Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people serving an imprisonment for a Public Protection sentence were held in secure hospitals at the start of the last 20 quarters.

Under sections 47/49 of the Mental Health Act 1983, the Secretary of State may authorise by warrant the transfer of sentenced prisoners to a mental health hospital, where he is satisfied that the criteria for detention are met by the aforementioned Act. Thereby, and for the duration of the period in hospital, the transferred prisoner becomes what is known as a restricted patient.

The requested data in the tables below are taken from an electronic casework system. Snapshot data of restricted patients in hospital are available only at the end of each year. We have provided this information in Table 1 for 2019-2022. We are unable to recreate snapshot data, for the start of each of the last 20 quarters, due to limitations of the case management system.

Table 1: Population of offenders serving a sentence of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) detained in hospital as a restricted patient on 31 December in each year from 2019-2023.

Table 2: The number of offenders serving an IPP sentence who have been transferred from prison to secure hospitals on mental health grounds in each year since 2020.

Notes

1. These figures have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large-scale recording systems are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.
2. Where patients are admitted more than once, each admission is counted separately. This information does not count number of individual patients but instances of transfers.

Data Source: Public Protection Unit Database (PPUD)