Chief Executive's Review of the Year

I would like to start this review by sending a vote of thanks to all of our staff, members and stakeholders for their hard work and dedication in maintaining their high standards and levels of performance over the last 12 months.

Workload

The resources required to keep up with the workload of the Board continued to increase during the year, with the switch away from less labour intensive paper hearings towards much more resource intensive oral hearings gathering pace.

The number of DCR cases is now dropping rapidly, with an increasingly complex hardcore of more serious and problematic offenders left in the system. Recall cases are also starting to reduce significantly from their peak in 2008/09.

The total number of cases we have handled has fallen this year. This is largely due to the 45% fall in determinate cases, from 4,012 to 2,202, and the 22% fall in the number of recall cases dealt with by the Board, from 17,184 to 13,423.

However, we are continuing to see an ever increasing number of oral hearings, driven by the expanding population of indeterminate sentence prisoners. This year has seen a record number of such hearings.

Oral hearings increased by 8% from 2,757 in 2008/09 to 2,974 with a small fall in lifer cases being overtaken by a doubling of IPP cases from 556 to 1,022. This, combined with the difficulties we have until recently experienced in obtaining sufficient judicial resource, has led to the backlog of indeterminate cases that we now face and the consequent delay in hearing some of those cases.

The unit cost of an indeterminate sentence oral hearing is £1,959 per case, compared to £433 for a paper DCR hearing and £49 for a recall case.

Outstanding cases

The Board has received a budget settlement of £11 million for 2010/11 from our sponsor department. This represents a £1.2 million (12%) increase over our 2009/10 budget of £9.8 million (of which £8.97 million was actually used). However, responsibility for paying our new serving judges for Parole Board work has transferred to the Board from HMCS for 2010/11. This change will account for a significant proportion of the additional funding increase.

This budget settlement will help us to meet our projected incoming workload given that we now have increased the number of judicial members to chair oral hearing panels. What will continue to challenge us, however, will be to cut deeply into the backlog that is currently estimated at around 2,500 cases. This will depend not only on how quickly we are able to train our new judges and get them sitting on oral hearing panels, but also whether we can find sufficient numbers of independent and specialist members to sit on panels alongside them and at the same time raise the capacity of our staff to administrate the additional workload.

Under our new sponsor the amended Parole Board Rules finally came into effect on 1 April 2009, allowing us the ability to refuse automatic oral hearings and to make use of independent members in order to allow them to chair IPP hearings.

We have also been working closely with the Public Protection Casework Section, since the Generic Parole Process came into effect 1 April 2009, to link together all the case-management processes and targets previously held separately by different departments.

Reducing the outstanding case backlog and the delays experienced by prisoners will continue to be my top operational priority over the coming year.

Performance

A detailed report on the Board's performance against Business Plan targets for 2009/10 is given on pages 26 to 30. Alongside our sponsor department, the Access to Justice Group of the Ministry of Justice, we now use a method of business planning based on a balanced scorecard.

The targets contained in this scorecard are set at a strategic level and include a whole system target for timeliness in dealing with oral hearing cases. The benefit of this whole system target is that it incentivises us and all of our partner agencies to work together towards our mission of protecting the public.

The whole system target also makes us dependent upon others who are operating downstream in the system providing us with complete dossiers on time. During 2009/10 only 21% of dossiers were provided to the Board on time, making it impossible for us to meet our target of issuing 80% of ICM directions or no decisions by week 12 of the generic parole process.

Because of the backlog of oral hearing cases the Board has had to introduce a listing prioritisation framework which requires us to hear the oldest cases first. This has meant that it is also impossible for us to meet our target of setting a hearing date by week 8 of the GPP in 90% of cases where directions are complete.

Our performance in determining cases within the scheduled calendar month of the GPP was better due to our timely hearing of paper reviews. However, our performance on oral hearing reviews, where we are affected by the listing prioritisation framework and a lack of judicial members, meant that we missed the 80% target, determining only 32% of cases on time.

We performed best of all in the one target that was solely a Parole Board action, issuing 95% of determinations within 14 days of the hearing. We narrowly missed this target, achieving an 86% success rate. However, this was a very creditable performance considering that we have held a record number of oral hearings this year.

Linda Lennon CBE
Chief Executive and Accounting Officer
30 June 2010

The Parole Board for England and Wales

Grenadier House, 99-105 Horseferry Road, London, SW1P 2DX

Telephone 0845 251 2220