Tuesday 17 May 2022 08:22 AM Offenders are making face masks and greetings cards while doing community ... trends now
Britain's post-pandemic 'work from home' culture has now extended to criminals, who have been permitted to carry out community payback work from the comfort of their own homes.
Offenders have been making face coverings and greeting cards at home in a bid to clear the vast backlog of unpaid work which built up during the Covid pandemic.
In a report by four chief inspectors, probation officers branded the work-from-home approach as 'innovative'.
They said they planned to use it going forward for those who are unable to perform 'external' payback work.
It comes after Prime Minister Boris Johnson last year said criminals ordered to perform unpaid work should do so in 'fluorescent-jacketed chain gangs', to visibly pay back their debts to society.
He also said last week that working from home 'does not work', arguing in a scathing attack that cutting down on remote working would boost productivity and revive the UK's town and city centres.
Meanwhile, a 500,000-strong backlog of passport applications is wreaking havoc on Brits' holiday plans, with long queues seen outside offices while civil servants continue to work from home.
The Criminal Justice Joint Inspection also warned the criminal justice system remains a 'long way from recovery', with the number of cases waiting longer than a year surging by more than 340 per cent since March 2020.
Offenders have been making face coverings and greeting cards at home in a bid to clear the vast backlog of unpaid work which built up during the Covid pandemic. (Stock image)
Prime Minister Boris Johnson (pictured) last week said working from home 'does not work', arguing in a scathing attack that cutting down on remote working would boost productivity and revive the UK's town and city centres
The backlog has also extended to hours of unpaid work by criminals.
Criminals convicted of less serious crimes, such as theft or shoplifting, are often ordered to carry out between 40 and 300 hours of unpaid work in the community, depending on the severity of the offence.
But following the pandemic and its successive lockdowns, there is now a backlog of hundreds of thousands of hours of uncompleted unpaid work, reports the Telegraph.
By the end of November last year, more than 13,000 offenders had not completed their mandated community service hours within 12 months of being sentenced.
It meant the Probation Service had to go back before judges to seek extensions, adding more pressure on the already clogged up courts.
The chief inspectors said this led to offenders with 'specific needs' being permitted to carry out some of their work from home.
The wait time is about five weeks, the target was extended to 10 weeks due to the backlog
Desperate travellers were queuing out the door at the passport office yesterday in a bid to beat the huge backlog caused by staff shortages and a surge in post-Covid travel.
Photos showed lengthy queues snaking round the building at the passport office in Peterborough with families waiting hours to be seen in the hope that their holiday plans could go ahead.
Other offices in Durham, Liverpool, Glasgow, London, Newport and Belfast are equally busy trying to cope with demand as it is estimated there is a huge backlog of 500,000 passport applications to process.
The usual wait for a passport is around five weeks, but target waiting time has been increased on HM Passport Office website to 10 weeks as officials struggle to keep up with demand.
Despite this, Home Office minister, Tom Pursglove admitted last week that the current 10-week target of processing applications is not 'guaranteed'.
Mr Purglove said passport offices across the country will be reinforced with an additional 700 staff 'by summer' in a bid to quickly process millions of outstanding passport applications.
The backlog has been blamed on a sudden rush in demand for new passports following a lull during the two years of Covid-enforced travel restrictions.
Officials have argued that holidaymakers have put off their passport renewal until they needed to go abroad as a result.
Post-Brexit travel rules from the EU have complicated matters further as they require travelling Britons to have at least three months validity remaining when travelling to EU member nations.
The Government expects 9.5 million British passport applications to be dealt with in 2022 - almost double the number processed last year.
It comes as families continue to face holiday disruption as a result of the enormous backlog in applications.
An Edinburgh family were forced to cancel their long-awaited trip to Disneyland after passport delays meant they were unable to travel.
Stuart McLean, his wife, Claire, and their two young girls were due to head to Paris for a five-day trip to mark their five-year-old's birthday this month.
Applying for passports for both girls in February, the family were told that the wait time would be five to seven weeks, allowing plenty of time before they headed off.
However, Stuart, 35, said that unexplained delays in the passport office had seen one of the passports arrive after four weeks, with the other nowhere to be seen.
With one passport still nowhere to be seen, the couple made the decision to cancel the trip less than two weeks before they were due to head off in order to ensure they got their £3,000 costs back.
Stuart said: 'We had been taking our daughter for her fifth birthday, and had applied for the passports at the start of February.
'One came within four weeks but there was no sign of the one for our two-year old.'
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'A group of Community Rehabilitation Companies in the south of England, for example, developed an unpaid work 'project in a box', which could be sent to individuals who were shielding at home or could otherwise not attend external sites,' they said.
'Projects included making face coverings and greeting cards to strict industry standards, with the proceeds going to charity.
'The Probation Service has adopted this idea and will deploy it when individuals meet the qualifying criteria.'
The backlog of unpaid work means that over the next three years, the Probation Service would need to deliver 155 per cent of the hours carried out pre-Covid.
Meanwhile, the report also said criminal justice staff will likely continue to enjoy a 'hybrid' working system going forward, which it criticised for 'reducing opportunities' for colleagues to learn from each other.
It comes despite pleas from the government, including prime minister Boris Johnson, for civil servants to return to the office full time.
The inspectors said: 'While there are some clear advantages to such arrangements, some staff have also told inspectors that working from home or socially distanced offices have reduced opportunities to learn alongside more experienced colleagues.
'This is something that will need to be considered in developing future ways of working.'
Elsewhere, the inspectors, who oversee the police, Crown Prosecution Service, prison and probation, warned that the criminal justice system was continuing to operate at 'unacceptable levels' in England and Wales.
They warned that police were suffering from a lack of detectives, resulting in low charging rates.
The report said forces were far from recovering from the 'shock' of the pandemic, while the number of victims waiting more than a year to have their case heard had quadrupled.
It also said prisoners were being kept in their cells for up to 22.5 hours per day.
'We have found that justice delayed, denied or disrupted in far too many instances,' they said.
Speaking on behalf of the four watchdogs, Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, said: 'This report reflects our serious concerns about the ability of the criminal justice system to recover, even to its pre-Covid state.
'The impact of the pandemic will be felt for a prolonged period and whole-system recovery will take a lot longer than initially anticipated.'
Earlier this month, magistrates had their sentencing powers doubled in a bid to tackle the courts backlog – but barristers warned the move could trigger a flood of appeals.
Criminals will now face sentences of up to a year from today for a single offence, compared with a previous six-month maximum at a magistrates’ court.
The plans are part of a bid to relieve the huge crown court
