Tougher Payback Time For Jobless Offenders

Criminals given community sentences will be expected to do a full week's work rather than stretch the sentence over a longer period, the Ministry of Justice has said.

Jobless offenders will be forced to work a minimum of 28 hours over four days, with the fifth day spent looking for full-time work, said prisons and probation minister Crispin Blunt in the announcement.

Previously, Community Payback programmes - known as community service - could be spread out over 12 months, with some offenders working just six hours a week.

Speaking on a visit to a programme in Croydon, south London, Mr Blunt said the new measures would make for more intensive unpaid work and would help rehabilitate offenders.

"If you are unemployed and on Community Payback you shouldn't be sitting idle at home watching daytime television or hanging about with your mates on a street corner, you should be out paying back to your community through hard, honest work," he said.

"The public want to see offenders giving something back to their communities but they are rightly not satisfied with seeing only a handful of hours a week dished out.

"Decent, law-abiding people can work a full five-day week and so should offenders."

Currently around 100,000 people are sentenced to Community Payback each year across England and Wales with more than 8.8 million hours of unpaid work completed last year, the Ministry of Justice said.

An MoJ spokeswoman told Sky News Online the aim was to get the offenders back into the habit of work.

"They will be out on the streets in all weather doing a variety of payback work - for instance, some are currently working in riot-hit areas - and can be recognised by their high visibility jackets."

One 21-year-old offender working on the Croydon project explained that he had been sentenced to 150 hours of work for keeping three illegal dogs in his one-bedroom flat.

While he thought jobseekers would need more than one day a week to look for work, he did say the intensity of the programme would deter him from reoffending.

"You can see, we're out here in the pouring rain, painting a wall. You don't want to wake up to that in the morning.

"You can't use your phone, there's a lot of things you can't do on Community Payback.

"For me personally, and I'm sure a lot of the others, we don't want to come back. It's enough to put you off - you don't need prison to put you off, this is enough."