By David Williams
Parole decisions are being held up at a cost of millions of pounds a year due to increased caseloads and inefficiency across criminal justice agencies, MPs have said.
Parole decisions are being held up at a cost of millions of pounds a year due to increased caseloads and inefficiency across criminal justice agencies, MPs have said.A Public Accounts Committee inquiry into the Parole Board identified a series of factors that are leading to delays in two-thirds of parole cases, with at least 20% a year delayed.
Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, said the board was suffering from a casework overload.
Although delays have blighted the system for years, the recent increase was partly down to more offenders requesting oral hearings, said Fletcher.
‘There are an additional 1,000 to 2,000 places being taken up in the prison system because of delays,’ he said. ‘It’s crazy economics. The Parole Board hasn’t got enough staff to process cases on time. It costs the prison service millions in keeping them inside, but there doesn’t seem to be a mechanism to give more funding to the Parole Board.’
The PAC said the board’s workload had doubled in five years due to an increasing prison population and a shift towards sentences of an indeterminate length, brought in under the 2003 Criminal Justice Act.
The board’s job is made harder by prison and probation services regularly failing to supply relevant information on offenders in time for hearings.
The delays alone cost £1m per year. The cost of keeping behind bars offenders who could have been released adds another almost £2m annually, the PAC estimates. Together, these costs are worth more than a third of the Parole Board’s £7.4m budget.
The PAC called the delays ‘completely unacceptable’, recommending that the board set targets for reducing them.
