Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people serving Imprisonment for Public Protection sentences on licence in the community have taken their own lives in each year since 2005.

Table: Self-inflicted deaths of offenders serving an Imprisonment for Public Protection sentence supervised on licence in the community, financial year 2019/20 to 2023/24, England and Wales (1) (2) (3)

(p) The 2023/24 figures are provisional and may be updated in future publications to account for any changes or additions to the data since they were originally collected.

(1) Apparent cause is as reported in annual returns (prior to 2020/21 only) or the national Delius case management system (nDelius), and has not been independently verified.

(2) The reporting period for these statistics (financial year 1 April to 31 March) relates to when the death occurred.

(3) A new set of death classifications was implemented on 1 April 2022 and, as such, figures for 2022/23 onwards are not comparable to those presented for previous years. The category of 'self-inflicted death' up to 31 March 2022 includes any death of a person who has apparently taken his or her own life, irrespective of intent. The category of 'self-inflicted death' from 1 April 2022 includes any death of a person at their own hand, including where intent is undetermined. This includes some drug poisonings (e.g. where a suicide note is found or the circumstances are suspicious) but not drug poisonings which appear to have been the accidental result of consumption for another purpose. Refer to the guide to deaths of offenders supervised in the community statistics for further details about the new set of classifications.

Data Sources and Quality

The figures in this table 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.

Source: National Delius case management system.

Data is only provided from April 2019 as prior to this the data was collected via manual returns and identifying IPP offenders in this data would require a manual matching exercise of thousands of offender records. Therefore, information for the period before April 2019 could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.