CRIME will rise because of shock cuts to the probation service in Hampshire, the Government has been warned.

Union leaders and the Conservatives reacted angrily to the revelation that £845,000 has been stripped from the county’s budget this year – equivalent to funding for 23 jobs.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw was warned that criminals would be less well supervised after release from prison and courses to prevent them reoffending would have to be scrapped. The inevitable result, said the National Association of Probation Officers (Napo), was higher crime – just as burglaries and street robberies start to rise again, because of the recession.

According to Ministry of Justice figures, Hampshire probation service will suffer a 3.3 per cent cut in its budget in 2009-10, a loss of £845,000.

The spending squeeze could claim 23 jobs in the county, according to Napo, and 799 across England and Wales, as £29.3m is slashed from budgets.

Napo spokesman Harry Fletcher warned that the £29.3m that will be disappearing from budgets this year was just the tip of the iceberg, with £120m of cuts pencilled in over the next three years.

He said: “It’s disastrous. We are anticipating up to 800 job losses in the current financial year, which is bound to mean that the quality of supervision will suffer.”

Answering questions in the Commons chamber, Mr Straw suggested the cuts could be achieved by stripping out “unnecessary layers of middle management”.