§ John McDonnellTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many probation areas in England and Wales operated bail information schemes in the last year for which figures are available; in how many cases information on bail was provided to the courts, broken down by probation area; and in how many of these cases the court ordered conditional bail. [65424]
430W
§ Hilary Benn36 areas provided bail information schemes to courts in 2001–02, although schemes in some areas will have been targeted at specific courts or court sittings and some courts within those areas will not have benefited from access to a scheme. The National Probation Directorate is currently considering how the overall scope of bail information schemes can be extended to provide courts with greater access to a scheme and to further develop the effectiveness of the bail information process. Work to identify qualitative performance measures will begin later this year.
A return showing the numbers of bail information reports prepared in 2001 is in the table. Consideration of a bail information report will be only one of a range of factors which courts take into consideration when considering whether to order conditional bail and records are not kept of the number of such orders where a bail information report has been presented.
Numbers of bail information reports prepared by the Probation Service during 2001 Number Avon 0 Cambridgeshire 2 Cheshire 1,014 Teesside 111 Cornwall 9 Cumbria 131 Derbyshire 40 Devon 91 Dorset 302 Durham 6 Essex 3 Gloucestershire 0 Hampshire 0 West Mercia 338 Hertfordshire 28 Humberside 634 Kent 181 Lancashire 198 Leicestershire 139 Lincolnshire 37 Greater Manchester 715 Merseyside 306 Norfolk 18 Northamptonshire 0 Northumbria 101 Nottinghamshire 0 Thames Valley 401 Somerset 15 Staffordshire 346 Suffolk 76 Surrey 228 West Sussex 140 Warwickshire 230 West Midlands 1,302 Wiltshire 62 North Yorkshire 0 South Yorkshire 403 West Yorkshire 1,991 Dyfed/Powys 191 Gwent 0 North Wales 0 West Glamorgan 9 Middlesex 71 England and Wales 9,870