Prison Sentences

(asked on 1st February 2022) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the average length of time was between the end of a Imprisonment for Public Protection minimum tariff and a parole hearing in (a) 2018, (b) 2019, (c) 2020 and (d) 2021.


Answered by
Kit Malthouse Portrait
Kit Malthouse
This question was answered on 9th February 2022

The Ministry of Justice holds some of the data required, as follows.

As of 31 December 2021, there were 1,602 prisoners serving a sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) in custody who have never been released.

The number of prisoners serving sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection who have served more than: three years over their minimum tariff is 1,422; five years over their minimum tariff is 1,250; and ten years over their minimum tariff is 583.

The number of prisoners serving an IPP sentence who were given a tariff of under 3 years was 584, and the number who were given a tariff of under 5 years was 1,076.

By law the Secretary of State must refer a prisoner’s case to the Parole Board at the end of his minimum tariff period and, if not released, at least every two years from the previous Parole Board decision. The Parole Board is a body independent of Government and is responsible for the listing of cases referred to it. Ministers or officials may not intervene in this process. The data required to provide an answer on the average length of time between the end of a Imprisonment for Public Protection minimum tariff and a parole hearing in (a) 2018, (b) 2019, (c) 2020 and (d) 2021, could be provided only at disproportionate cost, as central data is not stored in a way that it can be filtered by the required fields.

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