Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate she has made of the number of offenders released as a result of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Requisite and Minimum Custodial Periods) Order 2024 that have previous convictions for (a) sexual offences and (b) offences involving violence against women and girls.

Certain offences have been excluded from the change to automatic release points for eligible standard determinate sentences under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Requisite and Minimum Custodial Periods) Order 2024. This includes sex offences irrespective of sentence length; serious violent offences with a sentence of four years or more; specified offences linked to domestic abuse irrespective of sentence length (including stalking, coercive or controlling behaviour and non-fatal strangulation); as well as offences concerning national security. Every excluded offence retains the previous release point: this is not changing. No sex offender will serve a single day less for those offences under this scheme.

The law applies to sentences not prisoners. There are some people who have served the entirety of their prison sentence for a previous sexual offence, and are now serving a subsequent sentence for a different crime. They may see the sentence for that other crime reduced to 40%.

As set out in the Statutory Instrument to Amend the Standard Determinate Sentence Automatic Release Point Impact Assessment published on 17 July 2024 (available at the link below), prison population and release figures are monitored and published as part of the Offender Management Statistics.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukia/2024/117/pdfs/ukia_20240117_en.pdf.

Data on SDS40 releases forms a subset of data intended for future publication.