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Written Question
Probation: Bury South
Tuesday 27th February 2024

Asked by: Christian Wakeford (Labour - Bury South)

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what (a) support and (b) funding his Department provides to local probation services in Bury South constituency to help ensure effective rehabilitation of people leaving the criminal justice system.

Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)

His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) service delivery in Greater Manchester supports all Criminal Justice activity for the Bury Borough. This includes all aspects of Community and Custodial practice across public protection, sentencing, sentence management and delivery, resettlement and reintegration.

Greater Manchester Probation Service (GMPS) on behalf of HMPPS have a unique approach to commissioning rehabilitative services across the region. Services are co-commissioned with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA). There is a Memorandum of Understanding which sets out the principles of our approach, signed by both parties. There are also grant agreements in place which enable the co-commissioning to proceed in a way that provides both flexibility and assurance. These arrangements have enabled procurement of services at locality level, and there is specific activity across the Bury Borough.

From a wider partnership aspect, Reducing Reoffending is one of the six priorities of the Bury Community Safety Partnership (CSP), with the priority led by the local probation manager who chairs a multiagency steering group for this priority.

GMPS is an active participant in the Bury Community Safety Partnership, which encompasses work to tackle drug & alcohol related harm; involvement in the Prevent Partnership and Channel Panel (as part of CONTEST Counter-terror duty); involvement in the Domestic Abuse Partnership Board; involvement in the Bury Serious Violence Duty Steering Group and is the lead agency for actions in emerging Serious Violence Duty Delivery Plan to reduce serious violence related harm (offending and related hospital admissions).

GMPS lead engagement with the Creating & Maintaining Safe Spaces subgroup on Community Payback opportunities to link into local environmental improvement works.

Bury CSP (through GMCA core grant to CSP) have funded the Gateway project to break the cycle of substance misuse and offending,

Through the Co-commission approach outlined, approximately 60 services across the GM Region have been procured in this financial year, all of which support reducing harm and reoffending activities.

There has been investment and collaboration where appropriate with local authorities to procure services and ensure alignment with local Criminal Justice Priorities.

HMPPS delegate 4 reducing reoffending budgets into the GM region which are for the specific purpose of reducing reoffending in the region. These are Community Accommodation Service Tier 3, Community Rehabilitation Service, Integrated Offender Management and Regional Outcome and Innovation Fund. The Bury Borough are provided with services from each of these budgets, and this equates to roughly a 10% share.

Specifically, rehabilitative services in Bury cover the following: services for women; services for accommodation; services for training, education and access to employment; peer mentoring; drug and alcohol interventions; wellbeing support for improving physical and mental health.

The question specifies 'people leaving the criminal justice service’. GMPS has formal responsibility for those within the system and this answer details the offer in this context. However, given close integration with GMCA and local authorities, the intention is to provide a link to continuity of help in local areas like Bury, beyond the period someone is subject to probation supervision.


Written Question
Courts: Bury South
Tuesday 27th February 2024

Asked by: Christian Wakeford (Labour - Bury South)

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department is taking to reduce the backlog of court cases in Bury South constituency.

Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)

We are pursuing a number of measures at a national level that will contribute to the reduction of cases in the Bury South constituency, to tackle the outstanding caseload across all jurisdictions.

Over 90% of all criminal cases are heard at the magistrates’ court, where we heard 100,000 cases a month on average across 2023. While the outstanding caseload in the magistrates’ courts has slightly increased in recent months due to an increase in the number of cases coming to court, the caseload remains well below its pandemic peak and stood at 353,900 at the end of September 2023, and cases continue to be progressed quickly.

To aid our efforts in the magistrates’ courts, we have invested over £1 million in a programme of work to support the recruitment of new magistrates, and launched a new marketing campaign to target a more diverse pool of potential magistrates and raise the overall profile of the magistracy.

At the Crown Court, we remain committed to reducing the outstanding caseload.

We have introduced a raft of measures to achieve this aim. We are on course to deliver over 100,000 sitting days this year for the third financial year running, alongside recruiting more than 1,000 judges across all jurisdictions.

Judges have worked tirelessly to complete more cases, with disposals up by 9% during Q3 in 2023 compared to Q4 in 2022 (25,700 compared to 23,700). However, an increase in cases coming before the Crown Court throughout 2023 has caused the outstanding caseload to increase, and it stood at 66,500 at the end of September 2023.

Data on the outstanding caseload at Crown Court centre level is published by the Ministry of Justice on a quarterly basis. Receipts, disposals and the outstanding caseload for individual Crown Court centres can be found at: Criminal court statistics quarterly: July to September 2023 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).

We are also investing more in our criminal courts. In August 2023, we announced we are investing £220 million for essential modernisation and repair work of our court buildings across the next two years, up to March 2025.

In the Family Court, we are working closely with system partners to drive forward a cross-cutting programme of work to address delays and inefficiencies in the system and to ensure cases are ready to be heard when they reach court.

We are committed to meeting the 26-week statutory requirement for public law cases, and the Government is investing an extra £10 million to develop new initiatives to support this.

In addition, we remain committed to supporting more families to reach agreement on their children and finance arrangements earlier and, where appropriate, without court involvement. As of February 2024, over 25,400 families have successfully used the Family Mediation Voucher Scheme to attempt to resolve their disputes outside of court. We are investing up to £23.6 million, which we intend will allow for its continuation up to March 2025.

With regards to civil cases, we are taking action to ensure those that do need to go to trial are dealt with quickly. We have launched the biggest ever judicial recruitment drive for District Judges, are digitising court processes and holding more remote hearings, and are increasing the use of mediation.

