After several decades in journalism, the daughter of a history prof, remains fully Anglocentric, writing once more to conflate England’s woes with Scotland today. She only once reveals that this is all about England & Wales (poor things) in the very last paragraph.

Her main concern, highlighted in the headline, is:

Today it’s the probation officers, whose conference in Newcastle is launching a ballot for industrial action. Their caseloads overflowed long ago, but now thousands of prisoners released early – 2,000 this month – have been thrust upon them. The responsibility is overwhelming, with officers blamed for crimes their clients commit.

The probation story is told in scores of reports: the National Audit Office found the service running on half the staff needed to cover released prisoners. It also reported failures in electronic tagging, echoed by the IFG reporting only 55% of tags were fitted in time. Napo, the probation officers’ union, blames the problems on awarding contracts to the lowest bidders at prices that mean the job isn’t done properly.

The number of offenders charged with serious further offences while on probation has increased, with the public accounts committee blaming staff shortages. Vacancies leave probation services 25%-30% below target levels. The government is training another 1,300, but that’s not enough, says Napo, considering the high dropout rate once recruits discover the abuse, threats and stress of the work, alongside the fact that the most common cause of staff sickness is mental ill health.

The sheer impossibility of their caseloads caused the government to abandon any attempt to say what their caseload should be, so the “workload measurement tool” was abruptly ditched in September just before the October raft of new prisoner releases. There is no point in stating an official workload standard that can’t be met.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/oct/16/britain-addicted-prisons-crumbling-probation-service

We don’t see in the above just how many probation officers England has nor the ratio with prisoners. Maybe she she saw that and took fright.

On 19 June 2026, the Guardian’s Home Affairs Correspondent had:

The public is “at direct risk” from unsupervised ex-offenders because probation officers in England and Wales are being asked to cope with excessive workloads, a union has said. As ministers prepare to release and monitor tens of thousands more prisoners this autumn, Napo’s executive has declared for the first time that it has no confidence in managers at the probation service. In a worrying development for the government, the union is threatening to launch industrial action in three months’ time unless members receive increased support and pay.

James Timpson, the prisons minister, told MPs last week that the probation service was under severe pressure after disclosing that staff were each managing an average of 32 ex-offenders.¹

There are currently 5 576 ‘band 4’ probation officers in England.²

Scotland does not have “probation officers” as a distinct role. The equivalent is Justice Social Workers (also called criminal justice social workers), who are qualified social workers employed mainly by the 32 local authorities.

Per head of population, you might expect that Scotland would have around 560 of these but has 1 174 up from 950 the year before.³

Scotland has twice as many!

Sources:

1. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/19/probation-public-risk-ex-offenders-england-wales-union
2. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hm-prison-probation-service-workforce-quarterly-september-2025/hm-prison-and-probation-service-workforce-quarterly-september-2025
3. https://www.communitycare.co.uk/content/news/social-worker-numbers-increase-in-scottish-councils