Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask His Majesty's Government how many (1) male, and (2) female, prisoners who were aged 25 years or younger at the time of sentencing, were serving a life sentence in custody with a tariff of 15 years or more, split by ethnic group, in each year since 2021; and of these how many were (a) unreleased, or (b) recalled.

The information requested in PQ HL1418 can be found in the attached table.

The information requested in PQ HL1419 is set out as follows:

The average (mean) tariff for murderers (excluding whole life cases) sentenced in 2022 is 257 months and 2023 is 264 months. Tariff information for 2023 is a subset of data published on 25 January 2024. It is subject to change – please see information under Data sources and quality.

Data sources and quality

Note that the minimum term is the time between date of sentence and tariff expiry date. The numbers are subject to revision as more data become available; any changes in the numbers since the last publication of this information is as a result of more sentencing data becoming available.

The figures in these tables have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.

The figures are rounded to the nearest whole number.

*2023 has some missing tariff information. This PQ response gives provisional information and is subject to change as more tariff information comes in.