Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many offenders the Government projected would be referred to each community rehabilitation company in each quarter at the time of signing contracts with those companies.

Early indicative estimates of the volumes of offenders starting with Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) annually were published as part of the ‘Transforming Rehabilitation: A Strategy for Reform’ consultation document, which can be found at: https://consult.justice.gov.uk/digital-communications/transforming-rehabilitation/results/transforming-rehabilitation-response.pdf. It was always anticipated that volumes would vary through the life of the contract and we did not guarantee caseload levels to the providers.

Since 2014, there have been changes in the case-mix of offenders and falls in the number of community orders. This has led to a proportionately lower number of cases being allocated to CRCs.

To respond to these changes in volume, we changed the way we pay CRCs to reflect more accurately the costs of delivering services to offenders. This ensures they can focus on the delivery of those vital services.