In a piece of disinformation often used by the government to justify the privatisation of 70% of the probation service, the Ministry of Justice mentions plans for supervision of 50,000 prisoners currently "released with no statutory support" (Delay probation shakeup or risk deaths, Grayling is told, 29 October). In fact, the probation service does not and never has worked with these problematic offenders sentenced to less than 12 months, though the probation minister, Jeremy Wright, and the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, trot out the statistic to suggest that this high rate is a failure of the service. The probation service was awarded a BQS gold award for excellence in 2011, but a more important measure of its success is that the public are often so oblivious of it.

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