Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask His Majesty's Government how many incidents of self-harm were recorded by people serving a sentence of Detention for Public Protection in each year since 2005.

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.

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.

We have provided a breakdown of the incidents of self-harm that were recorded by people serving a sentence of Detention for Public Protection in each year since 2012 in the below table:

Number of self-harm incidents by prisoners serving a sentence of Detention for Public Protection 2012 to 2022

Data Sources and Quality

These figures have been drawn from the HMPPS Incident Reporting System. Care is taken when processing and analysing returns but the detail is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. Although shown to the last case, the figures may not be accurate to that level.

(1) Figures include incidents within the youth estate and during contracted out escorts.

(2) In prisons, as in the community, it is not possible to count self-harm incidents with absolute accuracy. In prison custody, however, such incidents are more likely to be detected and counted. Care needs to be taken when comparing figures shown here with other sources where data may be less complete.

(3) Indeterminate sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) and Detention for Public Protection (DPP) were introduced in 2005. They were intended for high risk prisoners considered ‘dangerous’ but whose offence did not merit a life sentence. The number of prisoners held on these sentences increased initially and the increase was offset by reductions elsewhere.

(4) Sentence type information is only available for a small proportion of incidents prior to 2012, so it is not possible to provide a reliable breakdown by sentence type prior to then.

(5) The numbers provided in this table result from a matching between NOMIS data and Public Protection Unit Database (PPUD) data. A total of 13 prisoners identified in the PPUD data did not have an associated NOMIS identifier. Additionally, the figures in the table only includes individuals identified in NOMIS as serving IPP or DPP sentences, and also as serving a DPP sentence in PPUD data. The figures provided here are an estimate based on these two sources and as inconsistencies in recording between these two sources exist the figures should be treated with caution.

(6) Includes known DPPs in prison regardless of whether they are unreleased or have been recalled, or if they have subsequently been resentenced.