Conclusions and recommendations
1. We welcome the Ministry's acceptance of
all the recommendations made in the Comptroller and Auditor General's
Report and the Action Plan which has resulted from it.
The National Offender Management Service, part of the Ministry
of Justice, encompasses HM Prison Service, the National Probation
Service and the 42 Probation Areas, and is working to implement
the Report's recommendations via a series of phased initiatives.
2. The Ministry lacks robust, national information
about which offenders are less likely to reoffend if sentenced
to a community order, rather than to a short custodial sentence.
Without this key information, it is harder for probation officers
to advise the courts properly on what might encourage particular
offenders to stop or reduce their reoffending. The Ministry's
planned research study, due for publication in summer 2015, should
show the type and combination of community order requirements
that work best for different types of offender. Rather than waiting
until 2012 to release the first results, the Ministry should report
emerging findings from this work, so that they can be absorbed
into Probation Officers' day to day work, including information
on the extent to which offenders gain and remain in employment.
3. The most widely used measure of reoffending,
the reconviction rate, does not include all offences committed
in the two year monitoring period after sentencing and is not
comprehensive enough to be a useful measure of sentence effectiveness.
Offences occurring during the two year monitoring period but identified
more than six months later are not included in the reconviction
rate, which is therefore understated. To gain a fuller picture
of re-offending, the Ministry should supplement its two year reconviction
data with information on offences identified later.
4. The National Probation Service does not
have accurate, complete and up-to-date information about its capacity
to oversee community orders, the relative costs between areas
or the number of community orders completed as sentenced.
In the face of changing demands on the National Probation Service,
good decision making is difficult without accurate information.
The changes set out in the Ministry's Action Plan should improve
the reliability and timeliness of management information, and
the National Probation Service should publish periodic reports
on progress made on implementation.
5. Funding for the delivery of community orders
is not aligned with the demands falling on individual local Probation
Areas. The Ministry should adjust its
funding arrangements to more flexibly respond to changes in demand
from sentencers, as well as local Area circumstances.
6. Some sentencers see community sentences
as a 'soft option', meaning they are less likely to give them
as a sentence. The Ministry could do more
to improve sentencer and public confidence in community orders
as a real alternative to custodial sentences by promoting community
sentences more proactively to local sentencers. The Ministry could
do this, for example, through using case examples and validated
local information on the proportions of orders completed and breached,
as well as reconviction rates.
7. There are variations in the way Local Probation
Areas have implemented the National Standards which underpin the
enforcement of community orders. These
variations mean that offenders are treated differently in different
Areas, and could reduce confidence in community orders. The Ministry
should publish local Area information showing performance against
national standards to identify poor performance and encourage
Areas to implement standards properly, particularly those relating
to acceptable absences and the completion of orders.
8. Some of the programmes supporting the delivery
of community order requirements may not be well suited to meeting
the needs of women and members of minority groups, which could
make it harder for these offenders to complete their order in
line with court requirements. The Ministry
should use the information it collects on the gender, ethnicity
and disabilities of offenders, and the length and type of community
orders they are serving, to check that the programmes provided
meet their needs.
9. The Ministry's current system of delivery
targets for local Probation Areas could create perverse incentives.
Offender managers, for example, may be
incentivised to channel offenders towards programmes that are
below target, and to avoid breaching those on such programmes.
In other instances, targets for some requirements, such as unpaid
work, are easily exceeded. The Ministry should refocus its performance
measures to drive up the quality of offender management and encourage
a better spread of programmes throughout the year.
10. Unpaid work is focused on projects which
benefits local community groups but could be broadened to include
more schemes which improve communal areas, such as litter clearing
and chewing gum removal. Nationally, unpaid
work represented some 31% of all requirements issued in 2006.
The National Probation Service should promote the performance
and increase the visibility of unpaid work sessions, both within
the local communities in which they occur and to sentencers.
11. Alcohol misuse was shown to cause a quarter
of offenders to commit offences, but only 2% were given an alcohol
treatment requirement. It is for the courts
to determine an offender's sentence, but a lack of alcohol treatment
in some areas may reduce sentencing options. This means that the
cause of offending may not be being tackled effectively. The Ministry
of Justice should work with the Department of Health to make the
alcohol treatment requirement available to courts for all offenders
with chronic alcoholism where this contributes to their offending
behaviour.
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