Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many prisoners with an Imprisonment for Public Protection sentence and given a Category B status have been released.

The information needed to provide a comprehensive answer to the question asking how many prisoners with an Imprisonment for Public Protection sentence and given a Category B status have been released could be provided only at disproportionate cost as central data were not stored in a way that it can be filtered by the required fields to obtain the information prior to 2015. Between 2015 and 2020, there were 86 releases of Category B IPP prisoners. This figure does not include re-releases following recall.

As of 31 March 2021, there were 91 Category B prisoners with an IPP sentence that were serving a sentence on recall.

A prisoner’s individual offending behaviour, resettlement needs and individual circumstances (such as medical requirements) may result in an individual being held in a prison of a higher category than their own category. Prisoners will not be allocated to a prison of a lower security category than the security category assigned to them personally.

Note for figures:

These figures have been drawn from the Public Protection Unit Database and Prison-NOMIS held by Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. As with any large scale recording systems, the figures are subject to possible errors with data migration and processing.