The Justice Secretary is expected to address a rise in newly released prisoners committing serious violent and sexual crimes in a major speech tomorrow. Shabana Mahmood will promise to make the probation service better at protecting the public from reoffending and will hit out at the Tories’ dire handling of the crucial justice sector. She will acknowledge grim figures on serious further offences (SFOs) - crimes committed by people who were, or had very recently been, under probation supervision.
Some 770 individuals were charged with SFOs in 2023/24 - up by 33% on previous years, according to the probation inspectorate’s annual report. Recent scandals include the murder of Zara Aleena, who was murdered in 2022 by killer Jordan McSweeney nine days after he had been released from prison on licence. In a wide ranging speech on probation, Ms Mahmood will take aim at former Tory Justice Secretary Chris Grayling, whose policies inflicted severe damage to the probation service. She will criticise how his decisions led to a surge in workload for probation officers and that the service has never fully recovered from his changes.
Under his widely criticised shake-up in 2024, Lord Grayling part-privatised the probation service, splitting it into a publicly-owned National Probation Service overseeing high-risk criminals and 21 private firms in charge of managing 150,000 low- to medium-risk offenders. Experts have previously branded his plan as an “unmitigated disaster” that left the public at risk from prisoners released from jail.
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NEWSLETTER: Or sign up here to the Mirror's Politics newsletter for all the best exclusives and opinions straight to your inbox. PODCAST: And listen to our exciting new political podcast The Division Bell, hosted by the Mirror and the Express every Thursday. At least £171million was wasted on the part-privatisation failure, according to a 2019 report by the spending watchdog the National Audit Office. His scheme was later reversed and the probation service was brought back into public control in 2021.
Last night research showed his botched privatisation resulted in an average of 60 extra serious further offences per year. Labour said the six years following his reforms saw an average of 325 SFO convictions - up from an average of 262 convictions in the five years before his changes. Pre-2015, only offenders given a sentence of more than a year were supervised by probation. Lord Grayling’s extension to supervising all criminals meant more resources were being spent monitoring low level criminals, which impacted the management of more high-risk. His changes also saw recalls to prison shoot up by 47% as many offenders serving short sentences often have chaotic lives and struggle to keep to their licence conditions.
