Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many instances of a Serious Further Offence review of murder has resulted in the perpetrator being (a) charged and (b) convicted where the supervisory agency has been (i) the National Probation Service and (b) a Community Rehabilitation Company in each year since 2014 in England and Wales.

The number of offenders managed by (i) the National Probation Service (NPS) and (ii) a Community Rehabilitation Company who were (a) charged with murder and (b) subsequently convicted of murder in each year since 2014 in England and Wales is given in the table below. The number of convictions is a provisional figure and is subject to change as some cases have not yet reached conclusion.

In addition, there was an offender supervised by the NPS in 2015 and another in 2016 who were charged with a lesser offence but eventually convicted of murder. Similarly, there was an offender supervised by a CRC in 2015 and three offenders supervised by a CRC in 2018 who were charged with a lesser offender but eventually convicted of murder.

A Serious Further Offence (SFO) review is triggered where an offender under statutory supervision in the community is charged with a qualifying offence – a “notification”. However, in cases where charges are dropped in the three-month period for the SFO review to be produced, the SFO review will not be completed.

SFOs are rare. Less than 0.1% of offenders under statutory supervision are convicted of murder, and less than 0.5% convicted of any SFO. Nonetheless, every single SFO 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 probation caseload, counted in September of each year was: 2015 – 127,000, 2016 – 181,000, 2017 – 185,000 and 2018 – 180,000. The CRCs have a much larger proportion of the caseload than the NPS.

1. 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.
2. The number of ORA only includes cases 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 (CO), 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.
3. 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.