Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to the Prison population projections: 2021 to 2026, published on 25 November 2021, for what reason the adult female prison population projected in (a) 2022, (b) 2023, (c) 2024 and (d) 2025 is lower than that projected in the publication Prison Population Projections: 2020 to 2026, published on 26 November 2020.

The starting point for the prison population projections published November 2021 (population as at end of July 2021) is lower than previously projected because of the continued impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Additional lockdowns and extended social distancing measures restricted the courts’ ability to process cases which means the criminal justice system has not recovered as quickly as previously forecast. For this reason, the population projections for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 are not directly comparable between the 2020 and 2021 publications.

The projections published in November 2020 assumed a female population based on historical proportions from the overall population, split by sentence length bands. The latest projections (published in November 2021) were produced with new determinate modelling, which has allowed more gender-specific assumptions around offence types and sentence lengths.