Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many offenders have been convicted of a serious further offence of murder, by type of index sentence in each year between 2010 and 2015.

The table below sets out the total number of convictions, where an offender subject to probation supervision was charged with a serious further offence (SFO), which resulted subsequently in a conviction for murder, for all cases notified to what is now HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2015.

1. Time period for conviction data relates to the date of SFO notification to HMPPS not the date of conviction.

2. Index sentence refers to the sentencing disposal imposed by the court which led to probation services supervision of the offender.

3. The data only includes convictions for serious further offences of murder that have been notified to the national SFO Team, HMPPS.

4. Conviction data also includes cases where the offender committed suicide or died prior to the trial, where the judicial process concluded that they were responsible.

5. The data for January 2010 to December 2015 has been updated and may differ to any original publication due to data cleansing, re-categorising and re-grouping.

6. Data Sources and Quality. We have drawn these figures from administrative IT systems which, as with some large-scale recording systems, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.

Serious further offences are incredibly rare, with fewer than 0.5% of offenders supervised by the Probation Service going on to commit serious further offences but each one is investigated fully so we can take action where necessary. We have also injected extra funding of more than £155 million a year into the Probation Service to deliver tougher supervision, reduce caseloads and recruit thousands more staff to keep the public safer.