Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how much funding his Department has allocated to maintain probation services in (a) Liverpool City Region and (b) the North West in each year since 2010.

Public Protection remains the number one priority in the probation system. With this in mind we continue to manage our high risk and complex cases face to face, as far as possible. Last summer, the Probation Roadmap to Recovery was published, which has since been revised to align with the Prime Minister’s National Roadmap. It sets out the aims for delivery in the coming weeks and months and outlines when we will lift national pauses, rather than mandate when services will be re-introduced.

A four-year estates strategy will see £131m of funding allocated to the refurbishment of existing sites and creation of 65 new sites across England and Wales. As part of the Probation Reform Programme 191 sites which are currently used by Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) will be transferred to the National Probation Service.

As part of the Probation Reform Programme, the estates strategy for Liverpool City region and the North West has been reviewed. The probation contact centre in St Helens closed in March 2021 as a result of the Probation Reform Programme estates strategy review. Staff and supervised individuals subsequently moved to Probation contact centres in Knowsley and Prescot. Changes to the estate have not affected the existing partnerships arrangements that are in place between the National Probation Service and key stakeholders/partners in St Helens. Currently there are no plans to increase the number of Probation contact centres in the region, however, we continue to source local premises for specific needs as required.

Funding for the Probation regions for 2021/22 is yet to be finalised. Given the changes to the nature and scope of Probation Service provision since 2010 it is not possible to provide meaningful figures covering the period requested without incurring disproportionate costs.

Data on the number of service users from 2014 to 2019 is provided on the attached table. It is not possible to provide probation caseload figures for the Liverpool City region specifically prior to 2014 as this would involve re-extracting data which would now be incomplete due to deletions in line with Data Protection Act rules applied on the recording system at the time; the cost of undertaking this exercise would therefore be disproportionate.

The number of offenders supervised by each National Probation Service region, division and CRC is regularly published as part of the Offender Management Quarterly series of statistics and can be found via the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/offender-management-statistics-quarterly