Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment his Department has made of the effectiveness of the End of Custody Temporary Release scheme for (a) pregnant women and (b) women.

The End of Custody Temporary Release Scheme (ECTR) allows risk-assessed prisoners, who are within two months of their release date, to be temporarily released from custody. ECTR was introduced as part of our wider measures to create headroom across the prison estate, to enable us to implement our compartmentalisation strategy. This strategy allows us to isolate those with symptoms, quarantine new admissions and shield those most at risk from Covid-19. Early release is however only one part of our overall strategy towards achieving the headroom. We are also expanding the capacity of the prison estate through temporary accommodation, expediting remand cases and expanding our video court capacity and capability to facilitate timely remand and sentencing hearings.

Public Health England and HMPPS modelling suggests that our strategy is having a positive impact on the risk of infection in prison populations (including the women’s estate).

In addition to ECTR, pregnant women, prisoners with their babies in custody and those defined by NHS guidelines as ‘extremely vulnerable’ to Covid-19 will merit consideration for compassionate temporary release on a Special Purpose Licence.

The Ministry of Justice now publishes a weekly release of Covid-19 related statistics. This includes the number of prisoners that have been released from custody under Covid-19 temporary release schemes. The statistics release can be found here each Friday:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hm-prison-and-probation-service-covid-19-statistics