Amy Sage, Unison Police, Probation and Cafcass Service Group Executive member, personal capacity
As our conference meets on 15-16 October, the Probation Service is running on empty. Andy Burnham is now prime minister, but so far his policies hold out little hope that he will improve things. Unison cannot sit on the sidelines.
The employer and the government have made deliberate choices that leave staff underpaid, overstretched and exposed to risk, and they will not change course unless the we force them to.
Pay, workloads and staffing are national issues created by national political decisions, and they need a national fight. Napo has already recognised this by balloting for national strike action. Unison should be standing alongside them.
Members should reject
Members should reject the 5% pay offer in the ballot currently taking place, despite the Probation Sector Committee unfortunately recommending acceptance.
Branches know exactly what’s happening on the ground. Staff are exhausted, services are unsafe. Staff are leaving because the job has become impossible, and probation can’t bring new people in fast enough to replace them.
Prison overcrowding hasn’t been resolved, it’s just been shifted by pushing thousands more people into a probation service that was already stretched past breaking point. Frontline staff are expected to absorb the pressure without the staffing, time or resources to do it safely.
They’ve handed probation an extra £700 million – money that could have funded a decent pay rise – but it isn’t being used for staff. It’s being pumped straight into private companies like Serco to expand electronic tagging, a system that has already been rolled out badly and caused more problems than it solved.
Probation workers keep the public safe every day. Unison’s job is to make sure we can do that safely, with the staffing, resources and respect the service should have had all along. We need an above-inflation pay rise that starts to restore pay lost to years of real-terms cuts. We need to end all forms of privatisation and fully fund all services.
Unison should be organising, building confidence, and preparing members for the action that will be needed to force investment back into probation.
Part of that must include making sure the TUC does organise the national demo agreed at Congress – which Unison voted for. Burnham’s continuation of Keir Starmer’s approach shows that Unison members must also continue to campaign for our union to debate its relationship with Labour and the need for the trade unions to have our own political voice.
