Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many people were serving a determinate sentence of 20 years or more in each year since 2012; and of those, how many were aged (1) under 18, (2) 18 to 20, (3) 21 to 24, (4) 25 to 29, (5) 30 to 34, (6) 35 to 39, (7) 40 to 49, (8) 50 to 59, (9) 60 to 69, and (10) 70 or over.

Responses are collated from two different data sources. Please refer to the footnotes of the tables to understand the differences.

HL1598 and HL1599:

The Ministry of Justice publishes information on detailed sentence and custodial sentence length, in England and Wales, for the years 2017 to 2021 available, in the Outcomes by Offence data tool (MS Excel Spreadsheet, 21 MB).

In this dataset, the age range for offenders 25 and over was not broken down further prior to 2017 – please refer to note 5 in the tables. Further breakdowns by age range are therefore not available before 2017.

The data requested is provided in the attached tables. Please note that court data records length as the custodial period specified in the sentence.

HL1594 and HL1595:

Requested information can be found in the attached data tables.

The sentence length information is the Judicially Imposed Sentence Length (JISL) which reflects the custodial period plus time to be served on post-release Probation supervision.