Vital checks on dangerous criminals are not being carried out quickly enough after their release from prison, new figures show.

The Probation Service in Thames Valley failed to assess more than half of high-risk ex-convicts within a week of them getting out of jail the second worst performance in the country.

The Government says that officials should be completing their checks in 90 per cent of cases yet in Thames Valley it is only 42 per cent.

Last night, Marjorie Binningsley whose father, Philip Huggins, murdered a woman after fleeing a bail hostel said she feared the probation service had learned nothing from its failings.

It was a condition of his parole that Huggins, released six years into an 11-year term for robbery and kidnap, stay at the hostel, but nothing was done after he fled.

Huggins, 49, later stabbed 53-year-old Cecilia Nightingale to death at her flat in Northfield Close, Littlemore, and is now serving life for her murder.

Mrs Binningsley, who tipped off police after the murder, said: "My father was on the run for two weeks and no one seemed to care where he was. He was allowed to roam the streets. Somebody wasn't doing their job properly."

Between August 2005 and March 2006, Thames Valley's probation service took longer than the deadline of a working week to process 59 out of 141 high-risk offenders. Only Hertfordshire was worse, with 14 per cent.

Staff also failed to meet a separate target of completing 90 per cent of reports on prolific and other priority offenders within five days of them either being released from prison or embarking on a community sentence.

It managed to do this in only 49 per cent of cases 47 out of 95.

But Paul Gillbard, Thames Valley Probation Service's director of offender management, said by April the service was completing assessments on 80 per cent of high risk offenders and 91 per cent of prolific offenders.

He added "Last year we supervised about 565 high risk offenders and one was convicted of a further serious offence. That performance is very good."