National Probation Service

The remit of the National Probation Service is to protect the public, operate and enforce court orders and prison licences, and rehabilitate offenders to law abiding lives; this includes reducing re-offending and ensuring that offenders are aware of the effects of crime on victims and the public.

Context:

The National Probation Service for England and Wales (NPS) is a key statutory criminal justice service. It was established by the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000 in April 2001 and consists of 42 areas throughout England and Wales. These match police force area boundaries.

NPS is currently being transformed to become part of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), a single service which will combine the work of the prison and probation services, to focus on end-to-end management of offenders. The current function of the service is to protect the public, supervise and enforce court orders and licences, and to rehabilitate offenders to law-abiding lives. NPS has accelerated the development of effective ways of working with offenders and it has created new central and local structures to support this work.

What do they do?

Each year NPS takes on the supervision of around 175 000 offenders; the caseload on any given day is over 200 000. Approximately 90% are male. Just over a quarter of offenders serving community sentences are aged 16-20. Approximately 70% of offenders supervised by the probation service are on community sentences; 30% are imprisoned with a period of statutory licence supervision in the community as an integral part of the sentence.

All work with offenders combines continuous assessment and management of the risk of both reoffending and harm. This is achieved through risk management structures such as Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) and the provision of accredited offending behaviour programmes designed to reduce re-offending. Enforcement of the order or licence conditions is a priority.

Specific tasks include:

• Assisting magistrates and judges in their sentencing decisions through the provision of pre-sentence and bail information reports
• Finding and supervising unpaid work by offenders in local communities
• Contributing to decisions about the release of prisoners through the production of reports on the assessment of risk, to the Parole Board and prison service
• Being a responsible authority within MAPPA (along with the police and the prison service). This is set of statutory arrangements operated by criminal justice and social care agencies that seek to manage the risk presented by sexual or violent offenders and protect the public
• Managing one hundred approved probation hostels which providing controlled environments for offenders on bail, community sentences and post custody licenses
• Contacting victims where the offender has been sentenced to 12 months or more in custody for a sexual or violent offence, to keep them informed of key developments throughout the offender's sentence. Victims are also given an opportunity to make representations about the offender's licence conditions, and this liaison also contributes to effective risk management of offenders.

Many probation staff are seconded to work in youth offending teams, prisons and a wide range of other public protection and crime prevention or reduction partnership agencies.