Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps he is taking to ensure that offending behaviour programmes accredited by Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service are evaluated for the effect on rates of reoffending.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is committed to engaging in impact evaluations of Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) accredited offender behaviour programmes. It is the ambition of the MoJ that all HMPPS accredited programmes will have an impact evaluation to measure proven reoffending outcomes and where possible this will include a value for money analysis.

However, impact evaluations are reliant on large enough cohorts to attend and complete the programme, complete their sentence, and spend sufficient time in the community to provide suitable follow-up periods to detect statistically significant differences between treatment and comparisons groups. This means that it can take many years to design and conduct an impact study that delivers reliable conclusions.

International evidence has shown that cognitive behavioural offender programmes for moderate and high risk offenders can yield a return on investment.

Most recently, in January 2021, MoJ published a large-scale reoffending impact study of the Resolve general violence programme. The report is published on .gov.uk: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/justice-data-lab-statistics-january-2021