Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many male prisoners were serving a sentence of 12 months or more had children as on 30 June 23, and if his Department holds data on the ages of those children.

This data is not currently available.

The Government is seeking to improve our data and evidence in this area through the Better Outcomes through Linked Data (BOLD) Programme. BOLD is a cross-government Shared Outcomes Fund 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 parents in prison and the number of children impacted by parental imprisonment. BOLD’s findings will include breakdowns by gender and sentence length, enabling us to identify how many male prisoners serving a sentence of 12 month or more have children. Findings will be published when the analysis is complete.

Changes have 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, how many children under the age of 18 are affected by their imprisonment and the ages of those children. The learning from the data collected will be incorporated into findings from the BOLD programme.