Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what recent assessment he has made of the potential merits of the introduction of unique identifiers for people in the justice system.

We have not made a recent assessment of the impact of introducing unique identifiers for people in the justice system.

However, we have started work to create a single 'Core Person record’ for use across HMPPS. This will begin to remove the multiple records we hold for those in our care, and reduce the amount of manual data matching required. Additionally, our award-winning probabilistic matching tool ‘splink’, has underpinned the linking of data across the justice system, including assessing the substance misuse pathways between justice and health, electronic monitoring curfew and probation case management, which has allowed us to identify individuals as they interact with our interventions and services. This has significantly overcome challenges of not having a unique identifier and has supported policy makers and operational staff in their work to reduce offending and strengthen public protection.