On Tuesday afternoon, an open-top double-decker bus took a tour of London’s justice hotspots. It passed the Houses of Parliament, the Royal Courts of Justice and the Old Bailey, but the most significant sight may have been a small G4S van parked on the Strand. As the bus went by, the passengers – most of them probation officers – chanted: ‘G4S, what a mess!’ At noon, thousands of probation officers in England and Wales had gone on strike for 24 hours. They were protesting against the Ministry of Justice’s ‘transforming rehabilitation’ programme. By 2015, the national probation service will no longer exist in its current form, and most cases will be handled by the private sector.
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