Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask His Majesty's Government what was the (1) mean, and (2) median, tariff length for prisoners receiving a life sentence aged (a) under 18, (b) 18 to 20, (c) 21 to 24, (d) 25 to 29, (e) 30 to 34 (f) 35 to 39, (g) 40 to 49, (h) 50 to 59, (i) 60 to 69, and (j) 70 and over, at the time of sentencing, in each year from 2002.

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

Data sources and quality

Note that the tariff length is the time between date of sentencing and tariff expiry date, and does not take into account any time spent on remand. The figures do not include whole-life orders. 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 data have come from administrative IT systems which, as with some large-scale recording systems, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing and may be amended as part of data cleansing or updates.