Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the reoffending rates of those serving short community sentences of six months or less.

In 2022/23, the proven reoffending rate for adults serving immediate custodial sentences of six months or less was 59.6%. For further details, please see here: proven-reoffending-jan23-mar23-annual.ods. We do not have a published breakdown for community sentences by sentence length. To produce this data would incur disproportionate costs.

However, studies found that short custodial sentences of 12 months or less were associated with higher reoffending rates (approximately 4 percentage points higher) than court orders of any length (which includes both community orders and suspended sentence orders) had been given.

The Government has delivered on a manifesto commitment to bring sentencing up to date and ensure the framework is consistent by launching an Independent Review of Sentencing chaired by former Lord Chancellor, David Gauke.