Ian, we're doing something this week about cartoons of the EU Commission, which mostly focus on boring gray men in suits drinking wine.

I'm just wondering if you've got anything to say about that.

I think it's the cartoonist actually just sublimating his hatred of this office full of boring

gray men drinking coffee mostly. Page 94 the Private Eye

Podcast hello and welcome to another episode of page 94 My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and this week

we will be talking about the Probation Service privatized by the government a few years ago and

which has been recently showing the strain of that decision. We'll also be talking to Richard Jolly, the eyes cartoonist

who for 15 years has been drawing the E euphemisms cartoon, scuring the EU Commission and its various

associated bodies. But first, probation. Now private I

has been covering this story for some years now and the principal correspondent on

it is Solomon Hughes, so I sat down with him to ask exactly what's been going wrong and why it's going wrong now.

So first of all I wanted to ask him what exactly the probation service does and what it should be doing.

The probation service, what it does is it tries to direct ex-offenders away from crime.

It's a kind of social work for people coming out of prison.

So probation services try and get ex-offenders and get them into jobs, into housing and away from crime.

Social work you could call it, but it's also a crime fighting service and our current government, apparently the Law and Order Party,

thought the best thing to do was hand it over to private companies.

Now what I've looked at most recently is just what's happened in terms of staffing.

The government have been asked, they said, how many probation officers are there?

You used to publish these statistics when it was national government-run service but we don't know how many are there

and they said oh we don't know either we know there are sufficient because it says

so in the contract but we don't count them what I did is just it at one level, it's a simple thing. I went and counted the number

...