Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service has made of the total number of prisoners in England and Wales that come from Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller backgrounds in the latest period for which data is available.

The number of prisoners self-designating as Gypsy and Traveller are published as part of a more detailed data set, which are released annually as part of the series ‘Offender Management Statistics Quarterly’. The most recent publication of this data was in July 2022.

The requested information can be found in Table A1.9ii of the ‘Annual Prison Population 2022’ publication:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_‌data/file/1094517/Population_30June2022_Annual.ods.

This showed that on 30 June 2022 1,459 prisoners self-designated as Irish Traveller or Gypsy.

We do not record separate figures for those declaring as ‘Roma’. They may self-declare in the category ‘White: Irish Traveller or Gypsy’, or as ‘White: Other background’.