Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask His Majesty's Government how many deaths by suicide of people on probation there were in England and Wales in each of the last 10 years.

In the table below, please find the number of self-inflicted deaths of offenders supervised in the community by the Probation Service, financial year 2014/15 to 2023/24, England and Wales (1) (2) (3).

(p) The 2023/24 figures are provisional and may be updated in future publications to account for any changes or additions to the data since they were originally collected.

Notes

(1) These figures are published annually in the Deaths of offenders in the community publication, which is available at this link: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/death-of-offenders-in-the-community.

(2) Apparent cause is as reported in annual returns (prior to 2020/21 only) or the national Delius case management system (nDelius) and has not been independently verified.

(3) The reporting period for these statistics (financial year 1 April to 31 March) relates to when the death occurred.

(4) The Offender Rehabilitation Act (ORA) was introduced on 1 February 2015 and corresponded with an increase in the number of offenders on post-release supervision. Caution should be used when comparing with earlier periods.

(5) A new set of death classifications was implemented on 1 April 2022 and, as such, figures from 2022/23 are not comparable to those presented for previous years. The category of 'self-inflicted death' up to 31 March 2022 includes any death of a person who has apparently taken his or her own life, irrespective of intent. The category of 'self-inflicted death' from 1 April 2022 includes any death of a person at their own hand, including where intent is undetermined. This includes some drug poisonings (e.g. where a suicide note is found, or the circumstances are suspicious) but not drug poisonings which appear to have been the accidental result of consumption for another purpose. Refer to the guide to deaths of offenders supervised in the community statistics (www.gov.uk/government/statistics/deaths-of-offenders-in-the-community-annual-update-to-march-2024/guide-to-deaths-of-offenders-in-the-community) for further details about the new set of classifications.

Data sources and quality: The figures in this table 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.

Source: National Delius (nDelius) case management system