Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the average number of days was that (a) male and (b) female prisoners were released on temporary licence during the latest year for which information is available.

In 2014, the average number of days that male prisoners were released on temporary licence (ROTL) was 59 days and the average number of days that female prisoners were released on temporary licence was 48 days. Over the course of the year, a total of 8,072 men and 731 women had at least one day of temporary release.

In the past 18 months we have made major changes to the policy and practice around temporary release applying equally to men and women, improving the risk assessment, monitoring and review of ROTL so that this important rehabilitative tool can continue to be used where appropriate and without putting the public at risk. In 2014, instances of ROTL have reduced by 14%, and the number of ROTL failures has fallen by 39%. At 53 failures per 100,000 releases, it was the lowest ROTL failure rate since 2002.

These figures 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.