Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people died in (a) on adult and (b) youth custody in each year since 2010; what their age was at the time of death; whether each such person was on (a) remand and (b) serving a custodial sentence of what length; which offence each such person was convicted; what the offence they were convicted of; and what the cause of death was in each case.

The Ministry of Justice is committed to open and transparent reporting of data relating to deaths in custody, self-harm and assaults. It remains a priority to reduce the number of deaths and violence in custody. Prisons take the responsibility of keeping prisoners, staff and visitors safe extremely seriously.

Strenuous efforts are made to learn from each death and improve our understanding and procedures for caring for prisoners. Each death is subject to a thorough investigation by the independent Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, in addition to a Coroner's inquest.

Central deaths in custody records do not specifically include information on those who die in ‘adult' or ‘youth' custody. Where a site is shared between a Young Offender Institute and an adult prison, records are not held to identify in which part of the site the deceased was detained. However, information based on the offenders' ages at the time of death has been provided.

The National Offender Management Service makes a provisional classification of death based on apparent cause and records may change following inquest.

A range of statistics on deaths in prison custody is published annually in the Safety in Custody statistical bulletin supplementary tables on deaths with updates on the number of deaths of prison custody published quarterly. This bulletin is published at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/safety-in-custody-statistics.

The overall numbers of deaths in prison custody by age group are shown in table 1.

Table 1: Deaths in custody by age group

The numbers of these deaths that were (a) on remand and (b) sentence length, the offence and cause of death have been placed in the library in the House. There were 74 self-inflicted deaths in custody in 2013, compared to 96 in 2004.