Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what recent estimate he has made of the unemployment rate among former male inmates compared with the rate among the general male population.

In May last year, we published our plans for reforming prison education and improving employment outcomes for ex-offenders in the Education and Employment Strategy. The strategy created a system in which each prisoner was set on a path to employment, with prison education and work geared towards employment on release from the outset.

In line with this, we introduced new performance measures to record the rates of employment for prison leavers at six weeks post-release. The Department is scheduled to publish the statistical data for this on 25 July in an annex to Community Performance Statistics on Gov.uk, at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/prison-and-probation-trusts-performance-statistics