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Close to a hundred thousand��community service hours have been wiped due to Covid-19, even as the Government scaled back pandemic restrictions.����

��һ�ǿ�����talk ZB can reveal in the year to August, 81,000 hours had been remitted under the now-expired Epidemic Preparedness Notice.����

That notice, in place from March 2020 until last week, was used to clear community service��hours,��with restrictions making it difficult for sentences to be completed.��

Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis maintains the majority of sentences with remitted community hours were for minor offending, such as traffic offences and the non-payment of fines.��

“These are people whose offences are very low level.”����

"We aren't talking about hardened criminals. We aren't talking about dangerous people”, he said.����

But��National says while it made sense during the height of the pandemic, every other hour struck off "is proof that the Government's soft on crime."����

“I agree that it's the lower end of offending, but offending has still happened”, said corrections spokesperson Simon O’Connor. ����

Community sentences are unpaid, and people can be sentenced to between 40 and 400 hours of work��as a court-ordered punishment for offending.����

In response to written questions from National, Davis revealed��81,924.5��community work hours had been wiped under the Epidemic Preparedness Notice between January and August this year.����

That equates��to 8,080 offenders, most of which were based in either central or southern regions. Over 2020 and 2021, 88,317.25��hours were remitted.����

The most community service hours erased during 2022��came��in March, when the monthly total hit more than 31,000 hours.����

Speaking to����һ�ǿ�����talk��ZB, Davis said that's "only an average of three hours per week, per offender in the community... or twelve hours for the month."��

"We need to keep it all in perspective."����

"You've got to remember the circumstances at the time, we were in the middle of the Omicron outbreak, [and] we had concerns about people in close association with each other," he said.����

New Zealand moved to the Covid-19 traffic light system in December last year.����

When the Omicron wave took hold in January, the country shifted to red, which involved mandatory face coverings in many public settings, as well as 100-person gathering limits.����

After a number of tweaks to the red setting, including larger gathering limits and the end of contact tracing for businesses, New Zealand moved to orange in April, with a greater focus on vaccine requirements and mask-wearing.����

Corrections’ Darius Fagan, general manager for case management & probation, said until mid-2022, a number of restrictions were put in place for community work, with “either reduced numbers in attendance or sites shut down for this period.” ����

“Decisions on remitting hours were made on a case-by-case basis... only people who had been compliant with their community work had hours remitted”, he said. ����

In line with the Sentencing Act, no more than eight hours in any week, and no more than the lesser of 48 hours in total, or one-third of the imposed sentence, can be remitted.��

“Community work sentences have now resumed across the country”,��Fagan said.��

Davis explained the rationale for why community service hours were being removed in the first place.����

“These are people who were looking to make amends for whatever they had done.... because of circumstances well out of their control, they couldn't do their hours."����

But National corrections spokesperson Simon O'Connor said "there's no reasonable explanation" for wiping hours this year.����

He claimed the Government's used "the Epidemic Preparedness Notice no longer to manage Covid, but to manage failings of the Corrections department."����

"The old adage was do the crime, do the time, but under Labour it seems there are no consequences", he said.����

Davis hit back, putting the criticism down to party politics.����

“Yeah, well, that's National. That's the sort of thing they'll say in Opposition. ����

“The��reality��is they'd have the same advice in Government that I received."����