Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many (a) prisoners serving an imprisonment for public protection and (b) other prisoners have been released on compassionate grounds in each year since 2005.

We have taken significant action through the Victim’s and Prisoner Bill to curtail IPP licence periods to give offenders the opportunity to move on with their lives. In addition to these changes, the actions this Government is taking are working: the number of prisoners serving the IPP sentence who have never been released now stands at 1,180 as of 31 March, down from more than 6,000 in 2012.

The Secretary of State has a statutory power to grant the early release of prisoners serving a sentence or term of imprisonment in custody on compassionate grounds. The power is used in exceptional circumstances only and in accordance with the HMPPS the Early Release on Compassionate Grounds Policy Framework.

Early release on compassionate grounds may, for example, be considered for terminally ill prisoners with a diagnosis of limited time left to live, and where there is medical advice that their end-of-life palliative care needs would be better met in a hospice. Compassionate release of such individuals is only approved if a risk assessment confirms they are safe to release.

The table shows the number of prisoners released early on compassionate grounds from 2010 to 2023. Data prior to 2010 is not available in a useable format and could only be provided at disproportionate cost.

1. Please note that data for 2024 has not been provided as it is a subset of data which are due for future publication as part of Offender Management Statistics Quarterly.
2. 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.