The probation service for England and Wales has been working over capacity every month since January 2023, FactCheck can reveal.

Figures obtained exclusively from the Ministry of Justice show the service has consistently been working at around 120 per cent capacity – meaning the average officer has about six days’ work to do in a five-day week.

Our findings come as the government plans to release around 2,000 prisoners on a single day next week as part of plans to ease overcrowding – which is expected to put even more pressure on the probation system.

FactCheck takes a look.

How are probation workloads calculated?

Probation officers have access to a “workload measurement tool“ which estimates how many hours of work are required to manage their caseload. 

If an officer is assigned a certain case, the tool will estimate how many hours of work that case will likely demand from the officer.

We understand that the percentage workload compares the estimated number of hours it should take to manage all of an officer’s cases, to the amount of time that officer is actually contracted to work.

So if an officer has 12 hours’ worth of work to do, but only 10 hours in which to do it, they would be deemed to have a workload of 120 per cent. 

Exclusive FactCheck figures

We obtained exclusive data about probation workload through a Freedom of Information request to the Ministry of Justice.

The data shows that the probation service – which covers all of England and Wales – was working at an average of 120 per cent capacity across the months of 2023. 

For an individual officer, this would be equivalent to having six days’ worth of work to do in a five-day working week.

And the service has been working at 117 per cent capacity on average in 2024 so far. 

The data for 2024 goes up to June.

It’s important to note that the figures come in the form of snapshots – telling us about a single day at the beginning of the relevant month.

Even worse than the data shows?

The Ministry of Justice highlighted that the workload measurement tool data is “based on averages and assumptions, and gives an overall measure [of workload] across the system”. 

It pointed out that as the tool is based on estimates, it is not a perfectly accurate reflection of real-life workload, or the “peaks and troughs of sentence management”.

NAPO, the union representing probation officers, told FactCheck that the workload measurement tool often underestimates how much time a given probation case will actually require from an officer.

The union said that this means the percentage workloads calculated by the tool are understated too.

‘Excessive’ workloads?

The probation service has its own measure of overwork. It says that if a probation officer is working at 110 per cent capacity for four weeks in a row, their workload is “excessive”. 

Our exclusive data suggests that the average officer would have been above this threshold in every month since January 2023. 

However, since we don’t have data on the workload of individual officers, we can’t say for certain how many officers were over this threshold for every week in the month.

But the probation officers’ union told us that they have anecdotal evidence of many of their members regularly working at 150 per cent capacity. (We put this to the Ministry of Justice, which did not directly respond to the claim.)

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson told us: “The new Lord Chancellor has already committed to recruiting 1,000 new trainee probation officers to bolster the supervision of offenders, ease workloads and better protect the public”. 

“We’ve also brought forward planned pay rises by six months meaning entry level frontline staff will receive a bonus of more than £1,000”.

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