Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the average sentence length was for (a) women and (b) men sentenced to prison in each month since January 2021.

The Ministry of Justice publishes these figures on an annual basis, by quarter, on the GOV.UK website in the Outcomes by Offence data tool (MS Excel Spreadsheet, 21 MB) as part of the Criminal Justice System statistics quarterly: December 2021 publication published in May 2022. Figures for 2022 will be published in subsequent releases of the data.

Please see the accompanying table, and associated notes, for a breakdown by month for the year 2021. These figures are not routinely published as monthly averages can be influenced by cyclical factors that need to be considered when considering average custodial sentence length (ACSL) – for example, ACSL will depend on the mixture of offences sentenced within that month. Monthly averages will also be more likely to fluctuations due to relatively small volumes of offenders in each period.