Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, for which types of offences prisoners released under the end of custody supervised licence scheme were sentenced.

End of Custody Supervised Licence (ECSL) allows certain lower-level offenders to be released before their automatic release date. Unlike Labour’s scheme, which ran from 2007 to 2010, all offenders will be released onto strict licence conditions.

Nobody convicted of serious violence will be released early and anyone convicted of any sexual or terror offence is automatically excluded. In contrast to Labour’s approach, we have also introduced an additional safeguard, whereby it remains at the discretion of the prison service to block the ECSL release of any prisoners where releasing an offender earlier presents a heightened risk than if they were released at their automatic release date.