The Justice Data Lab has been launched as a pilot for one year from April 2013. During this year, a small team from Analytical Services within the Ministry of Justice will support organisations that provide offender services by allowing them easy access to aggregate re-offending data, specific to the group of people they have worked with. This will support organisations in understanding their effectiveness at reducing re-offending.

The service model involves organisations sending the Justice Data Lab team details of the offenders they have worked with along with information about the specific intervention they have delivered. The Data Lab team then matches these offenders to MoJ’s central datasets and returns the re-offending rate of this particular cohort, alongside that of a control group of offenders with very similar characteristics in order to better identify the impact of the organisation’s work.

There are two publication types:

A summary of the findings of the Justice Data Lab pilot to date (2 April to 31 October 2013).
Tailored reports about the re-offending outcomes of services or interventions delivered by each of the organisations who have requested information through the Justice Data Lab pilot. Each report is an Official Statistic and will show the results of the re-offending analysis for the particular service or intervention delivered by the organisation who delivered it.

Main findings to date

9 To date, the Justice Data Lab has received 58 requests for re-offending information and has produced 7 reports which were published last month. A further 23 are now complete and ready for publication, bringing the total of completed reports to 30. To date, there have been 9 requests that could not be processed as the minimum criteria for analyses through the Data Lab had not been met. The remaining requests are currently in progress and will be published in future monthly releases of these statistics.

Of the 23 reports being published this month:

19 reports are regional analyses of the NOMS Co-Financing Organisation (NOMS CFO) project, which aims to help offenders access mainstream services with the aim of gaining skills and moving them into employment. The initiative is funded in partnership with the European Social Fund and is delivered regionally through a number of different suppliers; these include probation trusts and private companies such as Serco, A4E, and Pertemps People Development Group. There are 2 reports presented for each region where the programme was started by individuals in 2010; the first report for each region covers individuals who started the programme in custody, and the second report covers those who started whilst in the community.

Of these 19 reports:

All the programmes which started in the community, with the exception of the North East, led to a reduction in the one year proven re-offending rate.
There were inconclusive findings for the programmes which started in custody.

For further details about the NOMS CFO project, please see the following information.

There were four inconclusive results which looked at programmes delivered by Safe Ground, the Pre-School Learning Alliance in YOI Stoke, Riverside ECHG, and St Helens Integrated Offender Management (IOM). Reasons for an inconclusive result include; the sample of individuals provided by the organisation was too small to detect a statistically significant change in behaviour; or that the service or programme genuinely does not affect re-offending behaviour. However, it is very difficult to differentiate between these reasons in the analysis, so the organisations are recommended to submit larger samples of data when it becomes available. Detailed discussion of results and interpretation is available in the individual reports.

The bulletin is produced and handled by the Ministry’s analytical professionals and production staff. Pre-release access of up to 24 hours is granted to the following persons: Ministry of Justice Secretary of State, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Permanent Secretary, Policy Advisers for reducing re-offending, Policy Advisors for the Transforming Rehabilitation Programme, and relevant Press Officers and Special Advisers.

Published 14 November 2013
Last updated 15 November 2013 + show all updates

15 November 2013
Change of document
14 November 2013
First published.

Justice Data Lab statistics: November 2013

Applies to England and Wales

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