• Report begun after Sonnex case raises fresh concerns
• Monitoring of offenders in London 'worse than 2008'
Fresh concerns about the way dangerous offenders are monitored in the community were raised today by a damning investigation into probation service failings after the torture and murder of two French students in London last year.
The inquiry was ordered by the justice secretary, Jack Straw, after the conviction of Dano Sonnex, a violent drug addict who was supposed to be under supervision and should have been back in jail for breaching his release conditions.
Today's findings show that the quality of probation supervision falls short of the required standard in nearly half of all cases in London, and has actually got worse since the Sonnex case revealed a succession of failings.
Lawyers for the parents of the two students are preparing to sue the probation service and the police.
The inquiry into public protection work in the capital, by the chief inspector of probation, Andrew Bridges, looked at 276 cases across 10 London boroughs.
"The results are somewhat disappointing," said Bridges. "We judged that only 54% of the public protection work we examined was of the sufficiently high level of quality we were looking for.
"This did not compare well with the figure of 63% we found in the 'whole London' sample we examined for the 2008 general inspection, a figure which itself was well below the national average of around 69%."
The Sonnex case triggered the resignation of David Scott, London's chief probation officer, amid claims that high caseloads, stress levels and sickness rates were contributing to a service in meltdown. The special case inspections, carried out by Bridges's team of inspectors between March and July this year, confirm the claims, and reveal that staff have to deal with a computer system that often freezes or fails altogether.
Bridges said that in some London boroughs inexperienced probation officers were being asked to deal with a high proportion of particularly difficult offenders, including drug dealers with convictions for using guns or knives.
They also include trying to deal with offenders who are on lengthy licences, after being released from long prison sentences, who have been caught up in criminal sub-cultures and have little interest in changing their behaviour.
He also reports that in some parts of London the probation service still faces a high turnover of staff.
Few officers in charge of cases had more than three years' experience as a qualified probation officer. Senior managers were also inexperienced and the inspection team raised concerns that some unsatisfactory workers had been signed off.
During the inspection many probation officers reported holding high caseloads, including those based in public protection units, which were supposed to have lower caseloads to allow more intensive work to be carried out with each offender.
In May this year, for the first time, London probation adopted a workload management tool that enables senior staff to identify "hotspots" where workloads are increasing unacceptably.
"Nevertheless, substantial improvement is both necessary and achievable," said Bridges. "Plans to improve the quality of London probation area's public protection work have been under way for some time ... but progress appears to have stalled, at least for a while, although there has now been a redoubling of management activity since March 2009."
The justice minister, Maria Eagle, said: "London probation knows there are a number of key areas where they need to improve the quality of their work. At the beginning of the year they produced a detailed performance action plan which is improving performance rapidly through procedures such as prioritised training, new monthly targets, speedy recall processes and task forces for information technology and human resources."
Eagle said the report acknowledged that the improvements would be more visible across London next year.
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