Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many Serious Further Offence investigations in which the supervising body was (a) the National Probation Service and (b) a Community Rehabilitation Company there have been in each year since 2014; and in how many of those investigations was the new offence (i) murder, (ii) manslaughter, (iii) rape, (iv) violence against the person and (v) sexual assault.

A Serious Further Offence (SFO) review is undertaken where an offender under statutory supervision in the community is charged with a qualifying offence – a “notification”. Not every notification results in a conviction for an SFO, as charges are changed or dropped prior to the completion of the review.

Serious further offences are rare. Fewer than 0.5% of offenders under statutory supervision are convicted of serious further offences. Nonetheless, every single serious further offence is taken extremely seriously, and in all cases a review is carried out to identify any lessons for the better management of future cases.

The table below provides the number of serious further offences (SFOs) investigations (reviews) in which the supervising body was (a) the National Probation Service (NPS) and (b) a Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC) completed between 1 January 2015 and 31 December 2018, by (i) murder, (ii) manslaughter, (iii) rape, (iv) violence against the person and (v) sexual assault. .

1. Rape includes; rape, rape of a child under 13, attempted rape, assault by penetration and intercourse with a child under 13

2. Violence against the person includes; attempt or conspiracy to commit murder, other offences resulting in death, and all other SFO qualifying offences that are classified as violent

3. Sexual assault includes; all other SFO qualifying sexual offences

4. Under the Offender Rehabilitation Act (ORA) 2014 offenders serving short prison sentences are now released on licence. As a direct and predicted result, there has been an increase in the number of SFO notifications as a result of ORA. This does not mean that a greater proportion of offenders under statutory probation supervision are being charged with SFOs. The increase plateaued in 2017.

5. The number of ORA cases only includes those cases that would not have previously fallen in scope of the SFO procedures as mentioned above. Cases that were sentenced to an ORA sentence of less than 12 months, but who were previously and concurrently subject to probation intervention, have not been captured within this figure. For example, the offender was subject to a community order, when he was further sentenced to under 12 month sentence under ORA. If the CO was active at the time of the SFO, it would have qualified regardless of the ORA sentence, so has not been counted in the ORA numbers.

6. Data Sources and Quality .We have drawn these figures from administrative IT systems which, as with some large-scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.