Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment his Department has made of the effectiveness of probation services in preventing reoffending.

Probation services play a vital role in reducing reoffending, with a range of evidence to support this including:

• For a matched group of offenders, custodial sentences of less than 12 months had reoffending rates 4 percentage points higher than those on community or suspended sentences.
• Offenders with one or no previous convictions, the one-year re-offending rate is 14 to 17 percentage points lower for offenders on licence than similar offenders not on licence.
• An international meta-analysis also found that the average reoffending rate for offenders supervised by officers trained in Core Correctional Practices (CCP) was 36%, compared with an average reoffending rate of 50% for offenders supervised by officers lacking the CCP training.
• The Impact Evaluation of the Acquisitive Crime Electronic Monitoring Project found reoffending by burglars, robbers and thieves reduced by around 20%, when their movements were tracked by electronic monitoring.
• Finally, curfew tags and radio frequency electronic monitoring, used as part of community sentences, reduced reoffending by around 20%.

Probation supports rehabilitation through close monitoring and management of offenders’ risk, supporting access to treatment, education, and employment, and through specialised programmes and services, including:

• Commissioned Rehabilitative Services (CRS) are specialist interventions delivered in partnership with private, voluntary and community organisations to support individuals under probation supervision, or on license following release from custody. They address key rehabilitative needs that, if unmet, increase the risk of reoffending and are designed to complement and improve access to mainstream services such as housing, healthcare, and local authority support.
• Multi-agency programmes such as Intensive Supervision Courts and Integrated Offender Management, that address the underlying causes of offending and promote positive change. Internationally, there is strong evidence that problem-solving courts, such as Intensive Supervision Courts, reduce reoffending. Evidence drawn from several countries shows a 33 percent fall in arrests from these courts compared to standard sentences.