Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many offenders were subsequently convicted of murder by index sentence in each financial year between 2010-11 and 2015-16.

Serious Further Offences (SFOs) are rare. Fewer than 0.5% of offenders under statutory supervision are convicted of SFOs. Nonetheless, every single SFO is taken extremely seriously, and in all cases a review is carried out to identify any improvements that need to be made in the management of future cases.

We have increased funding for the Probation Service by an additional £155m a year to recruit staff, bring down caseloads and deliver better supervision of offenders in the community.

We have exceeded our recruitment targets for the last three years. As a result, over 4,000 trainee probation officers joined the Probation sService between 2020/21 and 2022/23, which we anticipate will start to reduce the number of cases held by a probation officer at any one time, with all the benefits which that brings in terms of the quality of risk assessment and risk management.

The table below sets out the total number of convictions where an offender subject to probation supervision was charged with a SFO which resulted in a conviction for murder, for all cases notified to HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) between 1 April 2010 and 31 March 2014.

1. Time period for conviction data relates to the date of SFO notification to HMPPS not the date of conviction.

2. Index sentence refers to the sentencing disposal imposed by the court which led to probation services supervision of the offender.

3. The data only includes convictions for serious further offences of murder that have been notified to the national SFO Team, HMPPS.

4. The data includes cases where the SFO was committed within 28 days of the end of the supervision period.

5. Conviction data also includes cases where the offender committed suicide or died prior to the trial, where the judicial process concluded that they were responsible.

6. The data for has been updated and may differ to any original publication due to data cleansing, re-categorising and re-grouping.

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

The number of convictions where an offender subject to probation supervision was charged with a serious further offence which resulted in a conviction for murder, for all cases notified to HMPPS between 1 April 2014 and 31 March 2016 are published at the following link: Serious_Further_Offences_2023.ods (live.com).