The Parole Board. Working with others to protect the public.
About the Parole Board
The 2006 - 2007 Annual Report is also available in PDF format
Annual Report 2006-07 Statistics
Annual Report 2005-06 Statistics
Annual Report 2003-04 Section 1
Annual Report 2003-04 Section 2
Annual Report 2003-04 Section 3
You will need Adobe Reader installed on your computer to open PDFs. It is available as a free download from the Adobe website.
It has been a year of internal and external reviews and debate about the position and role of the Board. The question of the Board's independence has been a matter of legal challenge and academic debate throughout the last 12 months and we ended the year with the announcement of a move of sponsorship from the Home Office to the newly formed Ministry of Justice.
Legal challenges and case law seem to be flowing in a single direction all have progressively reduced the Home Secretarys role, while passing increasing responsibility to the courts and the Board. The Parole Board has gone from being described as quasi-judicial, to a court-like body and most recently, in the Court of Appeal in the case of Girling, as a court.
In September 2006 the Cambridge Conference picked up on the independence theme and ended with a call for the Board to protect both its real and perceived independence by lobbying for a move from the Home Office to the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA).
This move took place quicker than anyone had anticipated when the Prime Minister announced in March 2007 that the new Ministry of Justice would take over both the work of the DCA and the responsibilities of the National Offender Management Service from the Home Office.
The move to the Ministry of Justice, which was completed in on 9 May 2007, raises at least as many questions as it has answered for the Board and it heralds a period of more uncertainty as we try to find an appropriate landing place.
At the same time we have faced a transformation of the work and workload of the Board as the changes brought in by the Criminal Justice Act 2003 have begun to take effect. Our workload has shot up in response to the rapidly increasing number of recalled prisoners. Recall cases rose from 9,296 in 2005/06 to 14,669 in 2006/07. Oral hearings rose from 1,900 to 2,505. And the first few IPP cases with very short tariffs started to trickle in.
One of the key challenges facing us as a Board will be how to respond effectively to the implications of the new indeterminate public protection sentences, especially where the tariff is a very short one. We will also need to consider the profile of the Board's membership and the way we do our work as we move towards an increasingly oral hearing based system.
Maintaining high quality risk assessment must remain our top priority and we have continued to focus on this with progressive plans for member development and accreditation. At the heart of our core responsibility is public safety and public protection and we retain our objective of making risk assessments which are rigorous, fair and timely, with the primary aim of protecting the public.
We have completed much of the preparatory work to enable the introduction of a system of intensive case management that can fully support Board members in their deliberations especially in the cases of sexual and violent offenders that pose particular difficulties for risk assessment. Crucially, our proposals here will ensure that members will not be faced with a late or incomplete dossier and can meet face-to-face with offenders wherever we feel that it would assist in our robust risk assessment process.
We have opened our doors to outside scrutiny this year in a way that we have not done before. Our Review Committee has been joined by distinguished external members Stephen Shaw, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, and Peter Neyroud, Chief Executive of the National Police Improvement Agency. This has at times not been a comfortable experience for us, but it has been a most worthwhile one.
We have also invited the BBC cameras to film the deliberations of our members in both paper and oral hearings for the acclaimed BBC2 documentary series "Lock them up or let them out". This openness on our part carried risk but we felt that this was a risk worth taking in order to start the process of raising public awareness and confidence in us.
The last 12 months have been turbulent for the Board and the next 12 months promise even more change as we seek to establish our place in the Ministry of Justice. We face a rapidly changing political, legal and social environment and we will strive to promote the independence of and public confidence in the work of the Board, while effectively managing this change.
Grenadier House, 99-105 Horseferry Road, London, SW1P 2DX
Telephone 0845 251 2220