Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment she has made of the long-term impact of (a) early release schemes and (b) other emergency prison measures.

In July 2024, the Lord Chancellor took decisive action to avoid imminent gridlock across the Criminal Justice System (CJS) by changing the automatic release point for those serving eligible Standard Determinate Sentences (SDS) from 50% to 40%. The measure will be reviewed 18 months after its implementation in September 2024. This allowed us to end the previous Government’s End of Custody Supervised Licence scheme.

When implementing the SDS measure, we took every possible step to mitigate risk including an 8-week implementation period, clear offence exclusions, and collaboration with partners across the CJS. We are committed to publishing transparency data on the number of SDS40-affected releases. We have already published data for day one of Tranches 1 and 2 on 7 November 2024 and are considering how routinely publishing SDS40 data best fits with our regular Accredited Official Statistics.

Whilst the SDS change provided the intended medium-term relief to the system, this was never expected to be a silver bullet. To put prison capacity on a sustainable footing in the long-term, the Lord Chancellor announced the Independent Review into Sentencing, alongside a series of prison capacity measures to ensure we have sufficient capacity in the lead-up to the Review’s recommendations. This included reforming our recall practices to target the unsustainable growth in the recall population since the pandemic and an extension of the maximum period offenders can spend on Home Detention Curfew from 6 – 12 months. MoJ remains dedicated to working with its agencies and stakeholders to continuously evaluate and where necessary improve the HDC scheme.

We will continue to monitor the longer-term impacts as they develop.