Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many (1) men, and (2) women, have been assessed by the screening tool for psychological maturity in each year since 2017 for every prison in England and Wales.

HM Prison and Probation Service use a system called the Offender Assessment System (OASys) for assessing the risks and needs of an offender. The system is designed to assess how likely an offender is to re-offend, identify offending-related needs, and assess the risk of serious harm and risks to the individual and the community. It also links the assessment to the supervision or sentence plan, along with any indication of the need for further specialist assessments, including changes during the period of supervision.

Automatic screening data is held on the segmentation tool for those young adult men aged up to 25 who have a full OASys assessment completed. This does not include data for anyone without a full OASys, on remand, or aged over 25. There is not currently any maturity screening available for women.

Records for screening are held locally – there is no national system that collates the data. Data is only available from 2019 to present as the tool was not launched until July 2019. 89% of prisons holding young adults are currently using the screening tool.

The table below shows the data on the numbers of prisoners who have been screened as having low psychosocial maturity. These figures are not cumulative, but representative of the population on that date.