Grahame M. Morris – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Grahame M. Morris on 2014-04-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether the National Probation Service will be responsible for the provision of court reports after the introduction of the Transforming Rehabilitation Agenda in England and Wales.

Jeremy Wright

Pre-Sentence Reports currently fall into three categories; Standard Delivery (SDR), Fast Delivery (FDR), and Same Day (or Oral) reports. This process allows Courts the flexibility to deliver sentencing decisions in the appropriate timeframe, depending on each individual case, reducing the number of adjournments and expediting the criminal justice process.

The Transforming Rehabilitation reforms will introduce a new Risk of Serious Recidivism (RSR) tool which will be used to inform the allocation of cases to new Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) or the National Probation Service (NPS) and complements the pre-sentence report process. Our testing with operational staff in Trusts of the RSR tool indicates that it is straightforward to use, in line with our commitment to minimising bureaucracy for frontline staff.

The new National Probation Service (NPS) will be responsible for advice to courts and, prior to sentence, the NPS will advise courts on sentencing options for cases as part of a pre-sentence report (in accordance with the reserved function of advice to court under section 4 of the Offender Management Act 2007).