Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many serious further offence investigations were undertaken by probation services in (a) England and (b) Wales in each of the last four years.

The table below provides a breakdown of the figures of the Serious Further Offence Reviews (SFO) Reviews that were completed following investigations undertaken by probation services in England and Wales between 1 January 2012 – 31 December 2015.

Currently the National Probation Service or the Community Rehabilitation Company responsible for the management of the offender is required to complete the internal review of a serious further offence. Internal reviews are completed by staff who were not involved in the management of the case. They are then independently scrutinised by senior operational staff in the National Offender Management Service to ensure that they are sufficiently thorough and identify all relevant lessons for the management of future cases. Ministers are currently considering future arrangements for the production of SFO reviews.

Where an offender under probation supervision is convicted of a further offence, the offender concerned bears the responsibility for that offence. The SFO review process is not a disciplinary or a capability investigation and such investigations do not fall in scope of the Probation SFO Review Procedures. Data on staff members who have been subject to disciplinary procedures following a wider investigation that had been prompted by the SFO review investigation are not held centrally in a readily accessible format for the last four years. To obtain these data would exceed cost limits.