Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the (a) average, (b) maximum and (c) minimum time spent in an open prison was for indeterminate sentence prisoners before their release in each of the last five years.

An indeterminate sentence prisoner will be transferred to open conditions only upon a positive recommendation from the independent Parole Board following a full risk assessment or, exceptionally, without a recommendation from the Parole Board where a prisoner can show exceptional progress. The Justice Secretary recently announced that any prisoner with an abscond history on their current sentence will not be eligible for return to open conditions other than in wholly exceptional circumstances.

Whilst the National Offender Management Service records the number of indeterminate sentence prisoners transferred into open conditions each year, its case management systems do not report on the total number of indeterminate sentence prisoners who spend time in open conditions in the course of a calendar year; neither do they provide data on the average, maximum and minimum time they spend in open conditions. In order to provide this information, officials would be required to undertake a manual interrogation of case management systems. Such an exercise would incur disproportionate cost.