The probation crisis could totally undermine the government’s domestic abuse law

It has long been accepted in Westminster, including by those who were actually in the Ministry of Justice when it took place, that the privatisation of the Probation Service hasn’t worked very well. That’s putting it mildly, as today’s report from HM Inspectorate of Probation shows.

The report found that in seven out of 10 cases, private probation companies were providing ‘inadequate’ protection for victims of domestic abuse when their abusers return to the community. Probation officers were handed impossibly weighty workloads of up to 60 cases each, and the implications of this were that fewer than a third of offenders were referred to what are known as ‘perpetrator programmes’ which are designed to teach them to change their behaviour, and home visits were only carried out in 19 per cent of the cases where they were needed.