Although we are still not able to do onsite visits to probation or youth offending services, July has nevertheless been a busy month for inspections – all being done remotely through various video conferencing platforms. Fieldwork has just finished on our thematic inspection of the impact of COVID-19 on the probation service in England and Wales, and we will shortly be completing a similar inspection for youth offending services. And we are well into the fieldwork for our thematic inspection around culture and practice relating to recall in the probation service.

Although we will not be publishing our final reports into the impact of COVID-19 until the Autumn, I had an initial briefing on the results from my team earlier this week. The tone was generally positive – perhaps surprisingly so, given the profound impacts the pandemic has had on so many aspects of our lives. Probation staff had, in general, adapted well to new ways of working and relationships with key partners like the police and children’s services were good.

Having said all that, the new ways of working haven’t suited everyone. More vulnerable and isolated service users have seen that isolation increase and probation staff with young children and no space to work at home have found things tougher and have also felt isolated. And difficult and challenging phone calls with service users in your living room felt very different to having those calls in the office.

July has also seen the publication of the last of the local probation inspections we were able to complete before lockdown with reports on Hampshire and Isle of Wight CRC (HIOW) and the North West NPS division. COVID-19 disruption meant we were not able to provide an overall rating for HIOW, though we did complete our inspection of individual cases, which showed a worrying decline in the quality of supervision since our last visit in 2018. NPS North West retained its overall ‘Good’ rating and we were pleased to see the recruitment of 153 PQIPs to fill the probation officer vacancies that concerned us last time. Though even with this new resource, a third of staff were still working at over 110 per cent of their expected capacity.

On 08 July we published an important thematic inspection into accommodation (or often lack of accommodation) for people under probation supervision. We found many individuals are homeless when they enter prison and even more are when they leave, with almost 11,500 prisoners released homeless in 2018-2019 and many barriers to them finding settled housing. In the sample of 116 cases we followed for a year after release, recall rates for those without settled accommodation (65 per cent), were almost double those who did have such provision. I had two useful roundtable meetings with senior NPS and CRC leaders at national and regional level to discuss our findings.

The differential impact of COVID-19 on black, Asian and minority ethnic communities has been much commented on and has joined with a broader debate about disproportionality in the criminal justice system. As with the police and prisons, probation and youth justice caseloads also show significant ethnic disproportionality. We’ve been debating this issue within HM Inspectorate of Probation and decided we need to shine a brighter light on it in our inspections. So, at the end of 2020 we’ll be starting two new thematic inspections into the treatment of, and services to, black, Asian and minority ethnic service users by the probation and youth justice services. We’ll also be reviewing the questions we ask and the data we gather on this issue in all our local inspections. And because it’s important that our inspection team reflects the diversity of the services we inspect, we’ll be seeking to recruit significantly more black and Asian inspectors over the next 18 months and will launch a campaign to do this in the early Autumn.