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4 Sep 2006 : Column 1922W—continued
Probation Service
Mr. Gerrard: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what the probation budget is for 2006-07, broken down by area; and what the figures were for 2005-06. [88005]
Mr. Sutcliffe: The Probation Board’s annual budget for 2005-06 was £786,468,759 and this figure represents the Board’s final budget position at the end of the financial year. It includes all relevant budget adjustments which were made during the year. The budget figure for 2006-07, of £818,004,241, is the first quarter allocated position and is therefore subject to further changes during the course of the year. A table showing the breakdown by area Board for both years follows.
| £ | ||
| Revenue budget | ||
| Board | 2005-06 | 2006-07( 1) |
| (1) Subject to further changes. | ||
Mr. Gauke: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what measures the Department routinely takes to monitor the whereabouts of (a) murderers, (b) rapists and (c) paedophiles released from prison; and what assessment he has made of the efficacy of these measures. [67681]
Mr. Sutcliffe [holding answer 3 May 2006]: Any offender sentenced to 12 months' imprisonment or more is subject to probation supervision and to licence conditions. The offender must adhere to any conditions attached to the licence, including standard conditions set in all cases, which require him to remain in contact with his supervising officer and live at a suitable address. Any offender in breach of licence conditions risks recall to prison. Although it is not possible from national data to categorise the breaches in question, the probation service has achieved a significant improvement in performance in relation to all breaches of licence conditions. Its target is to enforce 90 per cent. of breaches overall within 10 working days. In 1997-98 the enforcement rate for licences stood at 34 per cent. It is now 93 per cent.
In addition, any offender subject to sex offender registration requirements is required to notify to the
police a home address within three days of leaving prison, and to notify any subsequent change of address within three days of the change thereafter while still subject to registration. Failure to supply that information, or supplying false information, is an offence punishable by up to five years imprisonment. Registration requirements were strengthened recently by the Sexual Offences Act 2003.
| Enforcement of licences by the probation service | ||
| Percentage | ||
| Enforced within 10 days | Enforced whether or not within 10 days | |
| (1 )April 2005 to February 2006. Note: National Standards for the Supervision of Offenders in the Community require breach or recall action to be taken on or before a third unacceptable failure to comply with a licence and for this action to be initiated within 10 working days of the relevant failure. | ||
David T.C. Davies: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how the figures recently published in The Daily Telegraph and obtained from an internal Home Office document concerning the number of offences per week committed by offenders under supervision to the Probation Service were calculated. [75579]
Mr. Sutcliffe: The measure records subsequent contact with the criminal justice system by offenders who were under probation service supervision at a particular point in time. It is based on matching offenders who are recorded as being under supervision at the end of a given quarter with the Police National Computer (PNC). Once offenders are matched, automated programmes search for whether the offenders had an entry on the PNC in the two months following the end of the quarter. The PNC entries could be for (i) arrest, charge, summons, or report, and/or (ii) conviction, and/or (iii) caution. It does not show weekly data, only monthly summaries. The bulk of the entries are not proven offences; an arrest or charge cannot be equated with admission or proof of guilt. These data are in development, and are released as experimental statistics. At the moment, they have not been assessed as fit for purpose and could be inaccurate or misleading. The assessment of accuracy and fitness will proceed during the financial year 2006-07.
Mr. Clegg: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department pursuant to his answer of 5 July 2006, Official Report, columns 1093-94W, on life sentences, when the Probation Service lost contact with the offender who has been out of contact for more than 10 years. [84721]
John Reid: Probation Service contact with the offender in question was lost in 1984 when he is believed to have left the UK.
Mr. Clegg: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department (1) whether the relevant probation service informed the Recalls Section at his Department of every lifer who was released on licence and subsequently absconded; [88488]
(2) how many (a) discretionary lifers and (b) mandatory lifers released on licence subsequently absconded in each of the last five years. [88490]
John Reid: Probation areas are expected to notify breaches of life licence conditions in relation to individual cases, including loss of contact. Extracting the requested specific information through the examination of the individual files of each life licensee could be obtained only at disproportionate cost and would necessitate removing caseworkers from the business of managing offenders to carry out this work.
Mr. Graham Stuart: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many people in (a) England and (b) Beverley and Holderness were returned to prison after violating their probation conditions in each year since 2000; and if he will make a statement. [63509]
Mr. Sutcliffe: Information on the number of persons recalled to prisons in England and Wales (a) from Home Detention Curfew, (b) from licence following determinate sentences of four years or more, (c) from life licence, and (d) from ACR licence can be found in tables 10.7 to 10.9, and paragraph 10.12 respectively, of Home Office Statistical Bulletin 17/05: “Offender Management Caseload Statistics, England and Wales, 2004”. Copies of this publication can be found in the Library.
These figures have been drawn from administrative IT systems. Although care is taken when processing and analysing the returns, the detail collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system, and so is not necessarily accurate to the last whole number.
Information is not available on a constituency or regional basis.
Mr. Lidington: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many (a) former convicted prisoners and (b) foreign national former convicted prisoners are subject to supervision in the community following their release. [67660]
Mr. Sutcliffe: At 31 December 2005 there were 25,600 (rounded to the nearest 100) offenders under post-release supervision in England and Wales. It is not known how many of these were foreign nationals as, while the Probation Service routinely records the ethnic origin of offenders in accordance with agreed CJS codings, the nationality of offenders is not systematically recorded and there is no national framework for doing this.
Production Orders
Norman Baker:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many production orders were used by police in the last year for which figures were available to obtain information about individuals from
(a) solicitors, (b) accountants, (c) banks and (d) others. [68464]
Mr. McNulty: Information on the number of production orders issued under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 is not held centrally.
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