Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of excluding violent offenders who have breached lifetime restraining orders while in custody from the early release scheme.

Certain offences have been excluded from SDS40. This includes serious violent offences with a sentence of four years or more; specified offences linked to domestic abuse irrespective of sentence length (including stalking, coercive or controlling behaviour and non-fatal strangulation), and sex offences irrespective of sentence length.

To keep the public safe, we have kept the measures under review and acted immediately to address a small number of anomalies in the legislation. This means that anyone convicted of a breach of restraining order, breach of sexual harm prevention order, and breach of a stalking protection order would not be released early under SDS40.

Any increased risks shown by an offender’s custodial behaviour, such as behaviour that breaches a lifetime restraining order, will inform the licence conditions and risk management plans put in place by Probation practitioners for that offender’s release once they have served the custodial part of their sentence.