Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask His Majesty's Government how many people serving an imprisonment for public protection sentence have died in secure mental health facilities.

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), published on 28 September 2022.

These changes are being taken forward in the Victims and Prisoners Bill. The measure will make it quicker and easier to terminate the IPP licence (and therefore the IPP sentence as a whole) whilst balancing public protection considerations.

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, while balancing public protection considerations.

There were 18 deaths of those serving IPP sentences in secure hospitals, up to 31 December 2022.

Please Note:

(1) Data is only available from 2009 onwards.

(2) Figures have been taken from a subset of published data in the Restricted Patients Statistical Bulletin, which has been published up to 31 December 2022.

(3) The data relates to all deaths, including natural causes and self-inflicted.

(4) Some cases may have ongoing investigations to determine the cause of death.

HMPPS publishes quarterly Safety in Custody statistics which cover deaths, self-harm and assaults in prison custody, in England and Wales. These published statistics do not include the death of those in secure mental health facilities.