Probation Staff Vote to Strike Over Early Prisoner Release Plan: What's Going On

Probation staff in the Napo union have voted 91% in favour of going on strike. The result was announced on 11 August 2026 by Ben Cockburn, the union's national chair. He said the vote was professionals warning that they "cannot protect the public properly when there are not enough people to do the work" (The Guardian).

Probation staff are the people who monitor offenders after they leave prison, checking they follow the rules and do not commit new crimes. A strike means those staff would stop working, which could leave offenders without supervision.

The vote is a problem for Andy Burnham. On the same day, he said he had asked justice secretary Alex Norris to find extra prison places. The goal was to make sure that PC Andrew Harper's killers and other serious offenders would not be released early. Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers were sentenced to 13 years for killing PC Harper in Berkshire in 2019. They were due to be freed in January under a plan to release about 5,000 prisoners early, because prisons are too full (The Guardian).

Burnham suggested three ways to free up prison space without releasing serious offenders early: sending foreign offenders back to their home countries sooner, releasing lower-risk prisoners who are on sentences with no fixed end date, and using more of the prison system, including women's prisons, to house male offenders. These ideas came a day after Downing Street said on 10 August that there was no realistic way to exempt just a few prisoners from the early release scheme. Burnham's request to Norris seems to push back against that view (The Guardian).

The early release plan already exempts people convicted of rape, serious child sexual abuse, and grooming offences. But manslaughter is not on the exempt list, which is why Cole and Bowers are covered by the scheme (The Guardian).

Napo's complaints go beyond early release, though. The union had said the plans were rushed and warned that ministers did not seem to understand how stretched the probation service already is. For example, probation staff have a legal duty to tell victims when the person who harmed them is being released, and the union says there are not enough staff to handle that and the extra work early release would bring (The Guardian). The union's AGM authorised a vote on strike action over pay and workloads, with aims including rejecting the government pay freeze, the 2021 pay offer, and what the union called excessive workloads (Napo).

On pay, Napo received the probation pay offer for 2025–2026 and told members to reject it. The offer included a 4% pay rise across all pay levels, a 4% increase to London Weighting, Prison Supplement, and Standby allowances, and the removal of the lowest pay point (Napo). Separately, Napo ran an electronic vote from 27 March to 17 April asking members to accept or reject a 6% pay offer (Napo). A separate vote on workloads was also opened, with members getting a unique email ballot from 10 July 2026 (Napo).

The 91% strike vote is the strongest show of anger in the probation service in over a decade. The last similar action was in 2013, when Napo's strike vote over probation privatisation had a 46% turnout with more than 80% voting in favour of action (BBC News). The current vote shows a membership ready to fight on several fronts at once: pay, workloads, and the early release scheme.

The reason this is so hard to manage is that all of these problems are happening at the same time. Burnham is trying to respond to public concern about serious offenders like PC Harper's killers being released early. But Napo says the probation service does not have enough staff or resources to handle the work it already has, let alone the extra work that early release would create. A strike would remove frontline staff at the exact moment the service is being asked to do more.

The broader context here is a policy disagreement inside government. Downing Street says targeted exemptions from early release are not practical. Burnham has told the justice secretary to find a way to make them work. How this dispute is settled will affect not only individual prisoners like Cole and Bowers, but the future of the early release programme and the stability of the probation staff expected to run it.