Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 7 March 2017 to Question 66043, what the average time served in prison by those on mandatory life sentences was of those who were released from prison in each of the last five years.

The average minimum tariff length of those men and women serving mandatory life in custody as at 31 December 2016, is provided in the table below:

The average number of years served by those serving life sentences is published in table A3.3 of the OMSQ Annual Releases publication: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/563255/prison-releases-2015.xlsx. 2016 figures will be published at the end of April.

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.