Social Care
18 October, 2025
On 22 January 2026, the Sentencing Act received Royal Assent — marking one of the most significant reforms to the criminal justice system in England and Wales in a generation. The legislation was introduced against the backdrop of a prison population that has remained above 87,000, with projections suggesting that without intervention, the system would reach zero usable capacity within months.
The Act does not simply add capacity. It restructures how sentences are served, how offenders are supervised in the community, and how risk is managed across the justice system. As 12CP sets out in their analysis, for practitioners working in criminal justice, youth justice, probation, and community-based support, understanding what has changed — and what it means in practice — is essential.
The earned progression model replaces automatic release at the 50% point of a sentence. The new minimum release point is 33%, with progression toward release contingent on behaviour in custody. Poor behaviour can delay release — a significant shift in how the relationship between custody and community supervision is framed.
The Act also introduces a presumption in favour of suspending sentences of 12 months or less, reflecting long-standing evidence that short custodial sentences are among the least effective interventions for reducing reoffending. As GOV.UK notes in the reform announcement, currently almost 60% of those receiving a sentence of 12 months or less reoffend within a year.
Greater use of curfews, exclusion zones, Intensive Supervision Courts, and electronic monitoring is intended to make community sentences a genuinely demanding alternative to short custody. The probation budget is being increased by up to £700 million over the next three years — though the Public Accounts Committee has noted that probation services met only 7 of their 27 performance targets in the most recent period, with a 21% vacancy rate in the probation officer grade.
The shift toward community-based justice places increased weight on the quality of supervision, support services, and early intervention in the community. The Independent Sentencing Review has been explicit: community-based justice requires investment not just in probation, but in housing, addiction treatment, mental health services, and employment support — the social conditions that shape whether someone reoffends. Without these, surveillance and curfews alone do not address the root causes of offending.
Probation officers, youth justice workers, housing and mental health services, and voluntary sector organisations are all part of the infrastructure on which the success of these reforms depends. For practitioners, this creates both an opportunity and a pressure point.
The expanding use of community sentences is an acknowledgement that rehabilitation and reintegration work best outside custody, when delivered by skilled, well-resourced practitioners. But that acknowledgement needs to be matched with the investment, training, and organisational support that makes it deliverable.
As the Justice Committee’s inquiry into rehabilitation makes clear, 80% of all offending in England and Wales is reoffending, and 50% of prisoners are not taking part in education or work. The case for a justice system that genuinely reduces reoffending — rather than simply managing prison population pressure — has never been more pressing. The Sentencing Act 2026 provides a legislative framework. What happens next depends on the quality of practice that fills it. The Prison Reform Trust’s information sheet provides a useful summary for practitioners seeking to understand the detail.
