Probation officers should not be working remotely, the justice select committee chairman has said in the wake of revelations about the service’s blunders over a multiple child murderer.
Damien Bendall, 32, was this week given a whole-life sentence for killing three children and his pregnant partner with a hammer in Killamarsh, Derbyshire, last September, three months after receiving a suspended sentence for arson.
The Telegraph disclosed that the probation officer who assessed Bendall’s record for the sentencing judge in the arson case has been sacked for gross misconduct after miscategorising him as “medium risk” rather than “high risk”.
Probation officials believe it is unlikely that Bendall – who had a history of violent offending – would have been free to carry out one of the most grotesque child murder rampages in recent decades if the pre-sentence report had accurately reflected his risk.
The probation officer in question is understood to have spent a lot of time working from home, meaning other members of the team did not get the usual opportunities to offer advice on or read the report.
It is understood that probation officers are, as a general rule, allowed to write up reports from home. Officials at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) have said this has no bearing on the quality of the reports.
There is currently a vacancy for a fully remote probation officer, according to a job listing published this week. Among the main duties are managing and enforcing community orders and monitoring attendance, as well as writing reports.
The MoJ said the new recruit would join a “virtual hub” of probation officers on hand to be deployed in areas of the country experiencing high levels of demand.
Sir Bob Neill, the chairman of the justice select committee, said the probation service needed to be “very careful” about remote working as a “default position”.
“There’s no doubt that people don’t get as much experience if they are working in isolation, and that’s why it’s not suitable for all circumstances,” he said, adding that this was particularly the case for junior employees who could benefit from the guidance of their seniors.
Sir Bob added that there were a number of inexperienced employees working in the probation service because of a high turnover of staff in recent years, meaning new recruits needed to be trained.
He said that, since the pandemic, there had been a “serious drop-off” in face-to-face meetings between probation officers and the people they are supervising.
“Very often these meetings are being done on the phone, or on zoom calls, and I do think that is wrong – it is very troubling,” he said. “That’s really not a good enough way to keep tabs on people or to assess their risk. You may not get a robust assessment of how much risk these people do or don’t cause.”
Probation service ‘in “tatters’
The catalogue of errors in the case of Bendall has prompted the Ministry of Justice to order the Chief Inspector of Probation to carry out a full review of the case, which sources said is likely to be released in the new year.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former Business Secretary who led cross-Whitehall efforts to crack down on remote working in the wake of the pandemic, said: “It needs to be understood whether working from home played any part in this.
“It certainly ought to be looked into, and whether it would have been better if people had had the chance to discuss it in the office.”
Steve Reed MP, Labour’s shadow justice secretary, said the incident showed the probation service was “in “tatters”, leaing to “botched decisions”.
Harriet Wistrich, a leading solicitor and the director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, said she had dealt with “quite a number of cases” in recent years where “horrific” murders of women and children were carried out by men who were meant to be under supervision of probation.
“The problem with the probation service is that it is under-resourced, and probation officers are too inexperienced,” she said. “They do not have enough supervision, nor, it seems to me, do some have sufficient insight and understanding about male violence.
“I have seen cases where some naive probation officers are being hoodwinked by quite manipulative, charming men. Domestic abusers can be Jekyll and Hyde characters. They present as charming and really pleasant on the outside and have a really nasty undercurrent.”
A MoJ spokesman said: “Probation staff continue to meet offenders face to face, and hybrid working has no impact on their ability to produce, access and check reports thoroughly.
“All probation officers are subject to postgraduate-level training over a period of at least 15 months, and we have injected an extra £155 million a year to deliver tougher supervision and recruit thousands more staff to keep the public safe.”