Does reoffending cost the country £11 billion?
"£11 billion is how much reoffending costs the country annually."
Sadiq Khan, Labour Conference, 3 October
"The decision to privatise probation flies in the face of all available evidence. All probation areas are performing well: the service won an excellence award and probation programmes reduced reoffending to 35%."
Harry Fletcher, Assistant General Secretary of Napo (National Association of Probation Officers)
So, how do you solve a problem like reoffending? The Ministry of Justice reports that in the last decade 480,000 offenders who were tracked went on to commit approximately 3.6 million more crimes after being released from custody. For the 54,108 in the cohort who were discharged from custody in 2000, 45.8 per cent re-offended within one year and 78.4 per cent within 9 years.
Given these figures, should we be surprised by Sadiq Khan's claims that reoffending is costing the state £11 billion every year?
The number is backed by various sources, but seems to be out-of-date.
In 2002, both the Home Office and the Cabinet Office released estimates that put the cost of reoffending at £11 billion. Two years ago, however, the Independent National Audit Office (NAO) revised those figures: in 2009 re-offending cost the economy "between £8.5 billion and £11 billion." To be clear, in this instance NAO cites "young reoffenders" as the main culprits.
The most up-to-date figures are, once again, gathered by the National Audit Office. NAO recently estimated the economic and social costs to be around "£7 billion to £10 billion a year."
Overall, it seems the estimated cost of reoffending is being revised downwards, and while Sadiq Khan's figure does seem to be in the right ballpark, it is at risk of getting left behind.
Whether it's £7 billion or £11 billion, the new Justice Minister Chris Grayling is attempting to address recidivism by "adding some bite" to his predecessor Ken Clarke's proposals to reform community punishment.
Mr Grayling is proposing privitising parts of the probation service as a means of increasing efficiency and cutting costs.
Among his critics, the most vocal have been the National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO). Their assistant general secretary Henry Fletcher was quoted in the Guardian as saying that probation is crucial to combatting re-offending, and that "probation programmes reduced reoffending by 35%."
Though Mr Fletcher didn't cite a source, according to NAPO's website the figure is based on "independent research". However, the authors of the study are not named.
More importantly, the estimates quoted in the press release aren't quite so cut-and-dried. The NAPO website clarifies that:
"Curtailment of Programmes is counterproductive as independent research shows that participation in them leads to a reduction in reoffending of anywhere between 8% and 35%." [Emphasis added.]
We've tried to get in touch with NAPO to clarify the source for this claim, however as yet without success. We hope that once we've made contact, we'll be able to update with more information.
However what is clear is that this is again the upper bound of an estimate, and the true figure could be as low as 8%.
Conclusion
Both claims are grounded in evidence, although both also prove to be problematic.
While £11 billion has been cited as the cost of reoffending for as much as a decade, more recent estimates have suggested a lower figure of £7-10 billion.
Similarly, we don't yet know the source for NAPO's claim that probation cuts reoffending by over a third, but based on the more detailed explanation on its website, we can say that this figure is the upper limit to an estimate that could be as low as 8%.
Flickr image courtesy of SteveR-.