For a long time this page described a probation service split in two: a National Probation Service handling the highest-risk cases, and 21 privately-run Community Rehabilitation Companies handling everyone else. That split, introduced in 2014, was widely criticised and scrapped: since 26 June 2021 there has been a single, publicly-run Probation Service again, covering the whole of England and Wales.
Its core job hasn’t really changed. It supervises people serving a community sentence or released from prison on licence, so the public stays protected and the person has a real chance of not reoffending. In practice that means assessing how much risk someone poses, deciding what level of supervision they need, enforcing whatever a court or the Parole Board has ordered, and recalling someone to prison if they breach those conditions or their risk rises.
It also does a lot of less visible work: writing pre-sentence reports for courts and assessments for the Parole Board, and helping people find somewhere to live, a job, or treatment, since those things do more to cut reoffending than punishment alone.
The service is now organised into 12 regions across England and Wales, each broken down into local Probation Delivery Units, and run by HM Prison and Probation Service, an executive agency of the Ministry of Justice. The pages below cover what that means in practice: how you’re allocated to a local office, what’s actually required of you, and how to find your own.
This section is being rebuilt from scratch (September 2026) – the old pages here described the 2014-2021 Community Rehabilitation Company system, which no longer exists.
In this section: