Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask His Majesty's Government how many and what proportion of prisoner leavers were assessed as posing high or very high risk of harm between April 2024 and March 2025.

24,264 prisoner leavers released between April 2024 and March 2025 were assessed as posing high or very high risk of harm at the point of release between April 2024 and March 2025. This is 42% of all releases.

Public protection is this Government’s top priority.

Offenders on licence are subject to strict conditions – including exclusion zones, restriction zones and electronic monitoring – and they can be returned to prison if they breach any of these rules, in such a way as to demonstrate that their risk is no longer manageable in the community.

Notes

For information on the definition of ‘release’ in this context, please see the Notes page of the Offender Management Statistics Quarterly Releases tables which can be found here: prison-releases-Jan-to-Mar-2025.ods.

Information on release has been drawn from the Prison National Offender Management Information System (P-NOMIS). This has been linked to risk of harm information on National Delius (nDelius), the probation case management system.

Where the release could be matched between the two systems, risk of harm is as assessed at release. In cases where the release could not be matched, the risk of harm is drawn from information on NDelius closest to the release date.

Data are drawn from large administrative IT systems. Although care is taken when processing and analysing the returns, the information collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system due to possible errors with data entry and processing.