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 community service that were not carried out in (a) Enfield North constituency, (b) the London Borough of Enfield and (c) London in each year since 2010.

It is not possible to provide the data for individual London boroughs due to how data is recorded, but data is available for the London region.

For the period April 2014 to December 2022, 2,841,311 hours of Community Service were not carried out.

The vast majority of these hours were unworked because offenders received tougher sentences through orders revoked and suspended sentences activated, including prison time.

The attached table shows the total hours recorded as not carried out at termination of the requirement, by business year for the London region for the entire period 01/04/2014 – 31/12/2022.

The dataset covers reasons hours are not carried out including offender deaths, deportation, orders revoked and resentenced, successful appeals and Suspended Sentence Order activated.

For context: In 2019-2020, pre pandemic, Probation delivered 4,869,778 hours of unpaid work nationally. Between the 1 April 2022 and the 31 December 2022 (not a full year), Probation delivered 3,220,827 hours. We estimate that this will project to a full year delivery total of 4,294,436. All efforts are made to work hours, but where that is not possible then robust action is taken. For hours not worked due to non-compliance, enforcement action will be taken. Where it is not possible to work hours due to specific risk factors orders will be returned to the court.

It has not been possible to provide data prior to April 2014. This date marked the completion of Transforming Rehabilitation’s migration of data to the National Delius system. Prior to this, the use of multiple differing local recording systems has resulted in less robust data which cannot be used with confidence, in response to this PQ.

In the years 2019/20 and 2020/21, Community Payback was severely impacted by the pandemic and the resulting court backlogs. This included projects and organisations that provided placements being closed, along with the social distancing rules making it difficult for delivery to continue as normal.

This Government has committed to invest an additional £93 million in Community Payback over the next three years. This is so that we ramp up delivery to 8 million hours per year, focusing on outdoor projects that help to improve public spaces, ensuring that people can see justice being done.