Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many and what proportion of homicides were committed by people on (a) parole and (b) a life licence in England and Wales in each of the last three years.
Under the Probation Serious Further Offence (SFO) Review Procedures, the National Probation Service (NPS) or Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC) must undertake a review where an offender under statutory supervision in the community is charged with a qualifying offence – a “notification”. Not every notification results in a conviction for an SFO.
SFOs are rare. Less than 0.1% of offenders under statutory supervision are convicted of murder, and less than 0.5% convicted of any SFO. Nonetheless, every single SFO is taken extremely seriously, and in all cases a review is carried out to identify any lessons for the better management of future cases.
We have interpreted ‘parole’ to mean offenders subject to indeterminate sentences of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) released by the Parole Board.
Table 1 below sets out the number of offenders convicted of murder, who at the time they committed the offence were being supervised on a) an indeterminate sentence of imprisonment for public protection and b) life licence in England and Wales between 2016 and 2018.
Table 2
| 2016 | 2017 | 2018 |
a) Offenders supervised on an IPP sentence | 1 | 2 | 3 |
b) Offenders supervised on life licence | 2 | 6 | 1 |
We are not able to present the number of murders committed by offenders subject to probation supervision as a proportion of all murders and homicides, as there are differences in the way the respective data sets are produced. Published Homicide Index data are based on the year when the offence was recorded as a crime, not when the offence took place or when the case was heard in court. SFO data are first recorded when the notification, usually triggered by the court appearance, is received by the SFO Team in Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. However, in some cases it will be the following year(s) when the offender is convicted of the SFO