Asked by: Guto Bebb (Independent - Aberconwy)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people have been (a) murdered, (b) assaulted and (c) subject to a violent crime committed by people released from prison on licence in (i) England and (ii) Wales in each of the last five years.
Answered by Andrew Selous - Second Church Estates Commissioner
Offenders on licence are subject to strict controls and may be recalled to custody if they breach their licence conditions. Offender managers regularly review the risk presented by offenders and may place additional controls where they are needed to protect the public.
The latest data on the number of offenders who were convicted of a Serious Further Offence of Murder are published in Annex B of Proven reoffending statistics January 2013 to December 2013, published at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/proven-reoffending-statistics-january-2013-to-december-2013. The published figures include all offenders under any form of probation supervision, rather than just those on licence.
The information requested is set out in the table below, based on data collected under the Probation Serious Further Offence (SFO) Review Procedures. The figure for the most recent year does not include cases where an offender has been charged with but not yet convicted of murder.
Date | 01/11/2010 – 31/10/2011 | 01/11/2011 – 31/10/2012 | 01/11/2012 – 31/10/2013 | 01/11/2013 – 31/10/2014 | 01/11/2014 – 31/10/2015 |
No of Murders | |||||
England | 23 | 20 | 25 | 21 | 6 |
Wales | 2 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 0 |
The offences of violence against the person or violent crime in such general form do not fall in scope of the Probation SFO Review Procedures. Data on offenders released on a licence who have committed offences other than those in scope of the SFO Review Procedures are not held centrally in a readily accessible format for the last five years. To obtain these data would incur disproportionate costs.