“Being on probation” can mean quite different things depending on what a court, or your licence, actually requires. Here’s what tends to come up in practice.
Keeping your appointments. Whatever else is attached to your order or licence, you’ll have to report regularly to your probation practitioner (sometimes still called an offender manager), in person, by phone or occasionally by video call. How often depends on your risk level – it can be weekly to start with, tailing off over time. Missing an appointment without a good reason, and not letting them know in advance, counts as unacceptable non-compliance. Two unacceptable failures within a set period is usually enough to trigger breach action.
Unpaid Work (“Community Payback”). Between 40 and 300 hours of supervised community work – things like litter picking, decorating community buildings, or gardening for local charities – usually completed in day-long sessions, wearing a high-visibility jacket marked “Community Payback”. Comply well and you can now earn a reduction of up to 25% of your remaining hours once you’ve done a quarter of them.
Rehabilitation activity. Structured sessions, one-to-one or in a group, aimed at the specific things that led to the offending – anger management, thinking skills, domestic abuse or substance misuse programmes, for example. Courts used to set a maximum number of days for this; more recent reforms give probation practitioners more discretion to decide how much someone actually needs.
Curfew and electronic monitoring (tagging). You may be required to stay at a specific address during set hours, verified by an electronic tag (usually GPS-based now rather than the older radio-frequency tags). Some orders now also use GPS tags to enforce “exclusion zones” – areas you’re simply not allowed to enter – rather than just a curfew at home.
Exclusion and non-contact requirements. Staying away from a particular person (often the victim), address, or area.
Treatment requirements. For drug or alcohol misuse, or mental health, sometimes with a testing requirement attached to check compliance.
Residence requirements. Some orders and most licences require you to live at an address approved in advance, and to get permission before changing it.
Holidays. Being on probation does not automatically stop you going away – but it does mean you can’t just book a trip and go, whether it’s a weekend in the UK or a week in Benidorm. As a general rule, you need to agree any time away from your usual address with your probation practitioner before you go, not after.
For a UK holiday, tell your probation practitioner in advance where you’ll be, for how long, and how to contact you, so they can check it doesn’t clash with reporting appointments, unpaid work sessions, or other requirements. If you’re electronically monitored, you’ll also need to tell your tagging provider, since your curfew address and hours still apply unless they’re formally changed for the trip.
Travel abroad is looked at far more cautiously, especially if you’re on licence. You will usually need to apply in writing, giving the destination, dates, and reason for the trip, well ahead of when you want to travel – permission is not automatic, and requests linked to holidays are often refused, particularly early in a licence period. Probation will consider things like your compliance so far, whether the trip is connected to your original offence, and whether it interferes with your sentence plan. A tag may not work correctly outside the UK, so this has to be resolved with your monitoring provider first, and if your passport has been surrendered as a condition of your order or licence, it will need to be released to you for the trip and handed back afterwards.
Going away – in the UK or abroad – without agreeing it first can be treated as a breach, which can mean a return to court or, if you’re on licence, recall to prison. If in doubt, ask your probation practitioner well before you book anything.
Across all of these, the underlying principle is the same: comply, and an order or licence can now end earlier than the date originally set. Don’t, and you’re looking at a return to court (which can add requirements, increase unpaid work hours, or impose a fine), or, if you’re on licence, recall to prison – sometimes for a fixed 14-day period, sometimes for the rest of your sentence if you’re assessed as too risky to be back in the community.