Probation

Mr. Grieve
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what the caseload of the Probation Service in London was in each of the last five years.

Mr. Straw
The total case load of offenders supervised by the probation service in London as at 31 December in each of the last four years (the latest figures available) is shown in the table.

-------------
|    |Number|
-------------
|2005|41,665|
-------------
|2006|41,338|
-------------
|2007|41,998|
-------------
|2008|43,811|
-------------


The 2008 figures are provisional and were published on 30 April 2009 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 both Houses and may be accessed via the Ministry of Justice website:

http://www.justice.gov.uk/publications/probationquarterly.htm

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.