Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask His Majesty's Government how many people serving an imprisonment for public protection sentence were eligible for a review of their licence, in each quarter since 2021; and of those how many referrals were made to the Parole Board for review.

Where 10 years have elapsed since the Parole Board first directed the release of an offender serving a sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP), the Secretary of State must by law refer that offender to the Parole Board, in order for the Board to determine whether to terminate the offender’s IPP licence. The minimum 10-year period is not paused or reset if an offender is recalled to prison or serves a subsequent sentence for further offences. Where the Board does not terminate the licence, the Secretary of State must by law re-refer the offender every 12 months. This ensures that every eligible offender is considered by the Parole Board annually and will enable the IPP licence, and the IPP sentence as a whole, to be brought to a definitive end for more offenders.

On 16 October 2023, the Lord Chancellor announced he would be looking at options to curtail the licence period to restore greater proportionality to IPP sentences in line with recommendation 8 of the report by the Justice Select Committee’ (JSC) report, published on 28 September 2022.

These changes are being taken forward in the Victims and Prisoners Bill.

The new measure will:

1. Reduce the qualifying period which triggers the duty of the Secretary of State to refer an IPP licence to the Parole Board for termination from ten years to three years;
2. Include a clear statutory presumption that the IPP licence will be terminated by the Parole Board at the end of the three-year qualifying period;
3. Introduce a provision that will automatically terminate the IPP licence two years after the three-year qualifying period, in cases where the Parole Board has not terminated the licence; and
4. Introduce a power to amend the qualifying period by Statutory Instrument.

The Lord Chancellor was persuaded by the Committee’s recommendation to reduce the qualifying licence period from 10 years to 5 years and is going further: reducing the period to 3 years. These amendments will restore greater proportionality to IPP sentences and provide a clear pathway to a definitive end to the licence and, therefore, the sentence.

In addition to these changes, the actions this Government are taking are working; the number of prisoners serving the IPP sentence who have never been released now stands at 1,269 as of September 2023, down from more than 6000 in 2012.

Table 1: Shows the number of offenders serving an IPP sentence under pre- and post-release supervision who are eligible to be considered for termination of their licence, at end of period, December 2020 to June 2023, England and Wales.

Please Note:

(1) This table includes IPP offenders who have been returned to custody following a recall.

(2) 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.

Table 2: Shows the number of cases referred to the Parole Board

Please Note:

(1) Figures could contain cases where the offender became eligible for licence termination in previous quarter.

(2) Figures from Table 1 are snapshot figures and are not comparable to figures in Table 2

Table 3: Shows the outcomes of licence termination applications in each quarter since 2021.

Table 4: Shows the number of people serving an IPP sentence that were transferred from prison to a secure hospital, and held in a secure hospital, in each year, since 2009

Please Note:

(1) We do not hold figures prior to 2009 as the data entry system which holds these data was implemented in 2009 and data prior to this period are not of sufficient quality to allow for the breakdown requested.

(2) The number of transfers is not the same as number of offenders transferred as there could be more than one transfer associated with an offender in a year.

(3) These figures 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. Consequently, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when those data are used.

The information requested for HL236 and HL237 could only be obtained at disproportionate cost. The information for HL238 is not held centrally.