Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prisoners were armed forces veterans on 24 February 2025.

The most recent available data for the veterans prison population is from the 2024 edition of our annual publication on “Ex-service personnel in the prison population”, which is taken from a snapshot of the prison population on 30 June 2024. Any request for information ahead of this would give an indication of data scheduled for future publication, and so we are not able to provide the figures for 24 February 2025 at this time.

As per our 2024 publication, an estimated 3.6% of the prison population declared that they had served in the armed forces (based on 1,810 out of 50,700 prisoners who provided a response to that question at point of reception into prison). The publication can be found here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67218d8d3aa14203d06ef453/Ex-service_personnel_in_the_prison_population_2024.pdf