Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:01 pm on 21 January 2020.
Thank you, First Minister. When the system was privatised, as we know, eight organisations were awarded the contracts worth just under £4 billion. Working Links was the company supervising David Braddon. In 2015, the year of the murder, The Financial Times reported that staff were writing to the company complaining of excessive workloads. Last week, the coroner concluded that the management and supervision of the newly appointed probation worker responsible for David Braddon was woefully inadequate. However, it's not clear that much changed in the intervening period. The inspectorate of probation report in July last year reported that 60 per cent of reporting officers thought their workload was unmanageable. Were the concerns raised by probation workers brought to the attention of the integrated offender management Cymru board or the all-Wales criminal justice board, on which the Welsh Government is represented for the reasons that the First Minister has just outlined, and, specifically, were the boards aware of any increased risk, potentially, to the public in south Wales at the time of Conner Marshall's murder as a result of the shortcomings identified?