Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 30 June 2015 to Question 3497, for what reason his Department was able to provide this information on 29 August 2013, Official Report, column 1034W, in relation to earlier years but is now unable to do so.

Whilst we have released information on the use of maximum sentences in the past in response to specific questions, we are now reviewing the data and developing a methodology which should allow us to publish statistics on this subject on a routine basis.

As part of this development, we are quality assuring the data held centrally on whether the maximum sentence length was applied, to assess whether it meets the requirements for publication in our ‘Criminal Justice Statistics’ National Statistics publication.

During this development period we are unable to provide updated figures.