Probation Staff Vote 91% for Strike as Early Prisoner Release Plan Hits Turbulence
Probation staff in the Napo union have voted 91% in favour of strike action, a result announced on 11 August 2026 by the union's national chair, Ben Cockburn. He framed the vote as professionals warning that they "cannot protect the public properly when there are not enough people to do the work" (The Guardian).
The strike ballot lands as a serious complication for Andy Burnham, who on the same day said he had instructed justice secretary Alex Norris to find additional prison places. The goal: ensure that PC Andrew Harper's killers and other serious offenders would not be released early under a scheme designed to free up space in overcrowded prisons. Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, sentenced to 13 years for PC Harper's manslaughter, were due to be freed in January under plans to release roughly 5,000 people early. PC Harper was killed in Berkshire in 2019 (The Guardian).
Burnham proposed three ways to create prison capacity without resorting to early release for serious offenders: removing foreign offenders more quickly, releasing lower-risk prisoners held on indeterminate sentences (sentences with no fixed end date, where release depends on a parole board decision), and making greater use of the entire prison estate, including the female estate, for male offenders. These proposals came a day after Downing Street stated on 10 August that there was no feasible way to exempt just a handful of prisoners from the early release scheme. Burnham's instructions to Norris now appear to challenge that position (The Guardian).
The early release scheme already exempts those convicted of rape, serious child sexual abuse, and grooming offences. Manslaughter, however, is not on the exempted list, which is why Cole and Bowers fall within its scope (The Guardian).
Napo's grievances, though, extend well beyond early release. The union had previously criticised the proposals as rushed, warning that ministers appeared not to understand how ill-equipped the probation service was to absorb the additional workload. That workload includes statutory duties such as informing victims when a perpetrator is being released (The Guardian). The union's AGM authorised a ballot for industrial action over probation pay and workloads, with stated aims including rejection of the government pay freeze, the 2021 pay offer, and what the union called excessive workloads (Napo).
On the pay front, Napo received the probation pay offer for 2025–2026 and recommended rejection. The offer comprised a 4% increase to all pay points and bands, a 4% increase to London Weighting, Prison Supplement, and Standby allowances, and the removal of the minimum pay point (Napo). Separately, Napo had run an electronic ballot from 27 March until 17 April asking members to accept or reject a 6% pay offer (Napo). An indicative ballot on workloads was also opened, with members receiving a unique electronic ballot by email from 10 July 2026 (Napo).
The 91% strike vote is the sharpest expression of discontent within the probation service in over a decade. The last comparable action was in 2013, when Napo's strike ballot over probation privatisation recorded a 46% turnout with more than 80% voting in favour of action (BBC News). The current mandate reflects a membership that has moved decisively toward confrontation on multiple fronts: pay, workloads, and the early release scheme.
The convergence of these threads is what makes the situation difficult to manage. Burnham's effort to carve out exceptions to early release for high-profile offenders is, in effect, an attempt to respond to public alarm over cases like that of PC Harper's killers. But Napo's position is that the probation service lacks the staffing and resources to manage either the existing caseload or the additional burden that early release creates. A strike would remove frontline capacity at precisely the moment when the service is being asked to do more, not less.
The tension between Downing Street's position that targeted exemptions are unfeasible and Burnham's instruction to Norris to find a way to make them work suggests a live policy dispute within government. How that dispute is resolved will shape not only the fate of individual prisoners like Cole and Bowers, but the broader viability of the early release programme and the stability of the probation workforce expected to administer it.
