Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will place in the Library copies of all representations he has received on the consequences of excluding low risk offenders under community service orders from the payment by results model; and what estimate he has made of the potential effect of that conclusion on re-offending rates.

We are currently implementing major reforms to probation services in order to bring about a reduction in reoffending, with contracts to transfer ownership of the 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) on track to be signed by the end of 2014.

The two main elements of the payment mechanism for CRCs are the Fee For Service (FFS) and Payment by Results (PbR). The FFS is primarily paid for mandated activities that deliver the sentence of the court and licence conditions. PbR is paid for the achievement of reductions in reoffending against the baseline historical level and is designed to incentivise bidders to continuously innovate and improve performance throughout the life of the contract.

PbR measurement will be based on a series of offender “cohorts”. These are the groups of offenders whose reoffending will determine the providers’ success or otherwise at reducing reoffending rates. Cohorts will be built up on a quarterly and annual basis and will include offenders released from a custodial sentence and offenders who begin a community order (CO) or a suspended sentence order (SSO). Cohorts will exclude offenders not subject to any of the above disposals, and offenders allocated to the National Probation Service. They will also exclude offenders on a CO or SSO which includes only a single electronically monitored requirement (as CRCs will not be responsible for supervising this group) and offenders who are subject only to an unpaid work requirement (as for this group, the court will not have imposed an additional rehabilitative intervention).

CRCs will be paid for reducing reoffending rates significantly beyond historic levels. Those historic baselines are modelled to exclude the same types of offender that are excluded in the CRCs’ cohorts, thereby allowing a like-for-like comparison.

We have consulted widely on the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms and received and responded to a balance of views. The design of the payment mechanism has been set out in the draft payment mechanism design overview and draft payment mechanism contract schedule, copies of which were deposited in the Library of the House and published on the MoJ website in February 2014.