Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the number of hours of unpaid work completed at home as part of community sentences in each year for which data is available.

Independent working projects enabled eligible people on probation to complete some of their hours from home. They were introduced as a temporary delivery method in response to COVID-19 restrictions and enabled us to maximise delivery as the Probation Service recovers from the impact of the pandemic. Group unpaid work placements were still used whenever possible under COVID-19 restrictions.

Probation regions have been required to phase out their use from September 2022.

In 2020 – 2021 a total of 59,254 hours of Unpaid Work involving independent working projects were delivered across England and Wales.

In 2021 – 2022 a total of 275,044 hours of Unpaid Work involving independent working projects were delivered across England and Wales.

In 2022-23, for the period for which data is available, 136,356 hours of Unpaid work involving independent working projects were delivered across England and Wales.

This data was sourced from the Probation Case Management System, nDelius. While reasonable efforts have been taken to ensure the accuracy of this data, the inaccuracy inherent in any large-scale administrative data source means data should not be assumed to be accurate to the last unit presented.