Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many hours of unpaid work handed down as part of suspended sentences were cancelled as a result of not having been completed within 12 months of the sentence being handed down, in each of the last five years.

Suspended Sentence Orders cannot legally be extended beyond the length of the operational period of the order which is set by the judiciary.

Therefore, a Suspended Sentence Order ceases the moment the operational period expires, regardless of any outstanding requirements such as unpaid work.

It is important to note that these hours have not been “cancelled” but due to the legal limitations of a Suspended Sentence Order, the Probation Service is unable to apply for an extension in order to work hours once the operational period has expired.

While the number of unworked hours decreased between 2017 and 2019, the increase in 2020 and 2021 was the result of challenges caused by COVID-19 and restrictions imposed by public health legislation which meant either stopping delivery altogether, or running a severely restricted service.

When COVID-19 restrictions were sufficiently lifted to enable some Community Payback hours to be worked, the Probation Service prioritised working offenders on Suspended Sentence Orders given the legal limits of the order.

We remain committed to driving down the number of unworked hours. This is why, in response to the disruptions caused by COVID-19, we have invested £93million to hire 500 additional staff so that we boost the number of hours offenders spend doing tough Community Payback, such as cleaning up public places, by nearly two thirds – from five million to up to eight million hours a year.

Data as at 5/7/22.

Data are sourced from nDelius and while these data have been assured as much as practical, as with any large administrative dataset, the data should not be assumed to be accurate to the last value presented.