Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the (a) performance and (b) effectiveness of community rehabilitation companies in carrying out their statutory duties in the last 12 months.

Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) play a crucial role in delivering probation services . Following an internal review of the probation system we have amended CRC contracts to reflect more accurately the fixed costs of delivering services to offenders. We are exploring with providers further improvements that could be made to the delivery of rehabilitative services.

We closely monitor and robustly manage CRCs to make sure they fulfil their contractual commitments. Data on CRC performance against service levels is published quarterly, with the latest data published in July: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/community-performance-quarterly-and-annual-2016-to-2017. The first set of final reoffending data for offenders supervised by CRCs will be published in October 2017; thereafter data will be published quarterly.