Barry Snelgrove obituary

My former colleague Barry Snelgrove, who has died aged 68 of cancer, was a forward thinking senior probation officer. He was involved in a number of groundbreaking initiatives throughout his career before joining the Home Office, where he became a policy adviser on issues connected with offenders.

In total Barry spent 21 years in the National Probation Service, working mainly in the London area. For three years from 1990 he was the director of Sherborne House in Southwark, an experimental day centre run by the Inner London Probation Service (ILPS) for young adult offenders. It provided, among other things, employment skills training, an accommodation finding service and an offending behaviour programme. It began each day by offering participants breakfast, since many of them were homeless.

Later, as community service director for the ILPS, Barry joined forces with Thames 21, a charity that helps to clean London’s waterways and offers hundreds of offenders work on canals and rivers.

Barry also played a key role in delivering a joint Metropolitan police/ILPS initiative in 2000 and 2001, under which offenders made bunk beds, furniture, toys and playground equipment for orphanages in Romania.

After joining the Home Office in 2001, Barry took on a number of leadership roles, first as an adviser on the employment, education and the resettlement of offenders, and then on a team developing electronic tagging. From 2014 he spent more than three years as head of an international projects team within the Ministry of Justice that used European Union and Foreign Office funding to set up programmes in conjunction with other European governments.

Barry was born in Luton, Bedfordshire, to Frank, a sheet metalworker at Vauxhall Motors, and Pamela, a housewife. He graduated in 1980 from Hatfield Technical College (now the University of Hertfordshire) with a degree in applied social studies before becoming a probation officer in Bedfordshire (1980-83) and then in Middlesex, where he was promoted to senior probation officer in 1985.

He became director of Sherborne House five years later and stayed there until 1994, after which he was assistant chief officer for the ILPS until he moved to the Home Office as a policy adviser in 2001.

From 2007 to 2013 he was a senior contracts manager at the Ministry of Justice, before becoming head of international projects at the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office, managing an integrated team. For the last two years of his working life he was the joint head of regulation at the government’s prison and probation service.

A champion of LGBT rights, over the years Barry campaigned for those suffering from discrimination. He was a Ministry of Justice convener for the civil service FDA union and won its Wendy Jones Award in 2019 for his work on diversity.

He retired in 2019 and then worked for Diversity Role Models , a charity that combats homophobic bullying in schools. He had come out as gay in the early 90s and married his long-term partner, Philip Mountford, in 2006.

He is survived by Philip, a son, Lawrence, from his first marriage, to Evelyn (nee Linnell), which ended in divorce, by his mother and a sister, Lynn.