Question to the Ministry of Justice:

What steps his Department is taking to improve the probation system.

Probation services play a crucial role in protecting the public while working with offenders to turn their lives around.

We are unifying delivery of offender management, unpaid work and accredited programmes under the National Probation Service from June 2021. This will allow us to strengthen supervision, improve community sentences and increase rehabilitative support for offenders.

In June, we launched a Dynamic Framework as a platform to ensure we can draw on the expertise of private, voluntary and community organisations to provide rehabilitation services in future.

We aim to support these reforms with investment and this year secured an extra £155m for probation.