Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will publish figures on the number of offenders who have breached the terms of their community sentence years in each of the last five years.

We have interpreted the reference to ‘community sentence’ in the question to mean community orders.

Community orders consist of one or more requirements decided by the court. Where an offender fails to comply with any requirement of a community order, the court has wide powers: it can amend the order to make the requirements more onerous, impose a fine, or revoke the order and resentence the offender.

Sentencing in individual cases is entirely a matter for the independent courts, taking into account the circumstances of the case.

Data showing the number of offenders who have failed to comply with the requirements of their community order in each of the last five years can be viewed in table 1 below.

Table 1: Number of offenders who have had a community order terminated early for failing to comply with requirements, England and Wales, 2016 to 2020 ⁽¹⁾

(1) The figures include all terminations of community orders in each year, including multiple terminations of the same type of supervision (e.g. two periods of community order supervision terminating in the same year would be included in the figures).

(2) In this period, the number of court order completions was substantially reduced as a result of the operational restrictions that were put in place on 23 March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

(3) Includes terminated orders where:

(a) The sentence expiry date has been reached, but there is a Breach Listed and/or Warrant Outstanding for a failure to comply on the Sentence; or

(b) The order is revoked by the Court as a result of Breach proceedings; or

(c) The order is revoked by the Court as a result of a failure on another order.