Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people serving imprisonment for public protection sentences were (a) classified as Category A prisoners and (b) in Category A prisons on 11 March 2025.

Category A prisoners are those that are considered to pose the highest risk to the public, the Police or national security. High security establishments are designed to mitigate those risks and to prevent escape.

Some Category B prisoners are held in high security prisons, though they are not treated as Category A prisoners. They are assessed as posing a high or very high risk to the public if held in other types of establishments. High security prisons also provide specific interventions that are only provided within these establishments and therefore IPP prisoners are there to receive the support required to progress or manage the continued risk that they pose. This Government is committed to ensuring those who can make progress through their sentence are supported to do so, but not in a way that impacts public protection.

The information provided below is from the latest published snapshot for breakdowns of the prison population, as at 31 December 2024. More recent data cannot be provided because it could give an early indication of future Accredited Official Statistics.

Table 1: Number of IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) prisoners(1) classified as Category A prisoners(2), as at 31st December 2024, in England and Wales

Table 2: Number of IPP prisoners(1) held in predominant function Category A (High security) establishments(4), as at 31st December 2024, in England and Wales

Notes:

1.The figures presented in these tables include both unreleased and recalled IPP prisoners.

2. The data presented in this table includes prisoners classified as Provisional category A.

3. The figure presented in this table constitute a subset of the figure presented in Table 2.

4. A number of prisons have multiple functions (e.g. a prison could have both "Reception" and "Category C" functions). For these prisons, the predominant function has been used.

5. For more information see: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/prisons-and-their-resettlement-providers.

6. Data sources and quality: The figures in these tables have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing. Source: Prison NOMIS.