Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prisoners serving a custodial sentence work outside prison.

Suitable, risk assessed prisoners may be permitted to undertake work outside of prison towards their release date, where this has been identified as an appropriate resettlement activity in their sentence or resettlement plan. Such prisoners are released on licence, to return to the prison each night, must abide by the conditions of release and of the particular work placement, and are subject to monitoring and review throughout. Unfortunately, the current centrally held data does not allow us reliably to state how many prisoners are released on temporary licence in order to work, but we are changing recording practice so that we will be able to do this in future.