Community Rehabilitation Companies: Fines

(asked on 13th May 2019) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many financial penalties his Department has issued to community rehabilitation companies as a result of poor performance; and what the value was of those penalties in each of the last five years.


Answered by
Robert Buckland Portrait
Robert Buckland
This question was answered on 21st May 2019

Having agreed to terminate CRC contracts early, we now expect expenditure on CRCs to be approximately £1.4 billion less in total than originally expected over the shortened lifetime of the contracts.

Between July 2015 and March 2018, £7.4m of financial penalties (known as service credits) were levied in total across all Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). As referenced in the National Audit Office report of 1 March 2019, £4.1m was applied and paid back to the Department and £3.3m was re-invested back into services by the CRCs.

Our starting presumption is that penalties are applied if accrued by CRCs for under-performance. Penalties have not been applied where we have agreed that factors out of the control of the CRC have led to the under-performance, or where a recalculation has shown that penalties should not have been triggered. On relevant occasions where it has been considered appropriate not to apply the penalties, we have sought to agree a reinvestment of the value of the penalty back into the delivery of services.

Contract Management Teams continue to closely monitor and robustly manage CRCs to ensure that they fulfil their contractual commitments and deliver value-for-money for the taxpayer.

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