Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the number of children in England and Wales who had a parent in prison on 13 September 2023.

The Ministry of Justice’s most comprehensive estimate suggests over the course of a year, approximately 200,000 children may be affected by a parent being in or going to prison. However, this estimate is based on 2009 survey data.

The Prisons Strategy White Paper includes a commitment to improve the quality of the data collected on children impacted by parental imprisonment. We will deliver this commitment 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.

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.