Warning over community sentences

The Commons public accounts committee said the Ministry of Justice needed to speed up work on producing detailed data to back claims that non-prison punishments helped reduce reoffending.

Welcoming a commitment by the MoJ to compile the figures, the MPs said it presently lacked "robust, national information" about which offenders were most likely to benefit from community sentences.

Reconviction rates failed to include all offences committed within two years of sentencing and were "not comprehensive enough to be a useful measure of sentence effectiveness".

And the National Probation Service did 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", undermining its decision-making.

The report concluded: "Some sentencers see community sentences as a 'soft option', meaning they are less likely to give them. 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.

"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."

The report also called for better alcohol treatment provision across the country after figures showed just 2% of offenders were handed treatment orders as part of their sentence despite alcohol being a factor in a quarter of cases.

Edward Leigh, the Conservative MP who chairs the committee, said: "Community orders, which are intended to deliver both punishment and rehabilitation, can be a tough option and, in the right circumstances, a real alternative to locking offenders up.

"But there is a long way to go in making them as effective as they could be, everywhere in the country."