Asked by: Lord Trefgarne (Conservative - Excepted Hereditary)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Faulks on 17 December (HL4250), whether they now have any additional information about the number of women responsible for one or more young children who are currently serving prison sentences in England and Wales.
Answered by Lord Faulks
Whilst the specific information requested is not held, the Ministry of Justice recently published statistics on child dependents of female offenders, which can be found at gov.uk on the Statistics at MOJ pages under the topic Ad-hoc justice statistics. A copy of the report is attached here.
Asked by: Lord Trefgarne (Conservative - Excepted Hereditary)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many women responsible for one or more young children are currently serving prison sentences in England and Wales, and what assessment they have made of the sentencing guidelines relating to such women.
Answered by Lord Faulks
The specific information requested is not held.
Sentencing guidelines are issued by the independent Sentencing Council. They are available on the Sentencing Council website.
Asked by: Lord Bassam of Brighton (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many people received custodial sentences in the last 10 years, broken down by gender, for the non-payment of fines relating to television licences; for how many of those people this was their sole offence; and how long the average sentence was.
Answered by Lord Faulks
Offenders found guilty of TV licence evasion may be sentenced to a fine and there is an expectation that fines are paid immediately where possible. HM Courts and Tribunals Service takes the issue of fine enforcement very seriously and is working to ensure that the recovery of fines is a continued priority nationwide. Failure to pay a fine imposed for TV licence evasion can lead to committal to prison for fine default, but only as a last resort once all other methods of recovering the money have been considered or tried and have failed.
Information about the length of time for which men and women were committed to prison for failing to pay a fine imposed for non-payment of a TV licence, since 2005, is provided in the table. The data relates to the fine defaulter's principal offence: information about whether it was their sole offence is not collected.
| Fine defaulter receptions for non-payment of a TV licence, by sex and average sentence length, England and Wales, January 2005- September 2014 | |||||||||||||
| 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010(1) | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | Jan-Sep 2014 | ||||
| Fine defaulter receptions for non-payment of a TV licence | |||||||||||||
| Males | 21 | 21 | 17 | 19 | 11 | .. | 10 | 25 | 15 | 10 | |||
| Females | 8 | 3 | 10 | 16 | 19 | .. | 38 | 26 | 17 | 24 | |||
| Average sentence length in days | |||||||||||||
| Males | 14 | 14 | 11 | 20 | 17 | .. | 20 | 19 | 25 | 19 | |||
| Females | 17 | 6 | 17 | 16 | 17 | .. | 24 | 25 | 23 | 18 | |||
| Data Sources and Quality | |||||||||||||
| 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. | |||||||||||||
| (1) During 2010 there was a disruption to the supply of the prison receptions data which is used for the purpose of statistical reporting. | |||||||||||||