Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many life sentence prisoners were released on temporary licence in each month between 2010 and 2013.

Table A below gives the number of prisoners released on temporary licence in each month of 2011, 12 and 13, broken down by type of sentence. Data is unavailable for 2010. It should be noted that a single individual may be released multiple times in different months. These individuals will appear once in each month they are released. Therefore, the sum across all months in a year will not equate to the total number of individuals released in a year. That data is published in table A3.11 of the Offender Management Caseload Statistics at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-october-december-2013-and-annual

These figures have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.

Instances of ROTL have increased in recent years and Table A underlines the part played by the increase in the number of prisoners serving life and particularly indeterminate sentences for public protection (IPPs). One of the weaknesses our review identified in the approach to ROTL that has been in place since 2006 was that all prisoners were subject to the same risk assessment procedures regardless of sentence or risk. We have introduced a new approach whereby high risk and serious offenders, including all lifers and IPPS, will be subjected to an enhanced regime of restricted ROTL under which temporary release decisions may be made only by the governor or deputy, and the board recommending the decision must consider a psychologist's review report.