Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether (a) domestic abusers and (b) stalkers are ineligible for release under the end of custody supervised licence scheme.

Nobody convicted of serious violence will be released early and anyone convicted of any sexual or terror offence is automatically excluded. Unlike Labour’s End of Custody Licence scheme, which ran from 2007 to 2010, all offenders who may be eligible for release will be subject to the same set of licence conditions that would apply had they been released automatically.

Those licence conditions will reflect the risk management release plan prepared by probation staff and what is necessary to safely manage the offender in the community. The offender can be immediately recalled to prison if they do not comply or otherwise behave in a way that is assessed to be putting the public at risk.

In contrast to Labour’s approach, we have 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.