Probation officers don't need telling off

'David Cameron has made it clear that Kenneth Clarke's views are not what he wants from a justice secretary.' Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

"Probation red tape: Probation officers told to spend more time with offenders and less on paperwork." I could have done without a telling off from BBC News before my breakfast. The media has misunderstood the justice select committee's report as chastising naughty officers who prefer forms to people, missing important points about bureaucratic culture. I've been working in probation for 10 years, and the committee's summary is a pretty accurate picture of the "tick-box culture" that dominates the organisation.

Having said that, I don't think the report fully grasps how much of the 75% figure (the percentage of a probation officer's time not spent dealing with offenders) is taken up with computerised forms. The "electronic Offender Assessment System" – eOASys – was introduced in 2003 and described during my training as the most important task we undertake. In it, officers input information on an individual, ranging from details of their offence(s) to their accommodation, education, mental health, approaches when faced with problems and drug and alcohol use. Ratings are given to show the extent to which they display certain traits or problems. These are aggregated and weighted to produce figures for the statistical likelihood of their reconviction.

eOASys must be carried out before reports are prepared for courts and parole boards, at the start of any supervision, at least every 16 weeks while a case is in the community and at least every year for most prisoners, as well as when supervision ends, and following significant events – such as further arrest. A full eOASys takes five or six hours, and I generally have about five or six to do per 37.5-hour working week. Some reviews are quicker than others, but the time still adds up – particularly considering the slowness and unreliability of the IT. The repetitive nature of the task is very frustrating, as is the format: human beings' lives and minds do not often fit well into discrete categories and neat boxes to rate 0, 1 or 2.

It's remarkable that the justice committee largely confines discussion of eOASys to a single section, bizarrely entitled "the management of risk". eOASys do not provide a statistical calculation of the risk of a person causing serious harm to others, merely a "rubber stamp" of reliability for an officer's own comments, entered repeatedly under pages of headings. Seeing eOASys and risk assessment as synonymous does practitioners a disservice: it's a demoralising sign of how little trust is placed in our judgment and experience, and can rob us of confidence in our own abilities by institutionalising reliance on a limited tool.

This reliance means the forthcoming "relaxation" of national standards is going to be a major change. From drafts I've seen so far, the standards are almost being done away with: for example, pages of detail on how and when sentence planning should take place is replaced by the statement "there must be a sentence plan". Probation staff are used to bosses chucking the baby out with the bathwater (or chucking us three dozen babies and an inch of bathwater, and blaming us when their faces are still mucky five minutes later) but this is quite staggering, and seems to be motivated by producing a privatisation-friendly environment rather than a supportive framework for effective, defensible work.

The justice committee report is, however, strong on the importance of the professional relationship with clients in effective work: this is certainly not a new idea, but it has been sidelined by politicians terrified of sounding "soft on crime". In my area, the notion of "the working relationship" is presently being sold back to us as if it's brand new thinking. Interacting meaningfully is now a radical innovation called "offender engagement".

This comes hot on the heels of an initiative pushing target-hitting like never before: daily meetings at which everyone's performance is questioned, with detailed and sometimes individualised figures circulated to all during the week. For a time in 2010, officers were expected to attend a meeting with an assistant chief officer to explain a single missed target. After all this, someone notices that it's taking up quite a lot of our time to jump through all these hoops. I could scream.

To address the problems of bureaucracy, the government needs to get a coherent idea of what the probation service is for; eOASys and target-ticking have become ends in themselves. As the committee says, leadership and courage will be needed. Kenneth Clarke showed both – as a knit-yer-own-hummus lefty Guardianista, I didn't exactly expect to end up respecting him more than any of his former Labour counterparts – but David Cameron has made it clear that his views are not what he wants from a justice secretary. I expect to be replaced by a robot within the next five years.

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