Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 21 October to Question 866 on Prisons: Overcrowding, what estimate he has made of the effect on the prison population of those sentencing reforms.

On 14 October, the Government laid a draft statutory instrument (SI) that will mean offenders sentenced to a standard determinate sentence of at least 7 years for specified serious sexual and violent offences will serve two-thirds of their sentence in custody, rather than being released halfway. If approved by Parliament, this change will come into effect from April 2020.

Alongside the SI we published a full impact assessment. The impact on the prison population will be felt gradually. We estimate that the prison population will increase by around 2,000 places over 10 years, i.e. by March 2030.

This is the first step in a package of sentencing reforms which will be brought forward in a Sentencing Bill, announced in the Queen’s Speech. The Government has been clear that violent and sexual offenders must serve sentences that truly reflect the severity of the crime – helping to protect the public and giving victims confidence that justice has been served.

The full impact assessment is available at:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2019/9780111190524/resources