Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will make an estimate of the number of people convicted of murdering a person under the age of 18 who have received life imprisonment without parole since 2019.

Since the start of 2019, one offender has been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole (a whole life order) for the murder of a person under the age of 18. This was Damien Bendall who was convicted of the murder of his partner and three young children, and the rape of one of those children.

The Government’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act 2022 added the murder of a child involving a substantial degree of premeditation to the list of examples where a whole life order is normally the appropriate starting point when setting an offender’s minimum custodial term. It was already the case that a whole life order is the starting point for the murder of a child involving the abduction of that child or sexual or sadistic motivation.