Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how much his Department has spent on the (a) hire or purchase, (b) installation, (c) maintenance and and (d) replacement of shipping containers for use by probation services, in each of the last five years.

Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) provided front-line probation services for medium-low risk offenders from 2015 to June 2021. All front-line probation services transferred to the Probation Service on 26 June, in addition to assets that were required for the operation of services under the Unified Model.

CRCs will have had sub-contracting arrangements for their back-office operations, including shipping container installation and maintenance. These contractual relationships were between the CRC and their contractors.

During the lifetime of the contracts, CRCs were not obligated to provide an annual breakdown of spend on their back-office operations to the Authority and we, therefore, do not hold this data.