The Home Office intends to take away the statutory role of the 42 local probation boards, which will become known as probation trusts. Ten regional offender managers will be given the power to give the statutory duty to another provider. This could be the probation trust, or a voluntary or private sector group that performs the same role.
Pauline Batstone, chair of the association, said: "It is more than likely further down the road that there will be question marks about whether youth offending teams (YOTs) will be subject to the same sort of instability."
In the short term, she said the changes to the probation system could have an impact on partnership arrangements between YOTs and local probation teams. In Bournemouth and Poole, where Batstone is YOT manager, work with the probation board on an accommodation scheme for offenders has been delayed because of the uncertainty.
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