Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many offenders released on licence at the 40% point of their sentence were convicted of (a) one and (b) more than one breach of restraining orders.

The Government inherited a crisis in our criminal justice system, with prisons on the point of collapse. As a result, we were forced to take the difficult but necessary step to move certain release points for prisoners serving eligible standard determinate sentences (SDSs) from 50% to 40%.

Public protection is our priority, so we have important exclusions from this change, notably certain serious violent, sexual, national security and domestic abuse connected offences. These exclusions included the Breach of Restraining Order (BoRO) offence under Section 363 of the Sentencing Act 2020 passed by the previous Government.

It became clear that a repealed piece of legislation was being incorrectly used in a small number of cases. This created an anomaly, which meant 37 offenders were released under a repealed offence. These 37 offenders have now been returned to custody.

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