Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how much his Department and its agencies have paid in ex-gratia payments to people convicted of a criminal offence to settle cases prior to litigation in each of the last four years.

The Ministry of Justice and its Agencies each manage their ex-gratia payments separately and this data is not held centrally. To provide the information would require each prison establishment to manually search databases, which could only be achieved at disproportionate cost.