Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to the Answer of 14 January 2022 to Question 98878, how many transwomen, who do not have a Gender Recognition Certificate, are serving a sentence for a serious violent offence against the person are held in (a) female, (b) male and (c) all prisons as of 20 May 2022.

The Ministry of Justice and Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) approach to managing transgender offenders is set out in the policy framework ‘The Care and Management of Individuals who are Transgender’.

Prisoners are allocated to prisons initially according to their legal gender, which for the vast majority will be their sex recorded at birth. We are not obliged to allocate transgender prisoners according to their wishes, and their views are one of a range of factors considered when making allocation decisions. Any decisions to locate differently to an individual’s legal gender, at any point during a sentence, are made on a case-by-case basis by a Complex Case Board, an expert multi-disciplinary panel chaired by a senior operational manager in HMPPS with specialist training.

As we do not have a definition of a “serious violent offence against the person”, we have provided data on transgender women with any offence of violence against the person.

Data on transgender prisoners is not available for 20th May 2022. This is because transgender data comes from an annual collection exercise and is a snapshot of the transgender prison population on 31st March of each year.

The most recent data available is from 31st March 2021. On 31st March 2021, there were 146 transgender women without GRCs in prison estates across England and Wales. Of these, 41 individuals were serving their sentence for the principal offence of violence against the person in male establishments. There were no transgender women with a principal offence of violence against the person in the women’s estate.

The number of transgender women with GRCs serving sentences for offences of violence against the person in either estate is fewer than 5.