Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many women are still held in prison on indeterminate public protection sentences by (a) offence and (b) original length of sentence.

As of 31 December 2017¹, 74 women IPPs are being held in prison. Out of these, 54 have never been released by the independent Parole Board and 20 are in prison after being recalled (and they can be released only on a direction from the parole board).

Those unreleased are serving sentences for the following offences:

Those unreleased received the following minimum tariffs:

Between 2010 and 2017¹ a total of 40 women IPPs have been recalled.

Public protection is our priority and offenders on licence must comply with a strict set of conditions. If any offender breaches his or her licence conditions, he or she is liable to be recalled immediately to prison.

The independent Parole Board will continue to assess rigorously all tariff-expired IPP prisoners, in order to determine whether they are safe to be released.

¹By statistics code of practice, we cannot provide data for the most recent quarter as we have declared intention to publish such information next week.

The figures provided are for offenders recalled from 2010 to 2017 whose first releases were directed by the Parole Board. Information datasets held by the department do not record the data in this format prior to 2010. The figures may include offenders recalled more than once across multiple years but not within years. The figures in these tables have been drawn from administrative IT systems, which, as with any large-scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing. Recall reasons do not sum to the total number of recalls as more than one reason can be recorded against each recall.