Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many hours of community service given as part of community sentences have offenders completed in each (a) local justice area and (b) region in England and Wales in each of the last five years.

Community Payback is a term used to describe any work done as part of an unpaid work requirement made by the courts. Prior to 26^th June 2021, Community Rehabilitation Companies were responsible for the delivery of unpaid work. Since then, the new unified probation service has assumed responsibility for community payback delivery. This provides an opportunity to re-energise our work, drive up completion rates and deliver better outcomes. This Government has committed to invest an additional £93million in community payback over the next three years. This is so that we ramp up delivery to 8million hours per year, focussing on outdoor projects that help to improve public spaces, ensuring that people can see justice being done.

A significant dip in performance can be seen in years 2019/20 and 2020/21, which is attributed to the pandemic. Community Payback was severely affected by projects, and organisations that provided them, being closed along with the social distancing rules making it difficult for delivery to continue as normal.

Alongside the additional investment, other measures being taken include ; an increase in reporting directly to site to mitigate the reliance on restricted probation transport, increases to independent working projects, and educational online training.

We are unable to provide data segmented by Local Justice Areas as HMPPS report all data based on the probation service region where the person on probation has been allocated, not by criminal justice area.

Please find the data below in response to part b in England and Wales in the last five years. Where possible the data has been mapped to the new Probation Service regions that came into being in 2021. In cases where this was not possible it has been attributed to ‘unknown’.