Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what recent estimate he has made of the cost to the public purse of the (a) privatisation and (b) subsequent renationalisation of probation services since 2012.

It is not possible to disaggregate the full cost of implementing the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms in 2015 and then the unification of the Probation Service in 2021 from the wider costs of delivering probation services.

We are investing an additional £155m a year in the unified Probation Service to support improved quality of supervision, rehabilitation and other probation functions. This is a 15% increase on funding in 2019/20 when probation was operating under the structures introduced by the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms. This investment is supporting improved ways of working and increased staffing levels. We have exceeded our recruitment targets for the last three years, with more than 1,500 trainee probation officers starting their training in each of 2021/22 and 2022/23.