Parliamentary Written Answer (Correction)

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Tuesday 8th October 2013 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)]

I regret to inform the House that a written answer I gave on 2 September 2013, Official Report, column 218W, to the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) was incorrect. The hon. Member asked the Secretary of State for Justice how many offenders released on licence following a life sentence have committed (a) homicide and (b) other offences in each of the last two years. The response originally stated that there were four murders committed by four offenders. In fact, there were five murders committed by four offenders. All four offenders are now serving whole life tariffs.

The corrected answer is as follows:

Data on life sentence prisoners who commit offences of homicide are taken from the NOMS Public Protection Unit Database.

The most recent figures were published in July 2012 and may be found at the following web address:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/163377/2012-compendium-reoffending-stats-analysis.pdf.pdf

In the last two years there were five murders committed by four offenders on life licence, two in one year and three in the other. To provide some context, there are around 1,900 life sentence prisoners on supervision in the community at any one time.

Data on offenders released on life licences who have committed offences other than murder are not held centrally in a readily accessible format for the last two years. To obtain these data would exceed cost limits.

However, there are also data from published proven reoffending statistics for England and Wales for life sentenced prisoners. These statistics are published on a quarterly basis and the latest bulletin, which was published on 26 April 2013 on the Ministry of Justice website, is available at the following address:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/proven-re-offending--2