Appendix 3: Draft Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Suitability for Fixed Term Recall) Order 2024
Further information from the Ministry of Justice
Q1: The EM says that the impact on the public sector would be an increased workload for the probation service. Does the Probation Service have the spare capacity to deliver this? Is any additional resource being provided to them to deal with the change that this Order effects?
A1: We are aware of the caseloads that Probation have and have already taken action. On the supply side, we have 4,000 more probation officers since 2020 and are hiring more to ensure the probation service is equipped to handle increases in demand. This will help with caseloads and has come with £155 million of investment. More widely, we are also developing a package of operational measures to ensure probation staff have the capacity to deal with the changes resulting from this SI and wider demand on the probation service, ensuring that all their day to day work adds to public protection or rehabilitative outcomes. With that said, it is important to note that this is a cohort probation already work with in terms of recalling them then preparing them for release and receiving them back into the community, and this SI will compresses timescales for release rather than creating new cases.
Q2: Similarly the EM refers to “an increase in support necessary from charity and voluntary organisations to support those in the community, who would otherwise be in custody.” – could you elucidate what you mean by that, and whether you have consulted these organisations about their capacity to deal with additional prisoners being released into the community, or provided them with any additional funding.
A2: The probation service maintains relationships with third sector organisations working with offenders in the community, including contractual relationships which are designed to deal with fluctuating demand. We will keep these under review as this measure comes in to force to ensure adequate provisions are made.
29 February 2024
Q3: How many prisoners are in scope?
A3: We estimate based on recent data that each year around 4,000 standard recalls would be eligible for this change to recall policy. This is the number of prisoners sentenced to less than 12 months in custody who both received a standard term recall whilst on licence and who met the eligibility criteria (e.g. it excludes those who were charged with a serious further offence and / or quickly moved to the remand population, or those managed at level 2 or 3 under the Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements, also excludes those whose standard recall period would have been less than or equal to 14 days).
Please note this is an estimate based on operational management information that enables us to consider how many offenders recalled would not be eligible for the policy, however the dataset is not one we routinely publish as it is not subject to the same level of assurance as national statistics. The number should therefore be considered an indicative estimate only rather than absolute. The estimate is based on observed recall volumes data and does not project any changes to prison sentence volumes or lengths.
4 March 2024