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Probation

Volume 496: debated on Wednesday 15 July 2009

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what the average ratio of offenders to Probation Service staff in the (a) Thames Valley and (b) Milton Keynes probation area was in each of the last five years. (283830)

The information requested is shown in the following tables.

Staff:Offenders

(a) All Thames Valley probation area staff

(b) All Milton Keynes probation office staff

2005

1:8

1:11

2006

1:9

1:10

2007

1:10

1:11

2008

1:9

1:14

2009

1:8

1:12

Offender Managers:Offenders

(a) All Thames Valley probation area offender managers

(b) All Milton Keynes probation office offender managers

2005

1:14

1:17

2006

1:17

1:15

2007

1:21

1:17

2008

1:23

1:19

2009

1:22

1:17

This information has been provided by Thames Valley Probation Area. The number of offenders includes some in custody who would be subject to probation supervision on release.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what the (a) community and (b) custody caseload of the Probation Service has been in each year since 1997. (285821)

The total community and pre-release custodial offender caseload for England and Wales as at 31 December since 2002 was as follows:

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

Supervised in community

All court orders

116,125

120,734

128,217

137,377

146,532

150,179

146,725

Post-release supervision

22,000

21,106

22,739

25,603

26,096

28,721

32,220

Supervised in custody

55,732

59,791

61,328

64,682

65,378

66,381

66,864

Note:

A new system for collecting probation workload data was introduced from 1 January 2002, making comparisons with earlier years unreliable (and so data prior to 2002 are not provided here).

The 2008 figures are provisional and were published on 30 April in the Ministry of Justice statistics bulletin Probation statistics quarterly brief October to December 2008, England and Wales. Copies can be found in the Libraries of the House. The final 2008 data will be published in Offender Management Caseload Statistics 2008 on 31 July.

These figures have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.