Probation: Standards

Funding for probation and community services will increase by up to £700 million by 2028/29. This funding will support delivery of the reforms recommended by the Independent Sentencing Review. As part of this increased investment, this Government will invest £100 million over the Spending Review period to deliver the largest expansion in the use of Electronic Monitoring.

Recruitment and training of staff remain key priorities for this Government. The Probation Service exceeded our 2025/26 trainee Probation Officers target of 1,300, successfully onboarding 1,389 trainees. We have committed to onboarding at least 1,300 new trainee Probation Officers in 2026/27 and we are also carrying out improvement activity to support growth in the service through recruitment, particularly to roles which are historically harder to recruit to.

Through the Our Future Probation Service (OFPS) Programme, this Government will rebalance demand and capacity across the Probation Service. This will reduce probation workloads by 25% by April 2027 and ensure the Service is in the position to deliver the sentencing reforms.

As part of the OFPS Programme, we will introduce process improvements, policy changes and develop better digital tools to reduce the administrative burden on probation practitioners. These will enable staff to focus more on public protection and rehabilitation. This includes the deployment of Justice Transcribe, an AI-powered tool that converts meeting audio into accurate summaries and reduces the time practitioners spend writing notes by around 10 minutes per meeting. Between 7 October 2025 and 2 June 2026, over 800,000 meetings were summarised using Justice Transcribe, resulting in a saving of around 130,000 hours.