Consultation on the future of adult inspections (part two)

Under the new probation delivery model set out by the Ministry of Justice, responsibility for the provision of probation services will move to a new unified National Probation Service (NPS) from 26 June 2021. The service will be split into 12 regions across England and Wales. Each NPS region will be overseen by a Regional Probation Director (RPD) who will have responsibility for the delivery of probation services in their region.

Operational delivery in each region will be reorganised around Probation Delivery Units (PDUs), led by a manager with between five and 18 of these PDUs in each region. With the ending of the split between current NPS divisions and CRC services, HM Inspectorate of Probation will cease to focus on different providers of services. Instead, we will inspect the new arrangements based on overall provision to people on probation.

Our consultation is in two parts. We consulted in summer 2020 on our proposed broad approach and tested out these proposals on a pilot inspection of Wales NPS in December 2020. The decisions that we made following both the first consultation and the pilot are described in section three. It includes the decisions that we have made on our inspection standards framework, how we will achieve local and regional coverage, how often we inspect, how we sample cases for inspection and how we inspect statutory work with victims.

We now want to hear views about some of the detail of our approach that we have not yet settled on. This is in section four and includes our revised approach to inspecting diversity, how we judge outcomes, and how we capture and use the views of people on probation.