Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what data his Department holds on the number of prisoners serving public protection sentences in Wales.

The table below shows the number of IPP/DPP prisoners in Wales, as at 30 December 2023:

On 16 October 2023, the Lord Chancellor announced he would be looking at options to curtail the licence period to restore greater proportionality to IPP/DPP sentences in line with recommendation 8 of the Justice Select Committee’s report, published on 28 September 2022.

The Lord Chancellor announced on 28 November 2023, that these changes are being taken forward in the Victims and Prisoners Bill.

The new measure will:

1. Reduce the qualifying period which triggers the duty of the Secretary of State to refer an IPP/DPP licence to the Parole Board for termination from ten years to three years;
2. Include a clear statutory presumption that the IPP/DPP licence will be terminated by the Parole Board at the end of the three-year qualifying period;
3. Introduce a provision that will automatically terminate the IPP/DPP licence two years after the three-year qualifying period, in cases where the Parole Board has not terminated the licence, so long as the offender is not recalled in that period; and
4. Introduce a power to amend the qualifying period by Statutory Instrument.

The Lord Chancellor was persuaded by the Committee’s recommendation to reduce the qualifying licence period from 10 years to five years and is going further: reducing the period to three years. These amendments will restore greater proportionality to IPP/DPP sentences and provide a clear pathway to a definitive end to the licence and, therefore, the sentence.

In addition to these changes, the actions this Government are taking are working; the number of prisoners serving the IPP sentence who have never been released now stands at 1,227 as of December 2023, down from more than 6000 in 2012.