Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many people serving a life sentence were released at their first eligible parole date in each year since 2000.

The information needed to provide a comprehensive answer to each question could be provided only at disproportionate cost as central data was not stored in a way that it can be filtered by the required fields to obtain the information, until 2009. As a result, the tables below provide data for each year from 2009.

The Government is committed to the protection of the public and the effective management of offenders. By law, prisoners serving indeterminate sentences who have completed their tariff will be released only when the independent Parole Board concludes that the risk they present to the public is capable of being safely managed in the community under probation supervision.

The total number of prisoners serving a life sentence who were released at their first eligible parole date in each year since 2009, is shown in the following table:

The total number of prisoners serving a sentence of imprisonment for public protection who were released at their first eligible parole date in each year since 2009, is shown in the following table:

Notes for all tables:

1. These figures have been drawn from the Public Protection Unit Database and Prison-NOMIS held by Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. As with any large scale recording systems, the figures are subject to possible errors with data migration and processing.

2. The figures in these tables do not include recalled indeterminate-sentence prisoners.

Statistics on the indeterminate sentence population in prisons are routinely published as part of the Quarterly Offender Management Statistics on Gov.uk - https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/offender-management-statistics-quarterly