Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many serving prisoners were not in prison on 25 December 2014.

1,347 prisoners were lawfully absent from prisons on 25 December 2014, having been released on temporary licence (ROTL). This figure has been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.

Over the past 18 months, we have overhauled the eligibility rules, risk assessment and monitoring processes for allowing prisoners out on temporary licence and have increased the maximum penalty for failing to return from ROTL from 6 months to two years imprisonment. There has been a 39% drop in the number of temporary release failures between 2013 and 2014.