Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 4 January 2023 to Question 125370 on Community Orders, how many hours of community service were not carried out in each (a) local justice area and (b) region in England and Wales in each year since 2010.

As detailed in previous submissions, including PQ 125370, it is not possible to segment by Local Justice Area as this is not recorded.

This data in the attachment shows the total hours recorded as not carried out at termination of the requirement, by business year, by region for the entire period 01/04/2014 – 31/12/2022.

The dataset covers reasons hours are not carried out including offender deaths, deportation, orders revoked, and resentenced, successful appeals and Suspended Sentence Order (SSO) activated.

For context: In 2019-2020, pre pandemic, Probation delivered 4,869,778 hours of unpaid work nationally. Between the 1 April 2022 and the 31 December 2022 (not a full year), Probation delivered 3,220,827 hours. We estimate that this will project to a full year delivery total of 4,294,436. All efforts are made to work hours, but where that is not possible then robust action is taken. For hours not worked due to non-compliance, enforcement action will be taken. Where it is not possible to work hours due to specific risk factors orders will be returned to the court.

Please note data supplied in all 3 PQs 125370, 131221, 131222 do not allow for a direct comparison due to each dataset examining a different timeframe; start, delivery and completion date.

Data has 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’.

It has not been possible to provide data prior to April 2014.

In the years 2019/20 and 2020/21, Community Payback was severely impacted by the pandemic and the resulting court backlogs. This included projects and organisations that provided placements 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 so that we ramp up delivery to 8million hours per year, focussing on outdoor projects that help to improve public spaces, ensuring that people can see justice being done.