Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many Multi-agency public protection arrangements (MAPPA) serious case reviews following serious further offences by people under MAPPA supervision have been completed in each of the last five years.

Under the statutory guidance, it is for the Strategic Management Board (SMB) of the MAPPA area to commission a serious case review (SCR). The SMB must commission an SCR where a MAPPA offender managed at either Level 2 or 3 is charged with committing an offence of murder, manslaughter, rape, or attempted murder or rape. The SMB may decide to conduct an SCR, if an offender managed at Level 1 is charged with any of those offences or if the SMB considers that is in the public interest to undertake an SCR where one is not required.

The purpose of an SCR is to determine how effectively the various agencies worked together under the MAPPA framework to assess and manage the risks of the offender concerned and, where there were shortcomings, to identify the improvements needed, either locally or nationally.

Officials regularly revise the statutory guidance, to ensure that it reflects any legislative changes and incorporates best operational practice. As part of the rolling programme of revising the guidance, my officials are currently consulting on whether to make changes to the criteria for mandatory SCRs. Once this is complete, I will ask officials to seek views from SMBs as to the merits of publishing SCRs.

The published MAPPA Annual Report includes data on the number of SCRs the SMB commissioned that year for Level 2 and Level 3 cases. The data for 2019/20 will be published as National Statistics in the MAPPA Annual Report on 29 October 2020. However, the table below shows statistics for the previous 5 years:

Table 1 Number of SCRs for Level 2 and Level 3 cases.

In addition to the above table, SMBs conducted a number of discretionary reviews for Level 1 cases.

Table 2 Number of discretionary reviews Level 1 cases.

Table notes:

These figures are based on information provided to the National MAPPA Team by individual MAPPA areas.