagues out of redundancy packages and have created total uncertainty in many areas of my working and private life.

Other companies running CRCs, including Purple Futures and Working Links, have also announced redundancies.

‘It’s like someone smashed the office in half’

When staff were first allocated to either the privatised services or the remaining public service, many teams were still operating alongside each other, split up within the same offices. There was tension. The researchers heard from staff who said it felt “like someone took an axe to the office and smashed it in half”.

Probation officers face redundancy in plan to replace them with machines Read more

Although it’s the staff in the privatised companies, who are generally lower paid and those facing redundancy, that express most unhappiness, Kirton also heard from NPS staff struggling to position themselves within the civil service. These staff are finding the complex bureaucracy and centralised control difficult. There was also concern about levels of stress and burnout among staff who once had a balanced caseload and now deal only with high-risk and often harrowing cases.

One person talked about the impact of this high workload:

I am concerned about my physical health … as well as my mental health. I have come back after two weeks off sick because I was concerned for my colleagues who are already in a very small team and were having to cover my cases in my absence. I did not return because I felt better.

‘An assault on women’

Kirton is particularly concerned about the impact of the changes on women in a workforce that is 70% female. The public sector has traditionally been a good employer of women, providing skilled, relatively well-paid jobs with the chance of progression, she points out. But the changes have resulted in fewer opportunities for flexible or part-time working, and staff being relocated further from their families.

“An assault on the public sector is effectively an assault on women and women’s equality,” she says. “It’s another story of the undervaluation of the work that women disproportionately do.”

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