Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what recent steps he has taken to assess the potential success of current rehabilitation programme, Becoming New Me.

The design of our rehabilitation programmes is informed by various evaluations of existing and predecessor programmes, and all programmes are subject to ongoing quality assurance and monitoring. More detailed impact evaluations on reoffending programmes require large samples and study of offenders’ behaviour over time and therefore, it can take several years before there is a sufficient sample to produce such findings.

We expect to carry out evaluations of the Thinking Skills Programme (TSP) delivered in custody in England and Wales, and to conduct studies to assess Horizon and Becoming New Me Plus (BNM+). For Building Better Relationships (BBR), the Department is currently producing a feasibility study to assess the extent to which BBR can be evaluated in a robust way.

The Department published a substantial impact evaluation of the RESOLVE accredited programme in January 2021. This evaluation assessed the programme’s effectiveness as delivered in custody in England and Wales, and can be found by visiting https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/957855/RESOLVE_report.pdf.

A supplementary appendix was also published in October 2021 which provided further insight into the circumstances which affected the impact of the programme. This appendix can be found by visiting https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/justice-data-lab-statistics-october-2021.