Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 24 January 2023 to Question 125370 on Community Orders, how many hours of community service were given as part of community sentences in each (a) local justice area and (b) region in England and Wales in each year since 2010.

As detailed in previous submissions, including PQ125370, it is not possible to segment by Local Justice Area as this is not recorded.

For the period April 2014 to December 2022, 56,770,559 hours of Community Service have been imposed as a part of community sentences and suspended sentence orders. Please find data in the attached table.

These have been segmented by Probation Region. Where prior to unification (July 2021), locations have been mapped to current region. Where mapping has not been possible, due to ambiguous locations, these have been grouped as ‘Unknown Region’.

Please note the final year of data is not a full year, covering the period 01/04/22 -31/12/22.

It has not been possible to provide data prior to April 2014. This date marked the completion of Transforming Rehabilitation’s migration of data to the National Delius system. Prior to this, the use of multiple differing local recording systems has resulted in less robust data which cannot be used with confidence, in response to this PQ.

A significant dip in performance can be seen in the years 2019/20 and 2020/21, which is attributed to the pandemic. Community Payback was severely affected by projects, and organisations that provided them, being closed, along with the social distancing rules making it difficult for delivery to continue as normal

This Government has committed to invest an additional £93million in Community Payback over the next three years. This is to increase delivery up to 8 million hours per year, focussing on robust community projects that help to improve public spaces, ensuring that people can see justice being done.