Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will make an estimate of the average time taken to compile a pre-sentence report for (a) young people, (b) adult women and (c) adult men.

Pre-sentence reports (PSRs) are compiled by staff at Court and, under the Criminal Justice Act 2003, the judiciary have discretion to decide whether or not a PSR is requested by the Court.

The adjournment period for PSRs is set by the Court and time frames may vary for a number of reasons. Standard Delivery Reports are used for high complexity cases that courts are advised can be produced in 15 working days in order to obtain additional information. Short Format Reports can be delivered in two ways: as an Oral Delivery for non-complex matters where all necessary information is available on the day of sentence; or as a Written Delivery with a short adjournment for up to 5 working days for medium complexity cases.

The National Probation Service have a performance measure on PSR timeliness, that is assessed against the adjournment date set by the court. For the period 2019/20 the NPS delivered 99.8% of its PSRs on time.

The information requested for adult men and women for 2019/20 is provided below.

Mode and Median number of days taken to prepare report - Adult male, 2019/20

Mode and Median number of days taken to prepare report - Adult female, 2019/20

Values represent the Median number of working days for the delivery of a PSR. The Median value has been selected to avoid a small number of outliers having a disproportionate impact; these outliers may represent inaccurate recording of PSR dates or may represent unusual circumstances at court.

We do not hold any data for the time taken to prepare pre-sentence reports for young people because the responsibility to do so lies with Youth Offending Teams, managed by Local Authorities.