Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the budget of the Victim Contact Scheme has been in each year since 2010.

Our priority is to support victims, which is why the allocation of resources to victim liaison units has increased since the creation of the National Probation Service, with more staff and a greater investment in victim contact services.

The National Probation Service (NPS) was created on 1 June 2014. Prior to that date, responsibility for liaison with victims lay with the 35 former Probation Trusts. A search for information about numbers of victim liaison officers (VLOs) employed by the Trusts, and the related budgets, would require an extensive examination of archived records and could not be undertaken without incurring disproportionate cost.

At the formation of the NPS, it was decided to maintain previous staffing levels across all divisions while tools were developed to determine precise staffing requirements. Since that point, the number of VLO posts has increased from 169 to 189 and there has been a significant increase in the number of administrative staff employed to support their work. The budget dedicated to this work has increased from £8.5 million to £9.6 million over the same period.