The Ministry of Justice accidentally divulged that prison and probation service staffing levels were approaching dangerously low levels.
In an obvious blunder, the MoJ aired its concerns in the description of a recruitment contract on the government procurement website.
The £8 million contract blamed government commitments on prison expansion and high staff attrition for the shortages.
It warned a third of regions in England and Wales have less than 80 per cent of the probation officers they need, and it said 15 per cent of prisons were lacking more than a fifth of the prison officers or support staff they require.
The MoJ contract also outlines the challenges facing ministers due to the shortages in prison and probation services. It states that prison and probation staffing is approaching dangerously low levels and that this has been made more acute by government commitments to prison expansion and high staff attrition levels.
Labour’s justice spokesman Steve Reed said that if a third of the country has dangerously low levels of probation officers, they risk seeing even more cases where violent criminals who never should have been released from prison in the first place are allowed to strike again.
But a government source hit back, telling a newspaper outlet it was great to hear Steve Reed back tougher parole measures.
An MoJ spokesman said it had hired a record 4,000 probation officers since 2021 and would recruit up to 5,000 more prison officers by the mid-2020s.
Perhaps prisoners could be rehabilitated as prison officers, after all, they have the experience.
Being a probation officer isn’t an easy job. They have numerous high-risk cases, in addition to interviews and sentence plans. They have to find housing, write licences, and write progress reports. Then there are the police checks, home visits, check tags are working on the tracker system, prepare home detention curfew plans, paperwork for recalling to prison, do paperwork for the court when a person on probation breaches their order.
They have to work with many dangerous people who have been given a slap on the hand by woke judges. There’s no security so they could be attacked.
Some are fortunate to work with a lovely team, however, some coworkers in other places suffer from bullying, and inept managers in a regime plagued with the diversity and equality dictate, so one could understand the low retention levels.
The problem is that the Conservatives have for over a decade repeatedly cut police, probation, court and prison budgets.
Our government has diverted the money to finance its obsession with incentivising millions of economic migrants to overwhelm the country for low-paid workers. The consequences of Conservative incompetence are everywhere you look, but saying that, there’s not one thing that’s not broken in the United Kingdom now.
The Tories might talk tough about crime, but sentencing has become more and more lenient, and violent crimes in some parts of our nation have become out of control. Meanwhile, our nation’s population increases dramatically every year.
The Tories need to realise that this is what happens when you cut services to the bone and don’t pay staff enough money. But the Tories don’t care, because they’re more interested in supping champaign and scratching their heads and their backside – I must say they’re doing a good Ken Dodd impression.
It was said that the Ministry of Justice accidentally revealed this information, but it wouldn’t have mattered because everyone has known for years that prisons and probation services are dangerously understaffed and underfunded – what do they really believe that people are that stupid?
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 