Probation members are standing at a fork in the road.
One path is silence and inaction. It is the path where workloads keep rising, vacancies remain unfilled, experienced colleagues continue to leave, and those who stay are slowly worn down until there is hardly anything left to give to the clients they serve, to the colleagues who rely on them, or to the families waiting for them at home.
The other path is to stand up and fight. To say clearly, collectively and without apology that enough is enough, and that something has to change.
That is the choice before members now in the indicative ballot on workloads.
Nobody needs to persuade probation staff that workloads are high. You know it because you live it. You know what it means to work through lunch, to stay late, to log back on after dinner, to miss family time and to carry the pressure home long after the working day should have ended.
You also know what it does to people. Colleagues become exhausted, detached and diminished. They leave the profession, or they remain in it as empty shells of the practitioners they once were.
And now, more pressure is coming.
The Sentencing Act in September will bring further demand into a service that is already stretched beyond safe limits. At the same time, practitioner access to the Workload Measurement Tool is being removed, taking away a system that has helped demonstrate the work is too much, and the staffing is not enough.
But the truth is this: it will not be the Workload Measurement Tool that ultimately proves the point. It will not be your negotiators alone. It will not even be the risk to the public when overstretched systems mean cases fall through the cracks.
It will be members.
It will be your decision, your voice and your vote that tells the employer whether probation staff are prepared to keep absorbing the damage, or whether they have reached the point where they are ready to act.
That is why turnout in this ballot matters so much.
A strong turnout says that members understand the choice in front of them. It says they are not prepared to let workloads continue to destroy their health, their professionalism and their lives outside work. It says that if things do not change, then members will.
An underwhelming turnout sends the opposite message.
It tells the employer that, however serious the workload crisis feels to members, the workforce is not ready to fight over it. It allows them to assume that things cannot be that bad, that staff are coping, that unpaid overtime and personal sacrifice can continue to hold the system together.
That does not mean workloads are not important. It means the employer will draw conclusions from what members do, or do not do.
This ballot is a test of whether members want to fight, or whether they are prepared to be beaten down.
Because the path of silence has a destination. It leads to more late nights, more skipped lunches, more cancelled plans, more stress carried home, more colleagues walking away and more pressure dumped on those left behind.
The path of collective action has no easy guarantees, but it is the only path that offers the possibility of change.
It starts with members saying: no more.
No more late nights to make an impossible workload look manageable.
No more working through lunch to cover gaps the employer refuses to fill.
No more missing family time to paper over the cracks of a broken system.
No more giving everything to an employer that does not seem to care how much damage has already been done.
Members now need to decide which road they are willing to take.
Do you want to fight for change, or do you want to keep being beaten down by a workload crisis that everyone can see but only members can force the employer to confront?
The ballot runs 10 July to 10 August. For more information about voting, how to attend an all members meeting or to find out the latest updates, visit https://www.napo.org.uk/confidence-broken
