Thousands of criminals are treating community service sentences as optional – by simply refusing to start or abandoning them.
Ministry of Justice figures show courts in England and Wales issued 53,685 unpaid work orders in the year to March 2025 – yet 3,200 were never started and a third failed to complete the required hours.
As an alternative to custody, offenders can be given between 20 and 300 hours of unpaid work – such as litter picking, painting community facilities or gardening.
The figures heap further pressure on the Government to fix what the Commons Public Accounts Committee has described as a Probation
To provide well-rounded coverage and a breadth of insight across various events, we rely on contributions from several staff writers, each bringing their own area of expertise to our publication.
