Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what forecasts the Government has made of future trends in the prison population.

Projections of the prison population are published annually in November. We are currently seeing a higher population driven by changes in the case mix, including more sex offenders being sentenced to custody. Updated projections will be published on 27 November. As these are National Statistics, I cannot comment on what they will show.

I can assure the House we will always have enough prison capacity for those committed by the courts. We currently have over 2,000 spare prison places, a further 2,000 by April, Wrexham in 2017, and by the end of this Parliament will have 3,000 more adult male places than we inherited.