Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what data his Department holds on the number of children affected by parental imprisonment.

The Ministry of Justice’s most comprehensive prison population data suggests over the course of a year, approximately 200,000 children may be affected by a parent being in or going to prison.

The Prisons Strategy White Paper includes a commitment to improve the quality of the data collected on children impacted by parental imprisonment and to improve the support provided.

We are delivering on this through our Better Outcomes through Linked Data (BOLD) Programme. BOLD is a cross government project which will link data to enable better evidenced and more joined up cross government services.

Through BOLD, we will explore data sharing to improve our understanding of the number of children with parents in prison and how parental incarceration impacts children’s outcomes, including education, employment and future offending.

Changes have also 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. The learning from the data collected will be incorporated into findings from the BOLD programme, which will be delivered by March 2024.