Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prisoners released on licence have been found in breach of their licence conditions and (a) recalled to custody and (b) not recalled to custody in each of the last five years.

(a) The number of recalls to custody following breach of licence in each of the last five years¹:

1 The figures provided are for women and men recalled in each full year from 2013 to 2017 and may include offenders recalled more than once across multiple years or 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.

The last full year available is 2017. Published statistics, including figures up to and including June 2018 are available here https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/offender-management-statistics-quarterly

(b) We do not hold information centrally about the number of offenders in the community who may have breached their licence conditions and are not recalled to custody. To extract this data would require a review of each separate case file to track their progress on licence.

Public protection is our priority and recall is used to ensure that offenders on licence who present a high risk of harm to the public or are at risk of re-offending are returned to custody as quickly as possible.

Offenders on licence are subject to strict licence conditions, which are designed to enable the Probation Service to manage the risk that offenders may pose on release from prison and to safeguard public protection. All offenders on licensed supervision in the community are liable to recall to prison if they fail to comply with the conditions of their licence.