Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the number and proportion of (a) male and (b) female prisoners who have children.

An MoJ study estimated that there were approximately 200,000 children in England & Wales who had a parent in prison at some point during the year 2009. Looking at the number of children with a parent in prison at a single point in time, approximately 90,000 children had a parent in prison at the end of June 2009. No recent annual estimate has been made of the number of children affected by the imprisonment of a parent or main caregiver.

The Prisons Strategy White Paper includes a commitment to improve the quality of the data collected and to improve the support provided. We are investigating opportunities for data sharing between Government organisations, to facilitate targeted support for offenders and their families.

Changes have been made to the Basic Custody Screening Tool to enable us to collect data on entry to prison about how many primary carers are in custody and how many children under the age of 18 are affected by their imprisonment. As this data is self-reported, we will monitor the quality of the data over the next year and make a decision as to what format the data will be published.