Asked by: Tony Lloyd (Labour - Rochdale)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate his Department has made of the number of (a) suicides and (b) attempted suicides that have taken place in prisons in (i) 2019, (ii) 2020, (iii) 2021 and (iv) 2022.
Answered by Damian Hinds
The data on self-inflicted deaths is recorded in our published Safety in Custody Statistics.
The number and rates of self-inflicted deaths across the estate in the 12 months to March 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 is published in the Safety in Custody Summary table which can be found here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1153227/Safety-in-custody-summary-q4-2022-final-tables.xlsx.
We do not produce official statistics on suicides. Self-inflicted deaths are any death of a person who has apparently taken his or her own life irrespective of intent. This not only includes suicides but also accidental deaths as a result of the person’s own actions. This classification is used because it is not always known whether a person intended to take their own life.
We are unable to answer the question on attempted suicide as we do not record this data.
Asked by: Tony Lloyd (Labour - Rochdale)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will make an estimate of the number and proportion of applications for grant of probate that were resolved within the eight week target in the latest period for which data is available; and how many and what proportion of these applications took more than nine months to resolve.
Answered by Mike Freer
The attached table shows the number and proportion of Grants of Probate applications resolved in 8 weeks and those that took more than 9 months.
Cases can take longer than 8 weeks for a number of reasons including HMCTS stopping a case to request further information which the user has not supplied, time taken for users to reply, cases can also be stopped due to application being made by another interested party or because the application becomes contested.