Big increase in the number of Serious Further Offences

High quality assurance

The Inspectorate’s SFO inspectors high quality assured 87 SFO critiques this 12 months, ranking 46 per cent as ‘Good’, however 52 per cent as ‘Requires enchancment’, emphasising the necessity for SFO groups to be sufficiently resourced and skilled, for more practical administration oversight, and for improved centralised coaching.

The report additionally highlighted the backlog of SFO critiques due in lots of areas – inflicting delays within the probation service figuring out and implementing the required studying, and in sharing findings with victims and their households.

For the primary time, this 12 months’s annual report additionally sought reflections from probation workers on their experiences of the SFO evaluate course of, and their experiences of the organisational tradition linked to SFO critiques.

This raised recurring issues in regards to the SFO evaluate coverage framework, how it’s utilized, and its outcomes and influence. There was additionally suggestions that the extent of help supplied to these concerned in SFO critiques must be improved, with respondents involved a couple of ‘tradition of blame’ present inside HMPPS. Employees reported they usually felt particular person accountability was attributed to them, with a failure to acknowledge and tackle wider and procedural systemic points.

Chief Inspector of Probation, Martin Jones, commented on the report:

“The probation service manages a big and complicated caseload in the neighborhood. By its very nature, threat is inherent in that work and may by no means be eradicated. In opposition to that backdrop, the variety of SFOs dedicated every year stay low as a proportion of the general workload, however the influence of great additional offences on victims and their households can’t be underestimated, and they’re an necessary alternative for studying. So, it’s disappointing we’ve got continued to see a discount within the variety of SFO critiques that meet the required customary. Extra work is required to develop and help reviewing managers, alongside extra transparency and the sharing of high-quality knowledge and efficient follow throughout areas to help a collective developmental strategy.”

Disappointingly, however maybe not surprisingly given the continual under-staffing that the probation service has been experiencing for a number of years now, the Inspectorate’s suggestions for bettering SFO critiques are nearly an identical to these in final 12 months’s report.