We announced in July 2023 that we would introduce a requirement for small claims in the county court to attend a mediation session with the Small Claims Mediation Service, starting with specified money claims. This requirement will start in the spring and is expected to help parties resolve their dispute swiftly and consensually without the need for a judicial hearing.

With regards to tribunals, we continue to work with the Department for Business and Trade on further measures to address caseloads in the Employment Tribunal, where the deployment of legal officers, recruitment of additional judges and a new electronic case management system have already contributed to the caseload falling and remaining below its pandemic peak.

We are working on completing the programme of reform in the Immigration and Asylum Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal, and the judiciary have recently introduced a virtual region pilot to provide additional judicial capacity and flexibility in how appeals are heard and disposed of.


Written Question
Fraud: Personal Injury
Tuesday 29th June 2021

Asked by: Christian Wakeford (Labour - Bury South)

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

What steps his Department is taking to reduce the number of fraudulent whiplash claims.

Answered by Alex Chalk - Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice

We implemented several important reforms on 31 May to tackle the problems associated with whiplash which will cut costs, reduce fraud and lower motor insurance premiums.

We have introduced a tariff of damages for whiplash injuries, banned pre-medical offers to settle such claims and increased the small claims track limit to £5,000 for road accident related personal injury claims.

Genuinely injured claimants will be supported through a new digital Portal enabling them to settle claims without legal advice.


Written Question
Youth Custody: Restraint Techniques
Friday 29th January 2021

Asked by: Christian Wakeford (Labour - Bury South)

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many children in custody have been reported by his Department as being placed in (a) handcuffs or (b) restraints in each of the last twelve months; under what circumstances those children were handcuffed or restrained; and in which local authority these incidents took place.

Answered by Alex Chalk - Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice

Data on the use of force and restraint on children in the youth custodial estate is recorded and collated locally in incident reports at each custodial establishment. This data is aggregated annually in the “Youth Justice Statistics” report which are included in the Youth justice statistics series. The latest report for 2019/20 was published on 28 January: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/youth-justice-statistics-2019-to-2020.

Information on use of force, broken down by establishment and reason, can be found in the supplementary tables. The total number of Restrictive Physical Interventions (RPIs), are broken down by month in table 8.1. This provides figures on all restraints of young people that satisfy the definition of being RPI, and the relevant line of table 8.24 provides the subset of those that involve handcuffs.

For ease of reference, the number of times that handcuffs have been used to restrain children is also provided in the attached table. It should be noted that this does not take place in secure children’s homes.

The use of restraint and force is only ever used as a last resort to protect children from further harm.


Written Question
Youth Custody: Restraint Techniques
Friday 29th January 2021

Asked by: Christian Wakeford (Labour - Bury South)

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what data his Department collects on the (a) handcuffing or (b) restraining of children in custody.

Answered by Alex Chalk - Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice

Data on the use of force and restraint on children in the youth custodial estate is recorded and collated locally in incident reports at each custodial establishment. This data is aggregated annually in the “Youth Justice Statistics” report which are included in the Youth justice statistics series. The latest report for 2019/20 was published on 28 January: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/youth-justice-statistics-2019-to-2020.

Information on use of force, broken down by establishment and reason, can be found in the supplementary tables. The total number of Restrictive Physical Interventions (RPIs), are broken down by month in table 8.1. This provides figures on all restraints of young people that satisfy the definition of being RPI, and the relevant line of table 8.24 provides the subset of those that involve handcuffs.

For ease of reference, the number of times that handcuffs have been used to restrain children is also provided in the attached table. It should be noted that this does not take place in secure children’s homes.

The use of restraint and force is only ever used as a last resort to protect children from further harm.


Written Question
Young Offenders: Restraint Techniques
Friday 18th December 2020

Asked by: Christian Wakeford (Labour - Bury South)

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what data his Department collects on the practice of (a) handcuffing and (b) restraining children in the criminal justice system.

Answered by Lucy Frazer - Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport

The Government is clear that the use of restraint on children needs to be proportionate and reasonable.

The Home Office publishes annual statistics on the use of force by police in England and Wales including a breakdown by age - https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/police-use-of-force-statistics.

Data on the use of force and restraint on children in the youth custodial estate is recorded and collated locally in incident reports at each custodial establishment and this is aggregated annually in the “Youth Justice Statistics” report - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/youth-justice-statistics-2018-to-2019.

(current published data details incidents up to March 2019; the next data sets are due to be published in January 2021, for the period of April 2019 to March 2020).


Written Question
Legal Aid Scheme: Reviews
Wednesday 17th June 2020

Asked by: Christian Wakeford (Labour - Bury South)

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what progress his Department has made in its review of the means test; and when he plans to bring forward proposals.

Answered by Alex Chalk - Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice

The comprehensive review of the legal aid eligibility regime commenced in February 2019. The review is exploring how the current arrangements, including the existing financial thresholds, adequately protect access to justice, particularly for the vulnerable. Whilst the Government had previously committed to complete the review by Summer 2020 and to mark this with publication of a consultation paper, the impact of the Covid-19 crisis has meant this work has been temporarily paused and a revised timetable for delivery of the review will be announced shortly.


Written Question
Domestic Abuse: Coronavirus
Tuesday 9th June 2020

Asked by: Christian Wakeford (Labour - Bury South)

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

What additional financial support he is providing to help protect victims of domestic abuse during the covid-19 outbreak.

Answered by Alex Chalk - Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice

We have announced an unprecedented £76 million extra funding to support survivors of?domestic abuse, sexual violence, modern slavery and vulnerable children and their families. This includes £28 million for victims of domestic abuse.

This funding will help front line charities to provide support to those in need, including through virtual or telephone-based services.

This funding is part of comprehensive measures to support vulnerable people through the pandemic and we are working closely with local bodies, charities and other partners to ensure they get the support they need.